Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Investigation on Social Network Recommender Systems and Collaborative Filtering Techniques

Nowadays, with the remarkable expansion of the information through the internet, users prefer to receive the exact information that they need through some suggestions from their friends or profiles to save their time and money. Recommend systems based on different algorithms as one of the basic ways to reach this goal through the internet have been proposed but each of them has their own advantages and disadvantages. In this study, we have selected and implemented two approaches which are Collaborative Filtering (CF) and Social Network Recommendations System (SNRS). Based on some limitations to finding a dataset which covers friendship, rating and item categories we generated it for 10 categories, 10 items, and 100 users and compared two approaches. We used Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and accuracy to compare the result of two mentioned approaches and found that the SNRS method as it is claimed to be improved version of CF works more efficiency.
DistriBit: a distributed dynamic binary translator system for thin client computing

Although dynamic binary translators (DBT) are gaining popularity in the modern virtual execution environments (VEE), the requirement of DBTs' processing and memory resources has seriously hampered the performance of host platform. In this paper, we propose a distributed DBT system--DistriBit for resource-limited thin clients to overcome these challenges. Since thin client always has small memory and cannot cache all translated code, we divide its unified cache into a 2-level cache and design a dual locality cache management scheme to help thin client manage its translated code. Meanwhile, to improve the execution efficiency of thin client and reduce the overhead of network transmission, we not only optimize translated code on the server but also predict those thin client required code with a prediction scheme. Experimental results show that our DistriBit system could effectively improve a thin client's performance of SPECint2000 by 2%~26% relative to a monolithic thin client, and our dual locality cache management scheme that results in miss reduction of about 1.41%~20.6% for a thin client with a 2-level cache over a thin client with a unified cache.
On the influence of isotropic and kinematic hardening caused by strain gradients on the deformation behaviour of polycrystals

During the deformation of polycrystals, pronounced strain gradients may occur at grain boundaries between grains whose misorientations lead to a large mismatch in their deformation behaviour. Hence, even under globally uniaxial and homogeneous strains, internal stresses will arise that must be characterized by nonlocal plasticity models. In this work, such a nonlocal constitutive model is formulated based on the concept of densities of geometrically necessary superdislocations in an isotropic elastic-plastic medium. Since the deformation of individual grains is considered, crystal plasticity models are applied that take into account plastic slip on crystallographic planes. This new nonlocal constitutive model is applied to describe the deformation of a polycrystal under the influence of plastic strain gradients caused by isotropic and kinematic strain hardening. It is found that isotropic hardening originating from plastic strain gradients amplifies deformation heterogeneities stemming from different Schmid factors in neighbouring grains. However, the kinematic hardening resulting from plastic strain gradients tends to reduce such deformation heterogeneity. Thus, the capability of a polycrystal to deform uniformly is determined by the competition between isotropic and kinematic hardening. Finally, the model is applied to explain why grain refinement is an efficient way to improve material strength and ductility at the same time.
Why Do Countries Commit to Human Rights Treaties?

This article examines states' decisions to commit to human rights treaties. It argues that the effect of a treaty on a state—and hence the state's willingness to commit to it—is largely determined by the domestic enforcement of the treaty and the treaty's collateral consequences. These broad claims give rise to several specific predictions. For example, states with less democratic institutions will be no less likely to commit to human rights treaties if they have poor human rights records, because there is little prospect that the treaties will be enforced. Conversely, states with more democratic institutions will be less likely to commit to human rights treaties if they have poor human rights records—precisely because treaties are likely to lead to changes in behavior. These predictions are tested by examining the practices of more than 160 countries over several decades.
Critical issues in the design of a fault-tolerant multiprocessor database server

HypRa is a database server designed to meet extreme requirements from e.g. telecom applications. Fault-tolerance has been designed into HypRa by: (1) taking it into account at all hard-ware and software levels, (2) using a shared-nothing, coarse grained hardware platform with homogeneous nodes, basic fault detection, and a multiway interconnection network with dynamic rerouting, (3) doing fault masking and repair in software to achieve flexibility and dynamic reconfigurability, (4) using data fragmentation, fragment replication and replica allocation, and dynamic reconfiguration to automatically reproduce the data availability fault-tolerance level. <<ETX>>
Cohort Profile: the Whitehall II study.

