Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Jagged Cliffs and Stumbling Blocks: Interest Rate Pass-Through Fragmentation During the Euro Area Crisis

The financial crisis has been characterised by fragmentation in the transmission of monetary policy, reflected in high dispersion in the cost of bank finance for euro area firms. This paper shows the first results using a new micro dataset on euro area banks to identify individual bank balance sheet characteristics that have contributed to this fragmentation. Interest rate pass-through heterogeneity is estimated using an error correction framework, which captures banks’ funding constraints and balance sheet structures. Our results show incomplete pass-through of changes in money market rates targeted by the central bank to firms’ lending rates charged by banks over the crisis, with increases in sovereign bond yields affecting the cost of finance for firms, particularly in stressed countries. We find that individual bank characteristics have an effect on the pass-through of policy rate cuts over the crisis, even after we control for changes in macroeconomic conditions across countries. The effect is greatest when looking at characteristics that capture bank funding difficulties, with riskier banks transmitting less of the policy rate cuts through to firms. This suggests that a recovery in banks’ balance sheets,funding capacities and risk perception will help reduce fragmentation in the transmission of monetary policy.
AESSE: a cold-boot resistant implementation of AES

Cold boot attacks exploit the fact that memory contents fade with time and that most of them can be retrieved after a short power-down (reboot). These attacks aim at retrieving encryption keys from memory to thwart disk drive encryption. We present a method to implement disk drive encryption that is resistant to cold boot attacks. More specifically, we implemented AES and integrated it into the Linux kernel in such a way that neither the secret key nor any parts of it leave the processor. To achieve this, we used the SSE (streaming SIMD extensions) available in modern Intel processors in a non-standard way. We show that the performance penalty is acceptable and present a brief security analysis of the system.
Does loss of nerve growth factor receptors precede loss of cholinergic neurons in Alzheimer's disease? An autoradiographic study in the human striatum and basal forebrain

The mechanism by which cholinergic neurons degenerate in Alzheimer's disease is not known. Some of these neurons depend, however, on trophic support from NGF via a membrane receptor. We have analyzed the state of these receptors by autoradiography, with 125I-NGF as the ligand, in the caudate nucleus, putamen, ventral striatum, nucleus basalis of Meynert, and nucleus tegmenti pedunculopontinus of six patients with Alzheimer's disease and five controls, matched for age and postmortem delay. The binding characteristics were similar in the striatum (including caudate nucleus, putamen, and ventral striatum) and basal forebrain of control subjects and patients with Alzheimer's disease (Kd = 2.5-4 x 10(-11) M). In control brains, high levels of 125I-NGF binding were observed in the basal forebrain and striatum (0.32–0.49 fmol/mg tissue equivalent), but no specific binding was detected in the nucleus tegmenti pedunculopontinus. NGF binding sites were distributed heterogeneously in the striatum with patches of low density, corresponding to AChE-poor striosomes, surrounded by a matrix in which receptor density was significantly greater. In Alzheimer's disease, the density of NGF receptors was markedly decreased in the caudate nucleus, putamen, ventral striatum, and nucleus basalis of Meynert. In contrast, AChE staining decreased less in the nucleus basalis of Meynert in all Alzheimer's disease patients, and in the ventral striatum of those most severely affected. These results indicate that if NGF receptors are located on cholinergic neurons, receptor loss and the consequent decrease in trophic support may precede cell degeneration in Alzheimer's disease. The relationship between the loss of these receptors and the pathogenesis of the disease remains to be determined.
Continuous range monitoring of moving objects in road networks

A set of distributed continual range query requests, each defining a geographical region of interest, needs to be periodically reevaluated to provide up to date answers. Processing these continual queries efficiently and incrementally becomes important for location based services and applications. In this paper, we propose an efficient incremental method for continuous range query characterized by mobility of objects which follow paths in an underlying spatial road network. We notice that both queries and moving objects can be attached to the road link for updating of query answers. By using Grid R∗-tree which indexing spatial road network data, query requests and moving objects register themselves to corresponding road links according to query areas and moving object locations on the network. Also we analyzed the impacts to query answers caused by geometry relation of road link and query area and state of moving objects. Then we proposed an efficient update algorithm and corresponding memory data structures based on spatial and state classification which formed a safe region to avoid unnecessary updates. Finally a comprehensive experimental evaluation using real data has been conducted to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithm.
Fast and robust mapping with low-cost Kinect V2 for photovoltaic panel cleaning robot

