Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Energy efficient CMOS microprocessor design

Reduction of power dissipation in microprocessor design is becoming a key design constraint. This is motivated not only by portable electronics, in which battery weight and size is critical, but by heat dissipation issues in larger desktop and parallel machines as well. By identifying the major modes of computation of these processors and by proposing figures of merit for each of these modes, a power analysis methodology is developed. It allows the energy efficiency of various architectures to be quantified, and provides techniques for either individually optimizing or trading off throughput and energy consumption. The methodology is then used to qualify three important design principles for energy-efficient microprocessor design. <<ETX>>
The positive impact of physical activity on cognition during adulthood: a review of underlying mechanisms, evidence and recommendations

Abstract A growing body of literature suggests that physical activity beneficially influences brain function during adulthood, particularly frontal lobe-mediated cognitive processes, such as planning, scheduling, inhibition, and working memory. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, times of famine interspersed with times of feast necessitated bouts of intense physical activity balanced by periods of rest. However, the sedentary lifestyle that pervades modern society has overridden the necessity for a physically active lifestyle. The impact of inactivity on disease processes has been the focus of much attention; the growing understanding that physical activity also has the benefit of enhancing cognitive performance strengthens the imperative for interventions that are successful in increasing physical activity, with the outcomes of promoting health and productivity. Population health and performance programs that promote physical activity provide benefits for employees and employers through improvements in worker health and performance and financial returns for the company. In this review, we examine the mechanisms by which physical activity improves cognition. We also review studies that evaluate the effects of physical activity on cognitive executive performance in adulthood, including longitudinal studies that address the impact of physical activity during early adulthood and midlife on preservation of cognition later in life. This is of particular importance given that adulthood represents prime working years and that physical activity promotion is a key component of population health and performance programs. Finally, we provide recommendations for maximizing the lasting benefits of movement and physical activity on cognition in adulthood.
FBK-irst: Lexical Substitution Task Exploiting Domain and Syntagmatic Coherence

This paper summarizes FBK-irst participation at the lexical substitution task of the Semeval competition. We submitted two different systems, both exploiting synonym lists extracted from dictionaries. For each word to be substituted, the systems rank the associated synonym list according to a similarity metric based on Latent Semantic Analysis and to the occurrences in the Web 1T 5-gram corpus, respectively. In particular, the latter system achieves the state-of-the-art performance, largely surpassing the baseline proposed by the organizers.
Pre-production movie rating prediction using machine learning. (c2017)

Movie production is one of the most expensive investment fields and can result in enormous financial profit or loss. It is critical for investors and production companies to decide whether to invest in a certain movie given the huge loss that could occur from such investments. Hence, it is very beneficial to construct a model which helps investors in their decision making process. Machine learning has proven its effectiveness in building decision making models and recommender systems in various fields. In this work, we present several machine learning techniques (Support Vectors Machine, K-Nearest Neighbors, C5, Neural Networks and Case-Based Reasoning) along with a genetic algorithm to predict the success of a movie before its production using the IMDB rating as an indicator of the success. Results show that machine learning is useful in this domain and genetic algorithms can be used to build prediction models with relatively good performance.
The La protein from human liver cells interacts specifically with the U-rich region in the hepatitis C virus 3' untranslated region.

OBJECTIVE To identify cellular factors in human liver that interact with hepatitis C virus (HCV) 5' and 3' untranslated regions (UTRs) and therefore possibly are involved in the regulation of HCV transcription or translation. METHODS We prepared cytoplasmic extracts from human liver biopsy samples and fractionated cellular factors on ion exchange columns. The various fractions from ion exchange columns were subjected to ultraviolet (UV) cross-linking with radiolabeled HCV 5' and 3' UTR RNA probes. RESULTS Two major 45- and 46-kd proteins that interacted specifically with the HCV 5' and 3' UTR were identified. Using Western blot and immunoprecipitation, these proteins were identified as the La antigen. CONCLUSION Our results demonstrate that the La protein from human liver biopsy cells interacts specifically with the U-rich region in the positive strand of the HCV 3' UTR.
Light Absorption by Carbonaceous Particles: An Investigative Review

