Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fpga Research Design Platform Fuels Network Advances Fpga Research Design Platform Fuels Network Advances

Stanford University, together with Xilinx Research Labs, is building a second-generation high-speed networking design platform called the NetFPGA-10G specifically for the research community. The new platform, which is poised for completion this year, uses state-of-the art technology to help researchers quickly build fast, complex prototypes that will solve the next crop of technological problems in the networking domain. As with the first-generation platform, which universities worldwide have eagerly adopted, we hope the new platform will spawn an open-source community that contributes and shares intellectual property, thus accelerating innovation.
Limitations and Negative Results of Investment Regulation Policies

This article systematically studies investment regulation policies adopted after 1994 to prevent overcapacity in the Chinese iron and steel industry. Theoretical analysis shows that these policies have three major limitations: they cannot fundamentally govern overcapacity; they cannot be used by policymakers to make accurate predictions or formulate acceptable investment plans; they may disturb the market process and lead to negative policy results. Reviews of policy predictions show that there has always been a large difference between iron and steel industry policy forecasts and plans for investment regulation and market realities. A Hodrick-Prescott filter analysis of the effects of these policies on fixed-asset investment in the industry further reveals that the policies obstruct self-adjustment of fixed-asset investment in the market, leading to negative policy results. Policies of these types should be adopted with great caution.
A Generalization of the Standard AMOC Curve

The Activity Monitoring Operating Characteristic (AMOC) curve is a useful and popular method for assessing the performance of algorithms that detect outbreaks of disease [1]. As it is typically applied in biosurveillance, the AMOC curve plots the expected time to detection (since the outbreak began) as a function of the false alert rate. An ideal algorithm has zero false alerts and a detection time of zero. An alternative, conceptually equivalent version of the AMOC curve plots (T – detection_time) as a function of the false alert rate, where T is a maximum meaningful detection time. We focus on this version.
Prosody, supporting real-time conversation

We assume that prosody contains information forenoticing segment boundaries, syntactic structures, and turn transitions and enable us to predict these more easily. We examined this assumption using the F0 model. Concretely speaking, as for forenotices, we examined whether or not the F0 model parameters can lead to segment boundaries, dependencies of phrases, and turn transitions. On the other hand, as for predictions, we conducted cognitive experiments on turn-taking by presenting stimulations containing only prosody and not phonological information. As a result, the segment boundaries were exactly forenoticed at an accuracy of about 60%, the dependencies of phrases were done at about 80%, the turn transitions were done at about 70%, and the possibility of predictions about turn transitions was indicated.
Targeted Assembly of Short Sequence Reads

As next-generation sequence (NGS) production continues to increase, analysis is becoming a significant bottleneck. However, in situations where information is required only for specific sequence variants, it is not necessary to assemble or align whole genome data sets in their entirety. Rather, NGS data sets can be mined for the presence of sequence variants of interest by localized assembly, which is a faster, easier, and more accurate approach. We present TASR, a streamlined assembler that interrogates very large NGS data sets for the presence of specific variants by only considering reads within the sequence space of input target sequences provided by the user. The NGS data set is searched for reads with an exact match to all possible short words within the target sequence, and these reads are then assembled stringently to generate a consensus of the target and flanking sequence. Typically, variants of a particular locus are provided as different target sequences, and the presence of the variant in the data set being interrogated is revealed by a successful assembly outcome. However, TASR can also be used to find unknown sequences that flank a given target. We demonstrate that TASR has utility in finding or confirming genomic mutations, polymorphisms, fusions and integration events. Targeted assembly is a powerful method for interrogating large data sets for the presence of sequence variants of interest. TASR is a fast, flexible and easy to use tool for targeted assembly.
Biotransformation of Explosives by the Old Yellow Enzyme Family of Flavoproteins

ABSTRACT Several independent studies of bacterial degradation of nitrate ester explosives have demonstrated the involvement of flavin-dependent oxidoreductases related to the old yellow enzyme (OYE) of yeast. Some of these enzymes also transform the nitroaromatic explosive 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT). In this work, catalytic capabilities of five members of the OYE family were compared, with a view to correlating structure and function. The activity profiles of the five enzymes differed substantially; no one compound proved to be a good substrate for all five enzymes. TNT is reduced, albeit slowly, by all five enzymes. The nature of the transformation products differed, with three of the five enzymes yielding products indicative of reduction of the aromatic ring. Our findings suggest two distinct pathways of TNT transformation, with the initial reduction of TNT being the key point of difference between the enzymes. Characterization of an active site mutant of one of the enzymes suggests a structural basis for this difference.
Antigen persistence is required throughout the expansion phase of a CD4+ T cell response

