Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Log-driven user-centric OLAP

While OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) is now a mature, efficient technology, very little attention has been paid to the effectiveness of the analysis and the user-friendliness of a technology often considered tedious of use. This work summarizes various contributions to developing user-centric OLAP, focusing on the use of former queries to enhance subsequent analyses. We first introduce a logical model to describe and manipulate queries and logs, including a language parametrized by binary relations over analytical sessions. In particular, these relations can be specialization relations or based on similarity measures tailored for OLAP queries and sessions. We then describe how logs can be mined for knowledge representing the user behavior. This knowledge includes simple preferences, navigational habits and discoveries made during former explorations. We show how it can be used in various query personalization or query recommendation approaches, that vary in terms of formulation effort, proactiveness, prescriptiveness and expressive power. Finally, we remark that the models and approaches introduced can be seen as a starting point for assessing the effectiveness of analytical sessions, and bridging the gap between OLAP and exploratory search.
Extended Kalman filter for frequent local and infrequent global sensor data fusion

In this paper we compare the performance of a dead-reckoning system for robot navigation to a system using an extended Kalman filter (EKF). Dead-reckoning systems are able to approximate position and orientation by feeding data (provided usually by local sensors) to the kinematic model of the vehicle. These systems are subject to many different sources of error. EKFs have the ability to combine the same information and compensate for most of these errors to yield a better estimate. Our simulation results using a simplified kinematic model of Rocky 7 [an experimental rover used in the Mars exploration program at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)] show that an improvement in performance up to 40% (position error) can be achieved. The local sensors used are: wheel encoders, steering angle potentiometer and gyroscope. Involvement of global sensor measurements can drastically increase the accuracy of the estimate. The lack of GPS or magnetic field on Mars narrows our choices for global localization. Landmarks, such as the sun can be used as natural beacons (reference point for absolute measuremnts). A sun sensor (SS) that measures the absolute orientation of the rover has been built by Lockheed Martin and now is part of the sensor suite of Rocky 7. The SS measurement is crucial for the estimation filter and we show that the accuracy of the estimation decreases exponentially as the frequency of the SS data fed to the EKF decreases.
The roles of self‐disclosure, modesty, and self‐monitoring in the mentoring relationship

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of protege self‐presentation by self‐disclosure, modesty, and self‐monitoring in mentoring.Design/methodology/approach – This study used three data sources (i.e. employees, peers, and mentors) and a longitudinal design over a period of two years.Findings – Employee self‐disclosure and modesty at time 1 predicted an increase in mentoring received and mentoring given at time 2. Further, self‐monitoring moderated the modesty‐mentoring given relationship such that employees high in self‐monitoring had the strongest positive relationship between modesty at time 1 and mentoring given two years later. Also, modesty interacted with self‐monitoring at time 1 to influence the number of mentors involved with employees. That is, the modesty – number of mentors relationship was positive for those high in self‐monitoring, and negative for those low in self‐monitoring.Research limitations/implications – Employees can exercise influence over the amount and t.
Efficacy of luteal estrogen administration and an early follicular Gonadotropin-releasing hormone antagonist priming protocol in poor responders undergoing in vitro fertilization

