Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey: PSR J1811-1736, a Pulsar in a Highly Eccentric Binary System

We are undertaking a high-frequency survey of the Galactic plane for radio pulsars, using the 13-element multibeam receiver on the 64-m Parkes radio telescope. We describe briefly the survey system and some of the initial results. PSR J1811−1736, one of the first pulsars discovered with this system, has a rotation period of 104 ms. Subsequent timing observations using the 76-m radio telescope at Jodrell Bank show that it is in an 18.8-d, highly eccentric binary orbit. We have measured the rate of advance of periastron which indicates a total system mass of 2.6±0.9 M⊙, and the minimum companion mass is about 0.7 M⊙. This, the high orbital eccentricity and the recycled nature of the pulsar suggest that this system is composed of two neutron stars, only the fourth or fifth such system known in the disc of the Galaxy.
Virtual reality in the chemical engineering classroom

Virtual reality, VR, is an emerging computer interface that utilizes immersive interactive threedimensional graphics as well as audio, psychology, special hardware, and numerous other mechanisms to produce simulations so realistic that users believe (Eif only for a few momentsE) that what they are experiencing is OrealO [1]. In addition to high-speed graphics, VR can be enhanced through wired clothing, body tracking sensors, tactile and force feedback systems, spatialized sound, and even olfactory displays. Some of the earliest uses of VR have been in medical and military applications, where budgets are large and the consequences of even small errors are sufficient to justify the expense of high-quality equipment and initial software development. More recently VR has been used for computational fluid dynamics visualization, operator training, construction engineering, maintenance planning, and EPA site remediation.
Making MIRACLEs: Interactive translingual search for Cebuano and Hindi

Searching is inherently a user-centered process; people pose the questions for which machines seek answers, and ultimately people judge the degree to which retrieved documents meet their needs. Rapid development of interactive systems that use queries expressed in one language to search documents written in another poses five key challenges: (1) interaction design, (2) query formulation, (3) cross-language search, (4) construction of translated summaries, and (5) machine translation. This article describes the design of MIRACLE, an easily extensible system based on English queries that has previously been used to search French, German, and Spanish documents, and explains how the capabilities of MIRACLE were rapidly extended to accommodate Cebuano and Hindi. Evaluation results for the cross-language search component are presented for both languages, along with results from a brief full-system interactive experiment with Hindi. The article concludes with some observations on directions for further research on interactive cross-language information retrieval.
The human colon cancer methylome shows similar hypo- and hypermethylation at conserved tissue-specific CpG island shores.

Alterations in DNA methylation (DNAm) in cancer have been known for 25 years, including hypomethylation of oncogenes and hypermethylation of tumor suppressor genes1. However, most print, copy, and text and data-mine the content in such documents, the purposes of academic research, subject the Conditions of CpG tissue-specific differentially methylated regions (T-DMRs), cancer-specific differentially methylated regions (C-DMRs), and the latter subdivided into regions of cancer-specific hypermethylation and hypomethylation.
HVD-TLS: A Novel Framework of Thread Level Speculation

The advent of multicore platform brings a great opportunity to speedup sequential program via thread level parallelism. In this paper we have proposed a novel Thread Level Speculation (TLS) framework HVD-TLS. The framework uses heuristic value prediction to improve the speculation accuracy, reduces the rerolling overhead via value checking based correctness checking mechanism. The framework can partition and schedule task on different processor cores dynamically based on runtime information. We have implemented the HVD-TLS in ANSI C and tested its performance on a 4-core platform. The experiments show that the speedup is 2.2 on the average with a speculation depth equaling to 3.
On Approximate Decidability of Minimal Programs

An index e in a numbering of partial-recursive functions is called minimal if every lesser index computes a different function from e. Since the 1960s, it has been known that, in any reasonable programming language, no effective procedure determines whether or not a given index is minimal. We investigate whether the task of determining minimal indices can be solved in an approximate sense. Our first question, regarding the set of minimal indices, is whether there exists an algorithm that can correctly label 1 out of k indices as either minimal or nonminimal. Our second question, regarding the function that computes minimal indices, is whether one can compute a short list of candidate indices that includes a minimal index for a given program. We give negative answers to both questions for the important case of numberings with linearly bounded translators.
Faculteit Economie En Bedrijfskunde Tweekerkenstraat 2 B-9000 Gent an Empirical Evaluation of Rotation-based Ensemble Classifiers for Customer Churn Prediction an Empirical Evaluation of Rotation-based Ensemble Classifiers for Customer Churn Prediction

