Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scientific Workflow Repeatability through Cloud-Aware Provenance

The transformations, analyses and interpretations of data in scientific workflows are vital for the repeatability and reliability of scientific workflows. This provenance of scientific workflows has been effectively carried out in Grid based scientific workflow systems. However, recent adoption of Cloud-based scientific workflows present an opportunity to investigate the suitability of existing approaches or propose new approaches to collect provenance information from the Cloud and to utilize it for workflow repeatability in the Cloud infrastructure. The dynamic nature of the Cloud in comparison to the Grid makes it difficult because resources are provisioned on-demand unlike the Grid. This paper presents a novel approach that can assist in mitigating this challenge. This approach can collect Cloud infrastructure information along with workflow provenance and can establish a mapping between them. This mapping is later used to re-provision resources on the Cloud. The repeatability of the workflow execution is performed by: (a) capturing the Cloud infrastructure information (virtual machine configuration) along with the workflow provenance, and (b) re-provisioning the similar resources on the Cloud and re-executing the workflow on them. The evaluation of an initial prototype suggests that the proposed approach is feasible and can be investigated further.
Performance comparison of various information retrieval models used in search engines

The process by which information is retrieved from the repositories is called as information retrieval. This process had been a manual process since many centuries but since the advent of computers since the past few decades, it has become automated. Certain models form the basis of information retrieval in automated systems and are categorized as conventional and unconventional. This is because the motive of information retrieval systems is not only to render information to the regular users of internet but also, help the novice users of internet to skim out the documents that they need. In our paper, we have suggested that the information retrieval models must contain some questions regarding the user intent as well so that the search engine is able to search the websites that may prove to be informative for the users. These questions may enable the system to find out the user intent because entering one word may give varied results based upon the various uses to which it is put so that refining of requirements may be helpful in yielding appropriate results.
Tamper detection and localization for categorical data using fragile watermarks

Today, database relations are widely used and distributed over the Internet. Since these data can be easily tampered with, it is critical to ensure the integrity of these data. In this paper, we propose to make use of fragile watermarks to detect and localize malicious alterations made to a database relation with categorical attributes. Unlike other watermarking schemes which inevitably introduce distortions to the cover data, the proposed scheme is distortion free. In our algorithm, all tuples in a database relation are first securely divided into groups according to some secure parameters. Watermarks are embedded and verified in each group independently. Thus, any modifications can be localized to some specific groups. Theoretical analysis shows that the probability of missing detection is very low.
A new compressed sensing-based matching pursuit algorithm for image reconstruction

Compressed Sensing (CS), a popular technique which seeks to capture a discrete signal with a small number of linear measurements, could be used to compress a signal during the process of sampling. As an iterative greedy reconstruction algorithm for practical CS, sparsity adaptive matching pursuit (SAMP) takes advantage of the capability of signal reconstruction without prior information of the sparsity in the process of resuming the original high-dimension-data from low-dimension measurement. This paper presents a backward and adaptive matching pursuit reconstruction algorithm with fixed step sizes to avoid the overestimation phenomena of SAMP by using a standard regularized approach. Firstly, a fixed and biggish step size is set to make sure the size of support set of the signal to be reconstructed increasing stably. The energy difference between adjacent reconstructed signals is then taken as the halting condition of iteration. A standard regularized approach is employed to post-dispose the final iteration results, which backward eliminates superfluous atoms to acquire exact reconstruction. Experimental results show that such an improvement of SAMP is feasible in technology and effective in acquiring quick and exact reconstruction with sufficient measurement.
The impact of national vaccination policy changes on influenza incidence in the Netherlands

We assessed the impact of two major modifications of the Dutch National Influenza Prevention Programme – the introduction in 1997 of free‐of‐charge vaccination to persons aged ≥65 years and to high‐risk groups (previously only advised, and not free of charge), and the lowering of the eligible age to 60 years in 2008 – on the estimated incidence of influenza infection leading to influenza‐like illness (ILI).
Reproducibility of Frankfort Horizontal Plane on 3D Multi-Planar Reconstructed MR Images

