Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design and Development of an Online Computational Framework to Facilitate Language Comprehension Research on Indian Languages

In this paper we have developed an open-source online computational framework that can be used by different research groups to conduct reading researches on Indian language texts. The framework can be used to develop a large annotated Indian language text comprehension data from different user based experiments. The novelty in this framework lies in the fact that it brings different empirical data-collection techniques for text comprehension under one roof. The framework has been customized specifically to address language particularities for Indian languages. It will also offer many types of automatic analysis on the data at different levels such as full text, sentence and word level. To address the subjectivity of text difficulty perception, the framework allows to capture user background against multiple factors. The assimilated data can be automatically cross referenced against varying strata of readers.
Expression of Integrin αvβ3 in Gliomas Correlates with Tumor Grade and Is not Restricted to Tumor Vasculature

In malignant gliomas, the integrin adhesion receptors seem to play a key role for invasive growth and angiogenesis. However, there is still a controversy about the expression and the distribution of αvβ3 integrin caused by malignancy. The aim of our study was to assess the extent and pattern of αvβ3 integrin expression within primary glioblastomas (GBMs) compared with low‐grade gliomas (LGGs). Tumor samples were immunostained for the detection of αvβ3 integrin and quantified by an imaging software. The expression of αvβ3 was found to be significantly higher in GBMs than in LGGs, whereby focal strong reactivity was restricted to GBMs only. Subsequent analysis revealed that not only endothelial cells but also, to a large extent, glial tumor cells contribute to the overall amount of αvβ3 integrin in the tumors. To further analyze the integrin subunits, Western blots from histologic sections were performed, which demonstrated a significant difference in the expression of the β3 integrin subunit between GBMs and LGGs. The presented data lead to new insights in the pattern of αvβ3 integrin in gliomas and are of relevance for the inhibition of αvβ3 integrin with specific RGD peptides and interfering drugs to reduce angiogenesis and tumor growth.
On the development of e-business strategies: an integrated fuzzy logic and game theoretic approach

This paper presents a methodology to formulate business strategies for the web-based markets. We focus on strategies that involve decisions made by companies about the selection of the appropriate products to be launched on the web, as well as decisions about the right timing to do so. Our approach builds on the concept of a product's market value. The linguistic or imprecise perception of the customers on the product attributes is handled by using Fuzzy Sets theory, while the problem of exploration and resolution of the strategic issues involved is addressed through a Game Theoretic analysis.
An Ontology-Based Methodology for the Migration of Biomedical Terminologies to Electronic Health Records

Biomedical terminologies are focused on what is general, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) on what is particular, and it is commonly assumed that the step from the one to the other is unproblematic. We argue that this is not so, and that, if the EHR of the future is to fulfill its promise, then the foundations of both EHR architectures and biomedical terminologies need to be reconceived. We accordingly describe a new framework for the treatment of both generals and particulars in biomedical information systems that is designed: 1) to provide new opportunities for the sharing and management of data within and between healthcare institutions, 2) to facilitate interoperability among different terminology and record systems, and thereby 3) to allow new kinds of reasoning with biomedical data.
Critical Point Representations of Electron Density Maps for the Comparison of Benzodiazepine-Type Ligands

A procedure for the comparison of three-dimensional electron density distributions is proposed for similarity searches between pharmacological ligands at various levels of crystallographic resolution. First, a graph representation of molecular electron density distributions is generated using a critical point analysis approach. Pairwise as well as multiple comparisons between the obtained graphs of critical points are then carried out using a Monte Carlo/simulated annealing technique, and results are compared with genetic algorithm solutions.
MURU: A Multi-Hop Routing Protocol for Urban Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are going to be an important communication infrastructure in our life. Because of high mobility and frequent link disconnection, it becomes quite challenging to establish a robust multi-hop path that helps packet delivery from the source to the destination. This paper presents a multi-hop routing protocol, called MURU that is able to find robust paths in urban VANETs to achieve high end-to-end packet delivery ratio with low overhead. MURU tries to minimize the probability of path breakage by exploiting mobility information of each vehicle in VANETs. A new metric called expected disconnection degree (EDD) is used to select the most robust path from the source to the destination. MURU is fully distributed and does not incur much overhead, which makes MURU highly scalable for VANETs. The design is sufficiently justified through theoretical analysis and the protocol is evaluated with extensive simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that MURU significantly outperforms existing ad hoc routing protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio, packet delay and control overhead
A computational model for repeated pattern perception using frieze and wallpaper groups

