Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
X-ray properties of the microquasar GRS 1915+105 during a variability class transition

We present a detailed X-ray study of the microquasar GRS 1915+105 during a variability class transition observed in 2000 June with the Pointed Proportional Counters (PPCs) of the Indian X-ray Astronomy Experiment (IXAE). We supplement this observation with data from the RXTE archives. The source made a transition from a steady low–hard state to a regular oscillatory behaviour in the light curve known as bursts or class ρ (variability classes from Belloni et al.) between 2000 May 11 and 17 and reverted back to the low–hard state on 2000 June 27. A gradual change in the burst recurrence time from about 75 s to about 40 s was observed, which then increased to about 120 s during the ∼40 d of class ρ. The regular bursts disappeared from the X-ray light curves and the class transition was observed to occur within 1.5 h on 2000 June 27 with the PPCs. A correlation is found between the observed quasi-periodic oscillation frequency at 5–8 Hz in the quiescent phase and the average X-ray intensity of the source during the class ρ. We notice a strong similarity between the properties of the source during the class ρ and those during the oscillatory phase of the observations of class α, which contains a long stretch (∼1000 s) of steady low–hard state in the light curve along with the regular periodic bursts. From the timing and spectral analysis, it is found that the observed properties of the source over tens of days during the class ρ are identical to those over a time-scale of a few hundreds of seconds in the class α. Examining the light curves from the beginning of the RXTE/PCA and RXTE/ASM observations, it is found that the change of state from radio-quiet low–hard state to high state occurs through the X-ray classes ρ and α, which appear together during the state transition. It is further inferred that the source switches from low–hard state to the class ρ through the intermediate class α.
A Survey on Cache Analysis for Real-Time Systems

Real-time systems are reactive computer systems that must produce their reaction to a stimulus within given time bounds. A vital veriﬁcation requirement is to estimate the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) of programs. These estimates are then used to predict the timing behavior of the overall system. The execution time of a program heavily depends on the underlying hardware, among which the cache has the biggest inﬂuence. Analyzing the cache behavior is very challenging due to the versatile cache features and complex execution environments. This article provides a survey on cache analysis for real-time systems. We ﬁrst present the challenges and analysis techniques for independent programs with respect to different cache features. Then, the discussion is extended to cache analysis in complex execution environments, followed by a survey of existing tools based on static cache analysis. An outlook for future research is provided at last. Categories and Subject Descriptors: J.7 [ Computers in Other Systems ]; C.3 [ Special-Purpose and Application-Based Systems ]: Real-Time and Embedded Systems General Terms: Veriﬁcation, Reliability
Towards optimal convolutional neural network parameters for bengali handwritten numerals recognition

This work attempts to find the most optimal setting for a convolutional neural network (CNN) for Bengali digit dataset classification. Recognition of handwritten Bengali numerals has recently gained much interest among researchers due to the significant performance gain found in the recognition of English numerals using neural network based architecture. In this work, a new dataset of 70,000 samples were created first by taking handwriting of 1750 persons where 982 persons were male and the rests were female. These individual image samples are then converted to grayscale, normalized, inverted and pickled to complete the data preprocessing step. Later this dataset was recognized using several convolutional neural network settings where the most optimal setting being found to be two convolution layer with Tanh activation, one hidden layer with Tanh activation and one output layer with softmax activation. The proposed optimal number of feature maps is (35, 45). The minimum validation error has been found to be 1.22% which is the current best result compared to all other methods in the literature.
Eliminating Cross-server Operations in Scalable File Systems (CMU-PDL-06-105)

Distributed file systems that scale by partitioning files and directories among a collection of servers inevitably encounter crossserver operations. A common example is a RENAME that moves a file from a directory managed by one server to a directory managed by another. Systems that provide the same semantics for cross-server operations as for those that do not span servers traditionally implement dedicated protocols for these rare operations. This paper suggests an alternate approach that exploits the existence of dynamic redistribution functionality (e.g., for load balancing, incorporation of new servers, and so on). When a client request would involve files on multiple servers, the system can redistribute those files onto one server and have it service the request. Although such redistribution is more expensive than a dedicated cross-server protocol, the rareness of such operations makes the overall performance impact minimal. Analysis of NFS traces indicates that cross-server operations make up fewer than 0.001% of client requests, and experiments with a prototype implementation show that the performance impact is negligible when such operations make up as much as 0.01% of operations. Thus, when dynamic redistribution functionality exists in the system, cross-server operations can be handled with little additional implementation complexity. Acknowledgements: We thank the members and companies of the PDL Consortium (including APC, EMC, Equallogic, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Network Appliance, Oracle, Panasas, Seagate, Sun, and Symantec) for their interest, insights, feedback, and support. We also thank Intel, IBM, Network Appliances, Seagate, and Sun for hardware donations that enabled this work. This material is based on research sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation, via grant #CNS-0326453, by the Air Force Research Laboratory, under agreement number F49620–01–1–0433, and by the Army Research Office, under agreement number DAAD19–02–1–0389. James Hendricks is supported in part by an NDSEG Fellowship, which is sponsored by the Department of Defense.
Exploring the Relationship Between the Three Dimensions of Self-Authorship

Through a year-long study of welfare-to-work students in the community college CalWORKs program, we investigated what self-authorship development looks like by examining developmental progress, and whether there are patterns in development along the three dimensions of self-authorship. Findings demonstrate progress toward self-authorship, but development across the dimensions was not synchronous. Although the intrapersonal dimension was the most common leading dimension, the greatest amount of development occurred along the cognitive dimension and the interpersonal dimension was most likely to show developmental regression. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Brief Hypnotic Intervention Increases Throwing Accuracy

The present study examined whether motor skill learning could be enhanced through a hypnotic intervention. The task involved throwing a tennis ball overhand at a target. Participants were assigned to either a hypnosis or control group. Both groups first completed a pre-test of 20 throws. Prior to the second block of 20 throws (post-test), the hypnosis group received a 10-minute hypnotic intervention. The theme of the hypnosis session was to focus on the target while throwing. Participants were aroused from the hypnotic state prior to the throwing task. The control group was asked to relax in the same environment for the same length of time. Control group participants were told that focusing on the target had been shown to increase accuracy. On the post-test, as well as on a retention test (20 throws), conducted 5–8 days after the post-test, the hypnosis group showed an increase in throwing accuracy relative to the pre-test and more effective performance than the control group whose performance was similar to that on the pre-test. These findings show that hypnosis can have a positive impact on motor learning. Potential mechanisms for this effect are discussed.
First Prototype of a Genuine Power-Gatable Reconfigurable Logic Chip with FeRAM Cells

An advantage of a RLD (Reconfigurable logic device) such as an FPGA (Field programmable gate array) is that it can be customized after being manufactured. However, there is a problem related to standby power when using it in SoC used in embedded systems. Power gating, which is one of the power reduction techniques, is difficult to use in SRAM-based RLDs because of the high overhead — data hibernation and reconfiguration time — and SRAM being volatile. In this paper, we describe a chip that we developed — are configurable logic chip based on FeRAM (Ferroelectric random access memory) technology. The chip employs island-style routing architecture and uses a variable grain logic cell as a logic block. A NV-FF (Non-Volatile FlipFlop), which contains FeRAM, aFF, and power-gating control circuits, is used as configuration memory. The NV-FF can transmit data between FeRAM and FF automatically when power to the chip is turned off/on. Thus, chip-level power gating is possible. The hibernate/restore time is less than 1 ms. The chip has 18 x 18 logic blocks and an area of 54.76 mm2.
Propriedades psicométricas da Escala de Respostas Socialmente Desejáveis - 5 (SDRS-5) em jovens institucionalizados

The main aim of the present study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Socially Desirable Response Set Measure (SDRS-5) among a sample of institutionalized youths. Based on this sample (N = 221), the Portuguese version of the SDRS-5 demonstrated good psychometric properties, namely in terms of factor structure, internal consistency, convergent validity, and discriminant validity that support its use for Portuguese adolescents samples. In terms of criterion-related validity, negative correlations were found between SDRS-5 scores and alcohol use, cannabis use, cocaine/heroin use, and unprotected sex.doi: http://dx.doi. org/10.17575/rpsicol.v30i1. 1065
Design and control of an LCL-filter based three-phase active rectifier

The aim of the paper is to propose a design procedure for an LCL-filter in a front-end three-phase active rectifier. The main goal is to ensure a reduction of the switching frequency ripple at a reasonable cost and, at the same time, to obtain a high performance rectifier. In this paper a step-by-step procedure for designing an LCL-filter is proposed and verified by simulations and experiments. An example of LCL-filter design has been reported and, with the obtained values, the filter has been realised and tested. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the design procedure both of the LCL-filter and of the controllers. The performance of the overall system is good both in the low and high frequency ranges. Moreover the good agreement between these results and those obtained in simulation validate the adopted model: the design procedure and the simulation model represent a powerful tool to design an LCL active rectifier without the need for the realisation of several prototypes.
Holistic analysis of mix protocols

Security protocols are often analysed in isolation as academic challenges. However, the real world can require various combinations of them, such as a certified email protocol executed over a resilient channel, or the key registration protocol to precede the purchase protocols of Secure Electronic Transactions (SET). We develop what appears to be the first scalable approach to specifying and analysing mix protocols. It expands on the Inductive Method by exploiting the simplicity with which inductive definitions can refer to each other. This lets the human analyst study each protocol separately first, and then derive holistic properties about the mix. The approach, which is demonstrated on the sequential composition of a certification protocol with an authentication one, is not limited by the features of the protocols, which can, for example, share message components such as cryptographic keys and nonces. It bears potential for the analysis of complex protocols constructed by general composition of others.
Slotted Photonic Crystal Sensors

Optical biosensors are increasingly being considered for lab-on-a-chip applications due to their benefits such as small size, biocompatibility, passive behaviour and lack of the need for fluorescent labels. The light guiding mechanisms used by many of them results in poor overlap of the optical field with the target molecules, reducing the maximum sensitivity achievable. This review article presents a new platform for optical biosensors, namely slotted photonic crystals, which provide higher sensitivities due to their ability to confine, spatially and temporally, the optical mode peak within the analyte itself. Loss measurements showed values comparable to standard photonic crystals, confirming their ability to be used in real devices. A novel resonant coupler was designed, simulated, and experimentally tested, and was found to perform better than other solutions within the literature. Combining with cavities, microfluidics and biological functionalization allowed proof-of-principle demonstrations of protein binding to be carried out. Higher sensitivities were observed in smaller structures than possible with most competing devices reported in the literature. This body of work presents slotted photonic crystals as a realistic platform for complete on-chip biosensing; addressing key design, performance and application issues, whilst also opening up exciting new ideas for future study.
High Fat Diet Subverts Hepatocellular Iron Uptake Determining Dysmetabolic Iron Overload

Increased serum ferritin associated with mild hepatic iron accumulation, despite preserved upregulation of the iron hormone hepcidin, is frequently observed in patients with dysmetabolic overload syndrome (DIOS). Genetic factors and Western diet represent predisposing conditions, but the mechanisms favoring iron accumulation in DIOS are still unclear. Aims of this study were to assess the effect a high-fat diet (HFD) on hepatic iron metabolism in an experimental model in rats, to further characterize the effect of free fatty acids on iron metabolism in HepG2 hepatocytes in vitro, and to assess the translational relevance in patients with fatty liver with and without iron accumulation. Despite decreased uptake of dietary iron, rats fed HFD accumulated more hepatic iron than those fed regular diet, which was associated with steatosis development. Hepatic iron accumulation was paralleled by induction of ferritin, in the presence of preserved upregulation of hepcidin, recapitulating the features of DIOS. HFD was associated with increased expression of the major iron uptake protein Transferrin receptor-1 (TfR-1), consistently with upregulation of the intracellular iron sensor Iron regulated protein-1 (IRP1). Supplementation with fatty acids induced TfR-1 and IRP1 in HepG2 hepatocytes, favoring intracellular iron accumulation following exposure to iron salts. IRP1 silencing completely abrogated TfR-1 induction and the facilitation of intracellular iron accumulation induced by fatty acids. Hepatic TfR-1 mRNA levels were upregulated in patients with fatty liver and DIOS, whereas they were not associated with liver fat nor with inflammation. In conclusion, increased exposure to fatty acids subverts hepatic iron metabolism, favoring the induction of an iron uptake program despite hepatocellular iron accumulation.
Quantum walk with a time-dependent coin

We introduce quantum walks with a time-dependent coin, and show how they include, as a particular case, the generalized quantum walk recently studied by Wojcik et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 180601 (2004)] which exhibits interesting dynamical localization and quasiperiodic dynamics. Our proposal allows for a much easier implementation of this particularly rich dynamics than the original one. Moreover, it allows for an additional control on the walk, which can be used to compensate for phases appearing due to external interactions. To illustrate its feasibility, we discuss an example using an optical cavity. We also derive an approximated solution in the continuous limit (long-wavelength approximation) which provides physical insight about the process.
Hand tracking and gesture gecogniton by anisotropic kernel mean shift

Mean shift algorithm is an iterative procedure that shifts each data point to the average of data points in its neighborhood. It been applied to object tracking. But traditional mean shift tracker by isotropic kernel often loses the object with the changing structure of object in video sequences, especially when object structure varies fast. This paper proposes a non-rigid object tracker with anisotropic kernel mean shift in which the shape, scale, and orientation of the kernels adapt to the changing object structure. The proposed tracker is used for hand tracking in video. Gesture recognition is implemented simultaneously with orientation histograms. Experimental results show that the new algorithm ensures the robust and real-time hand tracking and and accurate gesture recognition.
Learning Auto-Structured Regressor from Uncertain Nonnegative Labels

In this paper, we take the human age and pose estimation problems as examples to study automatic designing regressor from training samples with uncertain nonnegative labels. First, the nonnegative label is predicted as the square norm of a matrix, which is bilinearly transformed from the nonlinear mappings of the candidate kernels. Two transformation matrices are then learned for deriving such a matrix by solving a semi definite programming (SDP) problem, in which the uncertain label of each sample is expressed as two inequality constraints. The objective function of SDP controls the ranks of these two matrices, and consequently automatically determines the structure of the regressor. The whole framework for automatic designing regressor from samples with uncertain nonnegative labels has the following characteristics: 1) SDP formulation makes full use of the uncertain labels, instead of using conventional fixed labels; 2) regression with matrix norm naturally guarantees the nonnegativity of the labels, and greater prediction capability is achieved by integrating the squares of the matrix elements, which act as weak regressors; and 3) the regressor structure is automatically determined by the pursuit of simplicity, which potentially promotes the algorithmic generalization capability. Extensive experiments on two human age databases, FG-NET and Yamaha, as well as the Pointing'04 pose database, demonstrate encouraging estimation accuracy improvements over conventional regression algorithms.
A Global Bifurcation and the Appearance of a One-Dimensional Spiral Wave in Excitable Media

It is well known that excitable media can sustain "fast" stable traveling pulses of excitation. In models for which analysis is tractable, the fast pulse solution is known to appear through a saddle- node bifurcation accompanied by a "slow" unstable traveling pulse. Furthermore, the uniform rest state is also a stable solution. It is generally assumed that the boundary between the basins of attractions of the rest state and fast pulse (i.e., threshold) consists of the stable manifold of the slow pulse. We use numerical experiments to explore this issue. Our results indicate that, near the saddle-node bifurcation, the stable manifold of the slow pulse does indeed act as the threshold between the rest state and fast pulse. However, further away from the saddle-node bifurcation, a global bifurcation involving the heteroclinic connections between slow and fast pulses occurs. This bifurcation gives rise to an unstable periodic solution that has been referred to as a one-dimensional spiral wave. Beyond the bifurcation point, the stable manifold of the one-dimensional spiral wave appears to act as the threshold between the rest state and fast pulse.
Automatic alignment of medical vs. general terminologies

We propose an original automatic alignment of deflnitions taken from difierent dictionaries that could be associated to the same con- cept although they may have difierent labels. The alignment between a specialized terminology used by the librarians to index concepts and a general vocabulary employed by a neophyte user in order to retrieve documents on Internet, will certainly improve the performances of the information retrieval process. The selected framework is a medical one. We propose a terminology alignment by an SVM classifler trained on a compact, but relevant representation of such deflnition pair by several similarity measures and the length of deflnitions. Three syntactic levels are investigated: Nouns, Nouns-Adjectives, and Nouns-Adjectives-Verbs. Our aim is to show how the combination of similarity measures ofiers a better semantic access to the document content than only one measure and it improves the performances of the automatic alignment. The re- sults obtained on the test set show the relevance of our approach, as the F-measure reaches 88%. However, this conclusion should be validated on larger corpora. One of the most important characteristic of an information retrieval system is related to its capability to answer queries of both neophyte and expert users. The expert user queries are formulated in a specialized language, which is gener- ally the language used to index the documents for a very particular domain, as the health area. The problem is that the neophyte users formulate their queries with a naive language, while the documents are indexed through the concepts of specialised terminologies. Therefore, it becomes necessary to automatically align several specialised terminologies with the vocabulary shared by an average user for information retrieval on Internet. These alignments will allow the informa- tion retrieval systems for a better exploitation of specialised terminologies and electronic dictionaries in order to beneflt from the advantages of their strengths. Our aim is to achieve an accurate automatic alignment of medical deflnitions in French taken from several specialised terminologies with those from general dictionaries. This alignment is a di-cult task since these deflnitions may have difierent labels, although they are related to the same medical concept. There- fore, we have chosen to represent the specialised terminology by several concepts taken from the thesaurus Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and the VIDAL dictionary, while the medical general vocabulary is represented by several defl- nitions from the encyclopaedia Wikipedia and from the semantic network of Le