Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Disambiguating Compound Nouns for a Dynamic HPSG Treebank of Wall Street Journal Texts

The aim of this paper is twofold. We focus, on the one hand, on the task of dynamically annotating English compound nouns, and on the other hand we propose disambiguation methods and techniques which facilitate the annotation task. Both the aforementioned are part of a larger on-going effort which aims to create HPSG annotation for the texts from theWall Street Journal (henceforward WSJ) sections of the Penn Treebank (henceforward PTB) with the help of a hand-written large-scale and wide-coverage grammar of English, the English Resource Grammar (henceforward ERG; Flickinger (2002)). As we show in this paper, such annotations are very rich linguistically, since apart from syntax they also incorporate semantics, which does not only ensure that the treebank is guaranteed to be a truly sharable, re-usable and multi-functional linguistic resource, but also calls for the necessity of a better disambiguation of the internal (syntactic) structure of larger units of words, such as compound nouns, since this has an impact on the representation of their meaning, which is of utmost interest if the linguistic annotation of a given corpus is to be further understood as the practice of adding interpretative linguistic information of the highest quality in order to give added value to the corpus.
Representation of sensory information in the cricket cercal sensory system. I. Response properties of the primary interneurons.

1. Six different types of primary wind-sensitive interneurons in the cricket cercal sensory system were tested for their sensitivity to the orientation and peak velocity of unidirectional airflow stimuli. 2. The cells could be grouped into two distinct classes on the basis of their thresholds and static sensitivities to airflow velocity. 3. Four interneurons (the right and left 10-2 cells and the right and left 10-3 cells) made up one of the two distinct velocity sensitivity classes. The mean firing frequencies of these interneurons were proportional to the logarithm of peak stimulus velocity over the range from 0.02 to 2.0 cm/s. 4. The other two interneurons studied (left and right 9-3) had a higher air-current velocity threshold, near the saturation level of the 10-2 and 10-3 interneurons. The slope of the velocity sensitivity curve for the 9-3 interneurons was slightly greater than that for the 10-2 and 10-3 interneurons, extending the sensitivity range of the system as a whole to at least 100 cm/s. 5. All of the interneurons had broad, symmetrical, single-lobed directional sensitivity tuning curves that could be accurately represented as truncated sine waves with 360 degree period. 6. The four low-threshold interneurons (i.e., left and right 10-2 and 10-3) had peak directional sensitivities that were evenly spaced around the horizontal plane, and their overlapping tuning curves covered all possible air-current stimulus orientations. The variance in the cells' responses to identical repeated stimuli varied between approximately 10% at the optimal stimulus orientations and approximately 30% at the zero-crossing orientations. 7. The two higher threshold interneurons (left and right 9-3) had broader directional sensitivity curves and wider spacing, resulting in reduced overlap with respect to the low-threshold class.
Q-Fabric: System Support for Continuous Online Quality Management

The explosive growth in networked systems and applications and the increase in device capabilities (as evidenced by the availability of inexpensive multimedia devices) enable novel complex distributed applications, including video conferencing, on-demand computing services, and virtual environments. These applications' need for high performance; real-time, or reliability requires the provision of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees along the path of information exchange between two or more communicating systems. Execution environments that are prone to dynamic variability and uncertainty make QoS provision a challenging task, e.g., changes in user behavior, resource requirements, resource availabilities, or system failures are difficult or even impossible to predict. Further, with the coexistence of multiple adaptation techniques and resource management mechanisms, it becomes increasingly important to provide an integrated or cooperative approach to distributed QoS management. This work's goals are the provision of system-level tools needed for the efficient integration of multiple adaptation approaches available at different layers of a system (e.g., application-level, operating system, or network) and the use of these tools such that distributed QoS management is performed efficiently with predictable results. These goals are addressed constructively and experimentally with the Q-Fabric architecture, which provides the required system-level mechanisms to efficiently integrate multiple adaptation techniques. The foundation of this integration is the event-based communication implemented by it, realizing a loosely-coupled group communication approach frequently found in multi-peer applications. Experimental evaluations are performed in the context of a mobile multimedia application, where the focus is directed toward efficient energy consumption on battery-operated devices. Here, integration is particularly important to prevent the multiple energy management techniques found on modern mobile devices to negate the energy savings of each other.
Curing Mycobacterium ulcerans Infection in Mice with a Combination of Rifampin-Streptomycin or Rifampin-Amikacin

