Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Regime Selection and Prediction Based on Observed Behavior in Electronic Marketplaces

Electronic marketplaces are gaining popularity among producers seeking to streamline their supply chains and consumers looking for good opportunities. Intelligent software agents can significantly facilitate human decision processes either by helping users to select strategies that maximize profit, or by making autonomous choices. In either case, agents need methods for making decisions under uncertain and dynamic market conditions. Competitive scenarios are increasingly being used as testbeds for the development of multi-agent systems. A new game, called TAC SCM, was introduced for the 2003 Trading Agent Competition (Collins et al. 2004). This game involves a Supply Chain Management (SCM) scenario in which agents attempt to maximize profits by manufacturing personal computers and selling them to customers. In TAC SCM six autonomous agents compete to maximize profits in a computer-assembly scenario. Agents earn money by selling computers they assemble out of parts purchased from suppliers. The agent with the highest bank balance at the end of the game wins. To obtain parts, an agent must send a request for quotes (RFQ) to an appropriate supplier. Suppliers respond either by specifying the price for the supplies, or, if they cannot satisfy the request in full, by giving a partial offer with a revised quantity and price, or the earliest date the request can be satisfied in full. Every day each agent receives a set of RFQs from customers requesting to buy computers. Customers accept the lowest bid which is at or below their reserve price. Computers are available in three different markets: a low, a medium and a high price market. We concentrate in this paper on the control mechanism which we are planning to use in our agent, MinneTAC, for TAC SCM 2005. This control mechanism is twofold, first is has impact on the sales strategies which the agent is using and second it will be used as a feedback mechanism between different components, e.g. procurement, production,
Official Dollarization and the Banking System in Ecuador and El Salvador

In January 2000 Ecuador adopted the U.S. dollar as legal tender, and El Salvador followed suit in 2001. The two countries officially dollarized under quite different circumstances: Ecuador was suffering an economic and banking crisis, while El Salvador enjoyed economic stability and low inflation rates. This article studies the evolution of the banking system in these two countries before and after official, or full, dollarization. ; In Ecuador the reforms that ensued from full dollarization have improved transparency and banking performance and competitiveness, but the implementation and enforcement of regulations remain weak, and accounting standards still deviate from international norms. In El Salvador, whose banking regulations are comparable to international standards, full dollarization has improved bank performance despite economic deceleration, increasing the banking system’s competitiveness in Central America. ; Overall, full dollarization has enabled both Ecuador and El Salvador to modernize and improve banking regulations and the safety and soundness of the banking system, the authors conclude. They find that official dollarization, along with other macroeconomic and financial structure factors, has played a significant role in improving bank liquidity and asset quality. Bank profitability has responded to variables that are bank specific. ; It is still too early, the authors note, to predict whether dollarization’s benefits will be sustainable over the long term.
The HCI researcher as artist and designer: approaches to creativity and distance

We first describe the process of working on creative problems using three different but related approaches: Art, Design and Human Computer Interaction research. We present case studies of two interactive artworks; Magic Hopscotch and Cities Tango: Melbourne/Sydney, and explain how engagement with those works has informed our further practice in art, design and HCI. We consider how HCI research can influence art and design, and how art and design can influence HCI research, thereby making some kinds of decisions more explicit, supporting stronger hypothesis generation and crucially enriching evaluation methods for creativity support tools.
Low vitamin D status in a representative sample of youth from Québec, Canada.

BACKGROUND Adequate vitamin D status is important for bone growth and mineralization and has been implicated in the regulation of autoimmunity, metabolic function, and cancer prevention. There are no reports of population-based studies on the vitamin D status of Canadian youth, a population with mandatory fortification of foods. METHODS We measured plasma 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D], the best indicator of vitamin D status, in a school-based cross-sectional sample of representative French Canadian youth (n = 1753) ages 9, 13, and 16 years living in Québec (latitude: 45 degrees-48 degrees N). Blood samples were collected from January to May 1999. We defined 25(OH)D deficiency as < or = 27.5 nmol/L, hypovitaminosis as < or = 37.5 nmol/L, and optimal as > 75.0 nmol/L. RESULTS More than 93% of youth in each age and sex group had suboptimal 25(OH)D concentrations. The prevalence of 25(OH)D deficiency increased with age in both sexes (P < 0.0001). It was 2%, 3%, and 13% in 9-, 13-, and 16-year-old boys and 2%, 8%, and 10% in 9-, 13-, and 16-year-old girls. Girls with higher body mass index and girls from households with lower income had lower 25(OH)D concentrations. These effects were not observed in boys. CONCLUSIONS Inadequate vitamin D status is a potentially serious public health problem among children and adolescents in Québec. Youth living at high latitudes in countries with and without mandatory fortification of vitamin D are likely at heightened risk of 25(OH)D deficiency. These results call for renewed efforts to ensure adequate vitamin D intake among growing children and adolescents.
THE COMPARATIVE PERFORMANCE OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE ENTERPRISES: THE CASE OF BRITISH PORTS.

