Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Hybrid Video Streaming Scheme on Hierarchical P2P Networks

Video streaming based on peer-to-peer networking technology has received much attention from researchers and developers. In this paper, we propose a new scheme for scalable and robust video streaming on P2P networks. Our scheme constructs hierarchical distribution trees from peers and considers the physical structure of underlying hierarchically organized networks, such as an enterprise network. A centric server manages the construction of a higher-level tree among branches, but lower-level trees are built through local communication among peers. Peers recover from faults by themselves, using partial information they have. Through simulation and practical experiments, we verified that our scheme can provide thousands or ten thousands of users with continuous video streaming services on an unreliable P2P network.
Storing and retrieving software components: a refinement based system

Software reuse poses a number of challenges, ranging from managerial to technical - not least of these is the problem of storing and retrieving software components in a time efficient manner. This paper presents the design and implementation of an automated software repository, where software components can be automatically stored and retrieved. This repository is based on a formal representation of programs and their specifications, as well as a refinement ordering of these specifications. <<ETX>>
Building Bridges toward Invasion: Tumor Promoter Treatment Induces a Novel Protein Kinase C-Dependent Phenotype in MCF10A Mammary Cell Acini

The potent tumor promoter 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate (TPA) alters many cellular processes through activation of its receptor protein kinase C (PKC), including gene expression, cell cycle, and the regulation of cell morphology, raising an important question for developing targeted methods to prevent cancer: which effects of TPA are crucial for carcinogenesis? To address this question, we studied TPA action in the 3-dimensional (3D) MCF10A human breast epithelial cell system, which models important features of in vivo epithelial tissue including growth constraints, structural organization of cells, and establishment of a basement membrane. MCF10A cells, which are immortalized but nontumorigenic, form hollow, spheroid structures in 3D culture referred to as acini. The development of normal acini requires the tight spatiotemporal regulation of cellular proliferation, polarization, apoptosis, and growth arrest. Treatment of MCF10A acini with TPA caused the appearance of multi-acinar structures. Surprisingly, this phenotype did not involve an increase in cell number or major changes in cell death, and polarization. Instead, live cell and confocal microscopy revealed that TPA stimulates MCF10A acini to aggregate. TPA induces the PKC-dependent production of actin-based protrusions, which leads to the formation of cellular bridges between acini, the clustering of acini, and allows cells to move into adjacent acini. During this process, the integrity of the laminin V basement membrane is disrupted, while E-cadherin-based cell-cell contacts remain intact. Altogether, our results show that under the biochemical and structural constraints of epithelial tissue, as modeled by the 3D MCF10A system, TPA induces a novel PKC-dependent phenotype that resembles local invasion. Of the many effects caused by TPA, these studies highlight the aggressive production of actin-based cellular protrusions as a potentially important event along the pathway to carcinogenesis.
Audio Watermarking Algorithm Based on Wavelet Packet and Psychoacoustic Model

An audio watermarking scheme based on wavelet packet and psychoacoustic model is presented. Wavelet packet is a very good tool to analysis the audio signal which is non-stationary. The algorithm has better imperceptibility by using masking effect in human auditory system. The masking threshold can be computed in wavelet domain. Thus the computational complexity is reduced greatly, because it doesn’t like MPEG algorithm which should perform FFT. The watermark can be blind extracted by using linear predictive coding. Experimental results show that the watermark is imperceptible and the algorithm is robust to many attacks, such as mp3 compression, noise addition, requantization, low pass filtering, D/A -A/D and so on.
Chronic respiratory symptoms in Croatian Adriatic island metapopulations.