ABSTRACT The curing activities of various durations of treatment with a combination of rifampin (RIF) and either streptomycin (STR) or amikacin (AMK) in murine Mycobacterium ulcerans infection were compared in two experiments. In the first experiment, treatment was begun 1 week after infection, when the inflammatory footpad lesion had not yet occurred (preventive model), and in the second experiment, treatment was begun 6 weeks after infection, when inflammatory footpad lesions were established (curative model). In the first experiment, 4 weeks of treatment with daily RIF-STR or RIF-AMK was able to postpone the occurrence of footpad lesion by 12 weeks (RIF-STR) or 17 weeks (RIF-AMK), thus demonstrating their promising bactericidal activities, but neither treatment was able to prevent the late occurrence of footpad lesions. In the second experiment, the overall cure rates, as assessed by the lack of rebound of inflammatory lesions or remultiplication of M. ulcerans, were only 62% after 2 weeks of treatment with RIF and an aminoglycoside and 85% after 4 weeks; but the cure rate reached 100% after 8 or 12 weeks of treatment. The cure rates were slightly higher with the AMK-containing combination than with the STR-containing combination, but the difference was at the limit of significance (P = 0.07). These results show that in the murine model of Buruli ulcer, 8 weeks is the optimal duration of treatment with a combination of RIF and an aminoglycoside.
Convex optimization of resource allocation in asymmetric and heterogeneous SoC

Chip area, power consumption, execution time, offchip memory bandwidth, overall cache miss rate and Network on Chip (NoC) capacity are limiting the scalability of SoCs. Consider a workload comprising a sequential and multiple concurrent tasks and asymmetric or heterogeneous SoC architecture. A convex optimization framework is proposed, for selecting the optimal set of processing cores and allocating area and power resources among them, the NoC and the last level cache, under constrained total area, total average power, total execution time and off-chip bandwidth. The framework relies on analytical performance and power models of the processing cores, NoC and last level cache as a function of their allocated resources. Due to practical implementation of the cores, the optimal architecture under constraints may exclude several of the cores. Several asymmetric and heterogeneous configurations are explored. Convex optimization is shown to extend optimizations based on Lagrange multipliers. We find that our framework obtains the optimal chip resources allocation over a wide spectrum of parameters and constraints, and thus can automate complex architectural design, analysis and verification.
Semantic Methods for Service Categorization - An Empirical Study

In this work we provide an initial analysis of service categorization, the process of associating services with ontologies. Service categorization is an important pre-processing step to tasks such as service composition. The absence of semantic understanding of services may yield erroneous compositions and therefore, service categorization can assist in determining the correctness of a composition. We analyze two common methods for text processing, TF/IDF and context analysis. We also test two types of service description, textual and WSDL. Our initial results indicate that context analysis is more useful than TF/IDF and that WSDL description provides better categorization than textual description.
Design and modeling of planar transformer-based integrated passive devices for wireless applications

This paper presents design and modeling techniques of integrated passive devices (IPDs) that can be stacked with RF chips in a highly integrated and miniaturized 3D system-in-package (SiP) for wireless applications. The research starts to study winding and modeling techniques for high efficiency planar transformers. Based upon the proposed and modeled planar transformers, the research explores novel planar transformer-based structures for various kinds of wireless passive components including baluns, bandpass filters and power combiners to achieve miniature size as well as high performance. The IPDs presented in this study are manufactured in an Above-IC (AIC) process that is ready for mass production in semiconductor industry.
Efficiently Supporting Edit Distance Based String Similarity Search Using B $^+$-Trees

Edit distance is widely used for measuring the similarity between two strings. As a primitive operation, edit distance based string similarity search is to find strings in a collection that are similar to a given query string using edit distance. Existing approaches for answering such string similarity queries follow the filter-and-verify framework by using various indexes. Typically, most approaches assume that indexes and data sets are maintained in main memory. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we propose B + -tree based approaches to answer edit distance based string similarity queries, and hence, our approaches can be easily integrated into existing RDBMSs. In general, we answer string similarity search using pruning techniques employed in the metric space in that edit distance is a metric. First, we split the string collection into partitions according to a set of reference strings. Then, we index strings in all partitions using a single B + -tree based on the distances of these strings to their corresponding reference strings. Finally, we propose two approaches to efficiently answer range and KNN queries, respectively, based on the B + -tree. We prove that the optimal partitioning of the data set is an NP-hard problem, and therefore propose a heuristic approach for selecting the reference strings greedily and present an optimal partition assignment strategy to minimize the expected number of strings that need to be verified during the query evaluation. Through extensive experiments over a variety of real data sets, we demonstrate that our B + -tree based approaches provide superior performance over state-of-the-art techniques on both range and KNN queries in most cases.
SVM based model generation for binding site prediction on helix turn helix motif type of transcription factors in eukaryotes

