Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hardware acceleration architectures for MPEG-Based mobile video platforms: a brief overview

This paper presents a brief overview of past and current hardware acceleration (HwA) approaches that have been proposed for the most computationally intensive compression tools of the MPEG-4 standard. These approaches are classified based on their historical evolution and architectural approach. An analysis of both evolutionary and functional classifications is carried out in order to speculate on the possible trends of the HwA architectures to be employed in mobile video platforms.
On-chip terahertz spectroscopy of liquid mixtures

We demonstrate `through-substrate' sensing of fluids for application in the terahertz spectroscopy of biological materials. This technique employs planar Goubau lines with integrated photoconductive material, formed on a flexible, thin polyimide substrate, and bonded to a microfluidic channel. Few-picosecond pulses are used to probe liquid samples confined within the channel, over a total interaction length of 4mm, overcoming water-absorption limitations of free-space terahertz transmission measurements.
Texture Synthesis Using the Structure Tensor

This paper proposes a two-stage texture synthesis algorithm. At the first stage, a structure tensor map carrying information about the local orientation is synthesized from the exemplar's data and used at the second stage to constrain the synthesis of the texture. Keeping in mind that the algorithm should be able to reproduce as faithfully as possible the visual aspect, statistics, and morphology of the input sample, the method is tested on various textures and compared objectively with existing methods, highlighting its strength in successfully synthesizing the output texture in many situations where traditional algorithms fail to reproduce the exemplar's patterns. The promising results pave the way towards the synthesis of accurately large and multi-scale patterns as it is the case for carbon material samples showing laminar structures, for example.
Results of Laparoscopic Heller's Myotomy for Achalasia in Children: A Systematic Review of the Literature.

INTRODUCTION Achalasia is a rare disorder in children who are commonly treated by laparoscopic Heller's myotomy (LHM). However, there are no large studies evaluating the results of LHM in the pediatric population, and the need of a concomitant fundoplication remains unclear. The aim of the study is to appraise the results of LHM based on a systematic literature review. MATERIALS AND METHODS MEDLINE search of the English literature was performed for "achalasia," "children," "laparoscopy," "Heller," "myotomy," and "cardiomyotomy. " Frequency of postoperative symptoms was grouped to calculate the percentage of patients with symptoms improvement. Incidence of postoperative gastro-esophageal reflux (GER) and dysphagia between patients with and without fundoplication at the time of LHM was compared by Fisher's Exact Test. P < . 05 was regarded as significant. RESULTS Twenty-one studies were analyzed (331 children, 1-19 years). All studies were retrospective case-series reviews. Intraoperative complications occurred in 33 patients (10%), with esophageal perforations in 31 (9%), and conversion to open procedure in 9 (2.7%). Fundoplication was performed in 271 (82%): Dor (n = 205, 76%), Toupet (n = 49, 18%), Thal (n = 13, 4.5%), and Nissen (n = 4, 1.5%). Incidence of postoperative GER and dysphagia was similar between children with and without fundoplication (P = 1). Forty-nine (15%) required re-intervention: pneumatic dilatations (n = 30, 9%), redo-surgery (n = 23, 7%), botox injection (n = 1, 0.3%), and medical therapy (n = 5, 1.5%). DISCUSSION LHM for achalasia is effective in 85% of children. Revision surgery is required in 7%. There is no difference in incidence of GER and dysphagia between patients with and without fundoplication. Routine use of an additional fundoplication might not be justified.
Exploiting STT-MRAM for approximate computing

Spin Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) is an emerging non-volatile memory technology and a potential candidate to replace SRAM in processor caches. However, STT-MRAM suffers from a high write latency and high write energy consumption which have to be addressed for energy-efficient on-chip caches. The non-volatility property of STT-MRAM can be relaxed by reducing the thermal stability factor to improve both the write latency and write energy of STT-MRAM. However, this leads to increase in retention failure and read disturb rates resulting in erroneous data stored in the cache. This problem can naturally be mitigated in the scope of approximate computing in which such errors can be tolerated at the application level. In this paper, we show how STT-MRAM technology can effectively be used for approximate computing by tuning technology and application parameters to achieve an acceptable level of correctness with significant gains. Results show that using our proposed approximate computing framework, the per-access write latency and energy can be improved up to 25% and 70%, respectively.
On Searching for Generalized Instrumental Variables

Instrumental Variables are a popular way to identify the direct causal effect of a random variable X on a variable Y . Often no single instrumental variable exists, although it is still possible to find a set of generalized instrumental variables (GIVs) and identify the causal effect of all these variables at once. Till now it was not known how to find GIVs systematically or even test efficiently, if given variables satisfy GIV conditions. We provide fast algorithms for searching and testing restricted cases of GIVs. However, we prove that in the most general case it is NP-hard to verify if given variables fulfill the conditions of a general instrumental sets
Modeling and automating detection of errors in Arabic language learner speech

