Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On user scheduling for maximum throughput in K-user MISO broadcast channels

This paper studies the sum-capacity of the Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) Gaussian broadcast channel where K single-antenna users are served by a base station with N antennas, with N <; K. The generalized Degrees-of-Freedom (gDoF) for this system is derived as the solution of a Maximum Weighted Bipartite Matching (MWBM) problem, where, roughly speaking, each of the N transmit antennas is assigned to a different user. The MWBM problem inspires a user selection algorithm where a subset of N out of K users is served. The proposed algorithm runs in polynomial-time (rather than involving an exhaustive search among all possible subsets of size N out of K users) and extends the classical DoF analysis to more realistic wireless channel configurations where users can experience very different channel gains from the base station. Extensive numerical simulations, run in practically relevant Rayleigh fading environments for different numbers of users and of antennas, show that the throughput achieved by serving the set of N users selected by the MWBM-based algorithm is at most N log(K) bits away from an outer bound to the sum-capacity, where in principle all the K users are served. Comparisons with another widely used user scheduling algorithm are also provided.
A Novel Approach for Efficient S-Box Design Using Multiple High-Dimensional Chaos

In this paper, a methodology for constructing efficient substitution boxes is proposed. The novel approach taps the features of high-dimensional chaotic systems namely the Chen, the Rossler and the Chua chaotic systems. The trajectories of these continuous-time chaotic systems are modulated randomly for improved randomness. The modulated trajectories are sampled and processed to select dynamically the 8×8 S-box cells. The cryptographic strength of proposed S-box against widely accepted analytical tests such as bijectivity, nonlinearity, strict avalanche criterion and equiprobable input/output XOR distribution is assessed. The performance investigations validate the suitability, consistency and effectiveness of proposed method for the design of strong block cryptosystems. The test results are also compared with some recent chaos-based S-boxes to support the claim.
Modal degeneracy in thermally loaded optical resonators

We characterize thermally-induced effects in an optical resonator illuminated with high-power laser radiation. From thermoelastic deformation of a mirror’s surface, we observe degeneracy of higher-order spatial modes with the fundamental mode that leads to power transmission limits and thermally-induced power fluctuations using a ring resonator with calibrated absorption loss. A model used to predict the thermal distortion shows reasonable agreement with experiments. Predictions for two future upgrades to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) show that coating absorption should be less than 3.8 ppm and 0.44 ppm for Enhanced and Advanced LIGO Fabry-Perot cavities, respectively, to avoid the first higher-order modal degeneracy. c © 2007 Optical Society of America
METHODOLOGICAL FIT IN MANAGEMENT FIELD RESEARCH.

Methodological fit, an implicitly valued attribute of high-quality field research in organizations, has received little attention in the management literature. Fit refers to internal consistency among elements of a research project—research question, prior work, research design, and theoretical contribution. We introduce a contingency framework that relates prior work to the design of a research project, paying particular attention to the question of when to mix qualitative and quantitative data in a single research paper. We discuss implications of the framework for educating new field researchers.
Sequence Features and Subset Selection Technique for the Prediction of Protein Trafficking Phenomenon in Eukaryotic Non Membrane Proteins

Protein trafficking or protein sorting is the mechanism by which a cell transports proteins to the appropriate position in the cell or outside of it. This targeting is based on the information contained in the protein. Many methods predict the subcellular location of proteins in eukaryotes from the sequence information. However, most of these methods use a flat structure to perform prediction. In this work, we introduce ensemble methods to predict locations in the eukaryotic protein-sorting non membrane pathway hierarchically. We used features that were extracted exclusively from full length protein sequences with feature subset selection for classification. Sequence driven features, sequence mapped features and sequence autocorrelation features were tested with ensemble learners and classifier performances were compared with and without feature subset selection technique. This study shows the new features extracted from full length eukaryotic protein sequences are effective at capturing biological features among compartments in eukaryotic non membrane pathways at two levels. Feature subset selection techniques helped to reduce the time taken for building the classification model.
Value of Information Literature Analysis: A Review of Applications in Health Risk Management

