Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Constrained Extreme Learning Machine: A novel highly discriminative random feedforward neural network

In this paper, a novel single hidden layer feedforward neural network, called Constrained Extreme Learning Machine (CELM), is proposed based on Extreme Learning Machine (ELM). In CELM, the connection weights between the input layer and hidden neurons are randomly drawn from a constrained set of difference vectors of between-class samples, rather than an open set of arbitrary vectors. Therefore, the CELM is expected to be more suitable for discriminative tasks, whilst retaining other advantages of ELM. The experimental results are presented to show the high efficiency of the CELM, compared with ELM and some other related learning machines.
The Effect of Board Composition and Ownership Concentration on Earnings Management: Evidence from IRAN

— The role of corporate governance is to reduce the divergence of interests between shareholders and managers. The role of corporate governance is more useful when managers have an incentive to deviate from shareholders’ interests. One example of management’s deviation from shareholders’ interests is the management of earnings through the use of accounting accruals. This paper examines the association between corporate governance internal mechanisms ownership concentration, board independence, the existence of CEO-Chairman duality and earnings management. Firm size and leverage are control variables. The population used in this study comprises firms listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) between 2004 and 2008, the sample comprises 196 firms. Panel Data method is employed as technique to estimate the model. We find that there is negative significant association between ownership concentration and board independence manage earnings with earnings management, there is negative significant association between the existence of CEO-Chairman duality and earnings management. This study also found a positive significant association between control variable (firm size and leverage) and earnings management.
Link Scheduling Algorithms for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have the potential of being a cost effective solution to provide connectivity and coverage in both urban and rural areas. Typically, a WMN is a backbone network that carries high data rate traffic and employs Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) like access mechanisms. For a WMN to provide high throughput, the design of an efficient link scheduling algorithm is of paramount importance. Towards this end, we provide an overview of link scheduling algorithms in Spatial TDMA wireless mesh networks. These algorithms can be classified into three categories: those based only on a communication graph model of the network, those based on a communication graph model and Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) threshold conditions at receivers and those based on an SINR graph model of the network. We first outline a framework for modeling STDMA networks. We review representative research works and provide the description of an algorithm from each of these classes. We describe the relative merits and demerits of each class of algorithms and compare their performance via simulations. We conclude with a discussion on practical implementation of these algorithms and open research problems.
Lysine methylation-dependent binding of 53BP1 to the pRb tumor suppressor

Significance The retinoblastoma protein (pRb) is a key regulator of cell cycle progression and the DNA damage response. Its importance in these processes is highlighted by the fact that it is mutated or functionally inactivated in almost all human tumors. Its activity is finely regulated by a number of post-translational modifications, including phosphorylation and methylation, which act to recruit “reader” proteins that mediate signaling events. Here, to our knowledge for the first time, we describe the methyl-dependent interaction between pRb and the tudor domain containing tumor protein p53 binding protein 1 (53BP1) and describe how this interaction integrates pRb cell cycle control with the DNA damage response. Our results therefore widen the repertoire of cellular targets for 53BP1 and suggest a new role in regulating pRb tumor suppressor activity. The retinoblastoma tumor suppressor protein pRb is a key regulator of cell cycle progression and mediator of the DNA damage response. Lysine methylation at K810, which occurs within a critical Cdk phosphorylation motif, holds pRb in the hypophosphorylated growth-suppressing state. We show here that methyl K810 is read by the tandem tudor domain containing tumor protein p53 binding protein 1 (53BP1). Structural elucidation of 53BP1 in complex with a methylated K810 pRb peptide emphasized the role of the 53BP1 tandem tudor domain in recognition of the methylated lysine and surrounding residues. Significantly, binding of 53BP1 to methyl K810 occurs on E2 promoter binding factor target genes and allows pRb activity to be effectively integrated with the DNA damage response. Our results widen the repertoire of cellular targets for 53BP1 and suggest a previously unidentified role for 53BP1 in regulating pRb tumor suppressor activity.
Flamingo: Enabling Evolvable HDD-based Near-Line Storage

Cloud providers and companies running large-scale data centers offer near-line, cold, and archival data storage, which trade access latency and throughput performance for cost. These often require physical rack-scale storage designs, e.g. Facebook/Open Compute Project (OCP) Cold Storage or Pelican, which co-design the hardware, mechanics, power, cooling and software to minimize costs to support the desired workload. A consequence is that the rack resources are restricted, requiring a software stack that can operate within the provided resources. The co-design makes it hard to understand the end-to-end performance impact of relatively small physical design changes and, worse, the software stacks are brittle to these changes. Flamingo supports the design of near-line HDD-based storage racks for cloud services. It requires a physical rack design, a set of resource constraints, and some target performance characteristics. Using these Flamingo is able to automatically parameterize a generic storage stack to allow it to operate on the physical rack. It is also able to efficiently explore the performance impact of varying the rack resources. It incorporates key principles learned from the design and deployment of cold storage systems. We demonstrate that Flamingo can rapidly reduce the time taken to design custom racks to support near-line storage.
Enhancement of Muscle Contraction in the Stomach of the Crab Cancer borealis: a Possible Hormonal Role for GABA

Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is best known as an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the mammalian central nervous system. Here we show, however, that GABA has an excitatory effect on nerve-evoked contractions and on excitatory junctional potentials (EJPs) of the gastric mill 4 (gm4) muscle from the stomach of the crab Cancer borealis. The threshold concentration for these effects was between 1 and 10 μmol l−1. Using immunohistochemical techniques, we found that GABA is colocalized with the vesicle-associated protein synapsin in nearby nerves and hence is presumably released there. However, since these nerves do not innervate the muscle directly, we conclude that these release sites are not the likely source of the GABA responsible for muscle modulation. We also extracted hemolymph from the crab pericardial cavity, which contains the pericardial organs, a major neurosecretory structure. Through reversed-phase liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry analysis we determined the concentration of GABA in the hemolymph to be 3.3 ± 0.7 μmol l−1, high enough to modulate the muscle. These findings suggest that the gm4 muscle could be modulated by GABA produced by and released from a distant neurohemal organ.
Cellulose Nanofibrils as Paper Additive and Coating Material: Properties, Distribution and Interaction Effects

Cellulose is well-known as the most common bio-polymer on earth. In the cell wall of most plants, it is organized in nanoscopic structures with interesting properties for a wide range of applications, among them as an additive to paper and board or as an applied coating. One socioeconomic perspective on these applications of the nanomaterial is associated environmental benefits; cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) as an additive to paper and board can improve tensile properties, enabling not just higher filler levels, but also increased potential fraction of recycled fibers in the product. As a coating, given its excellent oxygen barrier properties, CNF also has potential as a replacement for plastics in certain food packaging applications or, conceivably, aluminum in liquid packaging board. In the current work, we have addressed several questions pertaining to these potential applications and some fundamental questions of interest regarding the properties of CNF as individual fibrils and as fibril aggregates. Central questions in this current work, and brief answers later expounded upon, are; • Do fibril properties like crystallinity affect CNF film ductility? – Reducing crystallinity index (CI) is shown to correlate with an increased yield point and decreased Young’s modulus. • How does CNF behave within the paper or board matrix? – CNF appears to coat the surface of the furnish fraction with which it was added or premixed. – When filler particles are encased in CNF, it appears to form hollow capsules encasing the particles, and not as one would expect adhere very tightly. • Can CNF be successfully traced and studied within a paper matrix? – Using high resolution FIB/SEM, this has been demonstrated.
TALx86: A Realistic Typed Assembly Language∗

The goal of typed assembly language (TAL) is to provide a low-level, statically typed target language that is better suited than Java bytecodes for supporting a wide variety of source languages and a number of important optimizations. In previous work, we formalized idealized versions of TAL and proved important safety properties about them. In this paper, we present our progress in defining and implementing a realistic typed assembly language called TALx86. The TALx86 instructions comprise a relatively complete fragment of the Intel IA32 (32-bit 80x86 flat model) assembly language and are thus executable on processors such as the Intel Pentium. The type system for the language incorporates a number of advanced features necessary for safely compiling large programs to good code. To motivate the design of the type system, we demonstrate how various high-level language features are compiled to TALx86. For this purpose, we present a type-safe C-like language called Popcorn.
Foxg1 Is Required for Development of the Vertebrate Olfactory System

Illuminating the molecular identity and regulation of early progenitor cells in the olfactory sensory epithelium represents an important challenge in the field of neural development. We show in both mouse and zebrafish that the winged helix transcription factor Foxg1 is expressed in an early progenitor population of the olfactory placode. In the mouse, Foxg1 is first expressed throughout the olfactory placode but later becomes restricted to the ventrolateral olfactory epithelium. The essential role of Foxg1 in olfactory development is demonstrated by the strikingly severe phenotype of Foxg1 knock-out mice: older embryos have no recognizable olfactory structures, including epithelium, bulb, or vomeronasal organs. Initially, a small number of olfactory progenitors are specified but show defects in both proliferation and differentiation. Similarly, antisense RNA knockdown of Foxg1 expression in the zebrafish shows a reduction in the number of neurons and mitotic cells in olfactory rosettes, mirroring the phenotype seen in the mouse Foxg1 null mutant. Using mosaic analysis in the zebrafish, we show that Foxg1 is required cell-autonomously for the production of mature olfactory receptor neurons. Therefore, we identified an evolutionarily conserved requirement for Foxg1 in the development of the vertebrate olfactory system.
Formal verification of distributed dynamic thermal management

