Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High Availability for Database Systems in Geographically Distributed Cloud Computing Environments

In recent years, cloud storage systems have become very popular due to their good scalability and high availability. However, these storage systems provide limited transactional capabilities, which makes developing applications that use these systems substantially more difficult than developing applications that use a traditional SQL-based relational database management systems (DBMS). There have been solutions that provide transactional SQLbased DBMS services on the cloud, including solutions that use cloud shared storage systems to store the data. However, none of these solutions take advantage of the shared cloud storage architecture to provide DBMS high availability. These solutions typically deal with the failure of a DBMS server by restarting this server and going through crash recovery based on the transaction log, which can lead to long DBMS service downtimes that are not acceptable to users. It is possible to run traditional DBMS high availability solutions in cloud environments. These solutions are typically based on shipping the transaction log from a primary server to a backup server, and replaying the log at the backup server to keep it up to date with the primary. However, these solutions do not work well if the primary and backup are in different, geographically distributed data centers due to the high latency of log shipping. Furthermore, these solutions do not take advantage of the capabilities of the underlying shared storage system. We present a new transparent high availability system for transactional SQL-based DBMS on a shared storage architecture, which we call CAC-DB (Continuous Access Cloud DataBase). Our system is especially designed for eventually consistent cloud storage systems that run efficiently in multiple geographically distributed data centers. The database and transaction logs are stored in such a storage system, and therefore remain available after a failure up to the failure of an entire data center (e.g., in a natural disaster). CAC-DB takes advantage of this shared storage to ensure that the DBMS service remains available and transactionally consistent in the face of failures up to the loss of one or more data centers. By taking advantage of shared storage, CAC-DB can run in a geographically distributed environment with minimal overhead as compared to traditional log shipping solutions. In CAC-DB, an active (primary) and a standby (backup) DBMS run on different servers in different data centers. The standby catches up with the active’s memory state by replaying the shared log. When the active crashes, the standby can finish the failover process and reach peak througput very quickly. The DBMS service only experiences several seconds of downtime. While the basic idea of replaying the log is simple and not new, the shared storage environment poses many new challenges including the need for synchronization protocols, new buffer pool management mechanisms, approaches for guaranteeing strong
Prospective analysis of quality of life in elderly patients treated with adjuvant chemotherapy for non-small-cell lung cancer.

BACKGROUND Given the more comorbidities with a decline in physiologic reserve, it can be challenging to make appropriate treatment decisions in the elderly. PATIENTS AND METHODS Here, we prospectively evaluated and compared the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of patients aged ≥ 65 with aged <65 who were treated with a postoperative chemotherapy for completely resected stage Ib, II or IIIa non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Either four cycles of paclitaxel (Taxol)-carboplatin (PC) or vinorelbine-cisplatin (NP) was used. The HRQOL was assessed with EORTC QLQ-C30 and EORTC QLQ-LC13. RESULTS Between October 2008 and October 2011, a total of 139 patients (aged <65, n = 73; ≥ 65, n = 66) were enrolled, and 127 (91.4%) completed the questionnaire. Overall, the quality of life (QOL) in elderly patients did not significantly deteriorate with adjuvant chemotherapy and the time trend of QOL in elderly patients was similar to that of younger patients. Although the elderly suffered from increased treatment-related adverse events involving sore mouth, peripheral neuropathy and alopecia compared with the baseline, the same time trends were also observed in younger group. The mean dose intensities (MDIs) for PC and NP regimen were not significantly different between the two age groups. CONCLUSIONS Postoperative chemotherapy did not substantially reduce HRQOL in elderly NSCLC patients, and HRQOL during and after adjuvant chemotherapy did not significantly differ by age.
Anchor Text Extraction for Academic Search Accurate Argumentative Zoning with Maximum Entropy Models Classification of Research Papers into a Patent Classification System Using Two Translation Models Detecting Key Sentences for Automatic Assistance in Peer Reviewing Research Articles in Educational 