The Whitehall studies have come to be closely associated with the investigation of socioeconomic differences in physical and mental illness and mortality: the social gradient.1,2 That was not the initial purpose of the first Whitehall study. Donald Reid and Geoffrey Rose set up Whitehall, in the 1960s, as a kind of British Framingham:3 ‘Framingham’ insofar as it was a longitudinal study of cardiorespiratory disease and diabetes, looking at individual risk factors for disease; ‘British’ in that it was done on the cheap—a simple screening examination with follow-up limited to deaths identified from the National Health Service Central Registry. Socioeconomic differences were initially not on the agenda. In the 1970s there was a small group of researchers who continued the British tradition that went back to William Farr in the nineteenth century of examining social inequalities in health.4 For the most part, within epidemiology, ‘social class’ was not an object of study but a control variable: a potential confounder that you got rid of in order to arrive at the ‘correct’ conclusion about the association between risk factor and disease. To the extent that there was a focus on inequalities in health, the general view was that poor people got diseases of material deprivation and rich people got heart disease and peptic ulcers. If this perception had been true,5,6 Whitehall showed that it was no longer so. In a population of middle-aged men, all employed in stable jobs in the British Civil Service, there was an inverse social gradient in mortality: the lower the grade, the higher the risk of death. Tenyear follow-up showed that there was a steep inverse relation between grade of employment and death from all causes, from coronary heart disease (CHD), and from non-coronary causes.7 The relative risk of death owing to CHD was 2.2 in clerical compared with senior administrative staff, and 1.6 for those in the intermediate professional and executive grade. The first Whitehall study made clear that inequalities in health were not limited to the health consequences of poverty. Important as that issue remains, the Whitehall question was why there should be a social gradient in disease in people above the poverty threshold. When conventional risk factors were controlled for, two-thirds of the mortality risk differential between the clerical and administrative grades remained unexplained.7,8 Mortality gradients in the study were in the same direction as national social class mortality data,9 but larger. We hypothesized that psychosocial factors and aspects of nutrition other than those affecting plasma cholesterol (which was higher in high grades in Whitehall) might fill in the unexplained part of the social gradient in mortality.7 We therefore set up the Whitehall II study, a new longitudinal study of British civil servants, with the explicit intention of examining reasons for the social gradient in health and disease in men and extending the research to include women.
The effect of Setarud (IMODTM) on angiogenesis in transplanted human ovarian tissue to nude mice

Background: One of the promising methods in fertility preservation among women with cancer is cryopreservation of ovarian cortex but there are many drawbacks such as apoptosis and considerable reduction of follicular density in the transplanted ovary. One solution to reduce ischemic damage is enhancing angiogenesis after transplantation of ovarian cortex tissue. Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of Setarud, on angiogenesis in transplanted human ovarian tissue. Materials and Methods: In this case control study, twenty four nude mice were implanted subcutaneously, with human ovarian tissues, from four women. The mice were randomly divided into two groups (n=12): the experimental group was treated with Setarud, while control group received only vehicle. Each group was divided into three subgroups (n=4) based on the graft recovery days post transplantation (PT). The transplanted fragments were removed on days 2, 7, and 30 PT and the expression of Angiopoietin-1, Angiopoietin-2, and Vascular endothelial growth factor at both gene and protein levels and vascular density were studied in the grafted ovarian tissues. Results: On the 2nd and 7th day PT, the level of Angiopoietin-1 gene expression in case group was significantly lower than that in control group, while the opposite results were obtained for Angiopoietin-2 and Vascular endothelial growth factor. These results were also confirmed at the protein level. The density of vessels in Setarud group elevated significantly on day 7 PT compared to pre-treatment state. Conclusion: Our results showed that administration of Setarud may stimulates angiogenesis in transplanted human ovarian tissues, although further researches are needed before a clear judgment is made.
Bio-Rapid-Prototyping of Tissue Engineering Scaffolds and the Process-Induced Cell Damage

Tissue scaffolds play a vital role in tissue engineering by providing a native tissue-mimicking environment for cell proliferation and differentiation as well as tissue regeneration. Fabrication of tissue scaffolds has been drawing increasing research attention and a number of fabrication techniques have been developed. To better mimic the microenvironment of native tissues, novel techniques have emerged in recent years to encapsulate cells into the engineered scaffolds during the scaffold fabrication process. Among them, bio-Rapid-Prototyping (bioRP) techniques, by which scaffolds with encapsulated cells can be fabricated with controlled internal microstructure and external shape, shows significant promise. It is noted in the bioRP processes, cells may be continuously subjected to environmental stresses such as mechanical, electrical forces and laser exposure. If the stress is greater than a certain level, the cell membrane may be ruptured, leading to the so-called process-induced cell damage. This paper reviews various cell encapsulation techniques for tissue scaffold fabrication, with emphasis on the bioRP technologies and their technical features. To understand the process-induced cell damage in the bioRP processes, this paper also surveys the cell damage mechanisms under different stresses. The process-induced cell damage models are also examined to provide a cue to the cell viability preservation in the fabrication process. Discussions on further improvements of bioRP technologies are given and ongoing research into mechanical cell damage mechanism are also suggested in this review.
Contextualizing applications via semantic middleware