Several studies have demonstrated the superior performance of ensemble classification algorithms, whereby multiple member classifiers are combined into one aggregated and powerful classification model, over single models. In this paper, two rotation-based ensemble classifiers are proposed as modeling techniques for customer churn prediction. In Rotation Forests, feature extraction is applied to feature subsets in order to rotate the input data for training base classifiers, while RotBoost combines Rotation Forest with AdaBoost. In an experimental validation based on data sets from four real-life customer churn prediction projects, Rotation Forest and RotBoost are compared to a set of well-known benchmark classifiers. Moreover, variations of Rotation Forest and RotBoost are compared, implementing three alternative feature extraction algorithms: Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Sparse Random Projections (SRP). The performance of rotation-based ensemble classifier is found to depend upon (i) the performance criterion used to measure classification performance, and (ii) the implemented feature extraction algorithm. In terms of accuracy, RotBoost outperforms Rotation Forest, but none of the considered variations offers a clear advantage over the benchmark algorithms. However, in terms of AUC and top-decile lift, results clearly demonstrate the competitive performance of Rotation Forests compared to the benchmark algorithms. Moreover, ICA-3 based Rotation Forests outperform all other considered classifiers and are therefore recommended as a well-suited alternative classification technique for the prediction of customer churn that allows for improved marketing decision making.
A Polymorphism in the IL-5 Gene is Associated with Inhibitor Development in Severe Hemophilia A Patients

Objective: A severe complication in the replacement therapy of hemophilia A (HA) patients is the development of alloantibodies (inhibitors) against factor VIII, which neutralizes the substituted factor. The primary genetic risk factors influencing the development of inhibitors are F8 gene mutations. Interleukins and cytokines that are involved in the regulation of B-lymphocyte development are other possible targets as genetic risk factors. This study assesses the possible involvement of 9 selected single nucleotide gene polymorphisms (SNPs) with interleukins (IL-4, IL-5, and IL-10), transforming growth factor beta 1 (TGF-β1), and interferon gamma (IFN-γ) in inhibitor development in severely affected HA patients carrying a null mutation in the F8 gene. Materials and Methods: A total of 173 HA patients were screened for intron 22 inversion and null mutations (nonsense and deletions). Genotyping of a total of 9 SNPs in genes IL-4, IL-5, IL-10, TGF-β1, and IFN-γ in 103 patients and 100 healthy individuals was carried out. Results: An association analysis between 42 inhibitor (+) and 61 inhibitor (-) patients showed a significant association with the T allele of rs2069812 in the IL-5 gene promoter and patients with inhibitors (p=0.0251). The TT genotype was also significantly associated with this group with a p-value of 0.0082, odds ratio of about 7, and confidence interval of over 90%, suggesting that it is the recessive susceptibility allele and that the C allele is the dominant protective allele. Conclusion: The lack of other variants in the IL-5 gene of patients and controls suggests that rs2069812 may be a regulatory SNP and may have a role in B-lymphocyte development, constituting a genetic risk factor in antibody development.
Association of Maternal Smoking With Child Cotinine Levels

Introduction: Our aim was to understand the strength of association between parental smoking and child environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) exposure in order to inform the development of future tobacco control policies. ETS was measured using child cotinine levels below the active smoking threshold. Methods: Participants were drawn from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children and included 3,128 participants at age 7 years and 1,868 participants at age 15 years. The primary outcome was cotinine levels of nonsmoking children, to investigate the relationship between maternal smoking and child cotinine levels. The secondary outcome was cotinine levels of all individuals to investigate the relationship between child smoking and child cotinine levels. Maternal and child smoking behavior was assessed by self-report questionnaire. We adjusted for several sociodemographic variables. Results: We found an association between maternal smoking and child cotinine at age 7 years (mean cotinine = 1.16ng/ml serum, ratio of geometric means = 3.94, 95% CI = 2.86–5.42) and at age 15 years (mean cotinine = 0.94ng/ml serum, ratio of geometric means = 5.26, 95% CI = 3.06–9.03), after adjustment for potential confounders. Conclusions: The magnitude of this association for children whose mothers were heavy smokers was comparable with the quantity of half the levels of cotinine observed among children who were irregular (i.e., nonweekly) active smokers, and it was greater than five times higher than that seen in nonsmoking children whose mothers didn’t smoke. This provides further evidence for the importance of public health interventions to reduce smoking exposure in the home.
Effect of siRNA-Livin on drug resistance to chemotherapy in glioma U251 cells and CD133+ stem cells