Human tutors, in dealing with non-native speakers, draw from their knowledge of common learner mistakes to understand learner speech and offer effective corrective advice. In this paper we present our work towards embedding some of this knowledge in the speech recognition and learner speech error detection subsystems of the Tactical Language Training System (TLTS). We discuss the implementation and effectiveness of our methodology which uses a combination of rule based and probabilistic models derived from linguistic knowledge about the target language and annotated speech to identify potential learner errors, detect them using ASR and to provide the user with corrective feedback based on error severity and factors such as the learner history. Evaluation results show that our system can provide effective feedback to the learner with good accuracy.
The best trail algorithm for assisted navigation of Web sites

We present an algorithm called the best trail algorithm, which helps solve the hypertext navigation problem by automating the construction of memex-like trails through the corpus. The algorithm performs a probabilistic best-first expansion of a set of navigation trees to find relevant and compact trails. We describe the implementation of the algorithm, scoring methods for trails, filtering algorithms and a new metric called potential gain which measures the potential of a page for future navigation opportunities.
Habitat monitoring: application driver for wireless communications technology

As new fabrication and integration technologies reduce the cost and size of micro-sensors and wireless interfaces, it becomes feasible to deploy densely distributed wireless networks of sensors and actuators. These systems promise to revolutionize biological, earth, and environmental monitoring applications, providing data at granularities unrealizable by other means. In addition to the challenges of miniaturization, new system architectures and new network algorithms must be developed to transform the vast quantity of raw sensor data into a manageable stream of high-level data. To address this, we propose a tiered system architecture in which data collected at numerous, inexpensive sensor nodes is filtered by local processing on its way through to larger, more capable and more expensive nodes.We briefly describe Habitat monitoring as our motivating application and introduce initial system building blocks designed to support this application. The remainder of the paper presents details of our experimental platform.
MAC for Networks with Multipacket Reception Capability and Spatially Distributed Nodes

The physical layer of future wireless networks will be based on novel radio technologies such as UWB and MIMO. One of the important capabilities of such technologies is the ability to capture a few packets simultaneously. This capability has the potential to improve the performance of the MAC layer. However, we show that in networks with spatially distributed nodes, reusing backoff mechanisms originally designed for narrow-band systems (e.g. CSMA/CA) is inefficient. It is well known that when networks with spatially distributed nodes operate with such MAC protocols, the channel may be captured by nodes that are near the destination, leading to unfairness. We show that when the physical layer enables multipacket reception, the negative implications of reusing the legacy protocols include not only such unfairness but also a significant throughput reduction. We present alternative backoff mechanisms and evaluate their performance via Markovian analysis and simulation. We show that our alternative backoff mechanisms can improve both overall throughput and fairness.
Research Progress of Surface Treatment Techniques in the Application of Fouling Prevention and Heat Transfer Enhancement

The research progress of the conventional surface treatment techniques applied in the heat transfer enhancement is reviewed. The research status and development trend of the effects of the low-energy surface prepared by the novel surface treatment techniques such as magnetron sputtering, ion implantation, chemical composite plating and molecular self-assembly on fouling prevention and heat transfer enhancement are also discussed.
Tweeting videos: coordinate live streaming and storage sharing

User generated video sharing (e.g., YouTube) and social-networked micro-blogging (e.g., Twitter) are among the most popular Internet applications in the Web 2.0 era. It is known that these two applications are now tightly coupled, with many new videos being tweeted among Twitter users. Unfortunately, video sharing sites are facing critical server bottlenecks and the surges created by Twitter followers would make the situation even worse. To better understand the challenges and opportunities therein, we have conducted an online user survey on their personal preference and social interest of Internet video sharing. Our data analysis reveals an interesting coexistence of live streaming and storage sharing, and that the users are generally more interested in watching their friend's videos. It further suggests that the users are willing to share their resources to assist others with close relations, implying node collaboration is a rationale choice in this context. In this paper, we present COOLS (Coordinated Live Streaming and Storage Sharing), an initial attempt toward efficient peer-to-peer tweeting of user-generated videos. Through a novel ID code design that embeds nodes' locations in an overlay, COOLS leverages stable storage users and yet inherently prioritizes living streaming flows. Preliminary evaluation results show that, as compared to other state-of-the-art solutions, COOLS successfully takes advantage of the coexistence of live streaming and storage sharing, providing better scalability, robustness, and streaming quality.
Particle Size Distribution and Its Relation to Sintering—A Case Study for UO2 Powders

