Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Offline and Online Scheduling of Concurrent Bags-of-Tasks on Heterogeneous Platforms

Scheduling problems are already difficult on traditional parallel machines. They become extremely challenging on heterogeneous clusters, even when embarrassingly parallel applications are considered. In this paper we deal with the problem of scheduling multiple applications, made of collections of independent and identical tasks, on a heterogeneous master-worker platform. The applications are submitted online, which means that there is no a priori (static) knowledge of the workload distribution at the beginning of the execution. The objective is to minimize the maximum stretch, i.e. the maximum ratio between the actual time an application has spent in the system and the time this application would have spent if executed alone. On the theoretical side, we design an optimal algorithm for the offline version of the problem (when all release dates and application characteristics are known beforehand). We also introduce several heuristics for the general case of online applications. On the practical side, we have conducted extensive simulations and MPI experiments, showing that we are able to deal with very large problem instances in a few seconds. Also, the solution that we compute totally outperforms classical heuristics from the literature, thereby fully assessing the usefulness of our approach.
Research on Routing Algorithm for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks Based on Node Degree Theory

an Ad hoc network is recently a hot spot in wireless network researching domain. The design of routing algorithm, which is as the core layer technology in Ad Hoc networks, has drawn great concern. After analyzing the drawbacks of the existing algorithms, this paper puts forward a routing algorithm based on the node degree. This paper explains the principle of the node degree algorithm; we select nodes with high probability to forward data packets in the process of routing searching. Results of simulation show: number of relay nodes is reduced significantly in the process of routing setup.
An effective parse tree representation for tartarus

Recent work in genetic programming (GP) has highlighted the need for stronger benchmark problems. For benchmarking planning scenarios, the artificial ant problem is often used. With a limited number of test cases, this problem is often fairly simple to solve. A more complex planning problem is Tartarus, but as of yet no standard representation for Tartarus exists for GP. This paper examines an existing parse tree representation for Tartarus, and identifies weaknesses in the way in which it manipulates environmental information. Through this analysis, an alternative representation is proposed for Tartarus that shares many similarities with those already used in GP for planning problems. Empirical analysis suggests that the proposed representation has qualities that make it a suitable benchmark problem.
Combined Mining : Analyzing Object and Pattern Relations for Discovering Actionable Complex Patterns

Combined mining is a technique for analyzing object relatio ns and pattern relations, and for extracting and constructing actionable co mplex knowledge (patterns or exceptions) in complex situations. Although combi ned patterns can be built within a single method, such as combined sequential pa tterns by aggregating relevant frequent sequences, this knowledge is composed of multiple constituent components (the left hand side) from multiple data sources w hich are represented by different feature spaces, or identified by diverse modeli ng methods. In some cases, this knowledge is also associated with certain impac t (influence, action or conclusion, on the right hand side). This paper presents a hi gh-level picture of combined mining and the combined patterns from the perspect ive of object and pattern relation analysis. Several fundamental aspects of combined pattern mining are discussed, including feature interaction, pattern int eraction, pattern dynamics, pattern impact, pattern relation, pattern structure, patt ern paradigm, pattern formation criteria, and pattern presentation (in terms of patter n ontology and pattern dynamic charts). We also briefly illustrate the concepts and di scuss how they can be applied to mining complex data for complex knowledge in eith r a multi-feature, multi-source, or multi-method scenario.
Zero-error target tracking with limited communication

We study the problem of target tracking in a sensor network environment. In particular, we consider a target that moves according to a Markov chain, and a tracker that queries sets of sensors to obtain tracking information. We are interested in finding the minimum number of queries per time step such that a target is trackable under three different requirements. First we investigate the case where the tracker is required to know the exact location of the target at each time step. We then relax this requirement and explore the case where the tracker may lose track of the target at a given time step, but it is able to ";catch-up"; at a later time, regaining up-to-date information about the target's track. Finally, we consider the case where tracking information is only known after a delay of d time steps. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the number of queries per time step to track in the above three cases. These conditions are stated in terms of the entropy rate of the target's Markov chain.
A Novel Circle Detection Method for Iris Segmentation

This paper introduces a novel approach for iris segmentation. In detecting the inner boundary of the iris, the method introduces a circular filter which is specially designed to detect circular shapes in images. The inner boundary detection process consists of two steps. Firstly, a coarse circle of the pupil is detected by the proposed circular filter after a binarization to the input iris image. Then, the inner boundary is accurately located by applying a modified circular Hough transform in an extracted region from the coarse center. The presented method further proposes a process of extracting the outer boundary of the iris by applying a linear filter to the rectangular areas transformed from arc regions around the iris. Experimental results show promising performances on iris images captured in ideal and non-ideal conditions from the CASIA iris database version 1 and 2.
Contribution from the ten major emission sectors in Europe and Denmark to the health-cost externalities of air pollution using the EVA model system - an integrated modelling approach