Solar photovoltaic system maybe underperformanned because of too much dust, dirt and bird droppings, etc. 3D mapping for the cleaning robot still remains challenging in this large scale scenario. This paper presents a robust mapping system with Kinect V2 for automated photovoltaic cleaning system. Firstly, Kinect V2 is well-calibrated for a remedy to the production variety and the approach is fast and accurate. Secondly, robust mapping algorithm is proposed with the consideration of vibration, occlusion and loop closure. Globally consistent 3D map will be built after online loop detection. And lastly, 3D pointcloud will be transformed into octree-based data structure. The data is easy to save, reload and more suitable for motion planning problem. Extensive experimental results show that the system is robust with enough accuracy for automated motion planning and navigation.
Wireless Mesh Network Capacity Achievable Over the CSMA/CA MAC

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the maximum throughput of a wireless mesh backhaul network that is achievable over a practical carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) medium access control (MAC) protocol. We resort to the multicommodity flow (MCF) formulation augmented with the conflict-graph constraints, whereas we use a novel approach to take into account the collision overhead in the distributed CSMA/CA MAC. Such overhead due to random access has been ignored by existing MCF-based capacity studies, which assume impractical centralized scheduling and result in aggressive capacity planning, which is unachievable over the CSMA/CA MAC. This paper makes the following three main contributions: 1) we develop a generic method of integrating the CSMA/CA MAC analysis with the MCF formulation for optimal network capacity analysis, which readily generates an upper bound of the network throughput; 2) we define a new concept of CSMA/CA clique and theoretically study its relationship to a CSMA/CA area in terms of throughput; and 3) using the CSMA/CA clique as a tool, we derive a lower bound of the network throughput achievable over the CSMA/CA MAC by clique-based MCF formulation. NS-2 simulation results are presented to demonstrate the tightness of the upper and lower bounds that are newly developed, compared to those based on the MCF formulation assuming a slotted system and centralized scheduling.
Interpretation of Meaningful Expressions by Integrating Gesture and Posture Modalities

Integration of different modalities aims to increase the robustness of a system and improves its performance in an unconstrained environment. With this motivation, this research is focused on integrating two modalities such as hand gesture and posture in a unified framework where the criterion is measured by employing Particle Filter system. The proposed framework has two main modules: 1) Gesture and posture recognition system, and 2) Particle filter based integration of these systems by incorporating CFG rules. In first module, the gesture and posture features are extracted and classified by HMM and SVM respectively. In the second module, the integration is carried by mapping the classification outcome on Particle filter system which acts as contribution-weight at decision level. Moreover, to infer and extract the “meaningful expressions” from the input sequence based on their contribution-weights, we have exploited regular grammar and developed the production rules using context free grammar (CFG) for our test scenario (i.e. a restaurant). Experiments are conducted on 500 different combinations of restaurant orders with the overall 98.3% inference accuracy whereas the classification accuracy of gesture and posture recognition is approximately 98.6% which proves the significance of proposed approach.
Using Binoculars for Fast Exploration and Map Construction in Chordal Graphs and Extensions

We investigate the exploration and mapping of anonymous graphs by a mobile agent. It is long known that, without global information about the graph, it is not possible to make the agent halt after the exploration except if the graph is a tree. We therefore endow the agent with binoculars, a sensing device that can show the local structure of the environment at a constant distance of the agent's current location and investigate networks that can be efficiently explored in this setting. In the case of trees, the exploration without binoculars is fast (i.e. using a DFS traversal of the graph, there is a number of moves linear in the number of nodes). We consider here the family of Weetman graphs that is a generalization of the standard family of chordal graphs and present a new deterministic algorithm that realizes Exploration of any Weetman graph, without knowledge of size or diameter and for any port numbering. The number of moves is linear in the number of nodes, despite the fact that Weetman graphs are not sparse, some having a number of edges that is quadratic in the number of nodes. At the end of the Exploration, the agent has also computed a map of the anonymous graph.
Eigenvalue enclosures and applications to the Maxwell operator

In this work we discuss the numerical estimation of the eigenfrequencies and field phasors of the resonant cavity problem on a bounded region filled with a possibly anisotropic medium. We present a general framework which allows finding lower and upper bounds for the eigenfrequencies, hence providing a computable residual and multiplicity counting. We establish precise rates of convergence of the method in general, and show that this rate is optimal for trial spaces of standard nodal finite elements. In the final part of the paper we include a reproducible computational procedure and then report on various numerical experiments performed on two and three-dimensional benchmark geometries, with and without symmetries.
SLC30A3 Responds to Glucose- and Zinc Variations in ß-Cells and Is Critical for Insulin Production and In Vivo Glucose-Metabolism During ß-Cell Stress