It is generally recognized that the particle size distribution (PSD) of powders plays a very significant role in powder compaction and sintering. However, particle size distribution data are generally presented in the form of one number (mean diameter). In the case of PSD data obtained by sedimentation, analysis of the whole curve reveals some interesting information. The type of information obtained by such an analysis and its application to an analysis of compaction and sintering is discussed using the case of uranium dioxide powders as an example.
Platypnoea-orthodeoxia syndrome in the elderly: A difficult-to-make diagnosis of intracardiac right-to-left shunt

Introduction Platypnea-orthodeoxia syndrome is a combination of positional dyspnoea and hypoxemia; it is caused by several cardiac, pulmonary and hepatic diseases. Case presentation In this study, we describe a 77-year-old female affected by unexplained dizziness and hypoxia that exacerbated in upright position. After diagnosing platypnea-orthodeoxia syndrome and excluding all possible causes (liver cirrhosis, acute and chronic pulmonary diseases and arteriovenous malformations), the origin of the syndrome was individuated in the presence of a patent foramen ovale with right-to-left shunt. Endovascular patent foramen ovale closure permitted the resolution of symptoms and disappearance of platypnea-orthodeoxia syndrome. Conclusion Although patent foramen ovale may be present since birth without giving clinical signs, it may represent a common enough cause of platypnea-orthodeoxia syndrome and other vascular complications in the elderly.
A Constraint-Driven Assessment of Operating Systems for Wearable Devices

Wearable devices have increasingly become popular in recent years. Devices attached to users body now remotely monitor his daily activities/health. However, some operating systems running on these devices were not initially designed and developed for this purpose, letting them have a poor performance or even requiring to spend more resources or better hardware. This work presents a comparison, driven by specific constraints, between operating systems for wearable devices. Our research raised the key constraints of this context and figured out which operating system has the best performance. Results presented here shows that evaluated operating systems do not have enough performance when considering wearable devices specific constraints, letting us conclude that improvements should be made.
Utilizing two-ray interference in vehicle-to-vehicle communications

This paper presents a method for the utilization of radio channels with two-ray propagation properties between vehicles in vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The method uses spatial diversity with antennas separated in the vertical direction to counteract low received levels in regions of destructive interference according to a two-ray path loss model. Results are exemplified with measurements and further analysed with simulations.
Control-Based Database Tuning Under Dynamic Workloads

Database administration (tuning) is the process of adjusting database configurations in order to accomplish desirable performance goals. This job is performed by human operators called database administrators (DBAs) who are generally well-paid, and are becoming more and more expensive with the increasing complexity and scale of modern databases. There has been considerable effort dedicated to reducing such cost (which often dominates the total ownership cost of missioncritical databases) by making database tuning more automated and transparent to users (Chaudhuri et al, 2004; Chaudhuri and Weikum, 2006). Research in this area seeks ways to automate the hardware deployment, physical database design, parameter configuration, and resource management in such systems. The goal is to achieve acceptable performance on the whole system level without (or with limited) human intervention. According to Weikum et al. (2002), problems in this category can be stated as:
Color Image Restoration Using Robust Neuro-Fuzzy Network Approach

A combination of a simple noise impulse detector and a robust neuro-fuzzy (RNF) network yields an effective filter for color image that corrupted by impulse noise. This method consists of 2 mode of operation, i.e. training and testing (filtering). During training, the detector impulse is employed to locate the noisy pixels in the color image for optimizing the RNF network. During testing, if a pixel is detected by the impulse detector as the corrupted one then the trained RNF network will output a new pixel value for replacing the corrupted pixel. This filter consists of two properties. First is the use of an effective yet efficient simple impulse detector in detecting noisy pixels in the color image (feature selection). Second is the use of a memberhip function in the adaptive RNF network design, which makes the network robust to impulse noise. Experimental result shows that this filter is not only has the good ability of noise cancellation and detail preservation but also possesses desirable robustness and adaptive capability of filtering noisy images with different characteristic (size and color) from the image that is used in the training.
ESO 603-G21: A strange polar-ring galaxy

We present the results of B , V , R surface photometry of ESO 603-G21 – a galaxy with a possible polar ring. The morphological and photometric features of this galaxy are discussed. The central round object of the galaxy is rather red and presents a nearly exponential surface brightness distribution. This central structure is surrounded by a blue warped ring or disk. The totality of the observed characteristics (optical and NIR colors, strong color gradients, HI and H 2 content, FIR luminosity and star-formation rate, rotation-curve shape, global mass-to-luminosity ratio, the agreement with the Tully-Fisher relation, etc.) shows that ESO 603-G21 is similar to late-type spiral galaxies. We suppose that morphological peculiarities and the possible existence of two large-scale kinematically-decoupled subsystems in ESO 603-G21 can be explained as being a result of dissipative merging of two spiral galaxies or as a consequence of a companion accretion onto a pre-existing spiral host.
Properties of defect modes in one-dimensional ternary photonic crystal

