Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The TREC files: the (ground) truth is out there

Traditional tools for information retrieval (IR) evaluation, such as TREC's trec_eval, have outdated command-line interfaces with many unused features, or 'switches', accumulated over the years. They are usually seen as cumbersome applications by new IR researchers, steepening the learning curve. We introduce a platform-independent application for IR evaluation with a graphical easy-to-use interface: the TREC_Files Evaluator. The application supports most of the standard measures used for evaluation in TREC, CLEF, and elsewhere, such as MAP, P10, P20, and bpref, as well as the Averaged Normalized Modified Retrieval Rank (ANMRR) proposed by MPEG for image retrieval evaluation. Additional features include a batch mode and statistical significance testing of the results against a pre-selected baseline.
Mynah: Enabling Lightweight Data Plane Authentication for SDN Controllers

Software defined networking (SDN) has created new opportunities for both the research community and the net-working industry, but SDN also has created new challenges. One of the most fundamental SDN security issues we have observed is the absence of data plane authentication. We present a definition of this problem and a controller and switch design called Mynah that makes a first step towards addressing this problem. We then present a prototype experiment results and show that Mynah solves the issue very effectively with a trivial overhead around 4.5 percent of overall communication latency.
Contrasting Short- and Long-Term Projections of the Hydrological Cycle in the Southern Extratropics

AbstractAnalysis of model output from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) reveals that, in the zonal mean, the near-term projections of summertime changes of precipitation in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) subtropics are very widely scattered among the models. As a consequence, over the next 50 years, the CMIP5 multimodel mean projects no statistically significant trends in the SH subtropics in summer. This appears to be at odds with the widely reported, and robust, poleward expansion of the subtropical dry zones by the end of the twenty-first century.This discrepancy between the shorter- and longer-term projections in SH summer, as shown here, rests in the recovery of the ozone hole in the coming decades, as a consequence of the Montreal Protocol. This is explicitly demonstrated by analyzing model experiments with the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model, version 4 (WACCM4), a high-top model with interactive stratospheric chemistry, and coupled to land, ocean, and sea ice compo.
On the YM and QCD spectra from five dimensional strings

We consider a non-critical five dimensional string setup which could provide a dual description of QCD in the limit of large number of colors and flavors. The model corresponds to N_c color D3-branes and N_f D4/anti D4-brane pairs supporting flavor degrees of freedom. The matching of the string model spectrum with the dual field theory one is considered. We discuss the consequences of the possible matching of the gravity modes with the light glueballs and the interpretation of the brane spectrum in Yang-Mills and QCD.
Super-resolution from multiple views using learnt image models

The objective of the work presented is the super-resolution restoration of a set of images, and we investigate the use of learnt image models within a generative Bayesian framework. It is demonstrated that restoration of far higher quality than that determined by classical maximum likelihood estimation can be achieved by either constraining the solution to lie on a restricted sub-space, or by using the sub-space to define a spatially varying prior. This sub-space can be learnt from image examples. The methods are applied to both real and synthetic images of text and faces, and results are compared to R.R. Schultz and R.L. Stevenson's (1996) MAP estimator. We consider in particular images of scenes for which the point-to-point mapping is a plane projective transformation which has 8 degrees of freedom. In the real image examples, registration is obtained from the images using automatic methods.
Textured Image Based Painterly Rendering Under Arbitrary Lighting

Painterly rendering styles have received some attention lately as an interesting alternative to photo-realistic image processing and synthesis. State of the art painterly renderings, while producing results that superficially resemble certain artistic styles, such as impressionistic or expressionistic, fail to convey the implicit detail provided by the artist’s choices of brushes and canvas. In this paper we present techniques to simulate the effects of paint thickness and canvas texture as they interact under arbitrary lighting conditions. We also extend previous works by allowing the user to specify brush nibs of any size, shape and texture.
Functional Data Analysis in Electronic Commerce Research

This paper describes opportunities and challenges of using functional data analysis (FDA) for the exploration and analysis of data originating from electronic commerce (eCommerce). We discuss the special data structures that arise in the online environment and why FDA is a natural approach for representing and analyzing such data. The paper reviews several FDA methods and motivates their useful- ness in eCommerce research by providing a glimpse into new domain insights that they allow. We argue that the wedding of eCommerce with FDA leads to innovations both in statistical methodology, due to the challenges and complications that arise in eCommerce data, and in online research, by being able to ask (and subsequently answer) new research questions that classical statistical methods are not able to ad- dress, and also by expanding on research questions beyond the ones traditionally asked in the offline environment. We describe s ap- plications originating from online transactions which are new to the statistics literature, and point out statistical challenges accompanied by some solutions. We also discuss some promising future directions for joint research efforts between researchers in eCommerce and statis- tics.
Multimodal Transfer Deep Learning with Applications in Audio-Visual Recognition