This article provides the first comprehensive review of value of information (VOI) analyses related to health risk management published in English in peer-reviewed journals by the end of 2001. VOI analysis represents a decision analytic technique that explicitly evaluates the benefit of collecting additional information to reduce or eliminate uncertainty. Through a content analysis of VOI applications, this article characterizes various attributes of VOI applications, shows the evolution of the methodology and advances in computing tools that allow analysis of increasingly complex problems, and suggests the need for some standardization of reporting methods and results. The authors’ analysis shows a lack of cross-fertilization across topic areas and the tendency of articles to focus on demonstrating the usefulness of the VOI approach rather than applications to actual management decisions. This article provides important insights for VOI applications in medical decision making.
Role of Climate Feedback in El Niño–Like SST Response to Global Warming

AbstractUnder global warming from the doubling of CO2, the equatorial Pacific experiences an El Nino–like warming, as simulated by most global climate models. A new climate feedback and response analysis method (CFRAM) is applied to 10 years of hourly output of the slab ocean model (SOM) version of the NCAR Community Climate System Model, version 3.0, (CCSM3-SOM) to determine the processes responsible for this warming. Unlike the traditional surface heat budget analysis, the CFRAM can explicitly quantify the contributions of each radiative climate feedback and of each physical and dynamical process of a GCM to temperature changes. The mean bias in the sum of partial SST changes due to each feedback derived with CFRAM in the tropical Pacific is negligible (0.5%) compared to the mean SST change from the CCSM3-SOM simulations, with a spatial pattern correlation of 0.97 between the two. The analysis shows that the factors contributing to the El Nino–like SST warming in the central Pacific are different from t.
Urban environment audio simulation for contextual evaluation of Quiet Vehicles' sound design

The silence of Quiet Vehicles ‐ especially, Hybrid or Electric Vehicles ‐ is a crucial issue in terms of safety, ergonomics or even ecology which becomes to be largely studied either in a research or development point of view. Most of the works done in that domain are based on experiments which try to measure presence and emergence of such vehicles in real, or simulated, environment and to evaluate their detectabilty, in the same contexts, while being equipped with extra sounds specifically designed for fulfilling basic functional conditions with regards to nearby pedestrians or other road users. In this necessary experimental workflow, we assume that simulation approach ‐ or, more generally, virtual reality ‐ is a potentially powerful and valid paradigm to test the contextual impact of a large number of propositions and to conduct controled laboratory experiments for evaluation. This paper will then present the first step of the development of an audio simulation based on Ambisonics field recordings in various urban locations, multi-channel audio rendering and mock-up of different audio scenarios for insertion of one or multiple QV sound signatures in a given sound scene. Next steps ‐ together with general stakes and perspectives ‐ of this approach will also be presented and discussed.
Bleeding fragment localization using time domain information for WCE videos

Small intestine bleeding is one of the most common disease in human gastrointestinal tract. The Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) has been an advanced technology to inspect the intestine in recent years. In this paper, a new time domain based method was proposed to locate bleeding fragment in WCE videos. The spatial feature and the time domain information were combined to make the decision. The proposed method consists of four phases: First, dark holes and wrinkle edges of each frame were removed in preprocessing. Second, each frame was segmented into small patches by using super-pixel segmentation. A coarse bleeding region filter was adopted to remove noisy patches. Third, the red ratio feature and the a feature of the WCE images were extracted. Finally, the bleeding fragment was detected based on the temporal red ratio feature and the temporal a features fusion. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves good performance.
Active cells for redundant and configurable articulated structures

The proposed research effort explores the development of active cells—simple contractile electro-mechanical units that can be used as the material basis for larger articulable structures. Each cell, which might be considered a ‘muscle unit,’ consists of a contractile Nitinol Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) core with conductive terminals. Large numbers of these cells might be combined and externally powered to change phase, contracting to either articulate with a large strain or increase the stiffness of the ensemble, depending on the cell design. Unlike traditional work in modular robotics, the approach presented here focuses on cells that have a simplistic design and function, are inexpensive to fabricate, and are eventually scalable to sub-millimeter sizes, working toward our vision of articulated and robotic structures that can be custom-fabricated from large numbers of general cell units, similar to biological structures. In this paper, we present the design of the active cells and demonstrate their usage with three articulated structures built with them.
Social Network Mixing Patterns In Mergers & Acquisitions - A Simulation Experiment