Objectives We investigated whether luteal estrogen administration and an early follicular Gonadotropin-releasing hormone antagonist (E/G-ant) priming protocol improves clinical outcomes in poor responders to controlled ovarian stimulation for in vitro fertilization (IVF)-embryo transfer, and identified underlying mechanisms. Methods This restrospective study consisted of 65 poor responders who underwent the E/G-ant priming protocol. Sixty-four other poor responders undergoing conventional protocols without pretreatment were included as the control group. Clinical outcomes were compared between 2 groups. Results The E/G-ant priming protocol group exhibited improvements over the control group in terms of the number of retrieved oocytes (3.58±2.24 vs. 1.70±1.45; P=0.000), mature oocytes (2.68±2.11 vs. 1.65±1.23; P=0.000), fertilized oocytes (2.25±1.74 vs. 1.32±1.26; P=0.001), good embryos (1.62±0.91 vs. 1.14±0.90, P=0.021). Day 3 follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH; 8.40±4.84 vs. 16.39±13.56; P=0.000) and pre-ovulation progesterone levels (0.67 vs. 1.28 ng/mL; P=0.016) were significantly higher in the control group than in the E/G-ant priming group. The overall rate of positive human chorionic gonadotropin tests was higher in the E/G-ant priming group than in the control group (32.3% vs.16.1%; P=0.039). Also, clinical pregnancy rate (26.2% vs. 12.5%; P=0.048) and the rate of live births (23.1% vs. 7.1%; P=0.023) were significantly higher in the E/G-ant priming group than in the control group. Conclusion The E/G-ant priming protocol would lead to promising results in poor responders to IVF by suppressing endogenous FSH and by preventing premature luteinization.
Energy-recycling integrated 6.78-Mbps data 6.3-mW power telemetry over a single 13.56-MHz inductive link

We present a power/data telemetry IC with a new data modulation scheme and simultaneous power transfer through a single inductive link. Data-driven synchronized single-cycle shorting of the secondary LC tank conserves reactive power while inducing an instantaneous voltage change at the primary side. Cyclic on-off keying time-encoded symbol mapping of the shorting cycle allows transmission of two data bits per four carrier cycles with simultaneous power transfer during non-shorting cycles. All timing control signals for rectification and data transmission are generated from a low-power clock recovery comparator and 22-phase 2× PLL. The 1-mm2 65-nm CMOS IC delivers up to 6.3-mW power and transmits 6.78-Mbps data with a BER of less than 5.9×10-7 over a single 1-cm 13.56-MHz inductive link.
Cognitive Ergonomics in Interface Development Evaluation

Cognitive Ergonomics is a discipline that contributes with its knowledge to construct better machines in the sense of being easier to use by human beings. Cognitive Ergonomists perform a cognitive analysis of interaction to: (1) shorten the time to accomplish interaction tasks; (2) reduce the number of mistakes made by humans; (3) reduce learning time; and (4) improve people's satisfaction with a system. An appropriate methodology for performing this cognitive analysis of interaction could be based on what I call the "Principle of Mutual Dependency" (Canas et al 2004). This principle determines that: (1) The optimal interface functions will be those that fit the human cognitive functions involved in the task; (2) The human cognitive functions that are involved in the task depend on the interface functions; (3) The modification, replacement, or introduction of a new interface function implies the adaptation of the human cognitive functions; (4) The development (e.g., learning) or limitation (e.g., Elderly users) of the human cognitive functions will imply limitations on the possible interface functions. I will describe this principle with examples from research projects in which our research group participates.
Using Drosophila melanogaster as a Model for Genotoxic Chemical Mutational Studies with a New Program, SnpSift

This paper describes a new program SnpSift for filtering differential DNA sequence variants between two or more experimental genomes after genotoxic chemical exposure. Here, we illustrate how SnpSift can be used to identify candidate phenotype-relevant variants including single nucleotide polymorphisms, multiple nucleotide polymorphisms, insertions, and deletions (InDels) in mutant strains isolated from genome-wide chemical mutagenesis of Drosophila melanogaster. First, the genomes of two independently isolated mutant fly strains that are allelic for a novel recessive male-sterile locus generated by genotoxic chemical exposure were sequenced using the Illumina next-generation DNA sequencer to obtain 20- to 29-fold coverage of the euchromatic sequences. The sequencing reads were processed and variants were called using standard bioinformatic tools. Next, SnpEff was used to annotate all sequence variants and their potential mutational effects on associated genes. Then, SnpSift was used to filter and select differential variants that potentially disrupt a common gene in the two allelic mutant strains. The potential causative DNA lesions were partially validated by capillary sequencing of polymerase chain reaction-amplified DNA in the genetic interval as defined by meiotic mapping and deletions that remove defined regions of the chromosome. Of the five candidate genes located in the genetic interval, the Pka-like gene CG12069 was found to carry a separate pre-mature stop codon mutation in each of the two allelic mutants whereas the other four candidate genes within the interval have wild-type sequences. The Pka-like gene is therefore a strong candidate gene for the male-sterile locus. These results demonstrate that combining SnpEff and SnpSift can expedite the identification of candidate phenotype-causative mutations in chemically mutagenized Drosophila strains. This technique can also be used to characterize the variety of mutations generated by genotoxic chemicals.
Hit Song Prediction for Pop Music by Siamese CNN with Ranking Loss