We propose a transfer deep learning (TDL) framework that can transfer the knowledge obtained from a single-modal neural network to a network with a different modality. Specifically, we show that we can leverage speech data to fine-tune the network trained for video recognition, given an initial set of audio-video parallel dataset within the same semantics. Our approach first learns the analogy-preserving embeddings between the abstract representations learned from intermediate layers of each network, allowing for semantics-level transfer between the source and target modalities. We then apply our neural network operation that fine-tunes the target network with the additional knowledge transferred from the source network, while keeping the topology of the target network unchanged. While we present an audio-visual recognition task as an application of our approach, our framework is flexible and thus can work with any multimodal dataset, or with any already-existing deep networks that share the common underlying semantics. In this work in progress report, we aim to provide comprehensive results of different configurations of the proposed approach on two widely used audio-visual datasets, and we discuss potential applications of the proposed approach.
Risk-Sharing Across the United States , Proprietary Income , and the Business Cycle

This paper shows that the degree of risk sharing accomplished through capital markets increases in recessions and declines in booms. In order to explain this phenomenon, I decompose the variance of shocks to gross state product (GSP) growth, and show that the share of proprietary income out of personal income is an inherent determinant of risksharing. Using a panel of the US states over the period from 1963 to 1999, I find that changes in the share of proprietary income could be responsible for the negative relationship between the degree of risk sharing and the business cycle. The results suggest that provision of insurance to proprietors is desirable, especially during booms. I would like to thank John Campbell, Joshua Coval, Ilia Rainer, Jeremy Stein, Motohiro Yogo, Oved Yosha, and participants of the workshops at Harvard University, Tel-Aviv University, and Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia for helpful comments and suggestions.
Computational time reduction using low complexity skip prediction for H.264/Avc standard

In an attempt to reduce the computational time savings using H.264/AVC encoder, this paper seeks to provide that 23-35% can be achieved. The constraints are the following: Fidelity Range Amendment (FRExt) profile with correspondence tools, the skip prediction only for B pictures and rate-distortion optimization mode selection disabled. On the other hand, it is shown that there is not significant loss of rate-distortion performance.
Optimizing Human Bile Preparation for Two-Dimensional Gel Electrophoresis

Aims. Bile is an important body fluid which assists in the digestion of fat and excretion of endogenous and exogenous compounds. In the present study, an improved sample preparation for human bile was established. Methods and Material. The method involved acetone precipitation followed by protein extraction using commercially available 2D Clean-Up kit. The effectiveness was evaluated by 2-dimensional electrophoresis (2DE) profiling quality, including number of protein spots and spot distribution. Results. The total protein of bile fluid in benign biliary disorders was 0.797 ± 0.465 μg/μL. The sample preparation method using acetone precipitation first followed by 2D Clean-Up kit protein extraction resulted in better quality of 2DE gel images in terms of resolution as compared with other sample preparation methods. Using this protocol, we obtained approximately 558 protein spots on the gel images and with better protein spots presentation of haptoglobin, serum albumin, serotransferrin, and transthyretin. Conclusions. Protein samples of bile prepared using acetone precipitation followed by 2D Clean-Up kit exhibited high protein resolution and significant protein profile. This optimized protein preparation protocol can effectively concentrate bile proteins, remove abundant proteins and debris, and yield clear presentation of nonabundant proteins and its isoforms on 2-dimensional electrophoresis gel images.
PDTL: Parallel and Distributed Triangle Listing for Massive Graphs

This paper presents the first distributed triangle listing algorithm with provable CPU, I/O, Memory, and Network bounds. Finding all triangles (3-cliques) in a graph has numerous applications for density and connectivity metrics, but the majority of existing algorithms for massive graphs are sequential, while distributed versions of algorithms do not guarantee their CPU, I/O, Memory, or Network requirements. Our Parallel and Distributed Triangle Listing (PDTL) framework focuses on efficient external-memory access in distributed environments instead of fitting sub graphs into memory. It works by performing efficient orientation and load-balancing steps, and replicating graphs across machines by using an extended version of Hu et al.'s Massive Graph Triangulation algorithm. PDTL suits a variety of computational environments, from single-core machines to high-end clusters, and computes the exact triangle count on graphs of over 6B edges and 1B vertices (e.g. Yahoo graphs), outperforming and using fewer resources than the state-of-the-art systems Power Graph, OPT, and PATRIC by 2x to 4x. Our approach thus highlights the importance of I/O in a distributed environment.
Paradise Islands? Island States and Environmental Performance