Social Network Mixing Patterns In Mergers & Acquisitions - A Simulation Experiment In the contemporary world of global business and continuously growing competition, organizations tend to use mergers and acquisitions to enforce their position on the market. The future organization's design is a critical success factor in such undertakings. The field of social network analysis can enhance our uderstanding of these processes as it lets us reason about the development of networks, regardless of their origin. The analysis of mixing patterns is particularly useful as it provides an insight into how nodes in a network connect with each other. We hypothesize that organizational networks with compatible mixing patterns will be integrated more successfully. After conducting a simulation experiment, we suggest an integration model based on the analysis of network assortativity. The model can be a guideline for organizational integration, such as occurs in mergers and acquisitions.
Region substitution in video using graph cuts

Frequently, a screen editor have to edit a video shot by cutting parts of a video clip and patching them onto a targeted video. Even though cut-and-paste method is a good one to do so for editing still images, it is not appropriate for the same purpose on editing video clips since the assigned patched area is fixed while contents continuously change. In this paper we propose an automatic video patching method that preserves continuousness at the borders of the patched area by determining appropriate cut masks of every frame using graph cut algorithms. In our algorithm, it does the same thing as cut-and-paste does except that the patched mask is automatically adapted to contents on new frames.
Altimetric sampling and mapping procedures induce spatial and temporal aliasing of the signal – characteristics of these aliasing effects in the Mediterranean Sea

Abstract. This study deals with spatial and temporal aliasing of the sea surface signal and its restitution with altimetric maps of Sea Level Anomalies (SLA) in the Mediterranean Sea. Spatial and temporal altimetry sampling, combined with a mapping process, are unable to restore high-frequency (HF) surface variability. In the Mediterranean Sea, it has been shown that signals whose intervals are less than 30–40 days are largely underestimated, and the residual HF restitution signal contains characteristic errors which make it possible to identify the spatial and temporal sampling of each satellite. The origin of these errors is relatively complex. Three main effects are involved: the sampling of the HF long-wavelength (LW) signal, the correction of this signal's aliasing and the mapping procedure. – The sampling depends on the characteristics of the satellites considered, but generally induces inter-track bias that needs to be corrected before the mapping procedure is applied. – Correcting the aliasing of the HF LW signal, carried out using a barotropic model output and/or an empirical method, is not perfect. In fact, the baroclinic part of the HF LW signal is neglected and the numerical model's capabilities are limited by the spatial resolution of the model and the forcing. The empirical method cannot precisely control the corrected signal. – The mapping process, which is optimised to improve restitution of mesoscale activity, does not propagate the LW signal far from the satellite tracks. Even though these residual errors are very low with respect to the total signal, their signature may be visible on maps of SLAs. However, these errors can be corrected by more careful consideration of their characteristics in terms of spatial distribution induced by altimetric along-track sampling. They can also be attenuated by increasing the altimetric spatial coverage through the merging of different satellites. Ultimately, the HF signal, which is missing in maps of SLA, can be completed using a numerical model in order to estimate the total surface signal. The barotropic HF (
Impact of Change on Organizational Legitimacy: Application to the Bulgarian Wine Sector

Organizational legitimacy can be viewed as conformity to broadly-accepted standards, or institutions. The main question we are looking to answer with the present study is what happens if these standards change? Which legitimacy strategy will organizations adopt? This paper analyzes how institutional changes affect organizational strategies. A framework was designed to take into consideration the types of changes based on the different levels of the institutional environment of a company. A typology of organizational legitimacy strategies was developed based on a qualitative study carried out on the Bulgarian wine sector. The later represents the perfect setting for the present study since both the country as well as the industry encountered major transformations over the last several years. The results show that the type of strategy adopted depends on the type of change as well as the specific organizational characteristics such as organizational size, and also the management style initiated by the CEO. First, regarding their regulatory environment, organizations respond to change either by conforming to the new law, or by creating their own standards in order to conform also to standards established on a global basis. Furthermore, we found that institutional change influences the type of varietals grown. As for the normative aspect, organizations adopt an ‘inside-out strategy’, hence creating the basis for local reputation before expanding and looking for a global presence. Finally, in the context of institutional change, organizations are looking for the most ‘embedded’ anchor-point, represented by the cognitive dimension of legitimacy.
SAW: Java Synchronization Selection from Lock or Software Transactional Memory