Economic theory fails to provide unequivocal propositions on the issue of the relative efficiency of public vis-? -vis private enterprises. The argument for the superiority of private ownership may be advanced from the perspective of principal-agent theory. It is believed that the switch to private ownership, even with no change in the competitive environment, will improve cost efficiency because the change of ownership will sharpen managerial incentives and replace defective bureaucratic monitoring hierarchies with the capital market for corporate control. A number of economists (for instance, Vickers and Yarrow, 1989,andEstrinandP? rotin, 1991) have questioned the strength of this argument in favour of private ownership and suggest that principal-agent problems may also arise in the private sector as a result of capital market imperfections. Thus the question of the relative efficiency of alternative forms of ownership is an empirical one, and in this paper we offer evidence from the British port transport industry. The hypothesis that public enterprises are inherently less efficient than private enterprises has been subject to many empirical tests, but these have provided less informative results than might be expected (Ferguson and Ferguson, 1994, pp.211-14). Difficulties of comparative efficiency studies arise often because of data deficiencies. In many industries (for example, utility industries in the UK) there is simply no immediate domestic benchmark against which the performance of public enterprises can be assessed. In others, public enterprises coexist with their private counterparts, but the sample is not large enough to allow reliable inference. Even when the sample is large enough, valid efficiency comparisons between the public and private sectors are not always possible. One obvious problem is that public enterprises are often explicitly given wider social objectives, which may well result in, and at the same time provide an excuse for, poor productive performance. Another problem is that the existence of factors other than ownership is non-separable from ownership in many cases: these factors include market * London Guildhall University. This paper is based on a PhD thesis (Liu, 1992) pursued at Queen Mary and
Analysis of state estimation for power system using weighted least square method

In the power system various quantities like power, voltage, and currents are analog quantities where the conversion of these analog quantities are converted into the digital output by A/D converter. These digital outputs are telemetered to energy control centre over various communication links. This process may involve the imperfect or bad measurement so that state estimation process estimates the true value of the state variable. Imperfect or bad measurement should be reduced by the state estimation process so that reliability of estimated data will be will be increased by the reducing bad measurement which may be present in the system. Data at the energy control centre used for the finding the system performance in real time for system security and condition of economic dispatch. In this paper Weighted Least Square (WLS) method is discussed for 6-bus sample power system and IEEE 30-bus power system.
Is the European Monetary System converging to integration?

The emerging system at the European level can be conceptualized as a pattern of relations among member states that tends to be reproduced despite disturbances in individual trajectories. The Markov property is used as an indicator of systemness in the distribution. The individual trajectories of nations participating in the European Monetary System are assessed using an information theoretical model that is consistent with the Markov property in the multivariate case. Economic and monetary integration are analysed using independent data sets. Increasing integration can be retrieved in both of these dimensions, notably since the currency crises of 1992 and 1993. However, the dynamics for countries which have strongly coupled their currency to the German Mark are different from those which did not. Additionally, developments in inflation and exchange rates at the European level are assessed in relation to global developments.
From smart to deep: Robust activity recognition on smartwatches using deep learning

The use of deep learning for the activity recognition performed by wearables, such as smartwatches, is an understudied problem. To advance current understanding in this area, we perform a smartwatch-centric investigation of activity recognition under one of the most popular deep learning methods - Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM). This study includes a variety of typical behavior and context recognition tasks related to smartwatches (such as transportation mode, physical activities and indoor/outdoor detection) to which RBMs have previously never been applied. Our findings indicate that even a relatively simple RBM-based activity recognition pipeline is able to outperform a wide-range of common modeling alternatives for all tested activity classes. However, usage of deep models is also often accompanied by resource consumption that is unacceptably high for constrained devices like watches. Therefore, we complement this result with a study of the overhead of specifically RBM-based activity models on representative smartwatch hardware (the Snapdragon 400 SoC, present in many commercial smartwatches). These results show, contrary to expectation, RBM models for activity recognition have acceptable levels of resource use for smartwatch-class hardware already on the market. Collectively, these two experimental results make a strong case for more widespread adoption of deep learning techniques within smartwatch designs moving forward.
CCancer: a bird’s eye view on gene lists reported in cancer-related studies

