Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A realistic mobility pattern generator for the performance evaluation of mobile computing mechanisms

A platform for the simulation of mobility functions (e.g. protocols, application architectures) is presented. This platform, named RMPG, is based on the assumption that real humans exhibit considerable spatial and temporal regularity in their moves. We base our simulation environment on the random way‐point algorithm incorporated in the ns tool. We review other approaches, simulation tools and mobility models. Through the RMPG, that has been implemented in Java, we performed a series of simulations by considering a path prediction algorithm as a mobility function scheme. We present our results. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Stash: Have your scratchpad and cache it too

Heterogeneous systems employ specialization for energy efficiency. Since data movement is expected to be a dominant consumer of energy, these systems employ specialized memories (e.g., scratchpads and FIFOs) for better efficiency for targeted data. These memory structures, however, tend to exist in local address spaces, incurring significant performance and energy penalties due to inefficient data movement between the global and private spaces. We propose an efficient heterogeneous memory system where specialized memory components are tightly coupled in a unified and coherent address space. This paper applies these ideas to a system with CPUs and GPUs with scratchpads and caches. We introduce a new memory organization, stash, that combines the benefits of caches and scratchpads without incurring their downsides. Like a scratchpad, the stash is directly addressed (without tags and TLB accesses) and provides compact storage. Like a cache, the stash is globally addressable and visible, providing implicit data movement and increased data reuse. We show that the stash provides better performance and energy than a cache and a scratchpad, while enabling new use cases for heterogeneous systems. For 4 microbenchmarks, which exploit new use cases (e.g., reuse across GPU compute kernels), compared to scratchpads and caches, the stash reduces execution cycles by an average of 27% and 13% respectively and energy by an average of 53% and 35%. For 7 current GPU applications, which are not designed to exploit the new features of the stash, compared to scratchpads and caches, the stash reduces cycles by 10% and 12% on average (max 22% and 31%) respectively, and energy by 16% and 32% on average (max 30% and 51%).
Camera calibration method under poor lighting condition in factories

This paper proposes a method to perform accurate camera calibration under poor lighting condition of factories or industrial fields. Preprocessing of camera calibration required for measuring object dimensions has to be able to extract calibration points from patterns of the calibration scale, for example, the calibration from plane pattern scale needs at least seven points of the known dimension marked on the scale. However, industrial fields hardly provide proper lighting condition for camera calibration of the measurement system. The data points for calibration are automatically selected from a probabilistic assumption for size variation of the calibration point when the threshold level changes for image binarization. The system requires user to provide at least four points that are incomplete, these points are used to predict position of exact calibration points and extract accurate calibration parameters in an iterative procedure using nonlinear optimization of the parameters. From real images, we prove the method can be applied to camera calibration of poor quality images obtained under lens distortion and bad illumination.
Distributed multi-robot formation control among obstacles: A geometric and optimization approach with consensus

This paper presents a distributed method for navigating a team of robots in formation in 2D and 3D environments with static and dynamic obstacles. The robots are assumed to have a reduced communication and visibility radius and share information with their neighbors. Via distributed consensus the robots compute (a) the convex hull of the robot positions and (b) the largest convex region within free space. The robots then compute, via sequential convex programming, the locally optimal parameters for the formation within this convex neighborhood of the robots. Reconfiguration is allowed, when required, by considering a set of target formations. The robots navigate towards the target collision-free formation with individual local planners that account for their dynamics. The approach is efficient and scalable with the number of robots and performs well in simulations with up to sixteen quadrotors.
Analog System Verification in the Presence of Parasitics Using Behavioral Simulation

In analog system design, final verification in the presence of parasitic loading effects is crucial to guarantee functionality of the entire circuit. In this paper, we present a methodology for analog system verification in the presence of parasitics using behavioral simulation. When applied to a synthesized 10 bit D/A, our approach is accurate to 0.005 LSB compared with SPICE, while being several orders of magnitude faster.
Rapid Detection of Hepatitis B Virus Variants Associated with Lamivudine and Adefovir Resistance by Multiplex Ligation-Dependent Probe Amplification Combined with Real-Time PCR

