Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Katana : A Specialized Framework for Reliable Web Servers

E-commerce server reliability is critical, as downtimes cost an average of $10,000 per minute [40]. Commercial web server development today is done with fairly generic programming languages, like Java, Perl, and C#. The generality of these languages, while permitting a wide range of target applications, makes it difficult to guarantee reliability: dynamic type errors, race conditions, and resource leaks contribute to instability. Though the languages may detect such errors at runtime, the resulting downtimes in production code are costly. We present Katana, a specialized framework for creating reliable web servers. Generality is exchanged for specific capabilities tailored to server operation. In particular, servers written with Katana benefit from these properties: truly statically type-checked code; specialized language features for common server tasks, such as data transformation and formatted output; native, statically-checked database interaction; automatic memory management and concurrency control; and built-in state-sharing mechanisms. By eliminating much of the complexity inherent in general-purpose frameworks and unnecessary for web server operation, while retaining a suitable range of expressiveness, Katana servers are not subject to several entire classes of bugs that plague existing web servers, and are thus more reliable. Preliminary results indicate that Katana is comparable to existing server frameworks in terms of ease of use and performance, suggesting that it is a viable architecture for real-world web servers.
Bayesian Estimation of a Dynamic General Equilibrium Model

The paper presents the Bayesian estimation of a Dynamic General Equilibrium model for the Polish data. The structural parameters of the original model were calibrated and the model was used to in a context of accounting for the welfare cost of business cycles and investigating the monetary policy. This paper extends the previous analysis by applying the Bayesian methods to estimate all structural parameters and by illustrating the analysis with Polish data. Obtained results present the prior and posterior distributions of the parameters as well as parameters characterising shocks. 1 The paper is a part of the research programme at Department of Econometrics, Krakow University of Economics. The author kindly acknowledges comments and discussions of Professor Jacek Osiewalski and participants of the Department of Econometrics seminars.
Off the beaten track: Predicting localisation performance in visual teach and repeat

This paper proposes an appearance-based approach to estimating localisation performance in the context of visual teach and repeat. Specifically, it aims to estimate the likely corridor around a taught trajectory within which a vision-based localisation system is still able to localise itself. In contrast to prior art, our system is able to predict this localisation envelope for trajectories in similar, yet geographically distant locations where no repeat runs have yet been performed. Thus, by characterising the localisation performance in one region, we are able to predict performance in another. To achieve this, we leverage a Gaussian Process regressor to estimate the likely number of feature matches for any keyframe in the teach run, based on a combination of trajectory properties such as curvature and an appearance model of the keyframe. Using data from real traversals, we demonstrate that our approach performs as well as prior art when it comes to interpolating localisation performance based on a number of repeat runs, while also performing well at generalising performance estimation to freshly taught trajectories.
The Business Model : A Means To Comprehend The Management And Business Context Of Information And Communication Technology

This paper presents a conceptual business model, which aims to improve the understanding of the business context of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). We argue that research into how ICT generates economic value is limitedly valid due to lacking comprehensive knowledge of strategy theory and lacking abilities to integrate strategy perspectives, and the fragmentation of strategy theory. We discuss the main strategy perspectives as well as ICT research within each of these perspectives and conclude that in order to improve the understanding of the ways in which ICT generates value, research must integrate different perspectives. We also review some of the new ebusiness texts that addresses business models. The business model is broader than any individual strategy perspective (such as Industrial Organisation, the Resource-Based View or the Strategy Process Perspective) and includes market factors, offering, activities, organisation and resource bases as well as longitudinal management processes. In addition, we illustrate how the management and business context of ICT (such as ERP and CRM systems) can be viewed through the business model.
Fusarium keratitis in Brazil: genotyping, in vitro susceptibilities, and clinical outcomes