A model for hit song prediction can be used in the pop music industry to identify emerging trends and potential artists or songs before they are marketed to the public. While most previous work formulates hit song prediction as a regression or classification problem, we present in this paper a convolutional neural network (CNN) model that treats it as a ranking problem. Specifically, we use a commercial dataset with daily play-counts to train a multi-objective Siamese CNN model with Euclidean loss and pairwise ranking loss to learn from audio the relative ranking relations among songs. Besides, we devise a number of pair sampling methods according to some empirical observation of the data. Our experiment shows that the proposed model with a sampling method called A/B sampling leads to much higher accuracy in hit song prediction than the baseline regression model. Moreover, we can further improve the accuracy by using a neural attention mechanism to extract the highlights of songs and by using a separate CNN model to offer high-level features of songs.
Science and democracy: making knowledge and making power in the biosciences and beyond

In the life sciences and beyond, new developments in science and technology and the creation of new social orders go hand in hand. In short, science and society are simultaneously and reciprocally coproduced and changed. Scientific research not only produces new knowledge and technological systems but also constitutes new forms of expertise and contributes to the emergence of new modes of living and new forms of exchange. These dynamic processes are tightly connected to significant redistributions of wealth and power, and they sometimes threaten and sometimes enhance democracy. Understanding these phenomena poses important intellectual and normative challenges: neither traditional social sciences nor prevailing modes of democratic governance have fully grappled with the deep and growing significance of knowledge-making in twenty-first century politics and markets. Building on new work in science and technology studies (STS), this book advances the systematic analysis of the coproduction of knowledge and power in contemporary societies. Using case studies in the new life sciences, supplemented with cases on informatics and other topics such as climate science, this book presents a theoretical framing of coproduction processes while also providing detailed empirical analyses and nuanced comparative work.
Towards a Framework for Software Measurement Validation

In this paper we propose a framework for validating software measurement. We start by defining a measurement structure model that identifies the elementary component of measures and the measurement process, and then consider five other models involved in measurement: unit definition models, instrumentation models, attribute relationship models, measurement protocols and entity population models. We consider a number of measures from the viewpoint of our measurement validation framework and identify a number of shortcomings; in particular we identify a number of problems with the construction of function points. We also compare our view of measurement validation with ideas presented by other researchers and identify a number of areas of disagreement. Finally, we suggest several rules that practitioners and researchers can use to avoid measurement problems, including the use of measurement vectors rather than artificially contrived scalars.
Simultaneous determination of alpha-emitting radionuclides of thorium and plutonium in human tissues including bone.