ABSTRACT Drug-resistant mutations of hepatitis B virus (HBV) are the major obstacles to successful therapy for chronic hepatitis B infection. Although there are many methods for detecting the antiviral drug-resistant mutations of HBV, their applications are restricted because of their shortcomings, such as low sensitivity, the time required, and the high cost. For this study, a multiplex ligation-dependent probe real-time PCR (MLP-RT-PCR) method was developed to simultaneously detect lamivudine (LAM)- and adefovir (ADV)-resistant HBV mutants (those with the mutations rtM204V/I, rtA181V/T, and rtN236T). The new method combined the high-throughput nature of multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (MLPA) with the rapid and sensitive detection of real-time PCR. In this report, MLP-RT-PCR was evaluated by detecting drug-resistant mutants in 116 patients with chronic hepatitis B infection. By MLP-RT-PCR analysis, LAM-resistant mutations were detected in 41 patients (35.3%), ADV-resistant mutations were detected in 17 patients (14.7%), and LAM- and-ADV-resistant mutations were detected in 5 patients (4.3%). Based on the results of MLP-RT-PCR, the mutations rtM204V, rtM204I, rtA181T, rtA181V, and rtN236T were 95.7% (111/116 patients), 98.3% (114/116 patients), 99.1% (115/116 patients), 98.3% (114/116 patients), and 99.1% (115/116 patients) concordant, respectively, with those of direct sequencing. The MLP-RT-PCR assay was more sensitive than direct sequencing for detecting mutations with low frequencies. Four samples containing the low-frequency (<10%) mutants were identified by MLP-RT-PCR and further confirmed by clonal sequencing. MLP-RT-PCR is a rapid and sensitive method that enables the detection of multidrug-resistant HBV mutations in clinical practice.
Nucleic acid detection immunoassay for prostate-specific antigen based on immuno-PCR methodology.

BACKGROUND Serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) concentrations after radical prostatectomy typically become undetectable with the use of current immunometric assay methods. Despite modern surgical techniques, 15%-30% of prostate cancer patients undergoing radical prostatectomy develop a biochemical recurrence during follow-up. Unfortunately, poor analytical sensitivity of standard PSA assays delays biochemical recurrence detection, and because of day-to-day assay imprecision ultrasensitive PSA assays cannot assess PSA kinetics. We developed an immuno-PCR assay for total PSA that has a limit of quantification >10 times lower than current ultrasensitive assays. METHODS The 2-site immunometric assay for total PSA employed 2 monoclonal antibodies, one conjugated to a double-stranded DNA label and the other bound to paramagnetic microparticles. After several washing steps, quantification cycles were determined and values were converted to PSA concentrations. We characterized analytical performance and compared accuracy with a commercially available total PSA assay. RESULTS The limit of quantification was 0.65 ng/L and the assay was linear in the range of 0.25-152.0 ng/L. Total imprecision estimates at PSA concentrations of 3.8, 24.1, and 69.1 ng/L were <15.2%, <9.4%, and <10.6%, respectively. Recovery of supplemented PSA ranged from 87.5% to 119.2% (mean 100.3%). Dilution recovery ranged from 96.4% to 115.3% (mean 102.3%). There was no high-dose hook effect up to 50 000 ng/L of PSA. Comparison with the commercial PSA assay showed a regression slope of 1.06 and a correlation coefficient of 0.996. CONCLUSIONS The analytical characteristics of the assay support the use of this assay for the accurate and precise measurement of serum PSA, even at sub-nanogram-per-liter concentrations.
Xenrelay: An Efficient Data Transmitting Approach for Tracing Guest Domain

As the degree of virtualization is growing considerably, improving performance of virtual machine environments motivates deeper investigation of the internal processes and performance implications of virtualization. Several tools are currently available to help analyze performance in virtual machine environments. However, all of these cannot support users to add their own trace information. In this paper, we present Xenrelay, a unified, efficient, and simple mechanism for transferring large amounts of data from guest domain kernel to privileged domain user-space. Xenrelay allows users (who trace subsystems of guest domain to analyze performance) to record and fast relay data between domains. We provide a case of Xenrelay¡¯s value in revealing behavior of virtualization. We build a block trace toolkit (using Xenrelay as an engine). This toolkit is used to track the block I/O virtualization procedures and evaluates overheads in the Xen environment. Our trace results identify that the main delay is the time of request transmission and block device operation. Besides, the results reveal impact of the I/O schedules on the disk performance.
Efficient Processing of Skyline Queries Using MapReduce

The skyline operator has attracted considerable attention recently due to its broad applications. However, computing a skyline is challenging today since we have to deal with big data. For data-intensive applications, the MapReduce framework has been widely used recently. In this paper, we propose the efficient parallel algorithm <italic>SKY-MR <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^+$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="park-ieq1-2654459.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula></italic> for processing skyline queries using MapReduce. We first build a quadtree-based histogram for space partitioning by deciding whether to split each leaf node judiciously based on the benefit of splitting in terms of the estimated execution time. In addition, we apply the dominance power filtering method to effectively prune non-skyline points in advance. We next partition data based on the regions divided by the quadtree and compute candidate skyline points for each partition using MapReduce. Finally, we check whether each skyline candidate point is actually a skyline point in every partition using MapReduce. We also develop the workload balancing methods to make the estimated execution times of all available machines to be similar. We did experiments to compare <italic>SKY-MR<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^+$</tex-math> <alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="park-ieq2-2654459.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula></italic> with the state-of-the-art algorithms using MapReduce and confirmed the effectiveness as well as the scalability of <italic> SKY-MR<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^+$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="park-ieq3-2654459.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula></italic>.
Lte Technology Update: Part P P 2 F Bl Energy Impact of Emerging Mobile Internet Applications on Lte Networks: Issues and Solutions

