Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cluster analysis of local convergent sequences of structures

The cluster analysis of very large objects is an important problem, which spans several theoretical as well as applied branches of mathematics and computer science. Here we suggest a novel approach: under assumption of local convergence of a sequence of finite structures we derive an asymptotic clustering. This is achieved by a blend of analytic and geometric techniques, and particularly by a new interpretation of the authors' representation theorem for limits of local convergent sequences, which serves as a guidance for the whole process. Our study may be seen as an effort to describe connectivity structure at the limit (without having a defined explicit limit structure) and to pull this connectivity structure back to the finite structures in the sequence in a continuous way. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg. , 51, 674–728, 2017
Accounting for filter bandwidth improves the quantitative accuracy of bioluminescence tomography

Abstract. Bioluminescence imaging is a noninvasive technique whereby surface weighted images of luminescent probes within animals are used to characterize cell count and function. Traditionally, data are collected over the entire emission spectrum of the source using no filters and are used to evaluate cell count/function over the entire spectrum. Alternatively, multispectral data over several wavelengths can be incorporated to perform tomographic reconstruction of source location and intensity. However, bandpass filters used for multispectral data acquisition have a specific bandwidth, which is ignored in the reconstruction. In this work, ignoring the bandwidth is shown to introduce a dependence of the recovered source intensity on the bandwidth of the filters. A method of accounting for the bandwidth of filters used during multispectral data acquisition is presented and its efficacy in increasing the quantitative accuracy of bioluminescence tomography is demonstrated through simulation and experiment. It is demonstrated that while using filters with a large bandwidth can dramatically decrease the data acquisition time, if not accounted for, errors of up to 200% in quantitative accuracy are introduced in two-dimensional planar imaging, even after normalization. For tomographic imaging, the use of this method to account for filter bandwidth dramatically improves the quantitative accuracy.
Recovering vocal tract shapes from MFCC parameters

Recovering vocal tract shapes from the speech signal is a well known inversion problem of transformation from the articulatory system to speech acoustics. Most of the studies on this problem in the past have been focused on vowels. There have not been general methods e(cid:11)ec-tive for recovering the vocal tract shapes from the speech signal for all classes of speech sounds. In this paper we describe our attempt towards speech inverse mapping by using the mel-frequency cepstrum coe(cid:14)cients to represent the acoustic parameters of the speech signal. An inversion method is developed based on Kalman (cid:12)ltering and a dynamic-system model describing the articulatory motion. This method uses an articulatory-acoustic codebook derived from Maeda’s articulatory model.
A goal-oriented interface to consumer electronics using planning and commonsense reasoning

We are reaching a crisis with design of user interfaces for consumer electronics. Flashing 12:00 time indicators, push-and-hold buttons, and interminable modes and menus are all symptoms of trying to maintain a one-to-one correspondence between functions and physical controls, which becomes hopeless as the number of capabilities of devices grows. We propose instead to orient interfaces around the goals that users have for the use of devices.We present Roadie, a user interface agent that provides intelligent context-sensitive help and assistance for a network of consumer devices. Roadie uses a Commonsense knowledge base to map between user goals and functions of the devices, and an AI partial-order planner to provide mixed-initiative assistance with executing multi-step procedures and debugging help when things go wrong.
A parallel exact hybrid approach for solving multi-objective problems on the computational grid

This paper presents a parallel hybrid exact multi-objective approach which combines two metaheuristics - a genetic algorithm (GA) and a memetic algorithm (MA), with an exact method - a branch and bound (B&B) algorithm. Such approach profits from both the exploration power of the GA, the intensification capability of the MA and the ability of the B&B to provide optimal solutions with proof of optimality. To fully exploit the resources of a computational grid, the hybrid method is parallelized according to three well-known parallel models - the island model for the GA, the multi-start model for the MA and the parallel tree exploration model for the B&B. The obtained method has been experimented and validated on a bi-objective flow-shop scheduling problem. The approach allowed to solve exactly for the first time an instance of the problem - 50 jobs on 5 machines. More than 400 processors belonging to 4 administrative domains have contributed to the resolution process during more than 6 days
Role of miR-191/425 Cluster in Tumorigenesis and Diagnosis of Gastric Cancer

