Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Strong Consistency at Scale

Today’s online services must meet strict availability and performance requirements. State machine replication, one of the most fundamental approaches to increasing the availability of services without sacriﬁcing strong consistency, provides conﬁgurable availability but limited performance scalability. Scalable State Machine Replication (S-SMR) achieves scalable performance by partitioning the service state and coordinating the ordering and execution of commands. While S-SMR scales the performance of single-partition commands with the number of deployed partitions, replica coordination needed by multi-partition commands introduces an overhead in the execution of multi-partition commands. In the paper, we review Scalable State Machine Replication and quantify the overhead due to replica coordination in different scenarios. In brief, we show that performance overhead is affected by the number of partitions involved in multi-partition commands and data locality
Targeting Cre Recombinase to Specific Neuron Populations with Bacterial Artificial Chromosome Constructs

Transgenic mouse lines are characterized with Cre recombinase driven by promoters of CNS-specific genes using bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) constructs. BAC-Cre constructs for 10 genes (Chat, Th, Slc6a4, Slc6a2, Etv1, Ntsr1, Drd2, Drd1, Pcp2, and Cmtm5) produced 14 lines with Cre expression in specific neuronal and glial populations in the brain. These Cre driver lines add functional utility to the >500 BAC-EGFP (enhanced green fluorescent protein) transgenic mouse lines that are part of the Gene Expression Nervous System Atlas Project.
Clinical and Electroencephalographic Features of Carotid Sinus Syncope Induced by Internal Carotid Artery Angioplasty

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:Carotid sinus syncope may occur acutely during internal carotid artery angioplasty (CA). We performed this study to investigate the clinical, electroencephalographic (EEG), and hemodynamic features of carotid sinus syncope induced by CA. MATERIALS AND METHODS:Between 1992 and 2003, clinical, EEG, and cardiovascular monitoring was performed in 359 consecutive patients undergoing CA. RESULTS:Carotid sinus reaction (CSR) and syncope occurred in 62.7% and 18.6% of the procedures, respectively. CSR and syncopal spells were classified into cardioinhibitory, vasodepressor, and mixed type. Syncope occurred more frequently in patients with cardioinhibitory CSR (P < .001). The odds ratios for the risk of syncope in patients with cardioinhibitory CSR and vasodepressor/mixed CSR were 6.9 and 1.4, respectively. Sixty-one patients had cardioinhibitory syncope; 7 had the vasodepressor/mixed type. Thirteen spells were not related to cardiovascular disturbances. This last syncope subtype was significantly associated with brain hemodynamic disturbances, including a decrease in cerebral vasoreactivity (P = .04) and the absence of function of both communicating arteries (P = .03). Convulsive movements resembling supplementary sensorimotor seizures occurred in 79% of patients who experienced syncopal spells. EEG changes were more prominent in patients with cardioinhibitory syncope. CONCLUSIONS:Syncope occurs frequently in patients undergoing CA and can be misdiagnosed as seizures. The most frequent mechanism was a cardioinhibitory response. Cerebral hemodynamic disturbances may play a crucial role in the pathophysiology of syncope with normal sinus rhythm and normotension. Moreover, direct depression of the CNS following carotid sinus distension is likely to be involved.
Relations between Non-Commutative and Commutative Spacetime

Spacetime non-commutativity appears in string theory. In this paper, the non-commutativity in string theory is reviewed. At first we review that a Dp-brane is equivalent to a configuration of infinitely many D($p-2$)-branes. If we consider the worldvolume as that of the Dp-brane, coordinates of the Dp-brane is commutative. On the other hand if we deal with the worldvolume as that of the D($p-2$)-branes, since coordinates of many D-branes are promoted to matrices the worldvolume theory is non-commutative one. Next we see that using a point splitting reguralization gives a non-commutative D-brane, and a non-commutative gauge field can be rewritten in terms of an ordinary gauge field. The transformation is called the Seiberg-Witten map. And we introduce second class constraints as boundary conditions of an open string. Since Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions are mixed in the constraints when the open string is coupled to a NS B field, the end points of the open string is non-commutative.
A TPM-enabled remote attestation protocol (TRAP) in wireless sensor networks