CCancer is an automatically collected database of gene lists, which were reported mostly by experimental studies in various biological and clinical contexts. At the moment, the database covers 3369 gene lists extracted from 2644 papers published in ∼80 peer-reviewed journals. As input, CCancer accepts a gene list. An enrichment analyses is implemented to generate, as output, a highly informative survey over recently published studies that report gene lists, which significantly intersect with the query gene list. A report on gene pairs from the input list which were frequently reported together by other biological studies is also provided. CCancer is freely available at http://mips.helmholtz-muenchen.de/proj/ccancer.
Dissociating the effects of attention and contingency awareness on evaluative conditioning effects in the visual paradigm

Two experiments are described that investigate the effects of attention in moderating evaluative conditioning (EC) effects in a picture‐picture paradigm in which previously discovered experimental artifacts (e.g., Field & Davey, 1999) were overcome by counterbalancing conditioned stimuli (CSs) and unconditioned stimuli (USs) across participants. Conditioned responses for individuals who had attention enhanced were compared against a control group and groups for whom attention was impeded using a distracter task. In a second experiment the effects of attention were dissociated from those of contingency awareness by using backward‐masked US presentations. The results of these experiments indicate that although associative EC effects may not be disrupted by a lack of contingency awareness, attention is an important factor in establishing conditioning. These results shed some light onto the possible boundary conditions that could explain past inconsistencies in obtaining EC effects in the visual paradigm.
Vowel Restoration With Neural Networks

Modern Hebrew is written without vowels, presenting a problem for those wishing to carry out lexical analysis on Hebrew texts. Although fluent speakers can easily replace vowels when reading or speaking from a text, there are no simple rules that would allow for this task to be easily automated. Previous work in this field has involved using statistical methods to try to solve this problem. Instead we use neural networks, in which letter and morphology information are fed into a network as input and the output is the proposed vowel placement. Using a publicly available Hebrew corpus containing vowel and morphological tagging, we were able to restore 85% of the correct vowels to our test set. We achieved an 87% success rate for restoring the correct phonetic value for each letter. While our results do not compare favorably to previous results, we believe that, with further experimentation, our connectionist approach could be made viable.
Development of Mobile Agent Applications with Ajanta 1

Ajanta is a Java-based system for mobile-agent programming over the Internet. We present here an overview of the Ajanta system and its programming model. We outline the salient features and implementation of three agent-based distributed applications developed using Ajanta. These were designed to test and demonstrate the capabilities of Ajanta's programming model, APIs, and security architecture. The primary underlying motivation was to experiment with the agent paradigm itself. The applications described here include a distributed calendar manager, a distributed le access system, and a web search system.
Transient Suppression of Dbx1 PreBötzinger Interneurons Disrupts Breathing in Adult Mice

Interneurons derived from Dbx1-expressing precursors located in the brainstem preBötzinger complex (preBötC) putatively form the core oscillator for inspiratory breathing movements. We tested this Dbx1 core hypothesis by expressing archaerhodopsin in Dbx1-derived interneurons and then transiently hyperpolarizing these neurons while measuring respiratory rhythm in vitro or breathing in vagus-intact adult mice. Transient illumination of the preBötC interrupted inspiratory rhythm in both slice preparations and sedated mice. In awake mice, light application reduced breathing frequency and prolonged the inspiratory duration. Support for the Dbx1 core hypothesis previously came from embryonic and perinatal mouse experiments, but these data suggest that Dbx1-derived preBötC interneurons are rhythmogenic in adult mice too. The neural origins of breathing behavior can be attributed to a localized and genetically well-defined interneuron population.
The Deployment Algorithm Based on Cutting a Triangle for Wireless Sensor Networks

In a large monitored area, the static sensors are deployed by random. It is obvious there are coverage holes and a coverage hole can be polygonal. Because a polygon can be decomposed into a piece of triangles, triangles are considered, and the three nodes of triangles are the static sensors deployed randomly. This paper presents an efficiently deployment algorithm which is based on the coverage hole is a triangle. The triangle is cut into small triangles which contains at least one interior angles is equal to 60°. These small triangles with 60° angle can be guaranteed full coverage, and the rest area of the triangle is still a triangle. Continue the cutting until the triangle is small enough that the sensors on the three nodes can fully cover the area. As a result, the coverage hole of triangle can be full coverage. Beside, the x-y coordinates of each deployed sensor can be deduced.
The Application of SELDI-TOF-MS in Clinical Diagnosis of Cancers