For CD8+ T cells, a relatively short antigen pulse seems sufficient for antigen-presenting cells to drive clonal expansion and differentiation. It is unknown whether the requirement for antigen is similarly ephemeral for CD4+ T cells. To study the dependence of a CD4+ T cell response on antigen persistence in a quantitatively and temporally controlled manner in vivo, we engineered a mouse line expressing a major histocompatibility complex class II–restricted epitope in dendritic cells under the control of a tetracycline-inducible promoter. Experiments tracking the proliferation of CD4+ T cells exposed to their cognate antigen in various amounts for different time periods revealed that the division of such cells was contingent on the presence of antigen throughout their expansion phase, even in the presence of an inflammatory stimulus. This previously unrecognized feature of a CD4+ T cell response contrasts with the proliferative behavior of CD8+ T cells that has been documented, and it implies that the two T cell subsets might require different strategies for efficient vaccination.
Exploiting association rules and ontology for semantic document indexing

This paper describes a novel approach for document indexing based on the discovery of contextual semantic relations between concepts. The concepts are first extracted from WordNet ontology. Then we propose to extend and to use the association rules technique in order to discover conditional relations between concepts. Finally, concepts and related contextual relations are organized into a conditional graph.
Beyond bag of words: image representation in sub-semantic space

Due to the semantic gap, the low-level features are not able to semantically represent images well. Besides, traditional semantic related image representation may not be able to cope with large inter class variations and are not very robust to noise. To solve these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel image representation method in the sub-semantic space. First, examplar classifiers are trained by separating each training image from the others and serve as the weak semantic similarity measurement. Then a graph is constructed by combining the visual similarity and weak semantic similarity of these training images. We partition this graph into visually and semantically similar sub-sets. Each sub-set of images are then used to train classifiers in order to separate this sub-set from the others. The learned sub-set classifiers are then used to construct a sub-semantic space based representation of images. This sub-semantic space is not only more semantically meaningful but also more reliable and resistant to noise. Finally, we make categorization of images using this sub-semantic space based representation on several public datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Outlier Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks using Bayesian Belief Networks

Data reliability is an important issue from the user's perspective, in the context of streamed data in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Reliability is affected by the harsh environmental conditions, interferences in wireless medium and usage of low quality sensors. Due to these conditions, the data generated by the sensors may get corrupted resulting in outliers and missing values. Deciding whether an observation is an outlier or not depends on the behavior of the neighbors' readings as well as the readings of the sensor itself. This can be done by capturing the spatio-temporal correlations that exists among the observations of the sensor nodes. By using naive Bayesian networks for classification, we can estimate whether an observation belongs to a class or not. If it falls beyond the range of the class, then it can be detected as an outlier. However naive Bayesian networks do not consider the conditional dependencies among the observations of sensor attributes. So, we propose an outlier detection scheme based on Bayesian belief networks, which captures the conditional dependencies among the observations of the attributes to detect the outliers in the sensor streamed data. Applicability of this scheme as a plug-in to the component oriented middleware for sensor networks (COMiS) of our early research work is also presented
Informational Facts and the Metainformation Inherent in IFacts: The Soul of Data Sciences

Books, archives, and media contain information and meaning, and much of what librarians and information scientists focus on are these information vessels. Metadata is normally assigned to such vessels to assist in organizing and retrieving the information vessels. Facts are often derived from these information vessels through text mining, but facts may be directly produced from observations. A particular kind of fact, an informational fact (IFact), describes the information from the observation of an information producing process. Such IFacts will become a major part of future data libraries. Metainformation, a kind of metadata, is associated with these IFacts, describing the empirical characteristics of the observation that produced the IFact. This metainformation is inherent in informational facts, and is critical in the use of scientific datasets and “big data. ” The differences between regular facts and informational facts are examined, as well as between metadata and metainformation.
Integrating Bottom-up and Top-down Processing in Active Dendrites

| The classical view of information processing in the cortex is that of a bottom-up process in a feed-forward hierarchy. However there is psychophysical, anatomical and physiological evidence that top-down eeects play a crucial role in the processing of input stimuli. Hardly anything is known about the neural mechanisms underlying these effects. Here we investigate a physiologically inspired model of two reciprocally connected cortical areas. Each area receives bottom-up as well as top-down information which are integrated in active dendrites. I) This integration results in a burst signal that is extremely robust in the context of noise in bottom-up signals. II) Priming like eeects can be demonstrated by investigating the innuence of additional top-down information about the actual stimulus. III) The model takes into account recent physiological ndings: It has been shown that the interareal coupling in low frequency ranges is characteristically enhanced due to top-down mechanisms. Corresponding eeects can be demonstrated with the model presented here.
From Tom Thumb to the Dockers: some experiments with foraging robots