A method has been developed for the simultaneous determination of environmental, i.e., non-occupational, levels of . cap alpha. -emitting isotopes of thorium and plutonium in human lung, lymph nodes, liver, kidney, thyroid, spleen, gonads, and bone. Known amounts of soft tissues (5-850 g) spiked with 1-2 dpm tracers of /sup 229/Th and /sup 242/Pu are wet ashed with nitric acid, and H/sub 2/SO/sub 4/ with occasional addition of HNO/sub 3/ and H/sub 2/O/sub 2/. Th and Pu are coprecipitated with 10 mg of Fe carrier by gradual addition of ammonium hydroxide. The precipitate is dissolved in HNO/sub 3/ and adjusted to 4 M. Th and Pu are co-extracted into 25% (v/v) trilaurylamine in xylene. Th is backwashed with 10 M HCl and the Pu is back-extracted with 2 M H/sub 2/SO/sub 4/. Th and Pu are electrodeposited separately on platinum planchets and determined by . cap alpha. spectrometry. Bone samples are wet ashed with nitric acid and H/sub 2/O/sub 2/, after spiking with /sup 229/Th and /sup 242/Pu tracers. Th and Pu are coprecipitated with calcium oxalate by adding oxalic acid. The precipitate is heated at 550/sup 0/C, dissolved in nitric acid, and adjusted to 4 M. Then extractions, back-extractions, electrodeposition and measurementsmore » are performed as described for soft tissues. The recovery for Th ranged from 30 to 93% with a mean of 55% and for Pu from 32 to 94% with a mean of 71%. 4 figures, 2 tables. « less
Economic Contextual Factors and Child Body Mass Index

This study examines the relationship between child weight and fast food and fruit and vegetable prices and the availability of fast food restaurants, full-service restaurants, supermarkets, grocery stores and convenience stores. We estimate cross-sectional and individual-level fixed effects (FE) models to account for unobserved individual-level heterogeneity. Data are drawn from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics combined with external food price and outlet density data at the zip code level. FE results show that higher fruit and vegetable prices are statistically significantly related to a higher body mass index (BMI) percentile ranking among children with greater effects among low-income children: fruit and vegetable price elasticity for BMI is estimated to be 0.25 for the full sample and 0.60 among low-income children. Fast food prices are statistically significantly related to child weight only in cross-sectional models among low-income children with a price elasticity of -0.77. Increased supermarket availability and fewer available convenience stores are related with lower weight outcomes among low-income children. These results provide evidence on the potential effectiveness of using fiscal pricing interventions such as taxes and subsidies and other interventions to improve supermarket access as policy instruments to address childhood obesity.
Inter-Speech Clicks in an Interspeech Keynote

Clicks are usually described as phoneme realisations in some African languages or as paralinguistic vocalisations, e.g. to signal disapproval or as sound imitation. A more recent discovery is that clicks are, presumably unintentionally, used as discourse markers indexing a new sequence in a conversation or before a word search. In this single-case study, we investigated more than 300 apical clicks of an experienced speaker during a keynote address at an Interspeech conference. The produced clicks occurred only in inter-speech intervals and were often combined with either hesitation particles like "uhm" or audible inhalation. Our observations suggest a link between click production and ingressive airflow as well as indicate that clicks are used as hesitation markers. The rather high frequency of clicks in the analysed sections from the 1- hour-talk shows that in larger discourse, the time between articulatory phases consists of more than silence, audible inhalation and typical hesitation particles. The rather large variation in the intensity and duration and particularly the number of bursts of the observed clicks indicates that this prosodic discourse marker seems to be a rather acoustically inconsistent phonetic category.
The Impact of Private Precautions on Home Burglary and Robbery in Brazil

ObjectivesThis study evaluates the effects of precaution technologies (i.e., window bars, extra locks, alarms and electric fences, CCTV, private security, dogs and combinations of these tools) on household burglary and robbery in Brazil.MethodsUsing a sample of 121,042 unique households from the Brazilian National Household Sample Survey for 2009, this study estimates a Recursive Bivariate Probit to obtain the average treatment effect of these precaution technologies in the likelihood of home burglary and robbery victimization.ResultsThis study demonstrates that technology does not reduce home burglaries, but certain combinations of technologies may reduce home robberies. The combination of electric fences and alarms with private security reduces the likelihood of home robbery by 9.5 %, and when combined with a dog, these technologies reduce the likelihood of home robbery by 86 %. ConclusionsNo precaution technology is able to prevent crimes when employed independently. Occupancy combined with a set of technologies can reduce the expected victimization in crimes against property.
Miniglucagon: A Local Regulator of Islet Physiology