The optical properties of the light-absorbing, carbonaceous substance often called “soot,” “black carbon,” or “carbon black" have been the subject of some debate. These properties are necessary to model how aerosols affect climate, and our review is targeted specifically for that application. We recommend the term light-absorbing carbon to avoid conflict with operationally based definitions. Absorptive properties depend on molecular form, particularly the size of sp 2-bonded clusters. Freshly-generated particles should be represented as aggregates, and their absorption is like that of particles small relative to the wavelength. Previous compendia have yielded a wide range of values for both refractive indices and absorption cross section. The absorptive properties of light-absorbing carbon are not as variable as is commonly believed. Our tabulation suggests a mass-normalized absorption cross section of 7.5 ± 1.2 m2/g at 550 nm for uncoated particles. We recommend a narrow range of refractive indices for strongly-absorbing carbon particles, of which the highest is 1.95–0.79i. Our refractive indices are consistent with most measurements reported in the literature, and values used in present-day climate modeling are in error. Realistic refractive indices underpredict measured absorption by about 30% when used with common theories for spherical particles or aggregates. Field programs since about 1970 have measured quantities relevant to light absorption, but have only recently made enough measurements to isolate the light-absorbing carbonaceous component and determine its absorptive properties.
Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Val66Met and Blood Glucose: A Synergistic Effect on Memory

Age-related declines in episodic memory performance are frequently reported, but their mechanisms remain poorly understood. Although several genetic variants and vascular risk factors have been linked to mnemonic performance in general and age differences therein, it is unknown whether and how they modify age-related memory declines. To address that question, we investigated the effect of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) Val66Met polymorphism that affects secretion of BDNF, and fasting blood glucose level (a vascular risk factor) on episodic memory in a sample of healthy volunteers (age 19–77). We found that advanced age and high-normal blood glucose levels were associated with reduced recognition memory for name-face associations and poorer prose recall. However, elevated blood glucose predicted lower memory scores only in carriers of the BDNF 66Met allele. The effect on associative memory was stronger than on free recall. These findings indicate that even low-level vascular risk can produce negative cognitive effects in genetically susceptible individuals. Alleviation of treatable vascular risks in such persons may have a positive effect on age-related cognitive declines.
An Integrated Toolkit for Modern Action Planning

In this paper we introduce to the architecture and the abilities of our design and analysis workbench for modern action planning. The toolkit provides automated domain analysis tools together with PDDL learning capabilities. New optimal and suboptimal planners extend state-of-the-art technology. With the tool, domain experts assist solving hard combinatorial problems. Approximate or incremental solutions provided by the system are supervised. Intermediate results are accessible to improve domain modeling and to tune exploration in generating high quality plans, which, in turn, can be bootstrapped for domain inference.
Pattern Switchable Antenna System Using Inkjet-Printed Directional Bow-Tie for Bi-Direction Sensing Applications

In this paper, we propose a paper-based pattern switchable antenna system using inkjet-printing technology for bi-direction sensor applications. The proposed antenna system is composed of two directional bow-tie antennas and a switching network. The switching network consists of a single-pole-double-throw (SPDT) switch and a balun element. A double-sided parallel-strip line (DSPSL) is employed to convert the unbalanced microstrip mode to the balanced strip mode. Two directional bow-tie antennas have different radiation patterns because of the different orientation of the reflectors and antennas. It is demonstrated from electromagnetic (EM) simulation and measurement that the radiation patterns of the proposed antenna are successfully switched by the SPDT switch.
A Nucleolus-Based Approach for Resource Allocation in OFDMA Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are emerging as a key solution to provide broadband and mobile wireless connectivity in a flexible and cost-effective way. In suburban areas, a common deployment model relies on orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) communications between mesh routers (MRs), with one MR installed at each user premises. In this paper, we investigate a possible user cooperation path to implement strategic resource allocation in OFDMA WMNs, under the assumption that users want to control their interconnections. In this case, a novel strategic situation appears: How much an MR can demand, how much it can obtain, and how this shall depend on the interference with its neighbors. Strategic interference management and resource allocation mechanisms are needed to avoid performance degradation during congestion cases between MRs. In this paper, we model the problem as a bankruptcy game taking into account the interference between MRs. We identify possible solutions from cooperative game theory, namely the Shapley value and the nucleolus, and show through extensive simulations of realistic scenarios that they outperform two state-of-the-art OFDMA allocation schemes, namely, centralized-dynamic frequency planning, and frequency-ALOHA. In particular, the nucleolus solution offers best performance overall in terms of throughput and fairness, at a lower time complexity.
NEON PQCryto: Fast and Parallel Ring-LWE Encryption on ARM NEON Architecture