Background The purpose of this paper is to describe clinical characteristics and determine correlations between clinical outcomes and antifungal susceptibility among molecularly characterized ocular Fusarium isolates in Brazil. Methods Forty-one Fusarium isolates obtained from 41 eyes of 41 patients were retrieved from the ophthalmic microbiology laboratory at São Paulo Federal University and grown in pure culture. These isolates were genotyped and antifungal susceptibilities determined for each isolate using a broth microdilution method. The corresponding medical records were reviewed to determine clinical outcomes. Results The 41 isolates were genotypically classified as Fusarium solani species complex (36 isolates, 88%), Fusarium oxysporum species complex (two isolates, 5%), Fusarium dimerum species complex (one isolate, 2%) and two isolates that did not group into any of the species complexes. Final best corrected visual acuity varied from 20/20 to light perception and was on average 20/800 (logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution (LogMAR) 1.6). A history of trauma was the most common risk factor, being present in 21 patients (51%). Therapeutic penetrating keratoplasty was necessary in 22 patients (54%). Amphotericin B had the lowest minimum inhibitory concentration for 90% of isolates (MIC90) value (2 μg/mL) and voriconazole had the highest (16 μg/mL). There was an association between a higher natamycin MIC and need for therapeutic penetrating keratoplasty (Mann–Whitney test, P < 0.005). Conclusion Trauma was the main risk factor, and therapeutic penetrating keratoplasty was necessary in 54% of patients. Amphotericin B had the lowest MIC90 (2 μg/mL) of the three antifungal agents tested. There was an association between higher natamycin MIC levels and corneal perforation, emphasizing the need for antifungal susceptibility testing and tailoring of antifungal strategies.
Modeling gender information for emotion recognition using Denoising autoencoder

The Denoising autoencoder (DAE) has been successfully applied to acoustic emotion recognition lately. In this paper, we adopt the framework of the modified DAE introduced in that projects the input signal to two different hidden representations, for neutral and emotional speech respectively, and uses the emotional representation for the classification task. We propose to model gender information for more robust emotional representation in this work. For neutral representation, male and female dependent DAEs are built using non-emotional speech with the aim of capturing distinct information between the two genders. The emotional hidden representation is shared for the two genders in order to model more emotion specific characteristics, and is used as features in a back-end classifier for emotion recognition. We propose different optimization objectives in training the DAEs. Our experimental results show improvement on unweighted accuracy compared with previous work using the modified DAE method and the classifiers using the standard static features. Further performance gain can be achieved by structural level system combination.
Site-specific integrase-mediated transgenesis in mice via pronuclear injection

Microinjection of recombinant DNA into zygotic pronuclei has been widely used for producing transgenic mice. However, with this method, the insertion site, integrity, and copy number of the transgene cannot be controlled. Here, we present an integrase-based approach to produce transgenic mice via pronuclear injection, whereby an intact single-copy transgene can be inserted into predetermined chromosomal loci with high efficiency (up to 40%), and faithfully transmitted through generations. We show that neighboring transgenic elements and bacterial DNA within the transgene cause profound silencing and expression variability of the transgenic marker. Removal of these undesirable elements leads to global high-level marker expression from transgenes driven by a ubiquitous promoter. We also obtained faithful marker expression from a tissue-specific promoter. The technique presented here will greatly facilitate murine transgenesis and precise structure/function dissection of mammalian gene function and regulation in vivo.
A Two-Dimensional Sub-Pixel Edge Detection Algorithm Based on Hyperbolic Tangent

Locating edges in images accurately is important to improve the precision of visual measurement. Firstly, from the characteristics of edge gray distribution in actual images, a method is put forward to detect sub-pixel edges, which fits edge gray distribution with hyperbolic tangent function, and gets subpixel edges through least-square method. Then, the accuracy of the algorithm is evaluated, taking measurement error of sizes of high-accuracy checkerboard as criterion. This evaluation combines with camera calibration technique, which considers factors of lens distortion and perspective distortion.
Capacity dimensioning of VPN access links for elastic traffic

In this paper, we are studying the capacity dimensioning of virtual private networks (VPN) access-links for elastic traffic, such as the Web or ftp. Under the assumption that the core-VPN network is provisioned with sufficient large capacity, the capacity management of the VPN access link is a matter of bandwidth-sharing for elastic traffic of the two bottleneck links, the ingress and egress access links, the processor -sharing model gives a simple formulae of mean transfer time, but in our case, the value may be less than the actual transfer time. In contrast, max-min fair sharing provides an accurate sharing model which is similar to the TCP, but it is difficult to obtain a closed form of performance statistics. We propose a closed form approximation for a max-min fair sharing model, in a specific but realistic topology, by investigating the difference between the max-min and the processor sharing model. Using the approximation, we are performing the capacity dimensioning of VPN access links.
Effects of Warm Ischemic Time on Gene Expression Profiling in Colorectal Cancer Tissues and Normal Mucosa