Humans have an innate ability to perceive symmetry, but it is not obvious how to automate this powerful insight. In this paper the mathematical theory of frieze and wallpaper groups is used to extract visually meaningful building blocks (motifs) from a repeated pattern. A novel peak detection algorithm based on "regions of dominance" is used to automatically detect the underlying translational lattice of a repeated pattern. Following automatic classification of the pattern's symmetry group, knowledge of the interplay between rotation, reflection, glide-reflection and translation in that group leads to a small set of candidate motifs that exhibit local symmetry consistent with the global symmetry of the entire pattern. Although other work has addressed detection of the translational lattice of a repeated pattern, ours is the first to seek a principled method for determining a representative motif. Experiments show that the-resulting pattern motifs conform well with human perception.
Non Linear Techniques for Increasing Harvesting Energy from Piezoelectric and Electromagnetic Micro-Power-Generators

Non-linear techniques are used to optimize the harvested energy from piezoelectric and electromagnetic generators. This paper introduces an analytical study for the voltage amplification obtained from these techniques. The analytical study is experimentally validated using a macro model of piezoelectric generator. Moreover, the integration influences on these techniques is studied. Through all the obtained results, a suitable structure for autonomous microsystems is proposed.
A Rewriting Logic Approach to OWL-S Composite Process Formal Specification

OWL-S is one of the leading standards for the description of Web services on the Semantic Web. However its composite process specification is lack of precise mathematic semantic which leads the process specification described in OWL-S is only a semi-formal one, and canpsilat do reasoning and formal analysis in this part. This paper proposes a formal framework for enriching composite process description with rewriting logic that facilitates compositional reasoning about services in OWL-S composite process model. The technique is based on Maude language, a rewriting logic based methodology in which formal modeling and analysis can be used from the earliest phases of system design to uncover many errors and inconsistencies in composition, and to reach high assurance for critical components with runtime verification of OWL-S composite process specification.
Biological behavior of malignant melanoma cells correlated to their survival in vivo.

Successive B16 melanoma tumor lines were selected for their ability to form pulmonary tumor nodules. This was accomplished by injecting tumor cells i.v. into syngeneic C57BL/6 mice and 2 to 3 weeks later collecting the secondary tumor growths and placing them into tissue culture. These tumor cells were then injected i.v. into new syngeneic mice and the process was repeated several times. With each successive tumor line the number of experimental lung tumor nodules was significantly increased. The B16 lines were found to be stable in their metastatic properties even after many subculturings in vitro. These studies demonstrated that tumor cells that succeed in forming pulmonary tumor colonies also had increased invasive properties into normal tissues when implanted s.c. In addition, the tumor cell lines were prelabeled in vitro with [125-I]-5-iodo-2'-deoxyuridine and suspensions of labeled cells were injected i.v. into normal syngeneic hosts. Animals were killed at intervals afterwards, and the lungs and blood were processed and monitored for radioactivity. At any time interval, the lungs of mice treated by injections of cells of high metastatic yield contained more tumor cells. The differences in tumor cell numbers in the lungs were most pronounced immediately following i.v. injection. These results suggest that an increased initial arrest of highly metastatic cells in a capillary bed may be a major factor in their increased survival. Low numbers of normal lymphocytes or lymphocytes from syngeneic mice immunized to the B16 melanoma, when mixed in vitro with the tumor cells, lead to the formation of multitumor cell-lymphocyte clumps. The degree of clumping was related to both the type of the metastatic tumor line and/or the syngeneic lymphocyte. These results support the hypothesis that the survival of invasive and/or circulating malignant tumor cells is not a random phenomenon; rather it appears that malignant cells possess unique qualities which allow for their survival.
Teleimmersion and Visualization with the OptIPuter