Objective The purpose of this study was to determine the accuracy and reliability of Frankfort horizontal plane identification using displays of multi-planar reconstructed MRI images, and propose it as a sufficiently stable and standardized reference plane for craniofacial structures. Materials and Methods MRI images of 43 subjects were obtained from the longitudinal population based cohort study SHIP-2 using a T1-weighted 3D sequence. Five examiners independently identified the three landmarks that form FH plane. Intra-examiner reproducibility and inter-examiner reliability, correlation coefficients (ICC), coefficient of variability and Bland-Altman plots were obtained for all landmarks coordinates to assess reproducibility. Intra-examiner reproducibility and inter-examiner reliability in terms of location and plane angulation were also assessed. Results Intra- and inter-examiner reliabilities for X, Y and Z coordinates of all three landmarks were excellent with ICC values ranging from 0.914 to 0.998. Differences among examiners were more in X and Z than in Y dimensions. The Bland–Altman analysis demonstrated excellent intra- as well as inter-examiner agreement between examiners in all coordinates for all landmarks. Intra-examiner reproducibility and inter-examiner reliability of the three landmarks in terms of distance showed mean differences between 1.3 to 2.9 mm, Mean differences in plane angulation were between 1.0° to 1.5° among examiners. Conclusion This study revealed excellent intra-examiner reproducibility and inter-examiner reliability of Frankfort Horizontal plane through 3D landmark identification in MRI. Sufficiently stable landmark-based reference plane could be used for different treatments and studies.
Statistical Grey-Level Models for Object Location and Identification

Abstract This paper presents a new method for modelling and locating objects in images for applications such as Printed Circuit Board (PCB) inspection. Objects of interest are assumed to exhibit little variation in size or shape from one example to the next, but may vary considerably in grey-level appearance. Simple correlation based approaches perform poorly on such examples. To deal with variation we build statistical models of the grey levels across the structure in a set of training examples. A multi-resolution search technique is used to locate the best match to the model in an area of a new image to sub-pixel accuracy. A fit measure with predictable statistical properties can then be used to determine the probability that best match is a valid example of the model. We describe a ‘bootstrap’ approach to training and a method of automatically refining the final model to improve its performance. We demonstrate the method on PCB inspection, showing the approach is robust enough for use in a real production environment.
Supply chain coordination under vendor-managed inventory with consignment-based revenue-sharing contract

The paper deals with the problem of decentralized supply chain coordination in a single-retailer Stackelberg and a single-supplier over a multi-period planning horizon under VMI system with consignment and revenue-sharing agreements, subject to deteriorated goods and multivariate demand function. We formulate the profit-maximization issue and develop the solution procedures under cooperative and non-cooperative policies. Our analysis reveals that the benefit generated from cooperative policy can significantly achieve channel-wide profit improvements.
Characteristics of PM10 Chemical Source Profiles for Geological Dust from the South-West Region of China

Ninety-six particulate matter (PM10) chemical source profiles for geological sources in typical cities of southwest China were acquired from Source Profile Shared Service in China. Twenty-six elements (Na, Mg, Al, Si, K, Ca, Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Ga, As, Se, Sr, Cd, Sn, Sb, Ba, Be, Tl and Pb), nine ions (F−, Cl−, SO42−, NO3−, Na+, NH4+, K+, Mg2+ and Ca2+), and carbon-containing species (organic carbon and elemental carbon) were determined to construct these profiles. Individual source profiles were averaged and compared to quantify similarities and differences in chemical abundances using the profile-compositing method. Overall, the major components of PM10 in geological sources were crustal minerals and undefined fraction. Different chemical species could be used as tracers for various types of geological dust in the region that resulted from different anthropogenic influence. For example, elemental carbon, V and Zn could be used as tracers for urban paved road dust; Al, Si, K+ and NH4+ for agricultural soil; Al and Si for natural soil; and SO42− for urban resuspended dust. The enrichment factor analysis showed that Cu, Se, Sr and Ba were highly enriched by human activities in geological dust samples from south-west China. Elemental ratios were taken to highlight the features of geological dust from south-west China by comparing with northern urban fugitive dust, loess and desert samples. Low Si/Al and Fe/Al ratios can be used as markers to trace geological sources from southwestern China. High Pb/Al and Zn/Al ratios observed in urban areas demonstrated that urban geological dust was influenced seriously by non-crustal sources.
Transporter Gene Expression in Lactating and Nonlactating Human Mammary Epithelial Cells Using Real-Time Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction

Transporter-mediated processes in the lactating mammary gland may explain the significant accumulation of certain drugs in breast milk. The purpose of this study was to identify potential candidate drug transport proteins involved in drug accumulation in milk. Quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction methods were developed to determine the relative RNA levels of 30 different drug transporter genes. Transporter gene RNA levels in lactating mammary epithelial cells (MEC) purified from pooled fresh breast milk samples were compared with levels in nonlactating MEC, liver, and kidney tissue. Transcripts were detected in lactating MEC for OCT1, OCT3, OCTN1, OCTN2, OATP-A, OATP-B, OATP-D, OATP-E, MRP1, MRP2, MRP5, MDR1, CNT1, CNT3, ENT1, ENT3, NCBT1, PEPT1, and PEPT2. No transcripts were detected for OCT2, OAT1, OAT2, OAT3, OAT4, OATP-C, MRP3, MRP4, CNT2, ENT2, and NCBT2. Lactating MEC demonstrated more than 4-fold higher RNA levels of OCT1, OCTN1, PEPT2, CNT1, CNT3, and ENT3, and more than 4-fold lower RNA levels of MDR1 and OCTN2 relative to nonlactating MEC. Lactating MEC showed significantly higher RNA levels of CNT3 relative to liver and kidney, increased PEPT2 RNA levels relative to liver, and increased OATP-A RNA levels relative to kidney. These data imply CNT3 may play a specialized role in nucleoside accumulation in milk and may identify an important role for PEPT2 and OATP-A transporters at the lactating mammary epithelium. Furthermore, transporters expressed in lactating MEC identify a potential role for these transporters in drug disposition at the mammary gland.
Mixed-length SIMD code generation for VLIW architectures with multiple native vector-widths

The degree of DLP parallelism in applications is not fixed and varies due to different computational characteristics of applications. On the contrary, most of the processors today include single-width SIMD (vector) hardware to exploit DLP. However, single-width SIMD architectures may not be optimal to serve applications with varying DLP and they may cause performance and energy inefficiency. We propose the usage of VLIW processors with multiple native vector-widths to better serve applications with changing DLP. SHAVE is an example of such VLIW processor and provides hardware support for the native 32-bit and 128-bit wide vector operations. This paper researches and implements the mixed-length SIMD code generation support for SHAVE processor. More specifically, we target generating 32-bit and 128/64-bit SIMD code for the native 32-bit and 128-bit wide vector units of SHAVE processor. In this way, we improved the performance of compiler generated SIMD code by reducing the number of overhead operations and by increasing the SIMD hardware utilization. Experimental results demonstrated that our methodology implemented in the compiler improves the performance of synthetic benchmarks up to 47%.
Quantifier Elimination versus Generalized Interval Evaluation: a Comparison on a Specific Class of Quantified Constraint

This paper presents and compares two methods for checking if a box is included inside the solution set of an equality constraint with existential quantiﬁcation of its parameters. We focus on distance constraints, where each existentially quantiﬁed parameter has only one occurrence, because of their usefulness and their simplicity. The ﬁrst method relies on a speciﬁc quantiﬁer elimination based on geometric considerations whereas the second method relies on computations with generalized intervals— interval whose bounds are not constrained to be ordered. We show that on two dimension problems, the two methods yield equivalent re-sults. However, when dealing with higher dimensions, generalized intervals are more eﬃcient.
Exploiting feature correspondence constraints for image recognition

Image recognition is one of the fundamental problems in multimedia analysis. Typically in the training database, there will be more than one image for each object, however most existing bag-of-features based approaches treat them independently and completely ignore the feature correspondence relationship among them. As a result, features corresponding to the same physical point may be clustered into different clusters, which finally leads to inaccurate image representations for recognition. To tackle the problem, we present a supervised codebook construction algorithm exploiting the feature correspondence constraints in feature clustering. Features in different images of the same object are first matched, then ho-mography between images are computed to remove outliers as well as recover the feature correspondences that are not correctly matched. Features belonging to the same physical point are enforced to be in the same cluster. We show via experiments that codebook constructed using this approach can improve the recognition performance.
An adaptive feature selection method for multi-class classification