The aim of the present study was to observe the effect of siRNA-Livin on the expression of multidrug resistance-associated protein (MRP) genes in a U251 cell line and U251 stem cells. CD133+ cancer stem cells were identified and isolated from the U251 glioblastoma cells, and morphological observations were used to detect the cell survival conditions. In addition, quantitative polymerase chain reaction was used to detect the mRNA expression levels of Livin, MRP1 and MRP3. Following transfection with the lentivirus containing the siRNA-Livin, the expression of Livin was significantly inhibited in the U251 cells and stem cells (P<0.01). Following temozolomide intervention, the proliferation of the U251 cells and U251 stem cells was restrained, with a lot of cell debris present and the structure of the cell spheres destroyed. The inhibitory effect was more significant following transfection with siRNA-Livin. Prior to siRNA-Livin transfection, the expression of MRP1 presented an increasing trend in the U251 cells and U251 stem cells with increasing drug concentrations and intervention times (P<0.05). Following siRNA-Livin transfection, the expression of MRP1 decreased in the U251 cells and U251 stem cells under the same drug concentration and intervention time (P<0.05), while the expression of MRP3 increased in the U251 stem cells under the same intervention concentration and time (P<0.05). Therefore, siRNA-Livin was shown to decrease the expression of MRP1 in U251 cells and U251 stem cells, increase the expression of MRP3 in U251 stem cells and decrease the proliferation of U251 cells and U251 stem cells. Thus, Livin may be associated with the high expression of MRP1, and siRNA-Livin may be used to lower the expression of MRP1 in order to reduce the drug resistance to chemotherapy in cases of glioblastoma.
Cellular/molecular Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid 4 Is Essential in Chemotherapy-induced Neuropathic Pain in the Rat

The development of treatments for neuropathic pain has been hindered by our limited understanding of the basic mechanisms underlying abnormalities in nociceptor hyperexcitability. We recently showed that the polymodal receptor transient receptor potential va-nilloid 4 (TRPV4), a member of the transient receptor potential (TRP) family of ion channels, may play a role in inflammatory pain (Alessandri-Haber et al., 2003). The present study tested whether TRVP4 also contributes to neuropathic pain, using a rat model of Taxol-induced painful peripheral neuropathy. Taxol is the most widely used drug for the treatment of a variety of tumor types, but the dose of Taxol that can be tolerated is limited by the development of a small-fiber painful peripheral neuropathy. We found that Taxol treatment enhanced the nociceptive behavioral responses to both mechanical and hypotonic stimulation of the hind paw. Spinal administration of antisense oligodeoxynucleotides to TRPV4, which reduced the expression of TRPV4 in sensory nerve, abolished Taxol-induced mechanical hyperalgesia and attenuated hypotonic hyperalgesia by 42%. The enhancement of osmotic noci-ception involves sensitization of osmotransduction in primary afferents because osmotransduction was enhanced in cultured sensory neurons isolated from Taxol-treated rats. Taxol-induced TRPV4-mediated hyperalgesia and the enhanced osmotransduction in cultured nociceptors were dependent on integrin/Src tyrosine kinase signaling. These results suggest that TRPV4 plays a crucial role in a painful peripheral neuropathy, making it a very promising target for the development of a novel class of analgesics.
Graph Partitioning : A Heuristic Procedure to Partition Network Graphs

iii LIST OF FIGURES.iv INTRODUCTION.1 Scope and Motivation.1 Basic Definitions.2 GRAPH PARTITIONING PROBLEM.4 Classes of Network Partition.5 Clique Partition Problem.5 Equipartition Problem.5 K-way Equipartition Problem.5 K-way Partition Problem.5 Capacitated Partitioning Problem.6 Maxcut Problem.6 Previous Attempts.7 Random Solutions.7 Max Flow-Min Cut.7 Clustering.8 λ-opting.9 2-WAY UNIFORM PARTITION.10 Introduction.10 Phase 1 Partition.12 Effectiveness of the Procedure.15 Running Time of the Procedure.16 Improving Phase 1 Partition.19 Partitioning Unequal Sized Sets.21 Modified Task Performed.22 CONCLUSION.29 REFERENCES.31
Ocelot: A dynamic optimization framework for bulk-synchronous applications in heterogeneous systems