The OptIPuter is a radical distributed visualization, teleimmersion, data mining and computing architecture. Observing that the exponential growth rates in bandwidth and storage are now much higher than Moore's Law, this major new project of several US universities in Southern California and Illinois "goes to the end of the rainbow" to exploit a new world in which the central architectural element is optical networking, not computers. This transition is caused by the use of parallelism, as in supercomputing a decade ago. However, this time the parallelism is in multiple wavelengths of light, or lambdas, on single optical fibers, creating supernetworks. The OptIPuter project aims to re- optimize the entire Grid stack of software abstractions, to learn how, as George Gilder suggests, to "waste" bandwidth and storage in order to conserve increasingly "scarce" high-end computing and people time in this new world of inverted values.
P 2 P Based Decentralized Dynamic Replica Placement Strategy in Grid Environment

A big challenge to the grid computing is the communication on the network. The proper placement for replicas on multiple nodes in P2P or grid environment is an effective way to decrease network cost and improve communication efficiency. The unstable peers, networks, and fluctuant user access mode in the distributed environment make replica placement optimization difficult. We construct a network cost model and a decentralized algorithm to dynamically optimize the placement of replicas in a data grid based on P2P technology. We emphasize a proper system sensibility to adapt to the changing system status including both network status and diverse user access mode, which gives a better tradeoff between optimization and optimization overhead on network cost. According to our data grid project, a group of evaluation results are analyzed to describe our cost model and decentralized algorithm. We study the effects on network cost from different configurations of sensitive factor values in our system, which is the threshold for the decision-making algorithm to move replicas. Our results show that the data access and transfer cost on network in our system is close to the theoretical optimal value and better than traditional random or static method in a dynamic environment.
Scaling HTM-Supported Database Transactions to Many Cores

So far, transactional memory-although a promising technique-suffered from the absence of an efficient hardware implementation. Intel's Haswell microarchitecture introduced hardware transactional memory (HTM) in mainstream CPUs. HTM allows for efficient concurrent, atomic operations, which is also highly desirable in the context of databases. On the other hand, HTM has several limitations that, in general, prevent a one-to-one mapping of database transactions to HTM transactions. In this work, we devise several building blocks that can be used to exploit HTM in main-memory databases. We show that HTM allows for achieving nearly lock-free processing of database transactions by carefully controlling the data layout and the access patterns. The HTM component is used for detecting the (infrequent) conflicts, which allows for an optimistic, and thus very low-overhead execution of concurrent transactions. We evaluate our approach on a four-core desktop and a 28-core server system and find that HTM indeed provides a scalable, powerful, and easy to use synchronization primitive.
User recruitment for mobile crowdsensing over opportunistic networks

We look into the realization of mobile crowdsensing campaigns that draw on the opportunistic networking paradigm, as practised in delay-tolerant networks but also in the emerging device-to-device communication mode in cellular networks. In particular, we ask how mobile users can be optimally selected in order to generate the required space-time paths across the network for collecting data from a set of fixed locations. The users hold different roles in these paths, from collecting data with their sensing-enabled devices to relaying them across the network and uploading them to data collection points with Internet connectivity. We first consider scenarios with deterministic node mobility and formulate the selection of users as a minimum-cost set cover problem with a submodular objective function. We then generalize to more realistic settings with uncertainty about the user mobility. A methodology is devised for translating the statistics of individual user mobility to statistics of spacetime path formation and feeding them to the set cover problem formulation. We describe practical greedy heuristics for the resulting NP-hard problems and compute their approximation ratios. Our experimentation with real mobility datasets (a) illustrates the multiple tradeoffs between the campaign cost and duration, the bound on the hopcount of space-time paths, and the number of collection points; and (b) provides evidence that in realistic problem instances the heuristics perform much better than what their pessimistic worst-case bounds suggest.
Redescription and anatomy of Diplodonta portesiana (d’Orbigny, 1846) (Bivalvia, Ungulinidae) from Brazil