Background Genome-wide gene expression analyses of tumors are a powerful tool to identify gene signatures associated with biologically and clinically relevant characteristics and for several tumor types are under clinical validation by prospective trials. However, handling and processing of clinical specimens may significantly affect the molecular data obtained from their analysis. We studied the effects of tissue handling time on gene expression in human normal and tumor colon tissues undergoing routine surgical procedures. Methods RNA extracted from specimens of 15 patients at four time points (for a total of 180 samples) after surgery was analyzed for gene expression on high-density oligonucleotide microarrays. A mixed-effects model was used to identify probes with different expression means across the four different time points. The p-values of the model were adjusted with the Bonferroni method. Results Thirty-two probe sets associated with tissue handling time in the tumor specimens, and thirty-one in the normal tissues, were identified. Most genes exhibited moderate changes in expression over the time points analyzed; however four of them were oncogenes, and two confirmed the effect of tissue handling by independent validation. Conclusions Our results suggest that a critical time point for tissue handling in colon seems to be 60 minutes at room temperature. Although the number of time-dependent genes we identified was low, the three genes that already showed changes at this time point in tumor samples were all oncogenes, hence recommending standardization of tissue-handling protocols and effort to reduce the time from specimen removal to snap freezing accounting for warm ischemia in this tumor type.
RBA: An Integrated Framework for Regression based on Association Rules

This paper explores a novel framework for building regression models using association rules. The model consists of an ordered set of IF-THEN rules, where the rule consequent is the predicted value of the target attribute. The approach consist of two steps: (1) extraction of association rules, and (2) construction of the rule-based regression model. We propose a pruning scheme for redundant and insignificant rules in the rule extraction step, and also a number of heuristics for building regression models. This approach allows discovery of global patterns, offers resistance to noise, while building relatively simple models. We perform a comparative study on the performance of RBA against CART and Cubist using 21 real-world data sets. Our experimental results suggest that RBA outperforms Cubist and are equally as good as CART in many data sets, and more importantly, there are situations where RBA is significantly better than CART, especially when the number of noise dimensions in the data is large.
Generalization Ability in SVM with Fuzzy Class Labels

The paper attempts to introduce a fundamental fuzzy concept to break the equivalent attitude of the input training set of SVM, and tries to give individual example in the set a different attitude. The attitude can stand for the influence that the example takes into account in the classification. In the paper, we present a method to refresh the attitude by assigning proper fuzzy value to the class label of each example. Based on the benefit of individualized fuzzification, we re-examine the formulation of SVM, and try to find out the corresponding effects. Although it costs a little more computation, the introduction of fuzzy class label is eventually worth for the better generalization performance with a large margin. The effect is especially both crucial and subtle in worse confused training data set with many hard examples
Water Flows in the Economy. An Input-Output Framework to Assess Water Productivity in the Castile and León Region (Spain)

Traditionally, water policy has focused on coordinating the public effort required to fuel economic growth by supplying water services demanded as a result of the progress in the many areas of the economy. Under this supply-oriented paradigm, population growth and the improvement of living standards brought about by development have driven water demand up and the pressures over water resources have escalated. The failure to acknowledge the limited availability of water and to decouple economic development from water demand has resulted in a water dependent growth model that in many areas is currently threatened by increasing scarcity and more frequent and intense droughts. Consequently, there is an urgent need to use sparse water resources in a sustainable and efficient way. This demands a comprehensive assessment of water productivity dynamics as well as of the linkages among economic sectors in order to calculate the actual costs of eventual water reallocations to the environment and establish priorities in the design of strategic actions such as river basin or drought management plans. However, available studies only offer static analyses that are insufficient to attain the dual objective of reverting current water scarcity trends without impairing economic growth. This paper develops a methodology based on the Hypothetical Extraction Method to estimate inter-temporal indirect (i.e., including intersectoral linkages) water productivity values. The method is applied in the Spanish region of Castile and Leon for the period 2000-2006. The intensive use and the low water productivity found for agriculture confirms the intuition that this sector has to play a fundamental role in any water saving policy. However, the relevant linkages between agriculture and the rest of the economy, which acts as an indirect consumer of water for irrigation, may complicate the finding of a Pareto improvement in water allocation. Results also show increasing returns to scale in the manufacturing industry and the service sector, which may be regarded as an evidence of the existence of a Verdoorn’s Law for water.
Augmented Videos and Panoramas for Pedestrian Navigation