In this paper, we experiment, from the point of view of their efficiency, different implementations of the "explorer robots application". Three types of "Tom Thumb robots", whose behavior is based on the foraging behaviors of ants are proposed and their results are critically examined. We then introduce chain-making robots (the "dockers"), governed by local perceptions and interactions. This helps us to show that only a few changes in the robots' behavior may greatly improve the efficiency of the population.
ECO timing optimization with negotiation-based re-routing and logic re-structuring using spare cells

To maintain a lower re-masking cost, Engineering Change Order (ECO) using pre-placed spare cells for buffer insertion and gate sizing has been shown to be practical for fixing timing violating paths (ECO paths). However, in the previously known best scheme DCP [1, 2], re-routings are done with each path optimized according to its surrounding available spare cells without considering potential exchanges with neighboring active cells, and spare cell arbitration between competing ECO paths are less addressed. Besides, the extra flexibility for allowing logic restructuring was not exploited. In this work, we develop a framework harnessing the following more flexible strategies to make the usage of spare cells for ECO timing optimization more powerful: (1) a negotiation based re-routing scheme yielding a more global view in solving resource competition arbitration; (2) an extended gate sizing operation to allow exchanges of active gates with spare gates of different function types through equivalent logic re-structuring. Our experiments upon MCNC and ITC benchmarks with highly injected timing violations show that compared to DCP, our newly proposed framework can cut down the average total negative slack (TNS) by 50% and reduce the number of unsolved ECO paths by 31%.
Investigation of AODV Throughput Considering RREQ, RREP and RERR Packets

As Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are attracting attention for their potential use in several fields such as collaborative computing and multimedia communications, there is an increasing need to minimize the overhead introduced by routing protocols in the network. In this paper, we analyze the performance of a MANET by simulations, in terms of RREQ, RREP and RERR, considering Random Waypoint Mobility (RWM) model. We consider the cases when all nodes are moving and source and destination nodes are static. We evaluate the performance by measuring the throughput and AODV control packets.
Ought Computers Adjudicate

In 1991 Jaap van den Herik published his seminal inaugural address as a professor of legal informatics at Leiden University. He discussed the question whether computers can adjudicate. Not Van den Herik’s arguments were feverishly contested at the time, but his audacity to bring the question onto the Dutch legal academic fore at all. Ever since, it has been his adopted mission to emphasize over and over again that computers are and will be capable of much more than we are willing to imagine. He is right. And he is also right in expecting our societies to be caught unaware if we do not take this phenomenon as a serious matter of concern. Van den Herik’s inaugural lecture ended by a double note. One note gained the larger part of the public’s attention and concerned the proposition that computers will be capable of adjudicating in a better way than human judges will do in the future. This may be a question of several centuries (he tentatively mentions the year 2984), but it will happen eventually. Van den Herik is willing to take any bet on it. And as he has already won his bet with Hans Bohm on a computer gaining victory in a serious game of chess against the reigning world champion, few of us dare take him on. As predicting the future may be interesting entertainment, it is not the tack I choose to pursue. Here, I want to take up the other note by Van den Herik as stated in 1991. If we do accept, as a working hypothesis, that computers are capable of adjudication, then we have to address the question whether we let them do so, or even promote them to adjudicate. In brief, assuming that computers are capable to adjudicate, we face the new question: ought they? Ought computers adjudicate if they can? This is the question I want to address in my essay. And by doing so, I would like to pay tribute to the man who set me on this track.
A PIECEWISE BÉZIER VOLUME DEFORMATION MODEL AND ITS APPLICATIONS IN FACIAL MOTION CAPTURE

Capturing real facial motions from videos enables automatic creation of dynamic models for facial animation. In this paper, we propose an explanation-based facial motion tracking algorithm based on a piecewise Bézier volume deformation model (PBVD). The PBVD is a suitable model both for synthesis and analysis of facial images. With this model, basic facial movements, or action units, are first interactively defined. Then, by linearly combining these action units, various facial movements are synthesized. The magnitudes of these action units can be estimated from real videos using a model-based tracking algorithm. The predefined PBVD action units may also be adaptively modified to customize the dynamic model for a particular face. In this paper, we first briefly introduce the PBVD model and its application in computer facial animation. Then a coarse-to-fine PBVD-based motion tracking algorithm is presented. We also describe an explanation-based tracking algorithm that takes a collection of predefined action units as the initial dynamic model and adaptively improves this model during the tracking process. Experimental results on PBVD-based animation, model-based tracking, and explanation-based tracking are demonstrated.
Bullying in Public Schools in Missouri