Abstract. We have developed an integrated model system, EVA (Economic Valuation of Air pollution), based on the impact-pathway chain, to assess the health-related economic externalities of air pollution resulting from specific emission sources or sectors, which can be used to support policy-making with respect to emission control. Central for the system is a newly developed tagging method capable of calculating the contribution from a specific emission source or sector to the overall air pollution levels, taking into account the non-linear atmospheric chemistry. The main objective of this work is to identify the anthropogenic emission sources in Europe and Denmark that contribute the most to human health impacts. In this study, we applied the EVA system to Europe and Denmark, with a detailed analysis of health-related external costs from the ten major emission sectors and their relative contributions. The paper contains a thorough description of the EVA system, the main results from the assessment of the main contributors and a discussion of the most important atmospheric chemical reactions relevant for interpreting the results. The main conclusion from the analysis is that the major contributors to health-related external costs are major power production, agriculture, road traffic, and non-industrial domestic combustion, including wood combustion. We conclude that when regulating the emissions of ammonia from the agricultural sector, both the impacts on nature and on human health should be taken into account. This study confirms that air pollution constitutes a serious problem for human health and that the related external costs are considerable. The results in this work emphasize the importance of defining the right questions in the decision-making process. The results from assessing the impacts from each emission sector depend clearly on the assumption that the other emission sectors are not changed, especially emissions changing concentrations of atmospheric OH and therefore lifetimes of other chemical species.
Social inscription of sexualities in an era of AIDS (Aizibing shidai ‘Xing' de shehui miaoshu)

Contemporary Chinese society provides several socially pre-constructed models of representations and practices that interact to produce tensions that must be managed, and values, behaviour and actions are subject to renegotiation: the first system arises from pluralist and dynamic Chinese tradition (local traditional discourse), the second is two-folded—one was inherited from the 1919 intellectual and reform movement in the historical context of the fall of the Empire and the first republican revolution (1911), the other was introduced by Marxist ideology and nurtured the project to construct a socialist society (official discourse); the third reflects the global model that is producing changes in China just as it is elsewhere (local global or ‘glocalised' discourse). Except the first model, the others are broad projects of modernization of the Chinese society as well. Arising from a background description which provides pointers to the theory, methodology and Chinese context, the following points are addressed : (1) sexual transmission of HIV in the context of an epidemic dynamics; (2) its situation within society and the position of sexual and social sub-groups (sex workers/potential clients, MSM, and migrants as potential bridge populations for HIV transmission), and (3) late 1980s development of studies on sexuality in the context of ‘sexual health' and ‘sexology'-oriented awareness as assessing a social inscription of sexualities as well. Therefore, acknowledging the social inscription of sexual transmission in the larger context of the social inscription of sexualities while sexual transmission is becoming the leading mode of HIV transmission, may contribute to reframe social inscription of sexualities and vice-versa, documenting the latter may contribute to reframe efforts for HIV/AIDS prevention and care.
Efficient Correction of Anomalies in Snapshot Isolation Transactions

Transactional memory systems providing snapshot isolation enable concurrent access to shared data without incurring aborts on read-write conflicts. Reducing aborts is extremely relevant as it leads to higher concurrency, greater performance, and better predictability. Unfortunately, snapshot isolation does not provide serializability as it allows certain anomalies that can lead to subtle consistency violations. While some mechanisms have been proposed to verify the correctness of a program utilizing snapshot isolation transactions, it remains difficult to repair incorrect applications. To reduce the programmer’s burden in this case, we present a technique based on dynamic code and graph dependency analysis that automatically corrects existing snapshot isolation anomalies in transactional memory programs. Our evaluation shows that corrected applications retain the performance benefits characteristic of snapshot isolation over conventional transactional memory systems.
Chapter 9 Action Recognition in Realistic Sports Videos

The ability to analyze the actions which occur in a video is essential for automatic understanding of sports. Action localization and recognition in videos are two main research topics in this context. In this chapter, we provide a detailed study of the prominent methods devised for these two tasks which yield superior results for sports videos. We adopt UCF Sports, which is a dataset of realistic sports videos collected from broadcast television channels, as our evaluation benchmark. First, we present an overview of UCF Sports along with comprehensive statistics of the techniques tested on this dataset as well as the evolution of their performance over time. To provide further details about the existing action recognition methods in this area, we decompose the action recognition framework into three main steps of feature extraction, dictionary learning to represent a video, and classification; we overview several successful techniques for each of these steps. We also overview the problem of spatio-temporal localization of actions and argue that, in general, it manifests a more challenging problem compared to action recognition. We study several recent methods for action localization which have shown promising results on sports videos. Finally, we discuss a number of forward-thinking insights drawn from overviewing the action recognition and localization methods. In particular, we argue that performing the recognition on temporally untrimmed videos and attempting to describe an action, instead of conducting a forced-choice classification, are essential for analyzing the human actions in a realistic environment. K. Soomro (B) Center for Research in Computer Vision, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32826, USA e-mail: ksoomro@cs.ucf. edu A.R. Zamir Gates Computer Science, #130, Stanford University, 353 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA e-mail: zamir@cs.stanford. edu © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 T.B. Moeslund et al. (eds.), Computer Vision in Sports, Advances in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-09396-3_9 181 182 K. Soomro and A.R. Zamir
Tuning Curves for Movement Direction in the Human Visuomotor System

Neurons in macaque primary motor cortex (M1) are broadly tuned to arm movement direction. Recent evidence suggests that human M1 contains directionally tuned neurons, but it is unclear which other areas are part of the network coding movement direction and what characterizes the responses of neuronal populations in those areas. Such information would be highly relevant for the implementation of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) in paralyzed patients. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging adaptation to identify which areas of the human brain show directional selectivity and the degree to which these areas are affected by the type of motor act (to press vs to grasp). After adapting participants to one particular hand movement direction, we measured the release from adaptation during occasional test trials, parametrically varying the angular difference between adaptation and test direction. We identified multiple areas broadly tuned to movement direction, including M1, dorsal premotor cortex, intraparietal sulcus, and the parietal reach region. Within these areas, we observed a gradient of directional selectivity, with highest directional selectivity in the right parietal reach region, for both right- and left-hand movements. Moreover, directional selectivity was modulated by the type of motor act to varying degrees, with the largest effect in M1 and the smallest modulation in the parietal reach region. These data provide an important extension of our knowledge about directional tuning in the human brain. Furthermore, our results suggest that the parietal reach region might be an ideal candidate for the implementation of BCI in paralyzed patients.
A CAUSAL MODEL OF FACTORS INFLUENCING FACULTY USE OF TECHNOLOGY

Based on earlier studies using the 1999 and 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF) data, a causal model explaining faculty technology use was constructed. Path analysis was used to test the causal effects of age, gender, highest degree, discipline (health science or not), recent research productivity, and teaching load on faculty use of websites in teaching. Two models, one for faculty from Research I institutions and the other for faculty from Community Colleges, were tested and both models fit the data with satisfying indices. Results confirmed that age, highest degree, and teaching loads influenced technology use directly, but indicated the lack of relationship between research productivity and technology use in teaching. An additional connection is suggested from discipline to teaching load. One important difference between the two models is that the impact of gender and teaching load on research productivity is significant for faculty at Research institutions, but not for faculty at community colleges. The models confirm the consistent and relatively strong relationship of teaching load to faculty technology use.
A Critique of Ontological Syncretism in IS Research

This paper revisits the debate between positivism and its alternatives in the field of information systems from a philosophical point of view. It will argue that the heart of the debate is the ontological difference between the views of reality as observer-independent versus observer-dependent. The logical axiom of the excluded third (tertium non datur) informs us that two contradictory options cannot simultaneously be true. The paper will discuss what the incompatibility of the ontological positions of positivism and its alternatives means for IS research. It will discuss why scholars attempt to mix the two and will spell out the consequences of an acceptance of their incompatibility. The paper will end by arguing that this debate needs to be contextualized with the problem of positivism versus non-positivism in society and it will ask whether a tolerant coexistence of the two approaches is feasible. Without this contextualized understanding of ontology in general, regional ontologies in IS are not likely to be successful as they will be based on unclear bases.
Physicochemical characterization of solid dispersion systems of tadalafil with poloxamer 407

Physicochemical characterization of solid dispersion systems of tadalafil with poloxamer 407 Dissolution behaviour of a poorly water-soluble drug, tadalafil, from its solid dispersion systems with poloxamer 407 has been investigated. Solid dispersion systems of tadalafil were prepared with poloxamer 407 in 1:0.5, 1:1.5 and 1:2.5 ratios using the melting method. Characterization of binary systems with FTIR and XRPD studies demonstrated the presence of strong hydrogen bonding interactions, a significant decrease in crystallinity and the possibility of existence of amorphous entities of the drug. In the binary systems tested, 1:0.5 proportion of tadalafil/poloxamer 407 showed rapid dissolution of tadalafil (DE30 70.9 ± 3.6 %). In contrast, higher proportions of poloxamer 407 (1:1.5 and 1:2.5) offered no advantage towards dissolution enhancement of the drug, indicating altered rheological characteristics of the polymer at its higher concentration, which might have retarded the release rate of tadalafil. Fizikokemijska karakterizacija čvrstih disperzijskih sustava tadalafila s poloksamerom 407 U radu je ispitivano oslobađanje u vodi teško topljivog lijeka tadalafila iz čvrstih disperzijskih sustava. Ti sustavi pripravljeni su s poloksamerom 407 u omjeru lijeka i polimera 1:0,5, 1:1,5 i 1:2,5, koristeći metodu taljenja. Karakterizacija binarnih sustava s FTIR i rendgenskom difrakcijom praha XRD ukazuje na prisutnost snažnih vodikovih veza, značajno smanjenje kristaliničnosti i moguću prisutnost amorfnog lijeka. Iz binarnog sustava tadalafil/poloksamer 1:0,5 oslobađanje ljekovite tvari je brzo (DE30 70,9 ± 3,6 %). Nasuprot tome, iz pripravaka s višim omjerima lijeka i polimera (1:1,5 i 1:2,5) oslobađanje ljekovite tvari nije povećano. Usporavanje oslobađanja tadalafila moglo bi biti posljedicom promjene reoloških svojstava polimera pri višim koncentracijama.
Reconstructing species-based dynamics from reduced stochastic rule-based models

Many bio-molecular reactions inside the cell are characterized by complex-formation and mutual modification of a few constituent molecules that give rise to a combinatorial number of reachable complexes or species. For such cases rule-based models (or site-graph-rewrite rules), offer a compact model description, by enumerating only the necessary context of interacting molecules. Such a model specification induces symmetries in the underlying Markov chain, which we have recently exploited for model reduction, based on a backward Markovian bisimulation. Interestingly, the method showed a theoretical possibility of reconstructing the high-dimensional species-based dynamics from the aggregate state. In this paper, we present a procedure for reconstructing the high-dimensional species-based dynamics from the aggregate state, and we provide an algorithm for computing such de-aggregation functions explicitly. The algorithm involves counting the automorphisms of a connected site-graph, and has a quadratic time complexity in the number of molecules which constitute the site-graphs of interest. We provide illustrating case studies.
De Novo ORFs in Drosophila Are Important to Organismal Fitness and Evolved Rapidly from Previously Non-coding Sequences

How non-coding DNA gives rise to new protein-coding genes (de novo genes) is not well understood. Recent work has revealed the origins and functions of a few de novo genes, but common principles governing the evolution or biological roles of these genes are unknown. To better define these principles, we performed a parallel analysis of the evolution and function of six putatively protein-coding de novo genes described in Drosophila melanogaster. Reconstruction of the transcriptional history of de novo genes shows that two de novo genes emerged from novel long non-coding RNAs that arose at least 5 MY prior to evolution of an open reading frame. In contrast, four other de novo genes evolved a translated open reading frame and transcription within the same evolutionary interval suggesting that nascent open reading frames (proto-ORFs), while not required, can contribute to the emergence of a new de novo gene. However, none of the genes arose from proto-ORFs that existed long before expression evolved. Sequence and structural evolution of de novo genes was rapid compared to nearby genes and the structural complexity of de novo genes steadily increases over evolutionary time. Despite the fact that these genes are transcribed at a higher level in males than females, and are most strongly expressed in testes, RNAi experiments show that most of these genes are essential in both sexes during metamorphosis. This lethality suggests that protein coding de novo genes in Drosophila quickly become functionally important.
Discriminative 3D human pose estimation from monocular images via topological preserving hierarchical affinity clustering

This paper presents a hierarchical approach to address the problem of 3D human body pose estimation from a single images. In order to deal with multimodality, we learn piecewise mappings from observations to human poses. We first construct a tree on the pose manifold by applying affinity propagation clustering at the different levels of the hierarchy. Support vector machines classifiers are then trained to learn traversing the tree so that new examples/ observations can be classified to the clusters associated to the leaf nodes. Multi-valued Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) regressors are trained at each of the leaf nodes, so to learn local mappings from the observation to the pose space. We propose the use of a geodesic distance during clustering and describe a method for training multi-valued RVMs. The latter alleviates the need to train a separate RVM for each of the dimensions in the pose space. We validate the proposed method using the HumanEva dataset and show promising results.