Given the limited resources and computational power of current embedded sensor devices, memory protection is difficult to achieve and generally unavailable. Hence, the software run-time buffer overflow that is used by the worm attacks in the Internet could be easily exploited to inject malicious codes into Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Previous software-based remote code verification approaches such as SWATT and SCUBA have been shown difficult to deploy in recent work. In this paper, we propose and implement a remote attestation protocol for detecting unauthorized tampering in the application codes running on sensor nodes with the assistance of Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs), the tiny, cost-effective and tamper-proof cryptographic microcontrollers. In our design, each sensor node is equipped with a TPM and the firmware running on the node could be verified by the other sensor nodes in a WSN, including the sink. Specifically, we present a hardware-based remote attestation protocol, discuss the potential attacks an adversary could launch against the protocol, and provide comprehensive system performance results of the protocol in a multi-hop sensor network testbed.
Thread-local heaps for Java

We present a memory management scheme for Java based on thread-local heaps. Assuming most objects are created and used by a single thread, it is desirable to free the memory manager from redundant synchronization for thread-local objects. Therefore, in our scheme each thread receives a partition of the heap in which it allocates its objects and in which it does local garbage collection without synchronization with other threads. We dynamically monitor to determine which objects are local and which are global. Furthermore, we suggest using profiling to identify allocation sites that almost exclusively allocate global objects, and allocate objects at these sites directly in a global area.We have implemented the thread-local heap memory manager and a preliminary mechanism for direct global allocation on an IBM prototype of JDK 1.3. 0 for Windows. Our measurements of thread-local heaps with direct global allocation on a 4-way multiprocessor IBM Netfinity server show that the overall garbage collection times have been substantially reduced, and that most long pauses have been eliminated.
Fault-Intrusion Tolerant Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consist of a large number of tiny sensor devices that have limited power and limited sensing, computation, and wireless communications capabilities. Sensor nodes usually operate in unattended and even harsh environments, and as a result, sensor nodes are prone to failures and are vulnerable to malicious attacks. Therefore, for reliable and secure computation and communication in WSN, fault tolerance and intrusion tolerance become two essential attributes that should be designed into WSN. In this paper, we study state-of-the-art fault tolerance and intrusion tolerance techniques for WSN and propose a new fault-intrusion tolerant routing mechanism called MVMP (multi-version multi-path) for WSN that will support highly reliable and secure sensor networks. Follow-up work on the MVMP to be carried out in the near future is also discussed
EDL/MAE regulates EGF-mediated induction by antagonizing Ets transcription factor Pointed

Inductive patterning mechanisms often use negative regulators to coordinate the effects and efficiency of induction. During Spitz EGF-mediated neuronal induction in the Drosophila compound eye and chordotonal organs, Spitz causes activation of Ras signaling in the induced cells, resulting in the activation of Ets transcription factor Pointed P2. We describe developmental roles of a novel negative regulator of Ras signaling, EDL/MAE, a protein with an Ets-specific Pointed domain but not an ETS DNA-binding domain. The loss of EDL/MAE function results in reduced number of photoreceptor neurons and chordotonal organs, suggesting a positive role in the induction by Spitz EGF. However, EDL/MAE functions as an antagonist of Pointed P2, by binding to its Pointed domain and abolishing its transcriptional activation function. Furthermore, edl/mae appears to be specifically expressed in cells with inducing ability. This suggests that inducing cells, which can respond to Spitz they themselves produce, must somehow prevent activation of Pointed P2. Indeed hyperactivation of Pointed P2 in inducing cells interferes with their inducing ability, resulting in the reduction in inducing ability. We propose that EDL/MAE blocks autocrine activation of Pointed P2 so that inducing cells remain induction-competent. Inhibition of inducing ability by Pointed probably represents a novel negative feedback system that can prevent uncontrolled spread of induction of similar cell fates.
Cultural globalization on the printed page: Stability and change in the proportion of foreign cultural products in European quality newspapers, 1960–2010

To bring empirical scrutiny to the often very general and theory-driven debates on cultural globalization and to broaden the geographical scope of previous studies on the topic, this paper presents an analysis of the changes in the relative weight of national and global culture in the culture sections of quality European newspapers from 1960 to 2010. Through content analysis of newspaper articles, the paper examines how the composition of geographical origin of the cultural products discussed has changed over a half-century. The paper asks whether globalizing trends exist in newspaper coverage of culture or whether coverage of national culture remains dominant; to what degree is there variation, based on the art form discussed; and whether newspapers embedded in their national contexts differ from each other in these respects. The results show only a moderate increase in coverage of global products. However, clear trends were found that are associated with both the geographical origin of cultural products and the art forms discussed in the articles, highlighting that post-1960s cultural globalization is best understood as being intertwined with the rise of popular culture and the corresponding decline of traditional – and very European – highbrow culture.
What does Twitter Measure?: Influence of Diverse User Groups in Altmetrics