AIM To investigate the prevalence of chronic respiratory symptoms in 9 metapopulations on Adriatic islands in Croatia, and the relationship between respiratory symptoms and individual genetic background. METHODS We obtained random sample of 1001 adult inhabitants of 9 Adriatic island villages in Croatia, that also included immigrants to these villages. European Union respiratory health questionnaire and World Health Organization non-communicable diseases questionnaire were used. Personal genetic histories were reconstructed, based on the two-generation ancestral pedigrees. Bivariate and multivariate methods were used in the analysis. RESULTS Women reported the occurrence of acute dyspnea (P=0.017), cough (P=0.002), and asthma (P=0.002) more often than men. Gender was the strongest predictor for acute and/or chronic cough (odds ratio [OR], 1.69; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.23-2.33) and asthma (OR, 2.00; 95% CI, 1.00-4.01), whereas smoking was the strongest risk factor for acute and chronic dyspnea (OR, 1.90; 95% CI, 1.21-2.99) and airway narrowing (OR, 1.84; 95% CI, 1.18-2.87). Residence on the northern islands increased the odds of allergy, whereas the highest odds ratio of 3.20 was associated with the interaction of northern residence and immigrant background. Genetic background was a significant predictor only for the occurrence of allergy symptoms. CONCLUSION Differences in respiratory findings among the island inhabitants were often associated with smoking prevalence. Interaction of residence on northern Adriatic islands and immigrant background proved to be the strongest predictor for the occurrence of allergy symptoms. This study indicated that environmental factors played a very important role in the occurrence of respiratory symptoms.
Improving cross-document co-reference with semi-supervised information extraction modelsi

In this paper, we consider the problem of cross-document co-reference (CDC). Existing approaches tend to treat CDC as an information retrieval based problem and use features such as TF-IDF cosine similarity to cluster documents and/or co-reference chains. We augmented these features with features based on biographical attributes, such as occupation, nationality, gender, etc., obtained by using semisupervised attribute extraction models. Our results suggest that the addition of these features boosts the performance of our CDC system considerably. The extraction of such specific attributes allows us to use features, such as semantic similarity, mutual information and approximate name similarity which have not been used so far for CDC with traditional bag-of-words models. Our system achieves F0.5 scores of 0.82 and 0.81 on the WePS-1 and WePS-2 datasets, which rival the best reported scores for this problem.
MNSM-inspired method for the motion control of dual-arm robot

This work presents a MNSM (Mirror Neuron System Mechanism) inspired method to control the motion of a dual-arm robot. The new symmetrical action can be classified as instinct-following arbitrary trajectory and goal-based motion; they are planned by the dual-arm robot planner, and implemented by the dual-arm robot within a master/slave protocol. The master arm uses a motion planner to generate corresponding signal for the motor neuron. Then the motor neuron controls the motor to move the joint of the robot. The activities of motor neuron can also fire the MNSSL (Mirror Neuron System of Symmetry Limb) and it will generate the code about the movement and pass it to the receiver of the MNS (Mirror Neuron System) in the slave arm. The MNS of the slave arm will decode the information to generate the corresponding signal of the motor neuron to drive the motor to move the joints. The effective symmetrical motions are also linked with different vocabularies, and all these are stored in the memory as knowledge. High level mirror activities fired by high level neuron command, speech stimulus, etc will use the knowledge in the memory to control the dual-arm robot to realize different symmetrical motions. This study provides not only a new method for the dual-arm robot to realize some given motion task, but also firstly a way by robot motion demonstration to understand the mirror movement mechanism between human's symmetrical limbs.
A Compact LTCC Balun for Bluetooth/WLAN Application

In this paper, a 2.4-2.5 GHz Marchand balun,which uses semi-lumped concept and LTCC technology, has been newly designed,simulated, and fabricated. The measured results and the results of computer simulation show a good match. The balun is implemented with a ten-layer commercial low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) process. Between 2.4 GHz and 2.5GHz ,the measured insertion loss is small than 1.3dB and return loss is better than 20dB. The amplitude imbalance is less than 0.25dB and the phase balance is within 180°±4.5°. The overall dimension is as small as 2 mm×1.25 mm×0.96 mm.
Recovery of Primal Solution in Dual Subgradient Schemes

In this thesis, we study primal solutions for general optimization problems. In particular, we employ the subgradient method to solve the Lagrangian dual of a convex constrained problem, and use a primal-averaging scheme to obtain near-optimal and near-feasible primal solutions. We numerically evaluate the performance of the scheme in the framework of Network Utility Maximization (NUM), which has recently drawn great research interest. Specifically for the NUM problems, which can have concave or nonconcave utility functions and linear constraints, we apply the dual-based decentralized subgradient method with averaging to estimate the rate allocation for individual users in a distributed manner, due to its decomposability structure. Unlike the existing literature on primal recovery schemes, we use a constant stepsize rule in view of its simplicity and practical significance. Under the Slater condition, we develop a way to effectively reduce the amount of feasibility violation at the approximate primal solutions, namely, by increasing the value initial dual iterate; moreover, we extend the established convergence results in the convex case to the more general and realistic situation where the objective function is convex. In particular, we explore the asymptotical convergence properties of the averaging sequence, the tradeoffs involved in the selection of parameter values, the estimation of duality gap for particular functions, and the bounds for the amount of constraint violation and value of primal cost per iteration. Numerical experiments performed on NUM problems with both concave and nonconcave utility functions show that, the averaging scheme is more robust in providing near-optimal and near-feasible primal solutions, and it has consistently better performance than other schemes in most of the test instances. Thesis Supervisor: Asuman E. Ozdaglar Title: Associate Professor of EECS Class of 1943 Career Development Professor
Lycopene supplementation suppresses oxidative stress induced by a high fat diet in gerbils

The effect of lycopene supplementation on the antioxidant system was investigated by analyzing lipid peroxide levels, glutathione contents, and antioxidant enzyme activities in Mongolian gerbils fed a high fat diet. Gerbils were fed on each experimental diet for 6 weeks; normal diet (NC), normal diet with 0.05% lycopene (NL), high fat diet (HF), and a high fat diet with 0.05% lycopene (HFL). Dietary supplementation of lycopene increased hepatic lycopene level in gerbils fed a normal or high fat diet (P < 0.05). Liver and erythrocyte concentrations of lipid peroxide increased in gerbils fed a high fat diet, whereas lycopene supplementation decreased liver and erythrocyte concentrations of lipid peroxide (P < 0.05). Hepatic total glutathione content was higher in the NL group than that in the NC group (P < 0.05). Total antioxidant status in plasma increased following lycopene supplementation compared with that of the non-lycopene supplemented groups (P < 0.05). Hepatic catalase activity increased following dietary lycopene supplementation (P < 0.05). Superoxide dismutase activity in liver remained unchanged with lycopene supplementation, but erythrocyte superoxide dismutase activity increased in NL group compared with NC group (P < 0.05). Glutathione-S-transferase activity increased in the NL group compared to NC group (P < 0.05). Liver and erythrocyte glutathione peroxidase activity increased significantly in the NL group compared to that in the HF group (P < 0.05). Liver glutathione reductase activity was higher in the NL group than that in the NC group (P < 0.05). These results suggest that lycopene supplementation may be efficient for preventing chronic diseases induced by oxidative stress related to high fat diet.
Polarization Angular Spectra of Galactic Synchrotron Emission on Arcminute Scales

We study the angular power spectra of the polarized component of the Galactic synchrotron emission in the 28 deg2 test region of the Southern Galactic Plane Survey at 1.4 GHz. These data were obtained by the Australia Telescope Compact Array and allow us to investigate angular power spectra down to arcminute scales. We find that, at this frequency, the polarization spectra for E- and B-modes seem to be affected by Faraday rotation produced in compact foreground screens. A different behavior is shown by the angular spectrum of the polarized intensity PI = (Q2 + U2)1/2. This is well fitted by a power law (CPIℓ ∝ ℓ−αPI) with slope ~1.7, which agrees with higher frequency results and can probably be more confidently extrapolated to the cosmological window.
Land degradation monitoring in sahelian Africa from both

The African Sahel has been a very controversial region in the climatic change debate during the last decades. From the studies that announced a dramatic advance of the desert in the 1970s [Lamprey 1975] and lead to the first conference about desertification [Nairobi, 1977] to the hopeful articles assuming a global recovery from the great droughts of the 70s and 80s [Prince et al., 1998; Hermann et al., 2005], many works have been carried out about this region. The studies of recent years are often characterized by their emphasis in the analysis of climatic fluctuations, specifically inter-annual and inter-ecadal variations, as it is necessary to avoid sinterpretations related to climatic variability. Even if some authors have noticed a recovery as a result of increased rainfall since the mid 90s, the rainfall level of the 50s and 60s has never been reached again. It is not clear if a true climatic change is happening nowadays in the region, leading to degradation and desertification as a consequence of carry over effects from precedent droughts and reduced rainfall or if the changes observed are principally human-induced. Thus, two main variables are the most responsible of the observed changes in the last decades: climatic variability, related primarily to inter-annual and inter-decadal rainfall variability, and the demographic boom. Obviously, discriminate between climatic and human induced land degradation/improvement in a regional or global scale is an important matter that should be treated carefully. Following Evans et al. (2004) and Wessels et al. (2007) we have developed a method using the residuals of the NDVI-Rainfall relationship to retrieve the vegetation response in function of rainfall, so that climatic variability is cleaned off and human degradation is localized. The only remaining question is that the carry-over effects of precedent years are not taken into consideration and as a consequence detected trends cannot be only attributed to human factors. The evolution of Rain Use Efficiency RUE, the ratio of net primary production and rainfall, is also used here, as some authors claimed from observed RUE trends during the period 1982-2002 that degradation occurred in large areas of the Sahel, and we wanted to test this assumption. The studied region is depicted at figure 1.
Differentiated space allocation for wear leveling on phase-change memory-based storage device

Phase-change memory (PCM) is the best candidate for the storage device of next-generation mobile consumer electronics. PCM has the potential to replace NAND flash memory, due to its non-volatility, in-place programmability, and low power consumption. Even though the lifetime of PCM is longer than that of flash memory, wear leveling is still required to cope with the non-uniformity of storage workload or malicious attack. In this paper, a novel wear-leveling algorithm for PCM storage is proposed, where more physical pages are allocated to frequently updated logical pages, to balance the wear counts of PCM cells. In comparison with the previous techniques, the proposed algorithm improved the lifetime of PCM by at maximum 14 times and on average 8 times1.
An Improved Real-Time Natural Feature Tracking Algorithm for AR Application

A real-time camera registration algorithm using nature features for augmented reality applications is presented. The system uses a single camera for visual tracking of the nature features extracted from the real scene. A limited number of calibrated key-frames and a rough 3D model of the part of the real environment are required. Accurate camera registration can be achieved by matching the input image and the keyframe, whose viewpoint is as close as possible to each other. The problem of wide baseline correspondence is solved by rendering an intermediate image. Extended Kalman filter is applied for jitter correction. The performance of the algorithm is tested using real image sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that our registration algorithm is accurate and robust, and it can handle significant aspect changes
Active Feedback Technique for RF Channel Selection in Front-End Receivers

Co-existence problems in a mobile terminal environment pose strict requirements on the linearity of a front-end receiver. In this paper, active feedback is explored as a means to relax such requirements by providing channel selectivity as early as possible in the receiver chain. The proposed receiver architecture addresses some of the most common problems of integrated RF filters, while maintaining their inherent tunability. Through a simplified and intuitive analysis, the operation of the receiver is examined and the design parameters affecting the filter characteristics, such as bandwidth and stopband rejection, are determined. A systematic procedure for analyzing the linearity of the receiver reveals the possibility of LNA distortion canceling, which decouples the trade-off between noise, linearity and harmonic radiation. A prototype designed in a standard 65 nm CMOS process occupies <;0.06 mm2 and utilizes an RF channel-select filter with a 1 to 2.5 GHz tunable center frequency to achieve 48 dB of stopband rejection and a wideband IIP3 >; +12 dBm.
Arabic Handwritten Word Recognition Using HMMs with Explicit State Duration

We describe an offline unconstrained Arabic handwritten word recognition system based on segmentation-free approach and discrete hidden Markov models (HMMs) with explicit state duration. Character durations play a significant part in the recognition of cursive handwriting. The duration information is still mostly disregarded in HMM-based automatic cursive handwriting recognizers due to the fact that HMMs are deficient in modeling character durations properly. We will show experimentally that explicit state duration modeling in the HMM framework can significantly improve the discriminating capacity of the HMMs to deal with very difficult pattern recognition tasks such as unconstrained Arabic handwriting recognition. In order to carry out the letter and word model training and recognition more efficiently, we propose a new version of the Viterbi algorithm taking into account explicit state duration modeling. Three distributions (Gamma, Gauss, and Poisson) for the explicit state duration modeling have been used, and a comparison between them has been reported. To perform word recognition, the described system uses an original sliding window approach based on vertical projection histogram analysis of the word and extracts a new pertinent set of statistical and structural features from the word image. Several experiments have been performed using the IFN/ENIT benchmark database and the best recognition performances achieved by our system outperform those reported recently on the same database.
Video saliency detection with robust temporal alignment and local-global spatial contrast

Video saliency detection, the task to detect attractive content in a video, has broad applications in multimedia understanding and retrieval. In this paper, we propose a new framework for spatiotemporal saliency detection. To better estimate the salient motion in temporal domain, we take advantage of robust alignment by sparse and low-rank decomposition to jointly estimate the salient foreground motion and the camera motion. Consecutive frames are transformed and aligned, and then decomposed to a low-rank matrix representing the background and a sparse matrix indicating the objects with salient motion. In the spatial domain, we address several problems of local center-surround contrast based model, and demonstrate how to utilize global information and prior knowledge to improve spatial saliency detection. Individual component evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our temporal and spatial methods. Final experimental results show that the combination of our spatial and temporal saliency maps achieve the best overall performance compared to several state-of-the-art methods.
Parents' Nonstandard Work Hours and Children's Time Use in Spain: The Intersection of Parental Work Schedules, Gender, and Education

This study uses time-diary data from two-parent families with children aged 10-16 (N = 913) to analyse how parental work schedules interfere with children’s daily activities in Spain, a country where evening work is strongly institutionalised. Fathers’ work schedules are generally unrelated to children’s time use. Mothers’ evening work hours are significantly associated to less time on “developmental” family and educational activities, and with more time spent watching television and doing electronic activities without parents, two potentially “risky” activities in developmental terms. These associations generally apply to less-educated mothers, but not to high-educated mothers. On weekends, children with mothers who were more active on evening work during the week disproportionately participate in educational and family activities, reflecting partly a compensatory pattern in time use allocation. Overall, results suggest that constraints associated to evening work hours influence children’s daily activities, but with remarkable gendered and socioeconomic inequalities in family life.
Personalizing web surfing with semantically enriched personal profiles

Personalization mechanisms on the web today are clumsy and obtrusive, because users need to log in to multiple websites and enter their personal information and preferences separately for each. In addition, the user profile is different for each website and cannot be combined with other information on the web. Using Semantic Web technologies, in particular FOAF, we can identify the person browsing to the website. In this paper, we propose an extension of the HTTP GET method to include a new parameter that points to the URL of the user’s FOAF file. This simple, but powerful extension enables the web server to use information contained in the person’s FOAF file to personalize the web pages returned. We also present a proof-of-concept implementation by customizing our institute welcome page using a visitor’s FOAF file.