Simulation is the state-of-the-art analysis technique for distributed thermal management schemes. Due to the numerous parameters involved and the distributed nature of these schemes, such non-exhaustive verification may fail to catch functional bugs in the algorithm or may report misleading performance characteristics. To overcome these limitations, we propose a methodology to perform formal verification of distributed dynamic thermal management for many-core systems. The proposed methodology is based on the SPIN model checker and the Lamport timestamps algorithm. Our methodology allows specification and verification of both functional and timing properties in a distributed many-core system. In order to illustrate the applicability and benefits of our methodology, we perform a case study on a state-of-the-art agent-based distributed thermal management scheme.
Corrosion Improvement and Microstructure Evaluation of SEM-Solid A356 Alloy by Ecap Process

Al-Si is a casting alloy developed mostly for automobile and aircraft engine industries. This research presents a study related to the semi solid casting of Al-Si A356 alloy produced by cooling slope known as thixoforming process. The sample has then undergone T6 heat treatment. The grain refinement was achieved suitable for thixoforming by Severe Plastic Deformation (SPD) technique through Equal-Channel Angular Pressing (ECAP). The ECAP was conducted at room temperature in which a 10 mm rod was pressed through a constrained channel of a die that was bent abruptly close to 120°. The coarse α-Al phase and silicon particles changes into a globular shape after thixoforming process and T6 heat treatment. The ECAP processing through route A leads to particle refinement after one pass and further refined with an average particle size of 41. 2μm after two pass pressing. The potentiodynamic test showed that the corrosion rate reduced to 0.0024 mmpy after two passes of ECAP processing. It confirms that particle refinement through ECAP processing leads to significant enhancement of corrosion resistance in A356 alloy.
Optical filter based on metallic glass MgZnCa micro/nano-structure array

Metallic glasses with unique properties, such as large plasticity within supercooled liquid region ΔT and excellent wear resistance, have attracted much attention in recent years. However, the applications of thin film metallic glass (TFMG) in optical area are seldom reported yet. Here, we proposed a reflective color filter with simple sub-wavelength nanorods fabricated with MgZnCa metallic glasses. Using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) methods, we systematically simulated the reflection spectra with different parameters such as the diameter and the height of nanorods. The simulation results indicate that the reflection efficiency is as high as 80%, and the color can be adjusted by changing the parameters effectively, which could be of significance for designing desirable color filters by selecting the appropriate nanostructure parameters. More importantly, the color filter facilitates the scalability to the optical application of TFMG and possesses the potential of large-scale fabrication due to the MgZnCa TFMG has low glass transition temperature (Tg) and large plasticity within ΔT.
XMLLR for improved speaker adaptation in speech recognition

In this paper we describe a novel technique for adaptation of Gaussian means. The technique is related to Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (MLLR), but we regress not on the mean itself but on a vector associated with each mean. These associated vectors are initialized by an ingenious technique based on eigen decomposition. As the only form of adaptation this technique outperforms MLLR, even with multiple regression classes and Speaker Adaptive Training (SAT). However, when combined with Constrained MLLR (CMLLR) and Vocal Tract Length Normalization (VTLN) the improvements disappear. The combination of two forms of SAT (CMLLR-SAT and MLLR-SAT) which we performed as a baseline is itself a useful result; we describe it more fully in a companion paper. XMLLR is an interesting approach which we hope may have utility in other contexts, for example in speaker identification.
A Study of Detection Mechanism of Metal Oxide Gas Sensor Under UV Radiation

The presented paper deals with the effect of UV radiation and change in rate of recombination on the operation of metal oxide gas sensors. The performance of a simple metal oxide sensor is simulated first and the relation between absorbed gas concentration and resistance is monitored in absence of UV radiation. Later, the same performance is monitored in the presence of UV radiation on the sensor with the occurrence of surface recombination phenomenon. The performances are simulated on MATLAB. The Grain boundary resistance (R gb ), neck resistance (R n ) and total resistance (R) were obtained by simulating standard equation on MATLAB software. The effect of the surface recombination on absorption of gas concentration and change in resistance is also taken into account. It has been observed that the resistance of the sensors depends on the grain size ( L ), flux density, absorbed gas concentration ( N r ), depletion width (W). at a flux density (8x10 18 with surface Recombination phenomenon.
Feature-Based Selection of Dependency Paths in Ad Hoc Information Retrieval

Techniques that compare short text segments using dependency paths (or simply, paths) appear in a wide range of automated language processing applications including question answering (QA). However, few models in ad hoc information retrieval (IR) use paths for document ranking due to the prohibitive cost of parsing a retrieval collection. In this paper, we introduce a flexible notion of paths that describe chains of words on a dependency path. These chains, or catenae, are readily applied in standard IR models. Informative catenae are selected using supervised machine learning with linguistically informed features and compared to both non-linguistic terms and catenae selected heuristically with filters derived from work on paths. Automatically selected catenae of 1-2 words deliver significant performance gains on three TREC collections.
Prophylactic thyroidectomy: Who needs it, when, and why

The most common hereditary thyroid cancer is medullary thyroid cancer, which can be associated with MEN 2A, MEN 2B, or FMTC. In these patients, prophylactic thyroidectomy is recommended; timing of surgery is dependent on the specific RET mutation. Prophylactic thyroidectomy should include total thyroidectomy and accompanying central compartment neck dissection should be done for patients at high risk for micro‐metastatic disease only. Surgery should be performed at tertiary care institutions by high‐volume thyroid surgeons. J. Surg. Oncol. 2015 111:61–65. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Learning tactical human behavior through observation of human performance

It is widely accepted that the difficulty and expense involved in acquiring the knowledge behind tactical behaviors has been one limiting factor in the development of simulated agents representing adversaries and teammates in military and game simulations. Several researchers have addressed this problem with varying degrees of success. The problem mostly lies in the fact that tactical knowledge is difficult to elicit and represent through interactive sessions between the model developer and the subject matter expert. This paper describes a novel approach that employs genetic programming in conjunction with context-based reasoning to evolve tactical agents based upon automatic observation of a human performing a mission on a simulator. In this paper, we describe the process used to carry out the learning. A prototype was built to demonstrate feasibility and it is described herein. The prototype was rigorously and extensively tested. The evolved agents exhibited good fidelity to the observed human performance, as well as the capacity to generalize from it.
Enhanced LTE TOA/OTDOA estimation with first arriving path detection

With increasing importance of location based services, requirements for TOA (time of arrival) and TDOA (time difference of arrival) measurements have been specified in 3GPP LTE Rel. 9 to ensure accurate TIE (user equipment) positioning. In order to meet these requirements, it is vital to accurately estimate the first signal arriving path. This is, however, not trivial, especially in multipath environments. In this work, we describe methods for LTE TOA and TDOA measurements with enhanced first arriving path detection. The conventional maximum likelihood based correlation profile is used as detection metric. After grossly determining the signal region by a moving window, three methods, namely peak detection, SNR based threshold and adaptive threshold based on noise floor and metric peak value are employed to estimate the first arriving path. Simulations results show that the proposed adaptive threshold based method is robust against channel variations and can meet all 3GPP requirements under various multipath channels.
Robot localization using a complementary laser/camera filter

In this paper, we propose a novel localization method for indoor-wheeled robots. The system consists of fusing scene and range data to make more robust the 3D-to-3D egomotion estimation, which is typically done via ICP. To validate our approach and assess its performance, a system comprised of a laser range finder paired with a monocular camera is implemented and several experiments are performed. Results show that, provided the ground is flat, our proposed system is applicable to unstructured indoor environments while previous hybrid techniques are not.
Patient safety and systematic reviews: finding papers indexed in MEDLINE, EMBASE and CINAHL

Objective To develop search strategies for identifying papers on patient safety in MEDLINE, EMBASE and CINAHL. Methods Six journals were electronically searched for papers on patient safety published between 2000 and 2006. Identified papers were divided into two gold standards: one to build and the other to validate the search strategies. Candidate terms for strategy construction were identified using a word frequency analysis of titles, abstracts and keywords used to index the papers in the databases. Searches were run for each one of the selected terms independently in every database. Sensitivity, precision and specificity were calculated for each candidate term. Terms with sensitivity greater than 10% were combined to form the final strategies. The search strategies developed were run against the validation gold standard to assess their performance. A final step in the validation process was to compare the performance of each strategy to those of other strategies found in the literature. Results We developed strategies for all three databases that were highly sensitive (range 95%–100%), precise (range 40%–60%) and balanced (the product of sensitivity and precision being in the range of 30%–40%). The strategies were very specific and outperformed those found in the literature. Conclusion The strategies we developed can meet the needs of users aiming to maximise either sensitivity or precision, or seeking a reasonable compromise between sensitivity and precision, when searching for papers on patient safety in MEDLINE, EMBASE or CINAHL.
Discovery of X-ray flaring on the magnetic Bp-star σ Ori E

We report the detection of an X-ray flare on the Bp star σ Ori E with the ROSAT high resolution imager (HRI). The flare is shown to have likely occurred on the early-type star, rather than on an hypothesized late-type companion. We derive flare parameters such as total energy release, coarse estimates of size and density, and also present arguments for a magnetic origin of the flare. We place our observations in the context of a magnetic character of Bp-type stars and speculate on a common physical basis and connection between Bp and Be stars.