The most important goal for digital libraries is to ensure high quality search experience for all kinds of users. To attain this goal, it is necessary to have as much relevant metadata as possible at hand to assess the quality of publications. Recently, a new group of metrics appeared, that has the potential to raise the quality of publication metadata to the next level -- the altmetrics. These metrics try to reflect the impact of publications within the social web. However, currently it is still unclear if and how altmetrics should be used to assess the quality of a publication and how altmetrics are related to classical bibliographical metrics (like e.g. citations). To gain more insights about what kind of concepts are reflected by altmetrics, we conducted an in-depth analysis on a real world dataset crawled from the Public Library of Science (PLOS). Especially, we analyzed if the common approach to regard the users in the social web as one homogeneous group is sensible or if users need to be divided into diverse groups in order to receive meaningful results.
A Supervised Aggregation Framework for Multi-Document Summarization

In most summarization approaches, sentence ranking plays a vital role. Most previous work explored different features and combined them into unified ranking methods. However, it would be imprecise to rank sentences from a single point of view because contributions from the features are onefold in these methods. In this paper, a novel supervised aggregation approach for summarization is proposed which combines different summarization methods including LexPageRank, LexHITS, manifold-ranking method and DivRank. Human labeled data are used to train an optimization model which combines these multiple summarizers and then the weights assigned to each individual summarizer are learned. Experiments are conducted on DUC2004 data set and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the supervised aggregation method compared with typical ensemble approaches. In addition, we also investigate the influence of training data construction and component diversity on the summarization results.
Optimal Power Flow Evaluation of Power System Using Genetic Algorithm

This paper presents an efficient genetic algorithm for solving non-convex optimal power flow (OPF) problems with bus voltage constraints for practical application. In this method, the individual is the binary-coded representation that contains a mixture of continuous and discrete control variables, and crossover and mutation schemes are proposed to deal with continuous/discrete control variables, respectively. The objective of OPF is defined that not only to minimize total generation cost but also to improve the bus voltage profile. The proposed method is demonstrated for a IEEE 30-bus four generator ystem, and it is compared with conventional method.The experimental results show that the GA OPF method is superior to the conventional.
Generalized Postfilter for Speech Quality Enhancement

Postfilters are commonly used in speech coding for the attenuation of quantization noise. In the presence of acoustic background noise or distortion due to tandeming operations, the postfilter parameters are not adjusted and the performance is, therefore, not optimal. We propose a modification that consists of replacing the nonadaptive postfilter parameters with parameters that adapt to variations in spectral flatness, obtained from the noisy speech. This generalization of the postfiltering concept can handle a larger range of noise conditions, but has the same computational complexity and memory requirements as the conventional postfilter. Test results indicate that the presented algorithm improves on the standard postfilter, as well as on the combination of a noise attenuation preprocessor and the conventional postfilter.
Real-world Reference Game using the Words-as-Classifiers Model of Reference Resolution

When referring to visually-present objects, an elementary site of language use, sometimes there isn’t enough information to resolve the speaker’s intended object. When this happens, more information needs to be elicited from the speaker. In this demo, we will show a simple system that uses the word-as-classifiers model to resolve referring expressions to objects, as well as a simple interaction manager that determines if there is enough information to fully resolve the reference–if not, more information is elicited from the speaker. The modules are implemented and distributed with InproTK.
Guidance and Control for Spacecraft Planar Re-Phasing via Input-Shaping and Differential Drag

This paper proposes a solution to the problem of re-phasing circular or low eccentricity orbiting, short-distance spacecraft, by integrating existing analytical guidance solutions based on input-shaping and analytical control techniques for differential drag based on Lyapunov theory. The combined guidance and control approach is validated via numerical simulations in a full nonlinear environment using Systems Tool Kit. The results show promise for future onboard implementation on propellant-less spacecraft.
Celastrol Protects against Antimycin A-Induced Insulin Resistance in Human Skeletal Muscle Cells

Mitochondrial dysfunction and inflammation are widely accepted as key hallmarks of obesity-induced skeletal muscle insulin resistance. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the functional roles of an anti-inflammatory compound, celastrol, in mitochondrial dysfunction and insulin resistance induced by antimycin A (AMA) in human skeletal muscle cells. We found that celastrol treatment improved insulin-stimulated glucose uptake activity of AMA-treated cells, apparently via PI3K/Akt pathways, with significant enhancement of mitochondrial activities. Furthermore, celastrol prevented increased levels of cellular oxidative damage where the production of several pro-inflammatory cytokines in cultures cells was greatly reduced. Celastrol significantly increased protein phosphorylation of insulin signaling cascades with amplified expression of AMPK protein and attenuated NF-κB and PKC θ activation in human skeletal muscle treated with AMA. The improvement of insulin signaling pathways by celastrol was also accompanied by augmented GLUT4 protein expression. Taken together, these results suggest that celastrol may be advocated for use as a potential therapeutic molecule to protect against mitochondrial dysfunction-induced insulin resistance in human skeletal muscle cells.
Evaluation of Enhanced K- MEAN Algorithm to the Student Dataset