Abstract The present redescription of Diplodonta portesiana (d’Orbigny, 1846) is the first part of the revision of this genus in the East Atlantic. This species, despite being common in the Atlantic coast, remains poorly known. A detailed shell and anatomical study was conducted based not only on specimens from the type locality’s vicinities but also on samples from other regions. Diagnostic characters for Diplodonta portesiana includes: rounded shell with a small ligament; triangular, short and deep nymph; external micro ornamentation composed of small concavities in a concentric pattern; small adductor muscles; reduced pedal gape; pair of long hemipalps with a large area covered by folds; stomach with four ducts leading to digestive diverticula; and long intestine length. Our study suggests at least two new diagnostic characters to the genus: the two pair of muscles that controls the incurrent and excurrent openings and a residual ring-like tissue surrounding the anterior half of the posterior foot retractor muscle.
Plasmodium vivax Population Structure and Transmission Dynamics in Sabah Malaysia

Despite significant progress in the control of malaria in Malaysia, the complex transmission dynamics of P. vivax continue to challenge national efforts to achieve elimination. To assess the impact of ongoing interventions on P. vivax transmission dynamics in Sabah, we genotyped 9 short tandem repeat markers in a total of 97 isolates (8 recurrences) from across Sabah, with a focus on two districts, Kota Marudu (KM, n = 24) and Kota Kinabalu (KK, n = 21), over a 2 year period. STRUCTURE analysis on the Sabah-wide dataset demonstrated multiple sub-populations. Significant differentiation (F ST = 0.243) was observed between KM and KK, located just 130 Km apart. Consistent with low endemic transmission, infection complexity was modest in both KM (mean MOI = 1.38) and KK (mean MOI = 1.19). However, population diversity remained moderate (H E = 0.583 in KM and H E = 0.667 in KK). Temporal trends revealed clonal expansions reflecting epidemic transmission dynamics. The haplotypes of these isolates declined in frequency over time, but persisted at low frequency throughout the study duration. A diverse array of low frequency isolates were detected in both KM and KK, some likely reflecting remnants of previous expansions. In accordance with clonal expansions, high levels of Linkage Disequilibrium (I A S >0.5 [P<0.0001] in KK and KM) declined sharply when identical haplotypes were represented once (I A S = 0.07 [P = 0.0076] in KM, and I A S = -0.003 [P = 0.606] in KK). All 8 recurrences, likely to be relapses, were homologous to the prior infection. These recurrences may promote the persistence of parasite lineages, sustaining local diversity. In summary, Sabah's shrinking P. vivax population appears to have rendered this low endemic setting vulnerable to epidemic expansions. Migration may play an important role in the introduction of new parasite strains leading to epidemic expansions, with important implications for malaria elimination.
Arabic Language Text Classification Using Dependency Syntax-Based Feature Selection

We study the performance of Arabic text classification combining various techniques: (a) tfidf vs. dependency syntax, for feature selection and weighting; (b) class association rules vs. support vector machines, for classification. The Arabic text is used in two forms: rootified and lightly stemmed. The results we obtain show that lightly stemmed text leads to better performance than rootified text; that class association rules are better suited for small feature sets obtained by dependency syntax constraints; and, finally, that support vector machines are better suited for large feature sets based on morphological feature selection criteria.
Augustus: scalable and robust storage for cloud applications