Recently, ARM NEON architecture has occupied a significant share of tablet and smartphone markets due to its low cost and high performance. This paper studies efficient techniques of lattice-based cryptography on ARM processor and presents the first implementation of ring-LWE encryption on ARM NEON architecture. In particular, we propose a vectorized version of Iterative Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) for high-speed computation. We present a 32-bit variant of SAMS2 technique, original proposed in CHES’15, for fast reduction. A combination of proposed and previous optimizations results in a very efficient implementation. For 128-bit security level, our ring-LWE implementation requires only 145, 200 clock cycles for encryption and 32, 800 cycles for decryption. These result are more than 17.6 times faster than the fastest ECC implementation on ARM NEON with same security level.
Distributed Convolutional Sparse Coding via Message Passing Interface ( MPI )

Convolutional sparse coding methods focus on building representations of time signals as sparse and linear combinations of shifted patterns. These techniques have proven to be useful when dealing with signals (such as ECG or images) which are composed of several characteristic patterns ([1, 2, 3]). For this type of signals, the shapes and positions of these templates are crucial for their study (segmentation, classification, etc.). Depending on the context, the dictionary can either be fixed analytically, or learned from the data, using an alternated minimization of the representation cost over the dictionary and the representation.
Rabbit Cells Expressing Human CD4 and Human CCR5 Are Highly Permissive for Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Infection

ABSTRACT To evaluate the feasibility of using transgenic rabbits expressing CCR5 and CD4 as a small-animal model of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV) disease, we examined whether the expression of the human chemokine receptor (CCR5) and human CD4 would render a rabbit cell line (SIRC) permissive to HIV replication. Histologically, SIRC cells expressing CD4 and CCR5 formed multinucleated cells (syncytia) upon exposure to BaL, a macrophagetropic strain of HIV that uses CCR5 for cell entry. Intracellular viral capsid p24 staining showed abundant viral gene expression in BaL-infected SIRC cells expressing CD4 and CCR5. In contrast, neither SIRC cells expressing CD4 alone nor murine 3T3 cells expressing CCR5 and CD4 exhibited significant expression of p24. These stably transfected rabbit cells were also highly permissive for the production of virions upon infection by two other CCR5-dependent strains (JR-CSF and YU-2) but not by a CXCR4-dependent strain (NL4-3). The functional integrity of these virions was demonstrated by the successful infection of human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) with viral stocks prepared from these transfected rabbit cells. Furthermore, primary rabbit PBMC were found to be permissive for production of infectious virions after circumventing the cellular entry step. These results suggest that a transgenic rabbit model for the study of HIV disease may be feasible.
Challenges of extruded cable for HVAC and HVDC power transmission

The paper presents the challenges of the construction of extra-long high power underground cable transmission lines. Economical approach has pushed to increase cable lengths per shipping drum; the technical obstacles to be overcome and the performances required as a result of the increase in potential stresses applied to the screen insulation are shown. Different novelties in bonding diagram such as “direct cross bonding” are explained, highlighting their benefit as well as their prerequisites and drawbacks. The use of longer shipping lengths as well as of “direct cross bonding” method supposes that an accurate and thorough study of the electrical stress applied to joint shield break is carried out as part of the basic design of the link. The authors give practical experience with direct cross bonding. The increasing use of VSC (Voltage Source Converter) Technology is encouraging the use of synthetic insulated cables and both long submarine and underground links are being considered and actively implemented. Space charge formation under d.c. stress is certainly the major concern. A successfully test qualifications according to CIGRE recommendations TB 219 and currently to TB 496 have been performed on a full cable system. The tests were conducted for a nominal voltage U= 320 kV.
A Complete Anytime Algorithm for Treewidth