Ocelot is a dynamic compilation framework designed to map the explicitly data parallel execution model used by NVIDIA CUDA applications onto diverse multithreaded platforms. Ocelot includes a dynamic binary translator from Parallel Thread eXecution ISA (PTX) to many-core processors that leverages the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) code generator to target x86 and other ISAs. The dynamic compiler is able to execute existing CUDA binaries without recompilation from source and supports switching between execution on an NVIDIA GPU and a many-core CPU at runtime. It has been validated against over 130 applications taken from the CUDA SDK, the UIUC Parboil benchmarks [1], the Virginia Rodinia benchmarks [2], the GPU-VSIPL signal and image processing library [3], the Thrust library [4], and several domain specific applications. This paper presents a high level overview of the implementation of the Ocelot dynamic compiler highlighting design decisions and trade-offs, and showcasing their effect on application performance. Several novel code transformations are explored that are applicable only when compiling explicitly parallel applications and traditional dynamic compiler optimizations are revisited for this new class of applications. This study is expected to inform the design of compilation tools for explicitly parallel programming models (such as OpenCL) as well as future CPU and GPU architectures.
TEMPORAL AND TONAL ASPECTS OF CHINESE SYLLABLES: A CORPUS-BASED COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MANDARIN AND CANTONESE

Previous studies on temporal and tonal aspects of languages are usually based on limited data from a small number of subjects. It is difficult to know whether these findings can really represent the general temporal and tonal aspects of continuous speech, or just the speech of the specific subjects involved. Because of this difficulty it may not be appropriate to directly apply these findings to current speech technologies. In this study, large vocabulary continuous speech databases for Mandarin and Cantonese, recorded from large populations of subjects, are used to investigate the temporal and tonal aspects of syllables in continuous speech. Our findings include the following. No obvious temporal compensation effect has been found between the syllable initial (null initial being the sole exception) and the syllable final; Cantonese syllables exhibit less variation than Mandarin, achieving better isochrony. Then, following the example of the vowel balloons pioneered by Peterson and Barney, the tones of Mandarin and Cantonese with two parameters: F0 height and F0 slope, have been analyzed. Some linguistic hypotheses for tone development are advanced in the discussion of the tone balloons.
The IRMA Reference Database and Its Use for Content-Based Image Retrieval in Medical Applications

In medical image processing and analysis, a steadily growing demand on well defined references is inherent. Reference images are linked to pre-defined semantics and usually called ground truth or gold standard. In [1], it has been pointed out that a gold standard must be (i) reliable in itself, which means that manually drawn regions, manual selections, or manual classifications usually should not be referred to as gold standard since they may vary according to the non-reproducible interaction of humans, (ii) generated or obtained independently from the procedure to be evaluated, which means, for instance, that the same image should not be used both for training or parameter optimization of the algorithm and for its evaluation, and (iii) sufficiently reflecting the effect to be evaluated, which means, in particular, that a gold standard must reflect the manifold of appearances of the diagnostic imagery. With respect to the large variability of medical images having been acquired in clinical routine, a sufficient number of references is necessary. Most frequently, image processing algorithms developed for medical applications are evaluated on an insufficient number of images or based on images violating one or more criteria of a gold standard. Consequently, published algorithms of computerassisted image analysis often lack in accuracy, robustness, or applicability. With respect to the evaluation of computational methods of data mining or contentbased access to medical images, an even larger set of gold standards is required. Beside the collection of the image data, a reliable labelling with the pre-defined semantics is required. In this paper, we describe the methods developed by the image retrieval in medical applications (IRMA, http://irma-project.org) project [2] to establish a reference database and its use to evaluate computer algorithms for automatic categorization of medical images.
A provably convergent alternating minimization method for mean field inference

Mean-Field is an efficient way to approximate a posterior distribution in complex graphical models and constitutes the most popular class of Bayesian variational approximation methods. In most applications, the mean field distribution parameters are computed using an alternate coordinate minimization. However, the convergence properties of this algorithm remain unclear. In this paper, we show how, by adding an appropriate penalization term, we can guarantee convergence to a critical point, while keeping a closed form update at each step. A convergence rate estimate can also be derived based on recent results in non-convex optimization.
Local Search for Balanced Submodular Clusterings

In this paper, we consider the problem of producing balanced clusterings with respect to a submodular objective function. Submodular objective functions occur frequently in many applications, and hence this problem is broadly applicable. We show that the results of Patkar and Narayanan [8] can be applied to cases when the submodular function is derived from a bipartite object-feature graph, and moreover, in this case we have an efficient flow based algorithm for finding local improvements. We show the effectiveness of this approach by applying it to the clustering of words in language models.
A Framework for Integrating Symbolic and Sub-Symbolic Representations

This paper establishes a framework that hierarchically integrates symbolic and sub-symbolic representations in an architecture for cognitive robotics. It is formalised abstractly as nodes in a hierarchy, with each node a sub-task that maintains its own belief-state and generates behaviour. An instantiation is developed for a real robot building towers of blocks, subject to human interference; this hierarchy uses a node with a concurrent multi-tasking teleo-reactive program, a node embedding a physics simulator to provide spatial knowledge, and nodes for sensor processing and robot control.