Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plate-forme support à l'interconnexion de communautés de pratique ( ICP ) : application au tutorat avec TE-Cap

Ces travaux de recherche se situent dans le domaine des Environnements Informatiques pour l'Apprentissage Humain (EIAH) et s'interessent plus specifiquement au tutorat, activite fondamentale dans les formations mais pourtant encore aujourd'hui mal definie et peu institutionnalisee. Ainsi, il n'existe que tres peu de formations au tutorat et peu d'outils pour aider a la realisation de cette activite alors que paradoxalement de plus en plus d'enseignements medies informatiquement sont proposes et necessitent l'accompagnement des apprenants par un ou des tuteurs. Partant d'une analyse des besoins des tuteurs, a partir d'une etude theorique et d'une etude de terrain, nous proposons de traiter cette problematique en concevant la plate-forme TE-Cap (« Tutoring Experience Capitalization »), fondee sur le concept de Communautes de Pratique (CoP). Nous adoptons une demarche de conception co-adaptative qui tend a faire evoluer la plate-forme en meme temps que se precisent les besoins. Cette plate-forme a pour objectif de supporter les echanges, la confrontation et la mutualisation des experiences et des pratiques de ses utilisateurs afin de les amener a developper, de maniere informelle et creative par l'entraide et la collaboration, des competences et expertises, et a creer de nouvelles approches pour resoudre des problemes. Construite sur la base d'un modele d'Interconnexion de CoPs (ICP), propose comme extension du concept de Constellation de CoPs (CCP), la plate-forme utilise une classification des connaissances s'inspirant de principes du Knowledge Management et du Web 2.0. Ce modele d'ICP est applique au tutorat dans la plate-forme TE-Cap mais concerne tout ensemble d'acteurs exercant une meme activite. Il vise a favoriser la creation et le partage de connaissances a la fois dans le contexte local de pratique des acteurs (l'institution ou l'entreprise) et au niveau global de l'activite. L'interface homme-machine represente la base de connaissances de maniere spatiale et interactive, de facon a rendre rapide l'ajout et la recherche de connaissances, grâce a un modele d'indexation adapte aux themes lies a la communaute identifiee. Deux experimentations ont ete menees dans le cadre du tutorat afin d'evaluer la plate-forme avec des tuteurs de disciplines et pays differents.
No Please, After You: Detecting Fraud in Affiliate Marketing Networks

Cookie stuffing is an activity which allows unscrupulous actors online to defraud affiliate marketing programs by causing themselves to receive credit for purchases made by web users, even if the affiliate marketer did not actively perform any marketing for the affiliate program. Using two months of HTTP request logs from a large public university, we present an empirical study of fraud in affiliate marketing programs. First, we develop an efficient, decision-tree based technique for detecting cookie-stuffing in HTTP request logs. Our technique replicates domain-informed human labeling of the same data with 93.3% accuracy. Second, we find that over one-third of publishers in affiliate marketing programs use fraudulent cookie-stuffing techniques in an attempt to claim credit from online retailers for illicit referrals. However, most realized conversions are credited to honest publishers. Finally, we present a stake holder analysis of affiliate marketing fraud and find that the costs and rewards of affiliate marketing program are spread across all parties involved in affiliate marketing programs.
Learning Term Spaces Based on Visual Feedback

Extracting and visualizing concepts and relationship between text documents strongly depends on the used similarity measure. In order to provide meaningful visualizations and to extract useful knowledge from document collections, user needs must be captured by the internal representation of documents, and the used similarity measure. In most applications the vector space model and the cosine similarity are used therefore and serve as good approximations. Nevertheless, influencing similarities between documents is rather hard, since parameter tuning relies heavily on expert knowledge of the underlying algorithms, and the influence of different weighting schemes and similarity measures is not known before. In this paper we present an approach on how to adapt the vector space representation of documents by giving visual feedback to the system. Our approach starts by clustering a corpus of text documents and visualizing the results using multi dimensional scaling techniques. Afterwards, a 2D landscape visualization is shown which can be manipulated by the user. Based on these manipulations the high dimensional representation of the documents is adapted to fit the users need more precisely. Our experiments show that iterating these steps results in an adapted representation of documents and similarities, generating layouts as intended by the user and furthermore increases clustering accuracy. While this paper only investigates the influence on clustering and visualization, the method itself may also be used for increasing classification and retrieval performance since it adapts to the users need of similarity
The Press in a post-Apartheid South Africa: a Functional Analysis

In a politically sensitive and problematic country such as South Africa where change and the need for change is evident on a continuum of often volatile juxtapositions, two rather obvious questions (from a journalism studies point of view), offer themselves for discourse and research: what will the nature of a future South Africa be, and what kind of Press system could one expect to find in such a South Africa? The purpose of this paper is to seek an answer against the assumption that any future South Africa will by historical, economic and political necessity be a post-apartheid South Africa. The following general question is discussed from a functional point of view: What kind of political dispensation will post-apartheid society introduce, and what kind of Press system could one expect to find? The present South African Press is analysed against the well known Siebert et al. “Theories of the Press” model. Recent restrictions on the South African Press is discussed and it is suggested that the Press fal.
An Engineering Information Service Infrastructure for Ubiquitous Computing

This paper describes a software framework for the development of a ubiquitous computing environment for distributed engineering information services. Two fundamental issues are addressed: (1) universal accessibility from devices to information services, and (2) collaboration among the parties accessing the information services. The first issue calls for the development of device independent information services that have the flexibility to support wide range of client devices. We introduce a mediation-based framework that enables the information clients to calibrate the source information services to the clients’ characteristics. The second issue requires effective integration of information services, for which we address in two ways. First, we define an ontology standard and describe how such standard can be effectively applied for exchanging scheduling information. Second, we illustrate an infrastructure that is particularly suitable for the integration of engineering services. A prototype for the ubiquitous computing environment has been developed that incorporates a variety of project management software as well as different devices ranging from PDA, web browsers, desktop computers, and servers. 1 Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. E-mail: davidliu@stanford.edu 2 Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. E-mail: cjx@stanford.edu 3 Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. E-mail: law@stanford.edu 4 Professor, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. E-mail: gio@db.stanford.edu 5 Group Leader, Manufacturing Systems Integration Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899. E-mail: sriram@cme.nist. gov
Microtubules and the endoplasmic reticulum are highly interdependent structures

The interrelationships of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), microtubules, and intermediate filaments were studied in the peripheral regions of thin, spread fibroblasts, epithelial, and vascular endothelial cells in culture. We combined a fluorescent dye staining technique to localize the ER with immunofluorescence to localize microtubules or intermediate filaments in the same cell. Microtubules and the ER are sparse in the lamellipodia, but intermediate filaments are usually completely absent. These relationships indicate that microtubules and the ER advance into the lamellipodia before intermediate filaments. We observed that microtubules and tubules of the ER have nearly identical distributions in lamellipodia, where new extensions of both are taking place. We perturbed microtubules by nocodazole, cold temperature, or hypotonic shock, and observed the effects on the ER distribution. On the basis of our observations in untreated cells and our experiments with microtubule perturbation, we conclude that microtubules and the ER are highly interdependent in two ways: (a) polymerization of individual microtubules and extension of individual ER tubules occur together at the level of resolution of the fluorescence microscope, and (b) depolymerization of microtubules does not disrupt the ER network in the short term (15 min), but prolonged absence of microtubules (2 h) leads to a slow retraction of the ER network towards the cell center, indicating that over longer periods of time, the extended state of the entire ER network requires the microtubule system.
Identification and Characterization of Novel Renal Sensory Receptors

Recent studies have highlighted the important roles that “sensory” receptors (olfactory receptors, taste receptors, and orphan “GPR” receptors) play in a variety of tissues, including the kidney. Although several studies have identified important roles that individual sensory receptors play in the kidney, there has not been a systematic analysis of the renal repertoire of sensory receptors. In this study, we identify novel renal sensory receptors belonging to the GPR (n = 76), olfactory receptor (n = 6), and taste receptor (n = 11) gene families. A variety of reverse transcriptase (RT)- PCR screening strategies were used to identify novel renal sensory receptors, which were subsequently confirmed using gene-specific primers. The tissue-specific distribution of these receptors was determined, and the novel renal ORs were cloned from whole mouse kidney. Renal ORs that trafficked properly in vitro were screened for potential ligands using a dual-luciferase ligand screen, and novel ligands were identified for Olfr691. These studies demonstrate that multiple sensory receptors are expressed in the kidney beyond those previously identified. These results greatly expand the known repertoire of renal sensory receptors. Importantly, the mRNA of many of the receptors identified in this study are expressed highly in the kidney (comparable to well-known and extensively studied renal GPCRs), and in future studies it will be important to elucidate the roles that these novel renal receptors play in renal physiology.
O uso da teoria de resposta ao item em avaliações educacionais: diretrizes para pesquisadores