The research conducted sought to find evidence and data to support or lack of support to the following questions: Do school administrators perceive a problem with bullying in their schools in Missouri? Is there a relationship between the victim of bullying and the learning process? Do female adolescents engage in cyber bullying more than male adolescents? Do public schools in Missouri have policies in place that address bullying? The researcher used the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program survey on bullying. The study examined the perceptions and beliefs of the superintendents in the State of Missouri concerning bullying and student responses from students in the Western Missouri Conference Schools. Significant findings included more experienced S\superintendents stating that there is little or no problem with bullying in their schools or in the schools throughout Missouri, while less experienced superintendents believe that there is a tremendous problem with bullying in schools. One hundred percent of the superintendent responses revealed that all believe that there is a need for more antibullying programs in their schools. Out of the students surveyed, more than 50 percent reported that they had never been a victim of a bully, however, other studies make valid points to stress that younger students have a tendency to be bullied, or at least report the bullying behavior, than the older adolescents or adults. Eighty-three percent of the student responses showed that they had bullied another student in some way other than a physical confrontation. With 100% of the superintendents reporting the need for more anti-bullying programs in schools and 83% of students responding that they have bullied other students in some way, more studies and research on this topic would appear to the researcher to be of great value in the ongoing attempt to keep all children safe.
DENSITY OF ASPHALT CONCRETE - HOW MUCH IS NEEDED?

Density is one of the most important parameters in construction of asphalt mixtures. A mixture that is properly designed and compacted will contain the optimum amount of air voids. Because density of an asphalt mixture varies throughout its life, the voids must be low enough initially to prevent permeability of air and water and high enough after a few years of traffic to prevent rutting caused by plastic flow. There are three primary methods of specifying density: (a) percent of control strip, (b) percent of laboratory density, and (c) percent of theoretical maximum density (TMD). If used correctly, all three methods can result in satisfactory compaction. The initial in-place air voids must be below approximately 8% and are determined by comparing bulk density and TMD. The final in-place air voids, which must be above approximately 3%, are estimated by comparing the bulk density of laboratory-compacted samples and the TMD. The two methods that have been used to measure bulk density of asphalt mixture are physical measurements of cores and use of the nuclear gauge. The nuclear gauge is fast and nondestructive but is not as accurate as the core method.
An Interactive Software Tool for Parsing English Sentences

As natural language processing becomes an increasingly relevant field, there is a need for treebanks catered to the specific needs of more individualized systems. The current tools to construct such a treebank lack the clarity and utility to effectively and efficiently complete such a task; therefore, an interactive parser tool that caters more fully to the needs of a human annotator is necessary. This paper describes the implementation of an interactive parser tool which includes the addition of several utilities to facilitate the annotating process, including parse constraints and a manual mode to be used when the grammar cannot produce the correct tree.
Derflow: distributed deterministic dataflow programming for erlang

Erlang implements a message-passing execution model in which concurrent processes send each other messages asynchronously. This model is inherently non-deterministic: a process can receive messages sent by any process which knows its process identifier, leading to an exponential number of possible executions based on the number messages received. Concurrent programs in non-deterministic languages are notoriously hard to prove correct and have led to well-known disasters. Furthermore, Erlang natively provides distribution and process clustering. This enables processes to asynchronously communicate between different virtual machines across the network, which increases the potential non-determinism. We propose a new execution model for Erlang, ''Deterministic Dataflow Programming'', based on a highly available, scalable single-assignment data store implemented on top of the riak_core distributed systems framework. This execution model provides concurrent communication between Erlang processes, yet has no observable non-determinism. Given the same input values, a deterministic dataflow program will always return the same output values, or never return; liveness under failures is sacrificed to ensure safety. Our proposal provides a distributed deterministic dataflow solution that operates transparently over distributed Erlang, providing the ability to have highly-available, fault-tolerant, deterministic computations.
Human rights and US foreign policy

Part 1: Human Rights Discourse in Foreign Policy Theory and Practice Introduction 1. The Hegemonic Discourse 2. The Hegemonic Discourse of Wilson and Carter 3. Inconsistent Application of Human Rights 4. Consistent Application of Human Rights Part 2: Case Studies 5. War on Terror 6. War on Afghanistan 7. War on Iraq. Conclusion