Support vector machine is a class of machine learning algorithms which uses a set of related supervised learning methods for classification and regression. Nowadays this method is vividly applied to many detection problems related with secondary structure, tumor cell and binding residue prediction. In this work, support vector machines (SVMs) have been trained on 90 sequences of transcription factors with HTH motif. Four sequence features were used as attribute for the prediction of interaction site in HTH motif. A web page was also developed so that user can easily enter the protein sequence and receive the output as interaction site predicted or not predicted. The generated model shows a very high amount of accuracy, sensitivity and specificity which proves to be a good model for the selected case.
Cooperative communication strategies for cascaded sources/relays in wireless networks

Wireless networks with linear topology have attracted increasing attention, as they well represent sensor networks monitoring paths or roads, as well as source-destination routes in large multihop networks. We assume that nodes operate in half-duplex mode, generate their own traffic and relay other nodes' data to be delivered to a common destination. Unlike previous work, we analyze the above network scenario considering that the nodes can relay traffic over up to two hops, and we devise suitable communication strategies. We show that the proposed schemes exhibit good performance in terms of average achievable rate, when compared to non-cooperative techniques as well as to the cut-set upper bound.
Characterization of an Acute Muscle Contraction Model Using Cultured C2C12 Myotubes

A cultured C2C12 myotube contraction system was examined for application as a model for acute contraction-induced phenotypes of skeletal muscle. C2C12 myotubes seeded into 4-well rectangular plates were placed in a contraction system equipped with a carbon electrode at each end. The myotubes were stimulated with electric pulses of 50 V at 1 Hz for 3 ms at 997-ms intervals. Approximately 80% of the myotubes were observed to contract microscopically, and the contractions lasted for at least 3 h with electrical stimulation. Calcium ion (Ca2+) transient evoked by the electric pulses was detected fluorescently with Fluo-8. Phosphorylation of protein kinase B/Akt (Akt), 5′ AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (p38), and c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK)1/2, which are intracellular signaling proteins typically activated in exercised/contracted skeletal muscle, was observed in the electrically stimulated C2C12 myotubes. The contractions induced by the electric pulses increased glucose uptake and depleted glycogen in the C2C12 myotubes. C2C12 myotubes that differentiated after exogenous gene transfection by a lipofection or an electroporation method retained their normal contractile ability by electrical stimulation. These findings show that our C2C12 cell contraction system reproduces the muscle phenotypes that arise in vivo (exercise), in situ (hindlimb muscles in an anesthetized animal), and in vitro (dissected muscle tissues in incubation buffer) by acute muscle contraction, demonstrating that the system is applicable for the analysis of intracellular events evoked by acute muscle contraction.
Per-Exemplar Fusion Learning for Video Retrieval and Recounting

We propose a novel video retrieval framework based on an extension of per-exemplar learning [7]. Each training sample with multiple types of features (e.g., audio and visual) is regarded as an exemplar. For each exemplar, a localized per-exemplar distance function is learned and used to measure the similarity between itself and new test samples. Exemplars associate only with sufficiently similar test data, which accumulate to identify the data to be retrieved. In particular, for every exemplar, relevance of each feature type is discriminatively analyzed and the effect of less informative features is minimized during the fusion-based associations. In addition, we show that our framework can enable a rich set of recounting capabilities where the rationale for each retrieval result can be automatically described to users to aid their interaction with the system. We show that our system provides competitive retrieval accuracy against strong baseline methods, while adding the benefits of recounting.
Epidemics on Networks with Large Initial Conditions or Changing Structure

In this paper we extend previous work deriving dynamic equations governing infectious disease spread on networks. The previous work has implicitly assumed that the disease is initialized by an infinitesimally small proportion of the population. Our modifications allow us to account for an arbitrarily large initial proportion infected. This helps resolve an apparent paradox in earlier work whereby the number of susceptible individuals could increase if too many individuals were initially infected. It also helps explain an apparent small deviation that has been observed between simulation and theory. An advantage of this modification is that it allows us to account for changes in the structure or behavior of the population during the epidemic.
Catalytic Hydrogen Production from Bioethanol