Item response theory (IRT) is considered as a landmark of modern psychometrics by a great number of specialists. IRT is a set of mathematical models that considers the item like the basic unit of analysis and that relates the probability of a correct response of an examinee on an item in function of the item parameters and underlying latent trait of the evaluated person. This current paper aims to discuss the assumptions of IRT, the various models and applications in large scale educational assessment. Also, the utilization of the software program Bilog-MG is commented. Taking the complexity of the exposed topic into consideration, we do not intend to exhaust it, but are trying to offer support to researchers when making decisions in the process of performing psychometric analyses using IRT
Viewing proteomic experiments in context with known protein networks

We present a system that allows proteomic researchers to view data derived from phosphorylation experiments in context with known protein interaction networks. We hypothesize that such a visual integration between new, experimental data and known interactions, done in an automated and streamlined fashion, enhances the proteomic research process. We start from hand-drawn pathway representations, augment them with relevant protein interactions extracted from public databases, produce a novel, explorable visualization, and overlay results from phosphorylation experiments; these experiments indicate how proteins respond to stimuli and are one of the main methods of signaling pathway research. The system has been developed iteratively, in response to feedback obtained from collaboration with researchers using phosphorylation to study mast-cell signaling pathways. It was also recently deployed and integrated into their research lab. The main consequences of our work are: we enable researchers to put their experimental data in context with available knowledge about protein interactions, a task not supported by previous software; we introduced a novel network visualization method that works well for proteomic pathways but may have a wider application area; we identified tasks and work patterns in proteomics research, useful information in designing future applications.
A review of multi-instance learning assumptions

Abstract Multi-instance (MI) learning is a variant of inductive machine learning, where each learning example contains a bag of instances instead of a single feature vector. The term commonly refers to the supervised setting, where each bag is associated with a label. This type of representation is a natural fit for a number of real-world learning scenarios, including drug activity prediction and image classification, hence many MI learning algorithms have been proposed. Any MI learning method must relate instances to bag-level class labels, but many types of relationships between instances and class labels are possible. Although all early work in MI learning assumes a specific MI concept class known to be appropriate for a drug activity prediction domain; this ‘standard MI assumption’ is not guaranteed to hold in other domains. Much of the recent work in MI learning has concentrated on a relaxed view of the MI problem, where the standard MI assumption is dropped, and alternative assumptions are considered instead. However, often it is not clearly stated what particular assumption is used and how it relates to other assumptions that have been proposed. In this paper, we aim to clarify the use of alternative MI assumptions by reviewing the work done in this area.
cAMP Regulation of Myosin ATPase Activity in the Maturing Rat Heart

Calcium-activated myosin adenosine triphosphatase (ATPase) activity has been measured in sections of rat ventricles that were rapidly frozen to preserve the structure and regulatory state of myosin occurring in vivo. These results were related to myosin isozyme composition measured in ventricles by native gel electrophoresis and by quantitative immunocytochemistry. Both total ATPase activity and percent α-heavy chain rapidly rise during the first month following birth. However, ATPase activity remains constant at a high level from 1 to 12 months following birth, even though percent a-heavy chain declines during this period. The ATPase activity of V1 myosin was specifically determined using sections in which V3 myosin had been completely inhibited by exposure to alkaline pH in the absence of adenosine 5'-triphosphate (ATP). Relative V1 specific activity, taken as the ratio of V1 ATPase activity to percent a-heavy chain, doubles in the first 2.0 months after birth and then remains approximately constant at this higher level until at least 4 months after birth. The specific activity of V1 can be further increased by the addition of adenosine-3',5'-cyclic monophosphate (cAMP). This effect of cAMP is age dependent, increasing threefold between 1 and 2 months following birth and then declining as V1 is replaced by V3.
Absence of Brown Product FFI in Nondiabetic and Diabetic Rat Collagen

Accumulation of brown products in long-lived proteins might be an important factor in determining long-term diabetic complications. Fluorescent chromophore 2-(2-furoyl)-4-(5)-(2-furanyl)-1H-imidazole (FFI), isolated from hydrolyzed brown products synthesized in vitro, was proposed as a specific brown product responsible for functional and structural changes in long-lived proteins. In this study, an attempt was made to demonstrate by means of collision spectroscopy the presence of FFI in collagen samples taken from diabetic rats. Diabetic rat collagen samples showed mean values of absorbance per milligram of 4-hydroxy-L-proline significantly higher than those observed in nondiabetic rats, suggesting higher FFI levels. Surprisingly, all collagen samples from diabetic and nondiabetic rats gave collision spectra in which no peak diagnostic of FFI presence was observed. These data suggest that the absorbance level observed in diabetic rats is not due to the presence of FFI but to structurally related compounds, which are being investigated by means of mass spectrometry.
Sparse WiFi Deployment for Vehicular Internet Access With Bounded Interconnection Gap