In order to support pedestrians in the tasks of orientation and wayfinding with mobile devices appropriate visualizations of their location, its surrounding, and background information are needed. In this paper we present two complementary concepts for the combination of realistic views and location specific information that can be implemented with current generation PDAs and next generation cellular phones. The first employs video clips that were taken along every path in a city which are augmented by location information. It is shown how multimedia clips consisting of videos and textual information can be stored and transferred using the SMIL standard from the W3C consortium. The second approach supports navigation by the overlay of virtual signposts in panoramic images taken for every decision point, i.e. street junctions, in a city. We argue that the location- and orientation-synchronized presentation of (previously recorded) realistic views in combination with location specific information is an intuitive complement to map based visualization on the one hand and less invasive and resource demanding than augmented reality systems with head mounted displays on the other hand.
Performance and reliability model checking and model construction

Continuous-time Markov chains (CTMCs) are widely used to describe stochastic phenomena in many diverse areas. They are used to estimate performance and reliability characteristics of various nature, for instance to quantify throughputs of manufacturing systems, to locate bottlenecks in communication systems, or to estimate reliability in aerospace systems. CTMCs are the underlying semantic model of major high level performance modelling formalisms such as stochastic Petri nets, stochastic process algebras, and Markovian queueing networks. Model checking is a very successful technique to establish correctness of systems from very similar application domains, usually described in terms of a nondeterministic finite-state model. One of the major reasons for the success of model checking tools in practice is the efficient way to cope with the state-space explosion problem, using symbolic (BDD-based) techniques. In this talk, I will introduce CTMCs and discuss the use of model checking to assess performance and reliability properties of CTMCs. With this approach, properties-of-interest are expressed as formulas of a stochastic extension of the logic CTL and interpreted over CTMCs. Model checking this logic requires the solution of linear systems of equations and of systems of Volterra integral equations. I will outline approximate techniques for solving the equation systems, and present a JAVA implementation of a Markov chain model checker. My introduction to CTMC model checking will be complemented with a discussion of CTMC model construction techniques. I will survey formal methods that facilitate the construction of large CTMC models. In particular I will focus on high-level formalisms supporting a modern, hierarchical and compositional design methodology. Existing tool support, as well as techniques to combat the state space explosion problem will be discussed.
Evolution of global container operator efficiency: A DEA approach

Improving port efficiency can therefore have a significant impact on the whole maritime economy. Recognizing this fact, many governments have consistently prioritized the ports as a central element of infrastructure to promote regional economic growth. This paper treats container terminal operators as the Decision Making Unit, which represents a divergence from previous port efficiency studies. We compile a panel data of 141 global container terminal operators from 1997 to 2005 to study the efficiency of container operator production. We use the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute efficiency scores. We add country and port characteristics into our model except output/input. We examine the contribution of productivity to operator output based on the long time series. The efficiencies of different operators in same port are showed to investigate the core sources of productivity growth.
Improved navigation performance for curved approaches with a virtual receiver

The civil aviation of the future should be ecological, economical, and safe. The citizens in metropolises have on the one hand the requirement to travel efficiently between airports near the city. On the other hand they do not want to suffer from noise and emission of aircraft starting and landing at airports close to cities. Consequently, the future aircraft should harmonize these needs. In order to fulfil these requirements, new concepts for departure and approach procedures are mandatory. Curved approaches are one solution since critical regions can be omitted. These complex manoeuvres can only be carried out with the help of satellite navigation systems. One major challenge of curved approaches is the changing obstruction of satellite signals due to shadowing effects by the aircraft itself during curved approaches. Existing GPS landing systems suffer therefore degraded performance in terms of continuity, availability, integrity, and accuracy during curved approaches, especially with higher roll angles and at high and low latitudes. To avoid this problem and to meet the requirements of integrity, accuracy, continuity, and availability for future GNSS landing systems, the concept of the so called "virtual receiver" has been developed in the framework of the research project "Bürgernahes Flugzeug" (Metropolitan Aircraft). The main idea is to avoid obstructions by combining GNSS observations of few antennas, optimally installed on the aircraft and computing one common aircraft position solution. This paper presents the concept of the virtual receiver. The benefits in terms of precision, reliability and accuracy are evaluated based on the analysis of real data from a test flight with the research aircraft D-IBUF, a Dornier 128-6 from the Institut of Flight Guidance (TU Braunschweig). It will be shown, that virtual receiver outperforms a single antenna solution concerning the precision (DOP-values are reduced by 30%), reliability (MDBs are reduced by 10 % on average) and vertical accuracy (the 95 % error bound is reduced by 14%).