Island states have been shown to outperform continental states on a number of large-scale coordination-related outcomes, such as levels of democracy and institutional quality. The argument developed and tested in this article contends that the same kind of logic may apply to islands’ environmental performance, too. However, the empirical analysis shows mixed results. Among the 105 environmental outcomes that we analyzed, being an island only has a positive impact on 20 of them. For example, island states tend to outcompete continental states with respect to several indicators related to water quality but not in aspects related to biodiversity, protected areas, or environmental regulations. In addition, the causal factors previously suggested to make islands outperform continental states in terms of coordination have weak explanatory power in predicting islands’ environmental performance. We conclude the paper by discussing how these interesting findings can be further explored.
Extracting Family History Diagnoses From Clinical Texts

Family history information is an important part of understanding a patient's total health, and it is spread in text throughout the clinical record; mostly untagged and often very unstructured. We have performed a syntactic analysis of family history in 1274 sample clinical texts and created an algorithm to extract specific family history information. Using the Stanford NLP Parser, we created patterns of dependency relations to map specific family members to specific diseases. Preliminary results are promising with a precision and recall of . 82 and . 52, respectively. We find that this is of sufficient accuracy to drive meaningful, actionable clinical presentation of this information.
Randomized trees for real-time one-step face detection and recognition

We present a system for detecting and recognizing faces in images in real-time which is able to learn new identities in instants. In mobile service robotics, interaction with persons is becoming increasingly important, real-time performance is required and the introduction of new persons is a necessary feature for many applications. Although face detection and face recognition are well studied, only a few papers address both problems jointly and only few systems are able to learn to identify new persons quickly. To achieve real-time performance on modest computing hardware, we use random forests for both detection and recognition, and compare with well-known techniques such as boosted face detection and support vector machines for identification. Results are presented on different datasets and compare favorably well to competitive methods.
Effect of simulated rhizodeposition on the relative abundance of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbon catabolic genes in a contaminated soil

Microcosms were used to investigate whether soil exposure to mulberry root extracts (rich in phenolic compounds) select for bacteria that degrade polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Unlike previous studies with freshly spiked soil, the present experiments were conducted with soils aged for 518 d with [14C]phenanthrene to decrease bioavailability and avoid exaggerating the selective pressure exerted by PAHs relative to the rhizosphere effect. Microcosms simulating contaminated planted soil were exposed to carbon at 20 mg/L/week of mulberry root extract for 211 d to simulate rhizodeposition. Contaminated bulk soils microcosms were amended with a C‐free mineral medium to discern the effect of rhizodeposition. Uncontaminated soil controls also were exposed to similar dose regimes. Real‐time quantitative polymerase chain reaction was used to enumerate total bacteria and PAH degraders harboring the genes nahAc (coding for naphthalene dioxygenase), todC1 (coding for toluene/benzene/chloro‐benzene dioxygenase), bmoA (coding for hydroxylating monooxygenases), and dmpN (coding for phenol hydroxylase). Exposure to root extracts enhanced the growth of total bacteria and PAH degraders in both contaminated and uncontaminated rhizosphere microcosms. The relative abundance of PAH‐degrader gene copies (as a fraction of the total bacteria) was similar for different treatments, suggesting that the root extracts did not select for PAH degraders. Overall, these results suggest that rhizodeposition from phenolic releasers contributes to the fortuitous (but not selective) proliferation of PAH degraders, which may enhance phytoremediation.
Human cytomegalovirus load in plasma and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid: a longitudinal study of lung transplant recipients.

BACKGROUND In lung transplant recipients (LTRs), the measurement of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) load dynamics in the local environment of the lung allograft may offer distinct advantages over their assessment in the peripheral blood compartment. METHODS We compared HCMV load in paired bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) and plasma samples in a prospective cohort of LTRs. RESULTS In all, 182 paired samples were collected from 41 LTRs. Qualitative findings were concordant for 79.7% of the paired samples (virus load detected or absent in 8.1% and 71.5% of paired samples, respectively). In 35 paired samples (20.3%), HCMV was detected in the BAL but not the plasma sample; the converse was not found for any of the paired samples. HCMV inclusions were histologically detected in the lungs of 8 patients on 9 occasions. HCMV was detected in both BAL and plasma samples on 7 of the 9 occasions and in only the BAL sample on 2 occasions. Application of a threshold virus load in BAL samples, to predict histologically proven HCMV infection, was associated with improved diagnostic sensitivity and specificity. CONCLUSIONS Quantification of HCMV in the lung allograft correlates with histological detection and, in addition, offers the potential to monitor subclinical viral replication in the lung allograft.
FG-MPI: Fine-grain MPI for multicore and clusters