We have studied the properties of defect modes in one-dimensional ternary photonic crystal with one defect layer using transfer matrix method(TMM). we first compared the transmission spectra of one dimensional ternary photonic crystal with that of one dimensional binary photonic crystal, and found more bandgaps in the ternary structures. Then we are interested in the defect mode properties of the ternary structures, especially the optical sensing abilities. In the special bandgap owned only by the ternary photonic crystals, the defect modes are found to be very sensitive for sensing very small refractive index changes or very small thickness modulations of the defect layer medium. The defect mode wavelength could shift by 3nm for each refractive index change of 0.006, and the defect mode wavelength could shift by 13nm for each thickness change of 10nm. Finally we introduced a negative-refractive-index defect layer into the ternary structure and found that the defect mode wavelength could shift even by 27nm (two times of 13nm) for each thickness change of 10nm.
Low Immunogenicity of Neural Progenitor Cells Differentiated from Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Derived from Less Immunogenic Somatic Cells

The groundbreaking discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) provides a new source for cell therapy. However, whether the iPS derived functional lineages from different cell origins have different immunogenicity remains unknown. It had been known that the cells isolated from extra-embryonic tissues, such as umbilical cord mesenchymal cells (UMCs), are less immunogenic than other adult lineages such as skin fibroblasts (SFs). In this report, we differentiated iPS cells from human UMCs and SFs into neural progenitor cells (NPCs) and analyzed their immunogenicity. Through co-culture with allologous peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), we showed that UMCs were indeed less immunogenic than skin cells to simulate proliferation of PBMCs. Surprisingly, we found that the NPCs differentiated from UMC-iPS cells retained low immunogenicity as the parental UMCs based on the PBMC proliferation assay. In cytotoxic expression assay, reactions in most kinds of immune effector cells showed more perforin and granzyme B expression with SF-NPCs stimulation than that with UMC-NPCs stimulation in PBMC co-culture system, in T cell co-culture system as well. Furthermore, through whole genome expression microarray analysis, we showed that over 70 immune genes, including all members of HLA-I, were expressed at lower levels in NPCs derived from UMC-iPS cells than that from SF-iPS cells. Our results demonstrated a phenomenon that the low immunogenicity of the less immunogenic cells could be retained after cell reprogramming and further differentiation, thus provide a new concept to generate functional lineages with lower immunogenicity for regenerative medicine.
Cerebrospinal fluid in the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis: a consensus report.

The Committee of the European Concerted Action for Multiple Sclerosis (Charcot Foundation) organised five workshops to discuss CSF analytical standards in the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. This consensus report from 12 European countries summarises the results of those workshops. It is hoped that neurologists will confer with their colleagues in clinical chemistry to arrange the best possible local practice. The most sensitive method for the detection of oligoclonal immunoglobulin bands is isoelectric focusing. The same amounts of IgG in parallel CSF and serum samples are used and oligoclonal bands are revealed with IgG specific antibody staining. All laboratories performing isoelectric focusing should check their technique at least annually using “blind” standards for the five different CSF and serum patterns. Quantitative measurements of IgG production in the CNS are less sensitive than isoelectric focusing. The preferred method for detection of blood-CSF barrier dysfunction is the albumin quotient. The CSF albumin or total protein concentrations are less satisfactory. These results must be interpreted with reference to the age of the patient and the local method of determination. Cells should be counted. The normal value is no more than 4 cells/microliters. Among evolving optional tests, measurement of the combined local synthesis of antibodies against measles, rubella, and/or varicella zoster could represent a significant advance if it offers higher specificity (not sensitivity) for identifying chronic rather than acute inflammation. Other tests that may have useful correlations with clinical indices include those for oligoclonal free light chains, IgM, IgA, or myelin basic protein concentrations.
Old Wine in New Skins?: Revisiting the Software Architecture for IP Network Stacks on Constrained IoT Devices

In this paper, we argue that existing concepts for the design and implementation of network stacks for constrained devices do not comply with the requirements of current and upcoming Internet of Things (IoT) use cases. The IoT requires not only a lightweight but also a modular network stack, based on standards. We discuss functional and non-functional requirements for the software architecture of the network stack on constrained IoT devices. Then, revisiting concepts from the early Internet as well as current implementations, we propose a future-proof alternative to existing IoT network stack architectures, and provide an initial evaluation of this proposal based on its implementation running on top of state-of-the-art IoT operating system and hardware.