Abstract: Miniglucagon, or glucagon‐[19–29], is partially processed from glucagon in its target tissues where it modulates the glucagon action. In the islets of Langerhans, the glucagon‐producing A cells contain miniglucagon at a significant level (2–5% of the glucagon content). We studied a possible control of insulin release by miniglucagon using as a model the MIN6 cell line. Miniglucagon, in the 10−14 to 10−9 M range, inhibited insulin release induced by glucose, glucagon, tGLP‐1, or glibenclamide by 85–100% with an IC50 close to 1 pM. While no change in the cyclic AMP content was noted, Ca2+ influx was reduced in parallel with the inhibition of insulin release. Use of pharmacological modulators of L‐type voltage‐sensitive Ca2+ channels and bacterial toxins indicates that miniglucagon blocks insulin release by closing this type of channel via a pertussis toxin‐sensitive G protein. Miniglucagon is a novel, possibly physiologically relevant, local regulator of islet function.
The TgsGP Gene Is Essential for Resistance to Human Serum in Trypanosoma brucei gambiense

Trypanosoma brucei gambiense causes 97% of all cases of African sleeping sickness, a fatal disease of sub-Saharan Africa. Most species of trypanosome, such as T. b. brucei, are unable to infect humans due to the trypanolytic serum protein apolipoprotein-L1 (APOL1) delivered via two trypanosome lytic factors (TLF-1 and TLF-2). Understanding how T. b. gambiense overcomes these factors and infects humans is of major importance in the fight against this disease. Previous work indicated that a failure to take up TLF-1 in T. b. gambiense contributes to resistance to TLF-1, although another mechanism is required to overcome TLF-2. Here, we have examined a T. b. gambiense specific gene, TgsGP, which had previously been suggested, but not shown, to be involved in serum resistance. We show that TgsGP is essential for resistance to lysis as deletion of TgsGP in T. b. gambiense renders the parasites sensitive to human serum and recombinant APOL1. Deletion of TgsGP in T. b. gambiense modified to uptake TLF-1 showed sensitivity to TLF-1, APOL1 and human serum. Reintroducing TgsGP into knockout parasite lines restored resistance. We conclude that TgsGP is essential for human serum resistance in T. b. gambiense.
Multimodal feature fusion for video forgery detection

In this paper we propose a novel local feature analysis and feature level fusion technique for detecting tampering or forgery for facial-biometric based on-line access control scenarios. The local features are extracted by analysing facial image data in the chrominance colour space and hue-saturation colour space. A feature level fusion of local features consisting of hue and saturation gradients with global features obtained from principal component analysis showed that a significant improvement in performance can be achieved in detecting tampered or forged images from genuine images in low bandwidth online streaming video access control contexts. The performance evaluation of the proposed fusion technique for a multimodal facial video corpus showed that an equal error rate of less than 1% could be achieved with feature level fusion of local features and global features.
Interference Exploitation in D2D-Enabled Cellular Networks: A Secrecy Perspective

Device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks is a promising technology to improve network resource utilization. In D2D-enabled cellular networks, interference generated by D2D communications is usually viewed as an obstacle to cellular communications. However, in this paper, we present a new perspective on the role of D2D interference by taking security issues into consideration. We consider a large-scale D2D-enabled cellular network with eavesdroppers overhearing cellular communications. Using stochastic geometry, we model such a network and analyze the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) distributions, connection probabilities and secrecy probabilities of both the cellular and D2D links. We propose two criteria for guaranteeing performances of secure cellular communications, namely the strong and weak performance guarantee criteria. Based on the obtained analytical results of link characteristics, we design optimal D2D link scheduling schemes under these two criteria respectively. Both analytical and numerical results show that the interference from D2D communications can enhance physical layer security of cellular communications and at the same time create extra transmission opportunities for D2D users.