Cloud-scale storage applications have strict requirements. On the one hand, they require scalable throughput; on the other hand, many applications would largely benefit from strong consistency. Since these requirements are sometimes considered contradictory, the subject has split the community with one side defending scalability at any cost (the "NoSQL" side), and the other side holding on time-proven transactional storage systems (the "SQL" side). In this paper, we present Augustus, a system that aims to bridge the sides by offering low-cost transactions with strong consistency and scalable throughput. Furthermore, Augustus assumes Byzantine failures to ensure data consistency even in the most hostile environments. We evaluated Augustus with a suite of micro-benchmarks, Buzzer (a Twitter-like service), and BFT Derby (an SQL engine based on Apache Derby).
Full-Length Genome Sequencing of the Polish HPAI H5N1 Viruses Suggests Separate Introductions in 2006 and 2007

Abstract This paper describes the results of the molecular and phylogenetic analysis of seven highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 strains isolated in 2006 (n = 5) and 2007 (n = 2) from wild birds and poultry in Poland. The whole genome sequence of these isolates was determined. All of the isolates possessed the hemagglutinin (HA) cleavage site sequence PQGERRRKKR*GLF typical of HPAI. Molecular markers associated with increased adaptation and virulence in mammals, as well as susceptibility to neuraminidase inhibitors, were revealed in the HA, neuraminidase (NA), and PB2 proteins. Based on the sequencing results related to the HA and NA genomic segments, H5N1 viruses circulating in Poland all belong to lineage 2.2. However, isolates isolated in 2006 were genetically distinct from those isolated in 2007 and grouped in different sublineages. H5N1 viruses isolated from wild birds in 2006 are almost identical to each other (99.9% HA; 99.6%–100% NA), and they are grouped within a cluster of viruses isolated in Germany from wild and domestic birds and mammals in 2006. Isolates from 2007 are also closely related to each other (nucleotide homologies 99.9% and 100% for HA and NA, respectively), and they are grouped together with isolates from wild and domestic birds collected in Eastern and Central Europe (Romania, Germany), and the Middle East (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia). Phylogenetic analysis of the sequences related to the internal proteins confirmed the results obtained for the HA and NA genes. Overall, the results indicate that HPAI H5N1 in Poland in 2006–07 was caused by at least two separate incursions of genetically distinct viruses.
Functional and Prognostic Implications of the Main Pulmonary Artery Diameter to Aorta Diameter Ratio from Chest Computed Tomography in Korean COPD Patients

Background The ratio of the diameter of the main pulmonary artery (mPA) to the diameter of the aorta (Ao) on chest computed tomography is associated with diverse clinical conditions. Herein, we determined the functional and prognostic implications of the mPA/Ao ratio in Korean chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients. Methods The study population comprised 226 chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients from the Korean Obstructive Lung Disease cohort who underwent chest computed tomography. We analyzed the relationships between the clinical characteristics, including pulmonary function, echocardiography findings, St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire, 6-minute walking (6MW) distance, and exacerbation with the mPA, Ao, and mPA/Ao ratio. Results The mean age was 65.8 years, and 219 (96.9%) patients were male. The mean FEV1% predicted and FEV1/FVC ratio were 61.2% and 47.3%, respectively. The mean mPA and Ao were 23.7 and 36.4 mm, respectively, and the mPA/Ao ratio was 0.66. The mPA/Ao ratio correlated negatively with the 6MW distance (G = -0.133, P = 0.025) and positively with the right ventricular pressure (G = 0.323, P = 0.001). After adjustment for potential confounders, the mPA/Ao ratio was significantly associated with 6MW distance (β = -107.7, P = 0.017). Moreover, an mPA/Ao ratio >0.8 was a significant predictor of exacerbation at the 1-year (odds ratio 2.12, 95% confidence interval 1.27–3.52) and 3-year follow-ups (odds ratio 2.04, 95% confidence interval 1.42–2.90). Conclusions The mPA/Ao ratio is an independent predictor of exercise capacity and an mPA/Ao ratio >0.8 is a significant risk factor of COPD exacerbation.