The use of description logics (DLs) in modeling various real-world domains, and reasoning about them, has well-known benefits. We believe that the same framework can be used for representing a user-centric view of usage contexts. A DL-reasoner can then be used for organizing context definitions, merging domain knowledge into these definitions, and performing recognition of contexts from sensor inputs. A pure DL-based approach, however, has certain limitations in a context environment; hence, a hybrid reasoning approach is proposed. To ensure syntactic and semantic interoperability, we adopt a semantic Web-compliant approach that uses the OWL-DL variant of the OWL Web ontology language. This allows us to aggregate various heterogeneous data sources, both directly in semantic Web formalisms, and indirectly via the use of a transformation framework capable of using data from legacy applications. Context and domain models, along with associated reasoners, are themselves context, user and/or organization-specific; hence multiple systems should be maintained and connected into a distributed architecture. In order to deploy this architecture in a mobile environment, an underlying SIP-based provisioning framework has been experimented with, enabling device, network and location transparency.
Quantum field theory of metallic spin glasses.

We introduce an effective field theory for the vicinity of a zero-temperature quantum transition between a metallic spin glass (``spin density glass'') and a metallic quantum paramagnet. Following a mean-field analysis, we perform a perturbative renormalization-group study and find that the critical properties are dominated by static disorder-induced fluctuations, and that dynamic quantum-mechanical effects are dangerously irrelevant. A Gaussian fixed point is stable for a finite range of couplings for spatial dimensionality dg8, but disorder effects always lead to runaway flows to strong coupling for d\ensuremath{\le}8. Scaling hypotheses for a static strong-coupling critical field theory are proposed. The nonlinear susceptibility has an anomalously weak singularity at such a critical point. Although motivated by a perturbative study of metallic spin glasses, the scaling hypotheses are more general, and could apply to other quantum spin glass to paramagnet transitions.
Automatic parallelization via matrix multiplication

Existing work that deals with parallelization of complicated reductions and scans focuses only on formalism and hardly dealt with implementation. To bridge the gap between formalism and implementation, we have integrated parallelization via matrix multiplication into compiler construction. Our framework can deal with complicated loops that existing techniques in compilers cannot parallelize. Moreover, we have sophisticated our framework by developing two sets of techniques. One enhances its capability for parallelization by extracting max-operators automatically, and the other improves the performance of parallelized programs by eliminating redundancy. We have also implemented our framework and techniques as a parallelizer in a compiler. Experiments on examples that existing compilers cannot parallelize have demonstrated the scalability of programs parallelized by our implementation.
TREC 2013 Web Track Overview

Abstract : The goal of the TREC Web track is to explore and evaluate retrieval approaches over large-scale subsets of the Web -- currently on the order of one billion pages. For TREC 2013, the fifth year of the Web track, we implemented the following significant updates compared to 2012. First, the Diversity task was replaced with a new Risk-sensitive retrieval task that explores the tradeoffs systems can achieve between effectiveness (overall gains across queries) and robustness (minimizing the probability of significant failure, relative to a provided baseline). Second, we based the 2013 Web track experiments on the new ClueWeb12 collection created by the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. ClueWeb12 is a successor to the ClueWeb09 dataset, comprising about one billion Web pages crawled between Feb-May 2012. The crawling and collection process for ClueWeb12 included a rich set of seed URLs based on commercial search traffic, Twitter and other sources, and multiple measures for flagging undesirable content such as spam, pornography, and malware. The Adhoc task continued as in previous years.
Neyman-Pearson test for zero-rate multiterminal hypothesis testing

The problem of zero-rate multiterminal hypothesis testing is revisited. A Neyman-Pearson-like test is proposed and its non-asymptotic performance is clarified; for short blocklength, it is numerically examined that the proposed test is superior to a previously known Hoeffding-like test proposed by Han-Kobayashi. For the large deviation regime, it is shown that our proposed test achieves the optimal trade-off between the type I and type II exponents shown by Han-Kobayashi. The information geometry method plays an important role in the analysis as well as the construction of the test.
Conservation of virally encoded microRNAs in Kaposi sarcoma--associated herpesvirus in primary effusion lymphoma cell lines and in patients with Kaposi sarcoma or multicentric Castleman disease.