INTRODUCTION Fourth-generation (4G) technologies such as Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) have enabled the always-on always-connected model of Internet connectivity. However, this has led to f increased issues of reduced battery lifetimes of mobile devices and attracted the attention of a huge research community [1–3]. Before the introduction of smart mobile devices (e.g., smart phones, e-readers, and tablets), the most popular Internet applications included those such as HTTP web browsers and FTP. These applications generate traffic in a very specific pattern comprising distinct Active and Inactive sessions, f as shown in Fig. 1. The Active sessions consist of several bursts of packet arrival activity with interarrival times within the bursts in the range of a few to hundreds of milliseconds, while Inactive sessions are the times when the active session ends (i.e., the user closes the application and there is no data transmission) [4, 5]. Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Releases 8, 9, and 10 (LTE and LTE-Advanced) were designed before applications such as Facebook and Twitter were in widespread use over mobile devices. LTE's power management model, where the user equipment (UE) stays in RRC_Con-nected state during Active sessions and moves to RRC_Idle during Inactive sessions, is well suited to the previous generation of popular applications , and was effective at minimizing UE power consumption and other air interface resources. However, it is no longer good enough to effectively address the power consumption issues for new and emerging mobile Internet applications. We use the terms Connected and Idle for RRC_Connected and RRC_Idle, respectively, throughout the rest of this article. Recent developments in the field of smart mobile devices and the exponential growth in the number of mobile applications targeted for such devices have changed the traffic profile considerably. The demarcation between Active and Inactive sessions has either been blurred (since users sometimes do not close a session, r but let it run in the " background " instead) or previously Inactive sessions are now witnessing frequent autonomous application-initiated small packet transmissions, as depicted in Fig. 1 [5, 6]. As a result, the UE is unable to stay in Idle state for the duration of the entire Inactive session. Instead, there is now a constant stream of random aperiodic traffic comprising very small amounts of data such as status update messages ABSTRACT Mobile Internet applications run on devices such as smartphones and tablets, and have dramatically changed the landscape of …
The Role of Domestic Opposition and International Justice Regimes in Peaceful Transitions of Power

This article considers how international criminal justice administered by the International Criminal Court (ICC) affects the possibility of negotiated, peaceful transitions of power in autocracies. We argue that a strong international criminal tribunal can deter dictators’ decisions to peacefully relinquish their power. It does so when the dictator in question has faced a relatively violent opposition, one that was ready to strike a deal with the dictator promising him amnesty in exchange for stepping down. Facing an opposition that “has skeletons in its closet,” the dictator will peacefully exit his office only under a weak ICC regime. We use a cross-national time-series data set spanning 1998 to 2007 to test our theory and find that under a weak ICC regime, the more skeletons the opposition has in its own closet, the more likely is the dictator to peacefully step down from office. Interestingly, this relationship holds, to a large extent, across various levels of dictator’s culpability. If the ICC is strong, the number of skeletons the opposition has in its closet has, for the most part, no effect on the dictator’s likelihood of stepping down.
An Intronic Splicing Enhancer Binds U1 snRNPs To Enhance Splicing and Select 5′ Splice Sites

ABSTRACT Intronic G triplets are frequently located adjacent to 5′ splice sites in vertebrate pre-mRNAs and have been correlated with splicing efficiency and specificity via a mechanism that activates upstream 5′ splice sites in exons containing duplicated sites (26). Using an intron dependent upon G triplets for maximal activity and 5′ splice site specificity, we determined that these elements bind U1 snRNPs via base pairing with U1 RNA. This interaction is novel in that it uses nucleotides 8 to 10 of U1 RNA and is independent of nucleotides 1 to 7. In vivo functionality of base pairing was documented by restoring activity and specificity to mutated G triplets through compensating U1 RNA mutations. We suggest that the G-rich region near vertebrate 5′ splice sites promotes accurate splice site recognition by recruiting the U1 snRNP.
Self-organizing reservoir computing based on spiking-timing dependent plasticity and intrinsic plasticity mechanisms

Reservoir computing (RC) framework is a type of recurrent neural network (RNN) with the ability of powerful computing performance for input sequences. Unlike traditional RNNs which train the connection weights by complex procedures, RC only uses the linear regression method to train its output weights, which is also much easier to implement. However, academic research of optimization of its structure topologies and learning rules is still insufficient. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach which combines spiking-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) and intrinsic plasticity (IP) for self-organizing spiking reservoir computing. Experiments using the Mackey-Glass time series testing benchmark show that the RC model by our method can converge to a stable state in a short period of time, and is effective terms of the computational accuracy.
Individual differences in chronically defeated male mice: Behavioral, endocrine, immune, and neurotrophic changes as markers of vulnerability to the effects of stress