Background Ion transporters of the Slc30A- (ZnT-) family regulate zinc fluxes into sub-cellular compartments. β-cells depend on zinc for both insulin crystallization and regulation of cell mass. Methodology/Principal Findings This study examined: the effect of glucose and zinc chelation on ZnT gene and protein levels and apoptosis in β-cells and pancreatic islets, the effects of ZnT-3 knock-down on insulin secretion in a β-cell line and ZnT-3 knock-out on glucose metabolism in mice during streptozotocin-induced β-cell stress. In INS-1E cells 2 mM glucose down-regulated ZnT-3 and up-regulated ZnT-5 expression relative to 5 mM. 16 mM glucose increased ZnT-3 and decreased ZnT-8 expression. Zinc chelation by DEDTC lowered INS-1E insulin content and insulin expression. Furthermore, zinc depletion increased ZnT-3- and decreased ZnT-8 gene expression whereas the amount of ZnT-3 protein in the cells was decreased. Zinc depletion and high glucose induced apoptosis and necrosis in INS-1E cells. The most responsive zinc transporter, ZnT-3, was investigated further; by immunohistochemistry and western blotting ZnT-3 was demonstrated in INS-1E cells. 44% knock-down of ZnT-3 by siRNA transfection in INS-1E cells decreased insulin expression and secretion. Streptozotocin-treated mice had higher glucose levels after ZnT-3 knock-out, particularly in overt diabetic animals. Conclusion/Significance Zinc transporting proteins in β-cells respond to variations in glucose and zinc levels. ZnT-3, which is pivotal in the development of cellular changes as also seen in type 2 diabetes (e.g. amyloidosis in Alzheimer's disease) but not previously described in β-cells, is present in this cell type, up-regulated by glucose in a concentration dependent manner and up-regulated by zinc depletion which by contrast decreased ZnT-3 protein levels. Knock-down of the ZnT-3 gene lowers insulin secretion in vitro and affects in vivo glucose metabolism after streptozotocin treatment.
CLEF 2008 : Using Association Rules for Cross-Language Information Retrieval

For UFRGS’s participation on the TEL task at CLEF2008, our aim was to assess the validity of using algorithms for mining association rules to find mappings between concepts on a Cross-Language Information Retrieval scenario. Our approach requires a sample of parallel documents to serve as the basis for the generation of the association rules. The results of the experiments show that the performance of our approach is not statistically different from the monolingual baseline in terms of mean average precision. This is an indication that association rules can be effectively used to map concepts between languages. We have also tested a modification to BM25 that aims at increasing the weight of rare terms. The results show that this modified version achieved better performance. The improvements were considered to be statistically significant in terms of MAP on our monolingual runs.
Deadlock avoidance for switches based on wormhole networks

We consider the use of wormhole routed networks as internal interconnects of switches. The interconnection of two wormhole networks that are free from deadlocks does not necessarily produce a deadlock free network. This is problematic when wormhole networks are used as switch-internal fabrics, because it severely restricts the possibilities for coupling the switches together. This paper presents a theory that can be effectively used to control this phenomenon caused by aggregated dependencies. We show that all aggregated dependencies can be removed from wormhole networks by careful inclusion of a limited number of virtual channels.
Chronic Suppression of Inositol 1,4,5-Triphosphate Receptor-Mediated Calcium Signaling in Cerebellar Purkinje Cells Alleviates Pathological Phenotype in Spinocerebellar Ataxia 2 Mice

Spinocerebellar ataxia 2 (SCA2) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive ataxia. SCA2 results from a poly(Q) (polyglutamine) expansion in the cytosolic protein ataxin-2 (Atx2). Cerebellar Purkinje cells (PCs) are primarily affected in SCA2, but the cause of PC dysfunction and death in SCA2 is poorly understood. In previous studies, we reported that mutant but not wild-type Atx2 specifically binds the inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor (InsP3R) and increases its sensitivity to activation by InsP3. We further proposed that the resulting supranormal calcium (Ca2+) release from the PC endoplasmic reticulum plays a key role in the development of SCA2 pathology. To test this hypothesis, we achieved a chronic suppression of InsP3R-mediated Ca2+ signaling by adenoassociated virus-mediated expression of the inositol 1,4,5-phosphatase (Inpp5a) enzyme (5PP) in PCs of a SCA2 transgenic mouse model. We determined that recombinant 5PP overexpression alleviated age-dependent dysfunction in the firing pattern of SCA2 PCs. We further discovered that chronic 5PP overexpression also rescued age-dependent motor incoordination and PC death in SCA2 mice. Our findings further support the important role of supranormal Ca2+ signaling in SCA2 pathogenesis and suggest that partial inhibition of InsP3-mediated Ca2+ signaling could provide therapeutic benefit for the patients afflicted with SCA2 and possibly other SCAs.
RID: Finding Reference Count Bugs with Inconsistent Path Pair Checking