- -------------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACT ------------------------------------------------------------------ Conventional database querying methods are inadequate to extract useful information from huge data banks. Cluster analysis is one of the major data analysis methods and the k-means clustering algorithm is widely used for many practical applications. In this paper, the enhanced k-mean algorithm applied to the huge student dataset to find out the different categories and group them.
Stochastic equivalence for performance analysis of concurrent systems in dtsiPBC

We propose an extension with immediate multiactions of discrete time stochastic Petri Box Calculus (dtsPBC), presented by I.V. Tarasyuk. The resulting algebra dtsiPBC is a discrete time analogue of stochastic Petri Box Calculus (sPBC) with immediate multiactions, designed by H. Maci\`a, V. Valero et al. within a continuous time domain. The step operational semantics is constructed via labeled probabilistic transition systems. The denotational semantics is based on labeled discrete time stochastic Petri nets with immediate transitions. To evaluate performance, the corresponding semi-Markov chains are analyzed. We define step stochastic bisimulation equivalence of expressions that is applied to reduce their transition systems and underlying semi-Markov chains while preserving the functionality and performance characteristics. We explain how this equivalence can be used to simplify performance analysis of the algebraic processes. In a case study, a method of modeling, performance evaluation and behaviour reduction for concurrent systems is outlined and applied to the shared memory system.
Spatio-Temporal Pyramid Model based on depth maps for action recognition

This paper presents a novel human action recognition method by using depth maps. Each depth frame in a depth video sequence is projected onto three orthogonal Cartesian planes. Under each projection view, we divide the entire depth maps into several sub-actions. The absolute difference between two consecutive projected maps is accumulated through a depth video (several sub-actions) sequence to form a Depth Motion Map (DMM) to describe the dynamic feature of an action. Also the difference within the threshold between two consecutive projected maps is calculated through the entire depth video to form another kind of Depth Static Map (DSM) to describe the static feature. Collectively, we call them Temporal Pyramid of Depth Model (TPDM). Then Spatial Pyramid Histograms of Oriented Gradient (SPHOG) is computed from the TPDM for the representation of an action. For classification, we apply support vector machine (SVM) to classify the proposed descriptorsbased on MSR Action3D dataset. Experimental results demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Topic Negotiation in Information Systems Action Research Nereu

This paper discusses the gradual negotiation process involved in the resolution of the initiative dilemma of IS action research. This dilemma occurs when the researcher faces the decision to either take the initiative to define an opportunity for generating knowledge , and then try to find possible client organisations, or to leave this initiative to client organisations and tackle problems proposed by them. The first option may lead to the definition of a research project that does not meet the interests of client organisations, while the second may lead to a research topic beyond the researcher’s area of interest or area of expertise. The dilemma is resolved through a process of negotiation. The paper proposes two models to explain this negotiation process and to resolve this dilemma: a model of the overall negotiation process, and a model of the cyclical information exchange that supports this process. These models are supported by analysis of an on-going action research study of the effects of groupware technology on business process improvement groups in organisations. The paper highlights that the researcher and target organisation may initially hold different and potentially conflicting views, but that through an effective negotiation process these can change over time, and eventually converge into an agreed research project
Iot Based Weather Station Using Raspberry Pi 3

Weather is the day-to-day state of atmosphere that is hard to predict which affects the activities of mankind and has great significance in many different domains. However, the current weather station in the market is expensive and bulky which cause inconvenience. The aim of this project is to design a weather station with real time notifications for climatology monitoring, interface it to a cloud platform and analyse weather parameters. In this project, a weather station is assembled using SparkFun Weather Shield and Weather Meter and Arduino Uno R3 to collect weather parameters. Data collected from the sensors are then stored into Google Cloud SQL using Raspberry Pi 3 Model B which acts as a gateway between them and analysis of weather data are done. A website and mobile application are developed using Google Data Studio and Android Studio respectively to display the real-time weather conditions in graphical presentation which are accessible by administrator and users. Users will receive notification regarding the weather conditions at that particular place on social media platform regularly and irregularly. Weather prediction is done in short term which allows users to get themselves prepared for their future plan in the next thirty minutes.