This study aimed to analyze different behavioral profiles in response to chronic social defeat using the sensorial contact model. We hypothesized that a passive profile, unlike an active one, would be associated with behavioral and physiological characteristics related to depression. Six-week-old OF1 male mice were subjected to defeat for 21 consecutive days. A combination of cluster and discriminant analyses of the behavior exhibited during confrontation on Day 21 established two behavioral profiles: active (n = 22) and passive (n = 34). Passive mice, with a high level of immobility and low non-social exploration, had higher plasma corticosterone concentrations than active mice after 21 days of defeat. Three days after the last defeat, passive mice had lower corticosterone levels than manipulated-control mice (n = 11). Higher levels of interleukin-6 and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) in the spleen and lower hippocampal brain-derived neurotrophic factor levels were observed in passive mice in comparison with those in active mice and the manipulated controls. The only differences observed in active mice in relation to the manipulated control were higher plasma corticosterone (Day 21) and TNF-α levels. The results show that different behavioral profiles in response to chronic defeat are associated with different physiological profiles, and that the passive profile presents physiological characteristics previously associated with depression.
Scaled teleoperation controller design for micromanipulation over Internet

Developments on micro/nano manipulation and Internet technologies allow potential impacts on networked-micro-automation of small industrial products. However, reliable and efficient tele-micromanipulation systems with haptic feedback over the Internet face strong problems due to the nonlinear nature of the microenvironment and time-varying delays in communication lines. Towards this end, this paper presents a robust bilateral controller design using H/sub /spl infin//-optimal control and /spl mu/-synthesis frameworks. This approach allows a convenient means to tradeoff the optimization of various performance criteria (micro scale force/position) and robustness for a prespecified time-delay margin and force scaling factors. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulations and experiments for a pick-and-place micromanipulation task.
Executive functioning profiles of adult and juvenile male sexual offenders: A systematic review

Abstract Evidence regarding biological correlates of sexual offending, which might enhance the understanding, research, and treatment of these offenders, is rather emerging or in the embryonic stage. In this study, our main objective is to identify specific executive functioning (EF) processes that are commonly impaired in sexual offenders, and to further determine whether these differ as a function of offender subtypes. A search is conducted in ProQuest, Criminal Justice Abstract, EBSCOhost, and Social Science Citation Index electronic journal databases for studies published spanning the period 1990–2015. Google Scholar and Google search engines were also searched and the reference lists of the retrieved papers were searched for additional papers. A total of 1303 papers were retained for consideration. After removing duplicates, and subjecting the retrieved papers to inclusion and exclusion criteria, 24 papers (19 published and 5 unpublished) were deemed appropriate for the review. While several EF processes have been investigated, the available evidence implicates deficits in cognitive flexibility and inhibition of interference as commonly reported among adult male sexual offenders. This finding may be due to the sensitivity of tests of cognitive flexibility (e.g. the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test) and inhibition of interference (e.g. the Stroop Test) to frontal lobe lesions, and also because these tests are among the most frequently administered EF tests as revealed by this study. Juvenile sexual offenders, however, exhibit no distinct EF profiles. The findings of the study, implications for treatment, and recommendations for future studies are succinctly discussed.
Assessing Mens' Reactions to Workplace Sexual Harassment Stimuli

Introduction 1 Sexuality in the W orkplace 2 Types of Social-Sexual Behavior 5 Direct Nonharassing Behavior 5 Sexualization of the Workplace 6 Direct Harassing Behavior 7 Problems of Definition 8 Behavioral Aspects of Sexual Harassment , 10 Psychological Aspects of Sexual Harassm ent 12 Legal Aspects of Sexual Harassment 13 Canadian I^gal Aspect: 15 Operational Definitions • 16 Theories o f vSocial-Sexual B ehavior 17 The Natural-Biological M odel 18 The Organizational M o d e l 20 The Sociocultural M o d e l 21 Itie Sex-Role Spillover Model 23
Topic modelling of authentication events in an enterprise computer network

The possibility for theft or misuse of legitimate user credentials is a potential cyber-security weakness in any enterprise computer network which is almost impossible to eradicate. However, by monitoring the network traffic patterns, it can be possible to detect misuse of credentials. This article presents an initial investigation into deconvolving the mixture behaviour of several individuals within a network, to see if individual users can be identified. Towards that, a technique used for document classification is deployed, the Latent Dirichlet allocation model. A pilot study is conducted on authentication events taken from real data from the enterprise network of Los Alamos National Laboratory.