Order copies of this and other ACL proceedings from: ii Introduction In recent years, interest in scholarly publications in electronic forms has boomed, and several large-scale electronic digital libraries and citation indices are now used everyday by researchers. The fact that formal citation metrics have become an increasingly large factor in decision-making by universities and funding bodies worldwide makes the need for research in such topics and for better methods for measuring the impact of work more pressing. Current digital libraries collect and allow access to digital papers and their metadata (including citations), but largely do not attempt to analyze the items they collect. The goal of this workshop is to investigate how developments in natural language processing and information retrieval techniques can advance the state-of-the-art in scholarly document understanding, analysis and retrieval. We were amazed by the number of high-quality papers we received to this inaugural workshop, and by the innovativeness of the research that is done in this area. The contributions split into various areas, and we will here give a quick overview of what these are. Full document text analysis can help design information access, namely automatic summarization and sentiment detection methods, automated recommendation and reviewing systems, and may provide data for visualizing scientific trends and bibliometrics. Kaplan et al.'s paper studies the interaction of citation contexts and co-reference for scientific summarization. Discourse analysis also is the focus of Merity et al's paper which presents an ME-based approach to Argumentative Zoning, and of Sándor and Vorndran's reviewing support system. We are particularly proud to have two user studies on navigation and search at this workshop, because better systems for information access require such studies as a starting point. Hearst and Stoica present a user study and prototype system for faceted navigation in scholarly digital libraries, whereas the study by Wan et al. is collecting the browsing-specific information needs by medical searchers, in particular those that could be satisfied by citations and their contexts. As far as improvement of academic search itself is concerned, the topic of Shi et al.'s paper is improved anchor text extraction. Citation analysis takes this a step further, adding scientific social network analysis as another strand of evidence to enhance solutions to the above challenges. Web based digital libraries add download counts and Web 2.0 information such as tagging. This workshop contains three papers on citation support in the strictest sense, namely Hong …
Test Data Compression for Minimum Test Application Time

In this paper, we proposed a test data compression scheme targeted for minimizing the amount of test data. The proposed scheme can reduce the test application time and minimize the amount of compressed test data, which reduces the size of data memory in ATE and the time needed to transfer test data. A decoder design is also presented. Experimental results on ISCAS benchmark circuits show that the compressed data produced by our method are much smaller than previous methods.
Short Communication on QUIST: A Quick Clustering Algorithm

In this short communication we introduce the quick clustering algorithm (QUIST), an efficient hierarchical clustering algorithm based on sorting. QUIST is a poly-logarithmic divisive clustering algorithm that does not assume the number of clusters, and/or the cluster size to be known ahead of time. It is also insensitive to the original ordering of the input.
Methods to evaluate CaCO3 cycle modules in coupled global biogeochemical ocean models

Abstract. The marine CaCO3 cycle is an important component of the oceanic carbon system and directly affects the cycling of natural and the uptake of anthropogenic carbon. In numerical models of the marine carbon cycle, the CaCO3 cycle component is often evaluated against the observed distribution of alkalinity. Alkalinity varies in response to the formation and remineralization of CaCO3 and organic matter. However, it also has a large conservative component, which may strongly be affected by a deficient representation of ocean physics (circulation, evaporation, and precipitation) in models. Here we apply a global ocean biogeochemical model run into preindustrial steady state featuring a number of idealized tracers, explicitly capturing the model's CaCO3 dissolution, organic matter remineralization, and various preformed properties (alkalinity, oxygen, phosphate). We compare the suitability of a variety of measures related to the CaCO3 cycle, including alkalinity (TA), potential alkalinity and TA*, the latter being a measure of the time-integrated imprint of CaCO3 dissolution in the ocean. TA* can be diagnosed from any data set of TA, temperature, salinity, oxygen and phosphate. We demonstrate the sensitivity of total and potential alkalinity to the differences in model and ocean physics, which disqualifies them as accurate measures of biogeochemical processes. We show that an explicit treatment of preformed alkalinity (TA0) is necessary and possible. In our model simulations we implement explicit model tracers of TA0 and TA*. We find that the difference between modelled true TA* and diagnosed TA* was below 10% (25%) in 73% (81%) of the ocean's volume. In the Pacific (and Indian) Oceans the RMSE of A* is below 3 (4) mmol TA m−3, even when using a global rather than regional algorithms to estimate preformed alkalinity. Errors in the Atlantic Ocean are significantly larger and potential improvements of TA0 estimation are discussed. Applying the TA* approach to the output of three state-of-the-art ocean carbon cycle models, we demonstrate the advantage of explicitly taking preformed alkalinity into account for separating the effects of biogeochemical processes and circulation on the distribution of alkalinity. In particular, we suggest to use the TA* approach for CaCO3 cycle model evaluation.
Ethical issues in knowledge management: conflict of knowledge ownership

Purpose – This paper aims to review ethical issues inherent in the theorisation and practice of knowledge management (KM) with specific attention to the conflict of knowledge ownership between organisations and individual employees. Design/methodology/approach – Relevant literature was identified and reviewed via EPSCO host and ISIWeb. Findings – The paper notes that knowledge, although rooted in individuals, is often claimed or treated as owned by organisations, creating a conflict of knowledge ownership. The paper argues that such an approach to appropriation and management of knowledge leads to tension in knowledge processes between organisations and individuals, and also among individuals. This situation may, in turn, jeopardise individuals' knowledge processing behaviours, and pose difficulties to organisations in managing knowledge effectively. Research limitations/implications – Offers a number of potential research questions that may be turned into research hypotheses and assessed experimentally t.
HANSpeller: A Unified Framework for Chinese Spelling Correction