Vehicular Internet access via open WiFi access points (APs) has been demonstrated to be a feasible solution to provide opportunistic data service to moving vehicles. Using an in situ deployment, however, such a solution does not provide performance guarantees due to unpredictable intermittent connectivity. On the other hand, a solution that tries to cover every point in an entire road network with APs (a full coverage) is not very practical due to prohibitive deployment and operational costs. In this paper, we introduce a new notion of intermittent coverage for mobile users, called Alpha Coverage, which provides worst-case guarantees on the interconnection gap, i.e., the distance or expected delay between two consecutive mobile-AP contacts for a vehicle, while using significantly fewer APs than needed for full coverage. We propose efficient algorithms to verify whether a given deployment provides Alpha Coverage. The problem of finding an economic deployment that provides α -coverage turns out to be NP-hard. We hence provide both approximation algorithms that have provable guarantees on the performance as well as efficient heuristics that perform well in practice. The efficiency of our algorithms is demonstrated via simulations using data from real-world road networks.
Question Answering from Frequently Asked Question Files: Experiences with the FAQ FINDER System

This technical report describes FAQ Finder, a natural language question answering system that uses files of frequently asked questions as its knowledge base. Unlike AI question-answering systems that focus on the generation of new answers, FAQ Finder retrieves existing ones found in frequently-asked question files. Unlike information retrieval approaches that rely on a purely lexical metric of similarity between query and document, FAQ Finder uses a semantic knowledge base (WordNet) to improve its ability to match question and answer. We describe the design and the current implementation of the system and its support components, including results from an evaluation of the system''s performance against a corpus of user questions. An important finding was that a combination of semantic and statistical techniques works better than any single approach. We analyze failures of the system and discuss future research aimed at addressing them.
Controlling Consistency in Top-N Recommender Systems

Recommender systems have become essential navigational tools for users to surf through vast on-line catalogs. However, recommender algorithms are often tuned to improve accuracy, without paying any attention to the consistency of the recommendations when small changes happen to the user profile or to the model. Consistency of recommendations is closely related with user satisfaction and trust. In this work we analyze how small changes in either the user profile or the recommender model may affect the consistency of Top-N recommendation systems. We also design two mechanisms able to promote consistency without degrading accuracy and novelty of recommendations. Finally, we investigate the consistency of Top-N recommendation algorithms over time by analyzing real data from a production IPTV recommender system.
Characterization of cell‐surface prion protein relative to its recombinant analogue: insights from molecular dynamics simulations of diglycosylated, membrane‐bound human prion protein

The prion protein (PrP) is responsible for several fatal neurodegenerative diseases via conversion from its normal to disease‐related isoform. The recombinant form of the protein is typically studied to investigate the conversion process. This constructs lacks the co‐ and post‐translational modifications present in vivo, there the protein has two N‐linked glycans and is bound to the outer leaflet of the plasma membrane via a glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchor. The inherent flexibility and heterogeneity of the glycans, the plasticity of the GPI anchor, and the localization of the protein in a membrane make experimental structural characterization of biological constructs of cellular prion protein (PrPC) challenging. Yet this characterization is central in determining not only the suitability of recombinant (rec)‐PrPC as a model for biological forms of the protein but also the potential role of co‐ and post‐translational modifications on the disease process. Here, we present molecular dynamics simulations of three human prion protein constructs: (i) a protein‐only construct modeling the recombinant form, (ii) a diglycosylated and soluble construct, and (iii) a diglycosylated and GPI‐anchored construct bound to a lipid bilayer. We found that glycosylation and membrane anchoring do not significantly alter the structure or dynamics of PrPC, but they do appreciably modify the accessibility of the polypeptide surface PrPC. In addition, the simulations of membrane‐bound PrPC revealed likely recognition domains for the disease‐initiating PrPC:PrPSc (infectious and/or misfolded form of the prion protein) binding event and a potential mechanism for the observed inefficiency of conversion associated with differentially glycosylated PrP species.