Reference counts are widely used in OS kernels for resource management. However, reference counts are not trivial to be used correctly in large scale programs because it is left to developers to make sure that an increment to a reference count is always paired with a decrement. This paper proposes inconsistent path pair checking, a novel technique that can statically discover bugs related to reference counts without knowing how reference counts should be changed in a function. A prototype called RID is implemented and evaluations show that RID can discover more than 80 bugs which were confirmed by the developers in the latest Linux kernel. The results also show that RID tends to reveal bugs caused by developers' misunderstanding on API specifications or error conditions that are not handled properly.
Identification of Salt-Stress-Induced Genes from the RNA-Seq Data of Reaumuria trigyna Using Differential-Display Reverse Transcription PCR

Next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have been used to generate huge amounts of sequencing data from many organisms. However, the correct choice of candidate genes and prevention of false-positive results computed from digital gene expression (DGE) of RNA-seq data are vital when using these genetic resources. We indirectly identified 18 salt-stress-induced Reaumuria trigyna transcripts from the transcriptome sequencing data using differential-display reverse transcription PCR (DDRT-PCR) combined with local BLAST searches. Highly consistent with the DGE results, the quantitative real-time PCR expression patterns of these transcripts showed strong upregulation by salt stress, suggesting that these genes may play important roles in R. trigyna's survival under high-salt environments. The method presented here successfully identified responsive genes from the massive amount of RNA-seq data. Thus, we suggest that DDRT-PCR could be employed to mine NGS data in a wide range of applications in transcriptomic studies. In addition, the genes identified in the present study are promising candidates for further elucidation of the salt tolerance mechanisms in R. trigyna.
SMCA: a general model for mining asynchronous periodic patterns in temporal databases

Mining periodic patterns in time series databases is an important data mining problem with many applications. Previous studies have considered synchronous periodic patterns where misaligned occurrences are not allowed. However, asynchronous periodic pattern mining has received less attention and only been discussed for a sequence of symbols where each time point contains one event. In this paper, we propose a more general model of asynchronous periodic patterns from a sequence of symbol sets where a time slot can contain multiple events. Three parameters min/spl I.bar/rep, max/spl I.bar/dis, and global/spl I.bar/rep are employed to specify the minimum number of repetitions required for a valid segment of nondisrupted pattern occurrences, the maximum allowed disturbance between two successive valid segments, and the total repetitions required for a valid sequence. A 4-phase algorithm is devised to discover periodic patterns from a time series database presented in vertical format. The experiments demonstrate good performance and scalability with large frequent patterns.
Cerberus ’ 08 2-Legged Team Description Paper

“Cerberus” has been competing in the 4-Legged league since R oboCup 2001 competition [1]. Boğaziçi University has a strong research group in AI. The int roduction of Robocup as a unifying theme for different areas of study in au tonomous robots has attracted many talented students and accelerated research fforts with more than 40 journal and conference papers. Until 2008, the department h ad eams both in Robocup four legged and rescue simulation leagues. Together with th e introduction of the new humanoid robot Nao as the new standard platform as a replacem ent for Aibo, the team now has a new challenge to make the robots play soccer in a more “humanlike” manner and the opportunity to test the methods developed for bip edal walking and control against other teams. Bo ğaziçi University is collaborating with Işık University . The variety of robotic platforms that the team has worked on so far als o brought the necessity to develop a platform-independent robotics library details o f which will be also provided in this document. The rest of the document provides information about researc h done by our team in various fields of AI and robotics which we apply to the new plat form for playing soccer such as, vision, localization, locomotion, and planning an d coordination/cooperation.
ATPase-Independent Type-III Protein Secretion in Salmonella enterica

Type-III protein secretion systems are utilized by gram-negative pathogens to secrete building blocks of the bacterial flagellum, virulence effectors from the cytoplasm into host cells, and structural subunits of the needle complex. The flagellar type-III secretion apparatus utilizes both the energy of the proton motive force and ATP hydrolysis to energize substrate unfolding and translocation. We report formation of functional flagella in the absence of type-III ATPase activity by mutations that increased the proton motive force and flagellar substrate levels. We additionally show that increased proton motive force bypassed the requirement of the Salmonella pathogenicity island 1 virulence-associated type-III ATPase for secretion. Our data support a role for type-III ATPases in enhancing secretion efficiency under limited secretion substrate concentrations and reveal the dispensability of ATPase activity in the type-III protein export process.