A vast variety of feature selection methods have been proposed according to different metrics, such as information gain, entropy, chi-square test, t-test. Yet when applied to multi-class classification task, these methods generally suffer the “siren pitfall” of a surplus of predictive features for some classes while lack of predictive features for the remaining classes. A number of solutions to the “siren pitfall” have been proposed, yet there are still problems with these methods. For example, the selected features by “randomized feature set” method are not re-configurable; the “rand-robin” method and the “round-robin” method may miss some important features whenever the one v.s. others binary partition does not work; the computation cost of the wrapper's method is rather high. In this paper, we propose an adaptive feature selection method for multi-class classification task. With our method, the “siren pitfall” could be avoided, the selected features could be reproduced, the feature selection scheme does not rely on any prior knowledge, and the corresponding computation cost is low. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of our adaptive feature selection method.
Appraisal of Opinion Expressions in Discourse

We present an analysis of opinion in texts based on a detailed semantic analysis of a wide class of expressions. We propose a new annotation schema for a deep contextual opinion analysis using discourse relations. We analyze the distribution of our categories in three different types of online corpora, movie reviews, Letters to the Editor and news reports, in English and French.
InSilico Proteomics System: Integration and Application of Protein and Protein-Protein Interaction Data using Microsoft .NET

Summary In the last decades, biological databases became the major knowledge resource for researchers in the field of molecular biology. The distribution of information among these databases is one of the major problems. An overview about the subject area of data access and representation of protein and protein-protein interaction data within public biological databases is described. For a comprehensive and consistent way of searching and analysing integrated protein and protein-protein interaction data, the InSilico Proteomics (ISP) project has been initiated. Its three main objectives are (1) to provide an integrated knowledge pool for data investigation and global network analysis functions for a better understanding of a cell’s interactome, (2) employment of public data for plausibility analysis and validation of in-house experimental data and (3) testing the applicability of Microsoft’s . NET architecture for bioinformatics applications. Data integrated into the ISP database can be queried through the Web portal PRIMOS (PRotein Interaction and MOlecule Search) which is freely available at http://biomis.fh-hagenberg.at/isp/primos.
Default Rules in Functional Logic Programs

In functional logic programs, rules are applicable independently of textual order, i.e., any rule can potentially be used to evaluate an expression. This is similar to logic languages and opposite to functional languages, e.g., Haskell enforces a strict sequential interpretation of rules. However, in some situations it is convenient to express alternatives by means of compact default rules. Although default rules are often used in functional programs, the non-deterministic nature of functional logic programs does not allow to directly transfer this concept from functional to functional logic languages in a meaningful way. In this paper we propose a new concept of default rules for Curry that supports a programming style similar to functional programming while preserving the core properties of functional logic programming, i.e., completeness, non-determinism, and logic-oriented uses of functions. We discuss the basic concept and sketch an initial implementation of it which exploits advanced features of functional logic languages.
The Teicoplanin-Associated Locus Regulator (TcaR) and the Intercellular Adhesin Locus Regulator (IcaR) Are Transcriptional Inhibitors of the ica Locus in Staphylococcus aureus

ABSTRACT Infections involving Staphylococcus aureus are often more severe and difficult to treat when the organism assumes a biofilm mode of growth. The polysaccharide poly-N-acetylglucosamine (PNAG), also known as polysaccharide intercellular adhesin, is synthesized by the products of the intercellular adhesin (ica) locus and plays a key role in biofilm formation. Numerous conditions and exogenous factors influence ica transcription and PNAG synthesis, but the regulatory factors and pathways through which these environmental stimuli act have been only partially characterized. We developed a DNA affinity chromatography system to purify potential regulatory proteins that bind to the ica promoter region. Using this technique, we isolated four proteins, including the staphylococcal gene regulator SarA, a MarR family transcriptional regulator of the teicoplanin-associated locus TcaR, DNA-binding protein II, and topoisomerase IV, that bound to the ica promoter. Site-directed deletion mutagenesis of tcaR indicated that TcaR was a negative regulator of ica transcription, but deletion of tcaR alone did not induce any changes in PNAG production or in adherence to polystyrene. We also investigated the role of IcaR, encoded within the ica locus but divergently transcribed from the biosynthetic genes. As has been shown previously in Staphylococcus epidermidis, we found that IcaR was also a negative regulator of ica transcription in S. aureus. We also demonstrate that mutation of icaR augmented PNAG production and adherence to polystyrene. Transcription of the ica locus, PNAG production, and adherence to polystyrene were further increased in a tcaR icaR double mutant. In summary, TcaR appeared to be a weak negative regulator of transcription of the ica locus, whereas IcaR was a strong negative regulator, and in their absence PNAG production and biofilm formation were enhanced.