Along with the maturity of the production technology (i.e., fermentation) for a long history, bioethanol has become one of the most significant chemicals and energy carriers in large quantity derived from biomass. Although ethanol production from non-food resources remains challengeable for scientists, how to utilize ethanol in an efficient and economical way opens more space for all researchers both from industry and academia to play with. Hydrogen is likely to play an important role in the energy portfolio of the future due to its high gravimetric energy density. Especially when it is used in fuel cells, it is an ideal energy carrier that can offer clean and efficient power generation. In the United States, ~95 % of hydrogen is produced using a steam reforming process [1]. Over 50% of world’s hydrogen production relies on natural gas as the feedstock [2]. As the concern for a sustainable energy strategy grows, replacing natural gas and other fossil fuels with renewable sources is gaining new urgency. In this context, producing hydrogen from bio-derived liquids such as bio-ethanol has emerged as a promising technology due to the low toxicity, ease of handling and the availability from many different renewable sources (e.g., sugar cane, switchgrass, algae) that ethanol has to offer. An added advantage of producing hydrogen from bioderived liquids is that it is quite suitable for a distributed production strategy. This chapter is aimed to provide a big overview of the current technologies for catalytic hydrogen production from bioethanol while focusing the discussion on the hydrogen production through steam reforming of bioethanol over non-precious metal based catalysts, more specifically, cobalt-based catalysts. By combing the work performed at the author’ laboratories, this chapter will also provide the professional insights on the future development direction of such technologies. Through the estimated economic analysis of this process simulated at industrial scale, the ways of final commercialization of the developed catalyst system specially tailored for central and distributed hydrogen production from steam reforming of bioethanol will be suggested.
Prognostic importance of strain and strain rate after acute myocardial infarction.

AIMS Recently, strain and strain rate have been introduced as novel parameters reflecting left ventricular (LV) function. The purpose of the current study was to assess the prognostic importance of strain and strain rate after acute myocardial infarction (AMI). METHODS AND RESULTS A total of 659 patients after AMI were evaluated. Baseline echocardiography was performed to assess LV function with traditional parameters and strain and strain rate. During follow-up, 51 patients (8%) reached the primary endpoint (all-cause mortality) and 142 patients (22%) the secondary endpoint (a composite of revascularization, re-infarction, and hospitalization for heart failure). Strain and strain rate were both significantly related with all endpoints. After adjusting for clinical and echocardiographic parameters, strain was independent related to all endpoints and was found to be superior to LV ejection fraction (LVEF) and wall motion score index (WMSI). Patients with global strain and strain rate higher than -15.1% and -1.06 s(-1) demonstrated HRs of 4.5 (95% CI 2.1-9.7) and 4.4 (95% CI 2.0-9.5) for all-cause mortality, respectively. CONCLUSION Strain and strain rate provide strong prognostic information in patients after AMI. These novel parameters were superior to LVEF and WMSI in the risk stratification for long-term outcome.
Liquid-Based Urine Cytology as a Tool for Detection of Human Papillomavirus, Mycoplasma spp., and Ureaplasma spp. in Men

ABSTRACT Liquid-based urine cytology (LB-URC) was evaluated for cytological diagnosis and detection of human papillomavirus (HPV), Mycoplasma, and Ureaplasma. Midstream urine samples were collected from 141 male patients with urethritis and 154 controls without urethritis, and sediment cells were preserved in liquid-based cytology solution. Urethral swabs from urethritis patients were tested for the presence of Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Chlamydia trachomatis. Papanicolaou tests were performed for cytological evaluation. HPV, Mycoplasma, and Ureaplasma genomes were determined by PCR-based methods, and localization of HPV DNA in urothelial cells was examined by in situ hybridization (ISH). The β-globin gene was positive in 97.9% of LB-URC samples from urethritis patients and in 97.4% of control samples, suggesting that high-quality cellular DNA was obtained from the LB-URC samples. HPV DNA was detected in 29 (21.0%) urethritis cases and in five (3.3%) controls (P < 0.05). HPV type 16 (HPV 16) was most commonly found in urethritis patients. Cytological evaluations could be performed for 92.1% of urethritis patients and 64.3% of controls. Morphological changes suggestive of HPV infection were seen in 20.7% of the HPV-positive samples, and ISH demonstrated the presence of HPV DNA in both squamous and urothelial cells in HPV-positive samples. Mycoplasma genitalium, Mycoplasma hominis, Ureaplasma parvum, and Ureaplasma urealyticum were detected in 14.5%, 10.9%, 6.5%, and 12.3% of urethritis patients, respectively. The prevalence rates of these microorganisms (except Ureaplasma parvum) were significantly higher in urethritis cases than controls (P < 0.05). LB-URC is applicable for detection of HPV, Mycoplasma, and Ureaplasma. HPV infection occurs in urothelial cells, especially in gonococcal urethritis.
A 134 GHz dBm Frequency Doubler at in 130 nm CMOS

A dBm 134 GHz frequency doubler operating at the maximum oscillation frequency of the technology is shown in an IBM 130 nm CMOS process. The doubler is implemented in a balanced topology, driven by a chain of stacked Class-AB amplifiers, and generates the highest reported power in 130 nm CMOS beyond 100 GHz. A theoretical study of frequency doublers is presented including scaling trends across frequency and CMOS technology nodes.