Gastric cancer (GC) is among the most frequent types of cancer worldwide. Therefore, understanding the biology of GC tumorigenesis is important for appropriate diagnosis and patient surveillance. The miR-191/425 cluster has been reported to be overexpressed in various human cancers, but the tumorigenic role and clinical significance of miR-191/425 overexpression in gastric carcinogenesis is currently undefined. In this study, the expression of miR-191 and miR-425 in GC tissue and serum was assessed, and the relationship between miRNA expression and clinicopathological data was analyzed. We found that miR-191 and miR-425 were both significantly increased in human GC tissues relative to adjacent normal controls. In addition, miR-191 levels correlated with GC tumor stage and metastatic state. Furthermore, the level of serum miR-191 was significantly higher in the GC group than in the control group when using serum miR-16 as an endogenous control. Finally, inhibition of miR-191 or miR-425 in the GC cell lines HGC-27 not only reduced cell proliferation and cell cycle progression but also impaired cell migration and invasion. Taken together, our results revealed the oncogenic roles of miR-191 and miR-425 in gastric carcinogenesis, and indicated the potential use of serum miR-191 as a novel and stable biomarker for GC diagnosis.
Minimum-energy connected coverage in wireless sensor networks with omni-directional and directional features

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have acquired new features recently, i.e., both the sensor and the antenna of a node can be directional. This brings new challenges to the Connected Coverage (CoCo) problem, where a finite set of targets needs to be monitored by some active sensor nodes, and the connectivity of these active nodes with the sink must be retained at the same time. In this paper, we study the Minimum-Energy Connected Coverage (MeCoCo) problem in WSNs with Omni-directional (O) and Directional (D) features, aiming at minimizing the total energy cost of both sensing and connectivity. Considering different combinations of O and D features, we study the MeCoCo problem under four cases, namely: O-Antenna and O-Sensor (OAOS), O-Antenna and D-Sensor (OADS), D-Antenna and D-Sensor (DADS), as well as D-Antenna and O-Sensor (DAOS). We prove that the MeCoCo problem is NP-hard under all these cases, and present approximation algorithms with provable approximation ratios. In particular, we propose a constant-approximation for OAOS, and polylogarithmic approximations for all other cases. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations and the results strongly confirm the effectiveness of our approach.
Fast Variance Prediction for Iteratively Reconstructed CT with Arbitrary Geometries

Fast variance prediction for iteratively reconstructed CT images is useful for the analysis of reconstruction algorithms and potentially for automatic tube current modulation. Prior methods are either computationally intractable or require impractical computation times to produce a map of the reconstructed image variance. In this paper we present the extension of prior work for fast variance prediction, which was specific to limited classes of CT geometries, to arbitrary CT geometries. We compare the results of our method to an empirical variance map produced from repeated axial CT scans of a chest phantom.
Explicit, almost optimal, epsilon-balanced codes

The question of finding an epsilon-biased set with close to optimal support size, or, equivalently, finding an explicit binary code with distance 1-ϵ/2 and rate close to the Gilbert-Varshamov bound, attracted a lot of attention in recent decades. In this paper we solve the problem almost optimally and show an explicit ϵ-biased set over k bits with support size O(k/ϵ2+o(1)). This improves upon all previous explicit constructions which were in the order of k2/ϵ2, k/ϵ3 or k5/4/ϵ5/2. The result is close to the Gilbert-Varshamov bound which is O(k/ϵ2) and the lower bound which is Ω(k/ϵ2 log1/ϵ). The main technical tool we use is bias amplification with the s-wide replacement product. The sum of two independent samples from an ϵ-biased set is ϵ2 biased. Rozenman and Wigderson showed how to amplify the bias more economically by choosing two samples with an expander. Based on that they suggested a recursive construction that achieves sample size O(k/ϵ4). We show that amplification with a long random walk over the s-wide replacement product reduces the bias almost optimally.
Reduced lung function at birth and the risk of asthma at 10 years of age.