BACKGROUND MicroRNAs are small noncoding RNAs that posttranscriptionally regulate gene expression. Kaposi sarcoma (KS)-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) encodes 12 distinct microRNA genes, all of which are located within the latency-associated region that is highly expressed in all KSHV-associated malignancies. METHODS We amplified, cloned, and sequenced a 2.8-kbp-long region containing a cluster of 10 microRNAs plus a 646-bp fragment of K12/T0.7 containing the remaining 2 microRNAs from 5 primary effusion lymphoma-derived cell lines and from 17 patient samples. The patients included 2 with classic KS, 12 with AIDS-KS (8 from the United States, 1 from Europe, 3 from Africa, and 4 from Central/South America), and 2 with multicentric Castleman disease (MCD). Additionally, we analyzed the K1, open reading frame 75, and K15 genes to determine KSHV subtypes, and we performed a phylogenetic analysis. RESULTS Phylogenetic analysis of the 2.8-kbp microRNA region revealed 2 distinct clusters of sequences: a major (A/C) and a variant (B/Q) cluster. The variant cluster included sequences from 3 patients of African origin and both patients with MCD. Some microRNAs were highly conserved, whereas others had changes that could affect processing and, therefore, biological activity. CONCLUSIONS These data demonstrate that KSHV microRNA genes are under tight selection in vivo and suggest that they contribute to the biological activity and possibly the pathogenesis of KSHV-associated malignancies.
Manifold splines

Constructing splines whose parametric domain is an arbitrary manifold and effectively computing such splines in real-world applications are of fundamental importance in solid and shape modeling, geometric design, graphics, etc. This paper presents a general theoretical and computational framework, in which spline surfaces defined over planar domains can be systematically extended to manifold domains with arbitrary topology with or without boundaries. We study the affine structure of domain manifolds in depth and prove that the existence of manifold splines is equivalent to the existence of a manifold's affine atlas. Based on our theoretical breakthrough, we also develop a set of practical algorithms to generalize triangular B-spline surfaces from planar domains to manifold domains. We choose triangular B-splines mainly because of its generality and many of its attractive properties. As a result, our new spline surface defined over any manifold is a piecewise polynomial surface with high parametric continuity without the need for any patching and/or trimming operations. Through our experiments, we hope to demonstrate that our novel manifold splines are both powerful and efficient in modeling arbitrarily complicated geometry and representing continuously-varying physical quantities defined over shapes of arbitrary topology.
Erkka Näsäkkälä Modeling Price Processes in Telecommunications Capacity Markets

English title: Modeling price processes in telecommunications capacity markets Finnish title: Hintaprosessien mallintaminen tietoliikennekapasiteettimarkkinoilla Abstract: Bandwidth refers to the data transfer capacity of an electronic communications system. The buying and selling of telecommunications capacity will change considerably once bandwidth becomes a tradable commodity. A commodity is a generic product that is bought and sold under exact rules. The commoditization of bandwidth will be followed by the emergence of spot markets, along with derivative markets.
Predicting protein-protein interactions using signature products

MOTIVATION Proteome-wide prediction of protein-protein interaction is a difficult and important problem in biology. Although there have been recent advances in both experimental and computational methods for predicting protein-protein interactions, we are only beginning to see a confluence of these techniques. In this paper, we describe a very general, high-throughput method for predicting protein-protein interactions. Our method combines a sequence-based description of proteins with experimental information that can be gathered from any type of protein-protein interaction screen. The method uses a novel description of interacting proteins by extending the signature descriptor, which has demonstrated success in predicting peptide/protein binding interactions for individual proteins. This descriptor is extended to protein pairs by taking signature products. The signature product is implemented within a support vector machine classifier as a kernel function. RESULTS We have applied our method to publicly available yeast, Helicobacter pylori, human and mouse datasets. We used the yeast and H.pylori datasets to verify the predictive ability of our method, achieving from 70 to 80% accuracy rates using 10-fold cross-validation. We used the human and mouse datasets to demonstrate that our method is capable of cross-species prediction. Finally, we reused the yeast dataset to explore the ability of our algorithm to predict domains. CONTACT smartin@sandia.gov
High levels of C‐reactive protein are associated with reduced vagal modulation and low physical activity in young adults

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between cardiac autonomic control derived from heart rate variability (HRV), high‐sensitivity C‐reactive protein (hs‐CRP) and physical activity (PA) levels measured using accelerometers. A total of 80 healthy university students volunteered to participate in this study (20.56 ± 0.82 years, 1.36 ± 1.5 mg/L of hs‐CRP). The participants were divided into groups based on tertiles of hs‐CRP. Analysis of covariance adjusted to PA was used to assess group differences in HRV. Associations between hs‐CRP, HRV indices and PA were analyzed using Pearson's correlation. The participants at the highest tertile of hs‐CRP (tertile 3) had lower cardiac vagal modulation (SDNN, tertile 1=78.05 ± 5.9,tertile 2=82.43 ± 5.9,tertile 3=56.03 ± 6.1; SD1, tertile 1=61.27 ± 5.3, tertile 2=62.93 ± 5.4, tertile 3=40.03 ± 5.5). In addition, vagal indices were inversely correlated with hs‐CRP but positively correlated with PA (SDNN r=−0.320, SD1 r=−0.377; SDNN r=0.304, SD1 r=0.299; P<0.05). Furthermore, the most physically active subjects had lower levels of hs‐CRP and the highest levels of vagal modulation.