MPI (Message Passing Interface) has been successfully used in the high performance computing community for years and is the dominant programming model. Current implementations of MPI are coarse-grained, with a single MPI process per processor, however, there is nothing in the MPI specification precluding a finer-grain interpretation of the standard. We have implemented Fine-grain MPI (FG-MPI), a system that allows execution of hundreds and thousands of MPI processes on-chip or communicating between chips inside a cluster.
Heracles: Improving resource efficiency at scale

User-facing, latency-sensitive services, such as websearch, underutilize their computing resources during daily periods of low traffic. Reusing those resources for other tasks is rarely done in production services since the contention for shared resources can cause latency spikes that violate the service-level objectives of latency-sensitive tasks. The resulting under-utilization hurts both the affordability and energy-efficiency of large-scale datacenters. With technology scaling slowing down, it becomes important to address this opportunity. We present Heracles, a feedback-based controller that enables the safe colocation of best-effort tasks alongside a latency-critical service. Heracles dynamically manages multiple hardware and software isolation mechanisms, such as CPU, memory, and network isolation, to ensure that the latency-sensitive job meets latency targets while maximizing the resources given to best-effort tasks. We evaluate Heracles using production latency-critical and batch workloads from Google and demonstrate average server utilizations of 90% without latency violations across all the load and colocation scenarios that we evaluated.
AN ACCURATE DETERMINATION OF THE OPTICAL PERIODIC MODULATION IN THE X-RAY BINARY SAX J1808.4−3658

We report on optical imaging of the X-ray binary SAX J1808.4 − 3658 with the 8 m Gemini South Telescope. The binary, containing an accretion-powered millisecond pulsar, appears to have a large periodic modulation in its quiescent optical emission. In order to clarify the origin of this modulation, we obtained three time-resolved r′-band light curves (LCs) of the source over five days. The LCs can be described by a sinusoid, and the long time-span between them allows us to determine optical period P = 7251.9 s and phase 0.671 at MJD 54599.0 (TDB; phase 0.0 corresponds to the ascending node of the pulsar orbit), with uncertainties of 2.8 s and 0.008 (90% confidence), respectively. This periodicity is highly consistent with the X-ray orbital ephemeris. By considering this consistency and the sinusoidal shape of the LCs, we rule out the possibility of the modulation arising from the accretion disk. Our study supports the previous suggestion that the X-ray pulsar becomes rotationally powered in quiescence, with its energy output irradiating the companion star, causing the optical modulation. While it has also been suggested that the accretion disk would be evaporated by the pulsar, we argue that the disk exists and gives rise to the persistent optical emission. The existence of the disk can be verified by long-term, multiwavelength optical monitoring of the source in quiescence, as an increasing flux and spectral changes from the source would be expected based on the standard disk-instability model.
A generating function of the number of homomorphisms from a surface group into a finite group

A generating function of the number of homomorphisms from the fundamental group of a compact oriented or non-orientable surface without boundary into a finite group is obtained in terms of an integral over a real group algebra. We calculate the number of homomorphisms using the decomposition of the group algebra into irreducible factors. This gives a new proof of the classical formulas of Frobenius, Schur, and Mednykh. Let S be a compact oriented or non-orientable surface without boundary, and �(S) its Euler characteristic. The subject of our study is a generating function of the number |Hom(�1(S),G)| of homomorphisms from the fundamental group of S into a finite group G. We give a generating function in terms of a non-commutative integral Eqn. (2.7) or Eqn. (3.2), according to the orientability of S. The idea of such integrals comes from random matrix theory. Our integrals can be thought of as a generalization of real symmetric, complex hermitian, and quaternionic self-adjoint matrix integrals. The graphical expansion methods for real symmetric (7, 14) and complex hermitian (4) matrix integrals are generalized in (31) for quaternionic self-adjoint matrix integrals. The technique developed in (31) is further generalized in (32) to the integrals over matrices with values in non-commutative ∗-algebras. In this article we consider 1 × 1 matrix integrals over group algebras. Surprisingly, the graphical expansion of the integral gives a generating function of |Hom(�1(S),G)| for all closed surfaces. 1. Counting Formulas Computation of our generating functions Eqn. (2.7) and Eqn. (3.2) yields a new proof of the following classical counting formulas: