Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DLCQ and Plane Wave Matrix Big Bang Models

We study the generalisations of the Craps-Sethi-Verlinde matrix big bang model to curved, in particular plane wave, space-times, beginning with a careful discussion of the DLCQ procedure. Singular homogeneous plane waves are ideal toy-models of realistic space-time singularities since they have been shown to arise universally as their Penrose limits, and we emphasise the role played by the symmetries of these plane waves in implementing the flat space Seiberg-Sen DLCQ prescription for these curved backgrounds. We then analyse various aspects of the resulting matrix string Yang-Mills theories, such as the relation between strong coupling space-time singularities and world-sheet tachyonic mass terms. In order to have concrete examples at hand, in an appendix we determine and analyse the IIA singular homogeneous plane wave - null dilaton backgrounds.
A Novel Vision of Cyber-Human Smart City

Contemporary view on Smart City is very much static and infrastructure-centric, focusing on installation and subsequent management of Edge devices and analytics of data provided by these devices. While this still allows a more efficient management of city's infrastructure, optimizations and savings in different domains, the existing architectures are currently designed as single-purpose, vertically-siloed solutions. This effectively hinders an active involvement of a variety of stakeholders (e.g., citizens and businesses) who naturally form part of the city's ecosystem and have an inherent interest in jointly coordinating and influencing city-level activities towards a common benefit. This paper presents a value-driven architecture and the defining properties of the envisioned Smart City, characterized by complex coordinated activities involving the City's services, stakeholders and their devices. We look at existing foundational technologies for provisioning, coordination and controllability of said activities and discuss the required alignment steps towards the fulfillment of the stated vision.
Travel time estimation in real-time using buses as speed probes

Travel time estimation is a strategically important service in urban environments for personalized and eco-friendly route planning optimization, congestion avoidance, ridesharing and taxi dispatching. However, storing and retrieving traffic data in specific spatiotemporal regions is not an easy task as the data generated by these systems are typically very large and dynamic. In this paper we propose an efficient and scalable solution for real-time travel time estimation of trajectories. In our system buses are used as speed probes to obtain real-time traffic data information and spatio-temporal trajectories are stored in a dynamic indexing system optimized for efficiently retrieving spatiotemporal data in real-time. Our experimental evaluation illustrates the efficiency and scalability of our approach.
MCHITS: Monte Carlo based Method for Hyperlink Induced Topic Search on Networks

Hyperlink Induced Topic Search (HITS) is the most authoritative and most widely used personalized ranking algorithm on networks. The HITS algorithm ranks nodes on networks according to power iteration, and has high complexity of computation. This paper models the HITS algorithm with the Monte Carlo method, and proposes Monte Carlo based algorithms for the HITS computation. Theoretical analysis and experiments show that the Monte Carlo based approximate computing of the HITS ranking reduces computing resources a lot while keeping higher accuracy, and is significantly better than related works
Comparing In-House Numerical Simulations to the Analytical Solution of the Poiseuille Flow for the Oldroyd-B Model

Affidavit: I hereby declare that I have written this work on my own, without undue assistance from third parties and that I have not made use of sources or tools other than those specified. The sources of acquired data and concepts are indicated as such. Simulation of the Poiseuille Flow for the Oldroyd-B Model
Improving visual quality of view transitions in automultiscopic displays

Automultiscopic screens present different images depending on the viewing direction. This enables glasses-free 3D and provides motion parallax effect. However, due to the limited angular resolution of such displays, they suffer from hot-spotting, i. e. , image quality is highly affected by the viewing position. In this paper, we analyze light fields produced by lenticular and parallax-barrier displays, and show that, unlike in real world, the light fields produced by such screens have a repetitive structure. This induces visual artifacts in the form of view discontinuities, depth reversals, and excessive disparities when viewing position is not optimal. Although the problem has been always considered as inherent to the technology, we demonstrate that light fields reproduced on automultiscopic displays have enough degrees of freedom to improve the visual quality. We propose a new technique that modifies light fields using global and local shears followed by stitching to improve their continuity when displayed on a screen. We show that this enhances visual quality significantly, which is demonstrated in a series of user experiments with an automultiscopic display as well as lenticular prints.
Distributed Halide

Many image processing tasks are naturally expressed as a pipeline of small computational kernels known as stencils. Halide is a popular domain-specific language and compiler designed to implement image processing algorithms. Halide uses simple language constructs to express what to compute and a separate scheduling co-language for expressing when and where to perform the computation. This approach has demonstrated performance comparable to or better than hand-optimized code. Until now, however, Halide has been restricted to parallel shared memory execution, limiting its performance for memory-bandwidth-bound pipelines or large-scale image processing tasks. We present an extension to Halide to support distributed-memory parallel execution of complex stencil pipelines. These extensions compose with the existing scheduling constructs in Halide, allowing expression of complex computation and communication strategies. Existing Halide applications can be distributed with minimal changes, allowing programmers to explore the tradeoff between recomputation and communication with little effort. Approximately 10 new of lines code are needed even for a 200 line, 99 stage application. On nine image processing benchmarks, our extensions give up to a 1.4× speedup on a single node over regular multithreaded execution with the same number of cores, by mitigating the effects of non-uniform memory access. The distributed benchmarks achieve up to 18× speedup on a 16 node testing machine and up to 57× speedup on 64 nodes of the NERSC Cori supercomputer.
The gain and cost of multicast routing trees

The last several years we witness the proliferation of multimedia applications on Internet. One of the unavoidable techniques to support this type of communication is multicasting. However, even a decade after its initial proposal, multicast is not widely deployed. One reason lies in the lack of a business model. If the gain and the cost of multicast could be predicted, network operators might be encouraged to deploy multicast on a larger scale. We propose several analytical expressions that could be used to estimate the gain and cost of network-layer multicast. We show that the theoretical model we propose matches simulation and Internet measurement results remarkably well.
Supporting E.cient Authorization in Delegation with Supervision

Delegation is commonly used in organizations to transfer some permission by one user to another user. However, most existing delegation schemes do not support supervision, which allows the delegators to retain control over how the delegated permission can be exercised. In this paper, we describe how to support efficient authorization in delegation with supervision using proxy signature techniques
Investigation of time-reversal approach for detection and characterization of ultrasonic defects in dispersive plates

In this paper we investigated the application of time-reversal method for inspecting of defects in plates where Lamb waves suffer dispersion. Theoretical implementation of the time reversal method was carried out by the commercially available finite element analysis software Abaqus ExplicitTM. It has been demonstrated that the input wave form sent by a transmitting transducer was reconstructed. In the plate with a defect the reconstructed signal differs from the input signal in shape. That difference correlates with geometrical parameters of the defect.
Language Understanding andSubsequential Transducer

Language Understanding can be considered as the realization of a mapping from sentences of a natural language into a description of their meaning in an appropriate formal language. Under this viewpoint, the application of the Onward Subsequential Transducer Inference Algorithm (OSTIA) to Language Understanding is considered. The basic version of OSTIA is reviewed and a new version is presented in which syntactic restrictions of the domain and/or range of the target transduction can eeectively be taken into account. For experimentation purposes, a task proposed by Feldman et al. for assessing the capabilities of Language Learning and Understanding systems has been adopted and three increasingly diicult-to-learn semantic coding schemes have been deened for this task. In all cases the basic version of OSTIA has consistently proved able to learn very compact and accurate transducers from relatively small training sets of input-output examples of the task. Moreover, if the input sentences are corrupted with syntactic incorrectness or errors, the new version of OSTIA still provides understanding results that only degrade in a gradual and natural way.
Cumulative Effects of Fire and Fuels Management on Stream Water Quality and Ecosystem Dynamics

This final progress report is being submitted to the Joint Fire Science Program to provide a summary of findings, accomplished deliverables to date, and proposed products. This information is preliminary and is subject to revision. It is being provided to meet the need for timely 'best science' information. The assessment is provided on the condition that neither the U.S. Geological Survey nor the United States Government may be held liable for any damages resulting from the authorized or unauthorized use of the preliminary information. Interpretive results will be published in refereed publications (see list of deliverables enclosed). Any use of trade names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. government. Abstract: Prescribed fires and wildland fire-use are increasingly important management tools used to reduce fuel loads and restore the ecological integrity of western forests. Although a basic understanding of the effects of fire on aquatic ecosystems exists, the cumulative and possibly synergistic effects of wildfire following prescribed fire are unknown. Wildfires following prescribed fire may produce different burn severities and effects on riparian and stream ecosystems than wildfires in fire suppressed forests (e.g., fires absent >70 yrs) or prescribed fires alone. The goal of this study was to quantify and compare the effects of wildfire on stream and riparian ecosystems under three fire management practices: (1) wildfire following prescribed fire, (2) wildfire in fire suppressed forests, and (3) wildfire occurring at historic fire return intervals. We compared 6-7 years (2001-2006/07) of stream and riparian data collected prior to two large wildfire events to 3 years (2008-2010) of similar data collected after wildfire in catchments along the South Fork Salmon River and Big Creek in central Idaho. Here we report our preliminary findings on riparian-and catchment-level burn severity patterns, riparian forest structure, hydrology, amphibians, aquatic macroinvertebrates, periphyton, and instream habitat, including temperature, chemistry, substrate, sedimentation, and large woody debris. We found that the management practice of prescribed fire treatment prior to wildfire significantly reduced wildfire burn severity patterns in treated catchments relative to untreated catchments. This reduction in burn severity appeared to reduce wildfire effects on stream and riparian ecosystems rather than cause cumulative effects of prescribed fire plus wildfire. Instead, we found that the effects of natural inter-annual variability in stream flow and stochastic disturbances, such as debris flows and channel scouring events, are the dominant drivers of change in stream and riparian habitats …
Provenance comparison for large-scale knowledge discovery

Provenance is a record that describes entities and processes involved in producing, delivering and influencing a resource. Provenance management and reuse can enable interesting applications for knowledge discovery and analytics. One crucial component of a provenance management system is the comparison between provenances. In the era of big data, provenance management systems are in need of a scalable algorithmic solution for efficient comparison. Existing solutions to the problem have large memory footprint and require overlong system response time. In this paper, we present a new solution to threshold-based provenance comparison. We model provenance directly as graph, and propose to measure provenance similarity using provenance edit distance. Following the depth-first search paradigm, we design an algorithm PEDSim based on an encoding technique specific to provenance graphs and quantifiable heuristics. Extensive experiments on real data demonstrate the superiority of our method to other alternatives.
Time pressure: a controlled experiment of test case development and requirements review

Time pressure is prevalent in the software industry in which shorter and shorter deadlines and high customer demands lead to increasingly tight deadlines. However, the effects of time pressure have received little attention in software engineering research. We performed a controlled experiment on time pressure with 97 observations from 54 subjects. Using a two-by-two crossover design, our subjects performed requirements review and test case development tasks. We found statistically significant evidence that time pressure increases efficiency in test case development (high effect size Cohen’s d=1.279) and in requirements review (medium effect size Cohen’s d=0.650). However, we found no statistically significant evidence that time pressure would decrease effectiveness or cause adverse effects on motivation, frustration or perceived performance. We also investigated the role of knowledge but found no evidence of the mediating role of knowledge in time pressure as suggested by prior work, possibly due to our subjects. We conclude that applying moderate time pressure for limited periods could be used to increase efficiency in software engineering tasks that are well structured and straight forward.
Selection of key sequence-based features for prediction of essential genes in 31 diverse bacterial species

Genes that are indispensable for survival are essential genes. Many features have been proposed for computational prediction of essential genes. In this paper, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator method was used to screen key sequence-based features related to gene essentiality. To assess the effects, the selected features were used to predict the essential genes from 31 bacterial species based on a support vector machine classifier. For all 31 bacterial objects (21 Gram-negative objects and ten Gram-positive objects), the features in the three datasets were reduced from 57, 59, and 58, to 40, 37, and 38, respectively, without loss of prediction accuracy. Results showed that some features were redundant for gene essentiality, so could be eliminated from future analyses. The selected features contained more complex (or key) biological information for gene essentiality, and could be of use in related research projects, such as gene prediction, synthetic biology, and drug design.
Chronic Condition and Risk Behaviours in Portuguese Adolescents

Living with a chronic condition (CC) in adolescence has been historically considered protective for risk behaviours. However, research from the last decade suggest that when compared with healthy peers, adolescents living with a chronic condition can engage in risky behaviours in a similar if not higher rate than their counterparts living with out a CC. This study aims to characterize and evaluate the impact of 1) living with a chronic condition (CC), and 2) how the perception of living with a CC affects school participation, and its association with risk/protective behaviours (drunkenness, physical fight, sadness and self-harm). For this purpose 4 groups were identified: adolescents with mostly healthy behaviours, adolescents with mostly risk behaviours, adolescents with mostly risk-internalizing behaviours and adolescents with mostly risk-externalizing behaviours. A large sample was included in this study, composed by 3494 Portuguese adolescents with an average age of 15 years, who participated in the Portuguese Survey of Health Behaviour in School-aged Children/WHO (HBSC). Main results show that adolescents living with a CC have more risk-internalizing behaviours when compared to adolescents without CC, who present more healthy behaviors. Furthermore, adolescents that report that having a CC affects school participation show more risky behaviours than those not affected by a CC who present more healthy behaviours. Boys with a CC show more healthy behaviours, and those who feel that the CC affects school participation present more risky behaviours. On the other hand, girls with a CC have more risk-internalizing behaviours and less healthy behaviours It is important to point out that dolescents living with a CC represent a vulnerable group, and may engage in experimental/risky behaviours as likely as their non CC peers. Thus, potential benefits can arise from reinforcing interventions within protective contexts (family/peers/school setting). Health/education professionals, more than considering risk behaviours as dangerous in themselves, should offer adolescents with a CC an opportunity to reflect on their own decisions. Educational programs would benefit from looking at risk behaviors more from an experimentation perspective, focusing on constructive ways to help adolescents with CC to proceed into adulthood in a more appropriate developmental way.
Implementation of Patient Decision Support Interventions in Primary Care

Background. The benefits of patient decision support interventions (DESIs) have been well documented. However, DESIs remain difficult to incorporate into clinical practice. Relational coordination (RC) has been shown to improve performance and quality of care in health care settings. This study aims to demonstrate how applying RC theory to DESI implementation could elucidate underlying issues limiting widespread uptake. Methods. Five primary care clinics in Northern California participated in a DESI implementation project. We used a deductive thematic approach guided by behaviors outlined in RC theory to analyze qualitative data collected from ethnographic field notes documenting the implementation process and focus groups with health care professionals. We then systematically compared the qualitative findings with quantitative DESI distribution data. Results. Based on DESI distribution rates, clinics were placed into 3 performance categories: high, middle, and low. Qualitative data illustrated how each clinic’s performance related to RC behaviors. Consistent with RC theory, the high-performing clinic exhibited frequent, timely, and accurate communication and positive working relationships. The 3 middle-performing clinics exhibited high-quality communication within physician-staff teams but limited communication regarding DESI implementation across the clinic. The lowest-performing clinic was characterized by contentious relationships and inadequate communication. Limitations. Limitations of the study include nonrandom selection of clinics and limited geographic diversity. In addition, ethnographic data collected documented only DESI implementation practices and not larger staff interactions contributing to RC. Conclusions. These findings suggest that a high level of RC within clinical settings may be a key component and facilitator of successful DESI implementation. Future attempts to integrate DESIs into clinical practice should consider incorporating interventions designed to increase positive RC behaviors as a potential means to improve uptake.
Applying the viable system model in an MCS: Addressing relationships between ERP and budgeting

We apply the viable system model (VSM) in the management control system (MCS) area in order to address the multifariousrelationships between enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and budgeting through the introduction of five researchcriteria: ERP system, budgeting, informal control, organizational hierarchy and the relationships among them. The researchquestion discussed is: How can we develop an MCS that addresses the relationships among budgeting, ERP systems,informal control and organizational hierarchy? It is found that the VSM application overcomes the limitations in MCSframeworks by addressing the relationships among formal and informal sub-control components across all the organizationlevels. The main conclusion of the research is that the amended VSM could be used to describe and explain the social aspectbetween ERP and budgeting in organizations. The unintended use and disconnection of ‘ERP as a database’ in VSM’s system2 explains why the relationship between ‘ERP as a system’ and budgeting remains multifarious. (Less)
METAL: fast and efficient meta-analysis of genomewide association scans

Summary: METAL provides a computationally efficient tool for meta-analysis of genome-wide association scans, which is a commonly used approach for improving power complex traits gene mapping studies. METAL provides a rich scripting interface and implements efficient memory management to allow analyses of very large data sets and to support a variety of input file formats. Availability and implementation: METAL, including source code, documentation, examples, and executables, is available at http://www.sph. umich.edu/csg/abecasis/metal/ Contact: goncalo@umich.edu
Simulating and Evaluating the Local Behavior of Small Pedestrian Groups

Recent advancements in local methods have significantly improved the collision avoidance behavior of virtual characters. However, existing methods fail to take into account that in real life pedestrians tend to walk in small groups, consisting mainly of pairs or triples of individuals. We present a novel approach to simulate the walking behavior of such small groups. Our model describes how group members interact with each other, with other groups and individuals. We highlight the potential of our method through a wide range of test-case scenarios. We evaluate the results from our simulations using a number of quantitative quality metrics, and also provide visual and numerical comparisons with video footages of real crowds.