BACKGROUND Reduced lung function in early infancy has been associated with later obstructive airway diseases. We assessed whether reduced lung function shortly after birth predicts asthma 10 years later. METHODS We conducted a prospective birth cohort study of healthy infants in which we measured lung function shortly after birth with the use of tidal breathing flow-volume loops (the fraction of expiratory time to peak tidal expiratory flow to total expiratory time [t(PTEF)/t(E)]) in 802 infants and passive respiratory mechanics, including respiratory-system compliance, in 664 infants. At 10 years of age, 616 children (77%) were reassessed by measuring lung function, exercise-induced bronchoconstriction, and bronchial hyperresponsiveness (by means of a methacholine challenge) and by conducting a structured interview to determine whether there was a history of asthma or current asthma. RESULTS As compared with children whose t(PTEF)/t(E) shortly after birth was above the median, children whose t(PTEF)/t(E) was at or below the median were more likely at 10 years of age to have a history of asthma (24.3% vs. 16.2%, P=0.01), to have current asthma (14.6% vs. 7.5%, P=0.005), and to have severe bronchial hyperresponsiveness, defined as a methacholine dose of less than 1.0 micromol causing a 20% fall in the forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) (9.1% vs. 4.9%, P=0.05). As compared with children whose respiratory-system compliance was above the median, children with respiratory compliance at or below the median more often had a history of asthma (27.4% vs. 14.8%; P=0.001) and current asthma (15.0% vs. 7.7%, P=0.009), although this measure was not associated with later measurements of lung function. At 10 years of age, t(PTEF)/t(E) at birth correlated weakly with the maximal midexpiratory flow rate (r=0.10, P=0.01) but not with FEV1 or forced vital capacity. CONCLUSIONS Reduced lung function at birth is associated with an increased risk of asthma by 10 years of age.
A New Dynamin-Like Protein, ADL6, Is Involved in Trafficking from the trans-Golgi Network to the Central Vacuole in Arabidopsis

Dynamin, a high-molecular-weight GTPase, plays a critical role in vesicle formation at the plasma membrane during endocytosis in animal cells. Here we report the identification of a new dynamin homolog in Arabidopsis named Arabidopsis dynamin-like 6 (ADL6). ADL6 is quite similar to dynamin I in its structural organization: a conserved GTPase domain at the N terminus, a pleckstrin homology domain at the center, and a Pro-rich motif at the C terminus. In the cell, a majority of ADL6 is associated with membranes. Immunohistochemistry and in vivo targeting experiments revealed that ADL6 is localized to the Golgi apparatus. Expression of the dominant negative mutant ADL6[K51E] in Arabidopsis protoplasts inhibited trafficking of cargo proteins destined for the lytic vacuole and caused them to accumulate at the trans-Golgi network. In contrast, expression of ADL6[K51E] did not affect trafficking of a cargo protein, H+-ATPase:green fluorescent protein, destined for the plasma membrane. These results suggest that ADL6 is involved in vesicle formation for vacuolar trafficking at the trans-Golgi network but not for trafficking to the plasma membrane in plant cells.
Mild Parkinsonian signs: An overview of an emerging concept

Mild Parkinsonian signs (MPS) include gait and balance changes, rigidity, bradykinesia, and tremor. MPS can occur commonly during the clinical examination of older people who do not have known neurological disease, with prevalence estimates for MPS as a whole ranging from 15% to 95%. MPS are generally progressive and they are coupled with functional difficulties, impaired gait and balance, and increased risks of mild cognitive impairment, dementia, and mortality. The mechanistic basis for these signs is unclear, but is likely to be multifactorial, with possible factors including an age‐associated decline in dopaminergic nigrostriatal activity, the early development of neurodegenerative (Lewy body or Alzheimer's type) pathologies in the basal ganglia, or the accumulation of vascular pathology in the brain. It would be valuable to identify those individuals with MPS who are at increased risk for the development of future Alzheimer's disease, full‐blown Parkinson's disease, or strokes, and to develop therapeutic strategies to intervene to lessen the likelihood of MPS‐related morbidity and mortality. © 2007 Movement Disorder Society
A novel approach to IP traffic splitting using flowlets

TCP's burstiness is usually regarded as harmful, or at best, inconvenient. Instead, this thesis suggests a new perspective and examines whether TCP's burstiness is useful for certain applications. It claims that burstiness can be harnessed to insulate traffic from packet reordering caused by route change. We introduce the use of flowlets, a new abstraction for a burst of packets from a particular flow followed by an idle interval. We apply flowlets to the routing of traffic along multiple paths and develop a scheme using flowlet-switching to split traffic across multiple parallel paths. Flowlet switching is an ideal technique for load balancing traffic across multiple paths as it achieves the accuracy of packet-switching and the robustness to packet reordering of flow-switching. This research evaluates the accuracy, simplicity, overhead and robustness to reordering flowlet switching entails. Using a combination of trace analysis and network simulation, we demonstrate the feasibility of implementing flowlet-based switching. Thesis Supervisor: Dina Katabi Title: Assistant Professor
The algorithm of investigation of deformations of solids with contact interaction

The work is devoted to the construction of a computational algorithm for investigation of finite deformations of solids with contact interaction. Contact interaction of solids is an actual issue due to it is one of the most common methods of transferring external forces in practice and encounter in many engineering tasks. A master-slave algorithm is used to build a contact interaction model. To perform the contact conditions in finite element implementation of the penalty method is used. The contact problem is formulated in a variational formulation. A resolving equation in the actual state is obtained, which, with the help of linearization and the finite element method, reduces to a system of linear algebraic equations.
D ec 2 00 2 A Theory of Non-Gaussian Option Pricing

Option pricing formulas are derived from a non-Gaussian model of stock returns. Fluctuations are assumed to evolve according to a nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation which maximizes the Tsallis nonextensive entropy of index q. A generalized form of the Black-Scholes differential equation is found, and we derive a martingale measure which leads to closed form solutions for European call options. The standard Black-Scholes pricing equations are recovered as a special case (q = 1). The distribution of stock returns is well-modelled with q circa 1.5. Using that value of q in the option pricing model we reproduce the volatility smile. The partial derivatives (or Greeks) of the model are also calculated. Empirical results are demonstrated for options on Japanese Yen futures. Using just one value of σ across strikes we closely reproduce market prices, for expiration times ranging from weeks to several months. Acknowledgements Many insightful discussions with Roberto Osorio and Jeremy Evnine are gratefully acknowledged.
In Vivo Quantification of Parallel and Bidirectional Fluxes in the Anaplerosis of Corynebacterium glutamicum *

The C3-C4metabolite interconversion at the anaplerotic node in many microorganisms involves a complex set of reactions. C3carboxylation to oxaloacetate can originate from phosphoenolpyruvate and pyruvate, and at the same time multiple C4-decarboxylating enzymes may be present. The functions of such parallel reactions are not yet fully understood. Using a13C NMR-based strategy, we here quantify the individual fluxes at the anaplerotic node of Corynebacterium glutamicum, which is an example of a bacterium possessing multiple carboxylation and decarboxylation reactions. C. glutamicum was grown with a 13C-labeled glucose isotopomer mixture as the main carbon source and13C-labeled lactate as a cosubstrate. 58 isotopomers as well as 15 positional labels of biomass compounds were quantified. Applying a generally applicable mathematical model to include metabolite mass and carbon labeling balances, it is shown that pyruvate carboxylase contributed 91 ± 7% to C3 carboxylation. The total in vivo carboxylation rate of 1.28 ± 0.14 mmol/g dry weight/h exceeds the demand of carboxylated metabolites for biosyntheses 3-fold. Excess oxaloacetate was recycled to phosphoenolpyruvate by phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase. This shows that the reactions at the anaplerotic node might serve additional purposes other than only providing C4 metabolites for biosynthesis.
Identification of the Abundant Hydroxyproline-Rich Glycoproteins in the Root Walls of Wild-Type Arabidopsis, an ext3 Mutant Line, and Its Phenotypic Revertant

Extensins are members of the cell wall hydroxyproline-rich glycoprotein (HRGP) superfamily that form covalently cross-linked networks in primary cell walls. A knockout mutation in EXT3 (AT1G21310), the gene coding EXTENSIN 3 (EXT3) in Arabidopsis Landsberg erecta resulted in a lethal phenotype, although about 20% of the knockout plants have an apparently normal phenotype (ANP). In this study the root cell wall HRGP components of wild-type, ANP and the ext3 mutant seedlings were characterized by peptide fractionation of trypsin digested anhydrous hydrogen fluoride deglycosylated wall residues and by sequencing using LC-MS/MS. Several HRGPs, including EXT3, were identified in the wild-type root walls but not in walls of the ANP and lethal mutant. Indeed the ANP walls and walls of mutants displaying the lethal phenotype possessed HRGPs, but the profiles suggest that changes in the amount and perhaps type may account for the corresponding phenotypes.
Mixed-clock issue queue design for energy aware, high-performance cores

Globally-asynchronous, locally-synchronous (GALS) design style has started to gain interest recently as a possible solution to the increased design complexity, power and thermal costs, as well as an enabler for allowing fine grain speed and voltage management. Due to its inherent complexity, a possible driver application for such a design style is the case of superscalar, out-of-order processors. We propose a novel mixed-clock issue queue design, and compares and contrasts this new implementation with existing synchronous or mixed-clock versions of issue queues, used in standalone mode or in conjunction with mixed-clock FIFO (first-in, first-out) buffers for inter-domain synchronization. Both transistor level, SPICE simulation, as well as cycle-accurate, microarchitectural analysis, show that cores using mixed-clock issue queues are able to provide better energy-performance operating points when compared to their synchronous or asynchronous FIFO-based counterparts.
Brain monitoring for healthy living

This work presents a way of classifying EEG signal based on the stress parameter of EEG signal and also design of a low cost preamplifier of EEG signal operating on 5 volt dual supply for acquiring the EEG signal. The main idea of project is to study stress from EEG, so that Brain Health monitoring can be accomplished. The aim is to identify stress using Theta band of EEG signal and there amplitude which will help to keep the stress level under control limits which will further help to develop a handheld system for daily use for detecting more accurate stress pattern result. The previous work done on stress has implemented k-Nearest Neighbor technique but we have increased accuracy using Findpeaks method. Our study will lead to the development of Low cost handheld stress management system.
Electroencephalographic (EEG) control of three-dimensional movement

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) can use brain signals from the scalp (EEG), the cortical surface (ECoG), or within the cortex to restore movement control to people who are paralyzed. Like muscle-based skills, BCIs' use requires activity-dependent adaptations in the brain that maintain stable relationships between the person's intent and the signals that convey it. This study shows that humans can learn over a series of training sessions to use EEG for three-dimensional control. The responsible EEG features are focused topographically on the scalp and spectrally in specific frequency bands. People acquire simultaneous control of three independent signals (one for each dimension) and reach targets in a virtual three-dimensional space. Such BCI control in humans has not been reported previously. The results suggest that with further development noninvasive EEG-based BCIs might control the complex movements of robotic arms or neuroprostheses.
Affective Domain 1 Overview of the Affective Domain

Mounting evidence supports the position that human beings are inherently emotional beings and that emotion and affective development impacts human development and behavior in a wide variety of important ways. This paper provides an overview of emotion and the affective domain, including developmental considerations and methods that can be used to facilitate development in this domain. Also discussed are instruments and methods to assessment emotional and affective development.