To rewrite a sequential program into a concurrent one, the programmer has to enforce atomic execution of a sequence of accesses to shared memory to avoid unexpected inconsistency. There are two means of enforcing this atomicity: one is the use of lock-based synchronization and the other is the use of software transactional memory (STM). However, it is difficult to predict which one is more suitable for an application than the other without trying both mechanisms because their performance heavily depends on the application. We have developed a system named \emph{SAW} that decouples the synchronization mechanism from the application logic of a Java program and enables the programmer to statically select a suitable synchronization mechanism from a lock or an STM. We introduce annotations to specify critical sections and shared objects. In accordance with the annotated source program and the programmer's choice of a synchronization mechanism, SAW generates aspects representing the synchronization processing. By comparing the rewriting cost using SAW and that using individual synchronization mechanism directly, we show that SAW relieves the programmer's burden. Through several benchmarks, we demonstrate that SAW is an effective way of switching synchronization mechanisms according to the characteristics of each application.
A useful relationship between epidemiology and queueing theory

In this paper we establish a relation between the spread of infectious diseases and the dynamics of so called M/G/1 queues with processor sharing. The in epidemiology well known relation between the spread of epidemics and branching processes and the in queueing theory well known relation between M/G/1 queues and birth death processes will be combined to provide a framework in which results from queueing theory can be used in epidemiology and vice versa. In particular, we consider the number of infectious individuals in a standard SIR epidemic model at the moment of the first detection of the epidemic, where infectious individuals are detected at a constant per capita rate. We use a result from the literature on queueing processes to show that this number of infectious individuals is geometrically distributed.
A new approach of hand tracking based on integrated optical flow analyse

In this paper, we focus on the hand tacking with a combinatorial restrained optical flow algorithm instead of the feature point. The movement region of hand is segmented and then searched for the target. A new template is used for hand target recognition on the segmented regions for detecting the ROI. Then optical flow is used to initialize step sizes in a stochastic optimization setting for hand tracking. For decrease the calculation cost, integrated additional information based on image sequence in an edge-based pose estimation computation is adopted as an accessorial instrument. The experimental results achieved show a more significative increase in the tracking speed than classical algorithms.
Market Reaction to Initial Qualified Audit Opinions in an Emerging Market: Evidence from the Shanghai Stock Exchange

This study investigates the valuation effect of modified audit opinions (MAOs) on the emerging Chinese stock market. Here, the term MAO refers to both qualified opinions and unqualified opinions with explanatory note(s). The latter can be considered an alternative form of qualified opinion in China. The institutional setting in China enables us to find compelling evidence in support of the monitoring role of independent auditing as an institution. First, we find a significantly negative association between MAOs and cumulative abnormal returns after controlling for effects of other concurrent announcements. Further, results from a by-year analysis suggest that investors did not reach negative consensus about MAOs' valuation effect until the second year, exhibiting the learning process of a market without prior exposure to MAOs. Second, we do not observe significant differences between market reaction to non-GAAP and GAAP violation related MAOs. Third, no significant difference is found between market reaction to qualified opinions or to unqualified opinions with explanatory note(s).
Characterization of a Novel Transgenic Mouse Tumor Model for Targeting HER2+ Cancer Stem Cells

HER2 is an oncogenic tumor-associated antigen overexpressed in 20-25% of breast cancers, which is associated with increased invasion, metastasis of the disease and resistance to therapy. Recent studies have further shown that HER2 can increase the population of breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs). However, there is currently no in vivo model for the study of HER2+ BCSCs. In this study, we characterized a mouse breast cancer model for HER2+ BCSCs. This was accomplished by inoculating mouse mammary tumor EO771 cells engineered with human wild-type HER2 (EO771E2) into C57BL/6 HER2 transgenic mice to test and confirm the stable human HER2 expression in the model. More importantly, we detected a subpopulation of EO771E2 cells with a high activity of aldehyde dehydrogenases (ALDHhigh). We demonstrated that the isolated ALDHhigh EO771E2 cells possessed key properties of BCSCs including enhanced tumorigenicity, generation of heterogeneous tumors and the capacity to self-renewal in vitro. In conclusion, the tumors formed in C57BL/6 HER2 transgenic mice with EO771E2 cell injection revealed stable and functional human HER2 expression. These tumors contain a subset of ALDHhigh cells which are small in number, but are enriched in cancer stem cells. This model is deemed to be useful for experiments aimed to develop novel treatments to target HER2+ BCSCs.