The number of people learning Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) has been booming in recent decades. The problem of spelling error correction for CFL learners increasingly is becoming important. Compared to the regular text spelling check task, more error types need to be considered in CFL cases. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for Chinese spelling correction. Instead of conventional methods, which focus on rules or statistics separately, our approach is based on extended HMM and ranker-based models, together with a rule-based model for further polishing, and a final decision-making step is adopted to decide whether to output the corrections or not. Experimental results on the test data of foreigner's Chinese essays provided by the SIGHAN 2014 bake-off illustrate the performance of our approach.
Are Physical Therapy Interns Competent in Patient Management Skills? Assessment of the Views of Clinical and Academic Physical Therapists

[Purpose] This study aimed at evaluating PT interns’ performance from the perspectives of clinical and academic physical therapists (PTs). [Methods] An online questionnaire based on a modified version of the Clinical Internship Evaluation Tool (CIET) was used to evaluate PT interns’ performance in patient management skills. Assessors comprised clinical and academic PTs from Saudi Arabia. The survey aimed at assessing the competency of interns in 25 patient management skills comprising four major domains: clinical examination, patient evaluation, diagnosis and prognosis, and intervention. Assessors were also asked to rank the importance of possessing each skill and evaluating the internship programs at their facilities. A multivariate logistic regression analysis assessed whether the demographic variables between the two groups influenced their views. [Results] A total of 148 participants (112 clinical PTs and 36 academic PTs) responded to the survey. The majority of the participants agreed that interns were competent in all 25 skills. Differences between the two groups of assessors were observed for five out of the 25 skills. Interestingly, skills with the highest means were perceived as the most important skills by both groups of assessors. There was no association between sociodemographic variables and evaluation scores. [Conclusion] There were no differences observed between clinical and academic PTs in their evaluation of PT interns in 20 of the 25 clinical skills. There were indications of a need for further improvement in certain competencies and skills such as clinical examination, evaluation, diagnosis and prognosis, and intervention.
Security testing of a secure cache design

Cache side channel attacks are attacks that leak secret information through physical implementation of cryptographic operations, nullifying cryptographic protection. Recently, these attacks have received great interest. Previous research found that software countermeasures alone are not enough to defend against cache side channel attacks. Secure cache designs can thwart the root causes of cache side channels and are more efficient. For instance, Newcache is a cache design that can enhance security, performance and power efficiency simultaneously through dynamic memory-cache remapping and eviction randomization. However, these cache designs seldom had their security verified experimentally by mounting cache side channel attacks on them. In this paper, we test the security of Newcache using representative classes of cache side channel attacks proposed for conventional set-associative caches. The results show that Newcache can defeat all these attacks. However, what if a very knowledgeable attacker crafted the attack strategy targeting the secure caches design? We redesign the attacks specifically for Newcache. The results show that Newcache can defeat even crafted access-driven attacks specifically targeted at it but sometimes succumbs to the specifically crafted timing attacks, which is due to a very subtle vulnerability in its replacement algorithm. We further secure Newcache by modifying its replacement algorithm slightly, thus defeating these specifically crafted timing attacks. In addition, the improved Newcache simplifies the replacement algorithm in the original Newcache design.
File system design with assured delete

This paper describes a system that supports high availability of data, until the data should be expunged, at which time the system makes it impossible to recover the data. This design supports two types of assured delete; where the expiration time is known at file creation, and on-demand delete of individual files. The design assures previous work has described how to do this when the expiration time of a file is known at file creation time, and was particularly suited to supporting many independent clients. This paper reviews that work, but also describes how to support on-demand deletion of individual files
A Dynamic Bayesian Intelliegent Interface

This paper presents an intelligent user interface agent architecture based on Bayesian networks. Using a Bayesian network not only dynamically captures and models user behavior, but it also dynamically captures and models uncertainty in the interface's reasoning process. We present an approach that allows our intelligent interface agent (IIA) to alter its own topology to better adapt itself to modeling a particular user. We present several metrics that provide useful information concerning the performance of our IIA. IIA's sound semantics and mathematical basis enhances its ability to make correct, intelligent inferences as to the user's needs.
Movement patterns for mobile networks in disaster scenarios

Node mobility is one essential feature of mobile networks, especially for delay tolerant networks, where packet delivery is only possible through node movements. In mobile ad hoc networks, mobility adds new challenges to the protocol design. Therefore, realistic movement models are required to evaluate protocol performance. Usually, random node movement is considered for that but this kind of movement is not applicable for first responders in disaster scenarios. Their movements are driven by tactical mission requirements and highly depend on the type of disaster. In this paper, we analyze two different movement scenarios to derive common features as well as differences and present how to use these results to generate generic and at the same time realistic movements for first responders.
Canonical Skeletons for Shape Matching

Skeletal representations of 2-D shape, including shock graphs, have become increasingly popular for shape matching and object recognition. However, it is well known that skeletal structure can be unstable under minor boundary deformation, part articulation, and minor shape deformation (due to, for example, small changes in viewpoint). As a result, two very similar shapes may yield two significantly different skeletal representations which, in turn, will induce a large matching distance. Such instability occurs both at external branches as well as internal branches of the skeleton. We present a framework for the structural simplification of a shape's skeleton which balances, in an optimization framework, the desire to reduce a skeleton's complexity by minimizing the number of branches, with the desire to maximize the skeleton's ability to accurately reconstruct the original shape. This optimization yields a canonical skeleton whose increased stability yields significantly improved recognition performance
Information Retrieval-from Academic Research to Practical Applications

Information Retrieval (IR) as a discipline did not originate from an urgent need of professionals to master today's information explosion. Nor is the content of the relatively small test collections employed in the past by IR research in line with the kind of information professionals are faced with at the present time. Only recently IR researchers have started to study real-life problems and have realized that the information which enterprises invariably encounter is highly unstructured, heterogenous, multiand hypermedia, and of varying quality. Because of the requirements imposed by today's professional life, Information Technology (IT) software becomes increasingly complex. We argue in this paper that it is an advantage to use a framework approach—an advantage not only for operational IR applications but also for research purposes, particularly for the evaluation of indexing and retrieval techniques. The IR framework FIRE is being developed along these lines. The rationale for developing FIRE is discussed, and the structure and some of the basic properties of FIRE are explained. 1 Information and Information Retrieval It is not the aim of this article to repeat the technological achievements of the past decades nor to predict what technology will bring us in the decades to come. Likewise, the often cited information explosion is a well-known fact and its effect on the life of many professionals should not be reiterated either. Rather, we want to summarize what Information Retrieval (IR) research has accomplished in the past and to what effect the achievements of IR research have been put into practice in real-life environments. Hence, we will reflect upon different kinds of information, upon the value and price of information, and upon the expectations of practitioners concerning IR research results. It is often argued that information in the past used to consist of text only and, because of this single medium, searching for information was easier. There have, of course, always been other types of information, like speech, gesture, images, etc., but indeed text was the only information type that was stored on a medium (e.g. on paper) and was therefore searchable. With the advent of new recording equipment many other kinds of information started to grow into entire collections. When a need for searching mechanisms emerged,
Infrared Microspectroscopy of Bionanomaterials (Diatoms) with Careful Evaluation of Void Effects

In order to characterize a representative natural bionanomaterial, present day centric diatom samples (diameter, 175–310 µm) have been analyzed and imaged by infrared (IR) micro-spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Because diatom silica frustules have complex microscopic morphology, including many void areas such as micro- or nano-pores, the effects of voids on the spectral band shapes were first evaluated. With increasing void area percentage, 1220 cm−1/1070 cm−1 peak height ratio (Si–O polymerization index) increases and 950 cm−1/800 cm−1 peak height ratio (Si–OH/Si–O–Si) decreases, both approaching 1. Based on the void area percentage of representative diatom samples determined using SEM image analyses (51.5% to 20.5%) and spectral simulation, the 1220 cm−1/1070 cm−1 ratios of diatom samples are sometimes affected by the void effect, but the 950 cm−1/800 cm−1 ratios can indicate real structural information of silica. This void effect should be carefully evaluated for IR micro-spectroscopy of micro-nano-porous materials. Maturity of diatom specimens may be evaluated from: (1) void area percentages determined by SEM; (2) average thicknesses determined by optical microscope; and (3) average values of 1220 cm−1/1070 cm−1 peak height ratios (opposite trend to the void effect) determined by IR micro-spectroscopy. Microscopic heterogeneities of chemical structures of silica were obtained by IR micro-spectroscopic mapping of four representative diatoms. The 950 cm−1/800 cm−1 ratios show that large regions of some diatoms consist of hydrated amorphous immature silica. The successful analysis of diatoms by IR micro-spectroscopic data with careful void effect evaluation may be applied to physicochemical structures of many other bionanomaterials.