Cancer diagnosis is important, and the early diagnosis of cancers could predict a more successful treatment. The proteomic studies emerged to be useful in combined analyses of samples from patients and provide more accurate diagnosis when compared to the single-factor-based diagnosis. In recent years, cancer detection with surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (SELDI-TOF MS) is flourishing and brought significant progress in this area. This paper summarizes some recent results with this technique for cancer diagnosis.
Mobile agent for the building of automatic textual reports from web queries

Traditionally, web searching in order to discover meaningful information is an action that obeys a typical way. A user launches a web query by means of a set of keywords directed toward a web searcher. Thus, it returns a list of web links (URLs) which must be read and then, analyzed by the user for finding out the required information. This way of web searching is normal for devices with broad screens, but for mobile devices with small visual areas is tiresome and cumbersome, especially if we consider the amount of information to be deployed. In this work we present a software agent (a mobile app) for the preparation and deployment of text reports in natural language from a web query. The tool implies the definition of a formal method for the extraction of text fragments from web pages, the development of a library for natural language processing, the design of a software architecture and the development of mobile apps for interfacing with users. Our agent presents small text reports, which ensures more readability and improves searching user experience.
Spectral Sensitivities and Color Signals in a Polymorphic Damselfly

Animal communication relies on conspicuous signals and compatible signal perception abilities. Good signal perception abilities are particularly important for polymorphic animals where mate choice can be a challenge. Behavioral studies suggest that polymorphic damselflies use their varying body colorations and/or color patterns as communication signal for mate choice and to control mating frequencies. However, solid evidence for this hypothesis combining physiological with spectral and behavioral data is scarce. We investigated this question in the Australian common blue tail damselfly, Ischnura heterosticta, which has pronounced female-limited polymorphism: andromorphs have a male-like blue coloration and gynomorphs display green/grey colors. We measured body color reflectance and investigated the visual capacities of each morph, showing that I. heterosticta have at least three types of photoreceptors sensitive to UV, blue, and green wavelength, and that this visual perception ability enables them to detect the spectral properties of the color signals emitted from the various color morphs in both males and females. We further demonstrate that different color morphs can be discriminated against each other and the vegetation based on color contrast. Finally, these findings were supported by field observations of natural mating pairs showing that mating partners are indeed chosen based on their body coloration. Our study provides the first comprehensive evidence for the function of body coloration on mate choice in polymorphic damselflies.
Programming scientific and distributed workflow with Triana services

In this paper, we discuss a real‐world application scenario that uses three distinct types of workflow within the Triana problem‐solving environment: serial scientific workflow for the data processing of gravitational wave signals; job submission workflows that execute Triana services on a testbed; and monitoring workflows that examine and modify the behaviour of the executing application. We briefly describe the Triana distribution mechanisms and the underlying architectures that we can support. Our middleware independent abstraction layer, called the Grid Application Prototype (GAP), enables us to advertise, discover and communicate with Web and peer‐to‐peer (P2P) services. We show how gravitational wave search algorithms have been implemented to distribute both the search computation and data across the European GridLab testbed, using a combination of Web services, Globus interaction and P2P infrastructures. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Inferring a Population Structure for Staphylococcus epidermidis from Multilocus Sequence Typing Data

ABSTRACT Despite its importance as a human pathogen, information on population structure and global epidemiology of Staphylococcus epidermidis is scarce and the relative importance of the mechanisms contributing to clonal diversification is unknown. In this study, we addressed these issues by analyzing a representative collection of S. epidermidis isolates from diverse geographic and clinical origins using multilocus sequence typing (MLST). Additionally, we characterized the mobile element (SCCmec) carrying the genetic determinant of methicillin resistance. The 217 S. epidermidis isolates from our collection were split by MLST into 74 types, suggesting a high level of genetic diversity. Analysis of MLST data using the eBURST algorithm revealed the existence of nine epidemic clonal lineages that were disseminated worldwide. One single clonal lineage (clonal complex 2) comprised 74% of the isolates, whereas the remaining isolates were clustered into 8 minor clonal lineages and 13 singletons. According to our evolutionary model, SCCmec was acquired at least 56 times by S. epidermidis. Although geographic dissemination of S. epidermidis strains and the value of the index of association between the alleles, 0.2898 (P < 0.05), support the clonality of S. epidermidis species, examination of the sequence changes at MLST loci during clonal diversification showed that recombination gives rise to new alleles approximately twice as frequently as point mutations. We suggest that S. epidermidis has a population with an epidemic structure, in which nine clones have emerged upon a recombining background and evolved quickly through frequent transfer of genetic mobile elements, including SCCmec.