In this paper, we present a Branch and Bound algorithm called QuickBB for computing the treewidth of an undirected graph. This algorithm performs a search in the space of perfect elimination ordering of vertices of the graph. The algorithm uses novel pruning and propagation techniques which are derived from the theory of graph minors and graph isomorphism. We present a new algorithm called minor-min-width for computing a lower bound on treewidth that is used within the branch and bound algorithm and which improves over earlier available lower bounds. Empirical evaluation of QuickBB on randomly generated graphs and benchmarks in Graph Coloring and Bayesian Networks shows that it is consistently better than complete algorithms like Quick-Tree [Shoikhet and Geiger, 1997] in terms of cpu time. QuickBB also has good anytime performance, being able to generate a better upper bound on treewidth of some graphs whose optimal treewidth could not be computed up to now.
Water and Salt Migration with Phase Change in Saline Soil during Freezing and Thawing Processes

Water and salt transfer coupled with phase change may cause serious damage to engineering structures in saline soil regions. In this study, the migration of water and salt in silty clay collected from the Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau is explored experimentally and numerically during freezing and thawing processes. The results revealed that there are significant differences in the variations of liquid water content and solution concentration for different initial salt contents, due to salt crystallization and dissolution. The temperature‐induced water migration is determined by the soil properties, which can be well explained by the thermodynamics of mass transfer. The amount of salt migrated upward during cooling is slightly larger than that transported downward in the warming period, implying that salt may be accumulated in the surface soil after a large number of circulations and finally result in soil salinization.
Evaluation of polynomial models to predict methane production in batch mode bioreactors

The modeling and prediction of the methane production with anaerobic digestion processes is a complex task. Usually, first principles nonlinear models are used to fulfill this objective. These model structures are normally quite complex and some of the parameters may not be identifiable depending on the available measurement data. To overcome this problem, it is proposed the use of NAR and NARMA black-box models for modeling and prediction of methane production in batch bioreactors. First, simulations comparing well established nonlinear models with NAR and NARMA are proceeded and the selection of model regressors are based on the identified parameter values and the output relative errors. The domain of validity of the model and its parameters are analyzed for different concentrations of process initial conditions. To complete the validation experimental data are used to show the promising results in use these models for prediction of methane production in anaerobic batch bioreactors.
Deep Temporal Pyramid Design for Action Recognition

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are nowadays achieving significant leaps in different pattern recognition tasks including action recognition. Current CNNs are increasingly deeper, data-hungrier and this makes their success tributary of the abundance oflabeled training data. CNNs also rely on max/average pooling which reduces dimensionality of output layers and hence attenuates their sensitivity to the availability of labeled data. However, this process may dilute the information of upstream convolutional layers and thereby affect the discrimination power of the trained representations, especially when the learned categories are fine-grained. In this paper, we introduce a novel hierarchical aggregation design, for final pooling, that controls granularity of the learned representations w.r. t the actual granularity of action categories. Our solution is based on a tree-structured temporal pyramid that aggregates outputs of CNNs at different levels. Top levels of this hierarchy are dedicated to coarse categories while deep levels are more suitable to fine-grained ones. The design of our temporal pyramid is based on solving a constrained minimization problem whose solution corresponds to the distribution of weights of different representations in the temporal pyramid. Experiments conducted using the challenging UCF101 database show the relevance of our hierarchical design w.r. t other related methods.
Linguistic complexity, speech production, and comprehension in Parkinson's disease: behavioral and physiological indices.

PURPOSE To investigate the effects of increased syntactic complexity and utterance length demands on speech production and comprehension in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) using behavioral and physiological measures. METHOD Speech response latency, interarticulatory coordinative consistency, accuracy of speech production, and response latency and accuracy on a receptive language task were analyzed in 16 individuals with PD and 16 matched control participants. RESULTS Individuals with PD had higher oral motor coordination variability, took a longer time to initiate speech, and made more errors on the speaking task compared with the control group. They also received lower scores on the 2 complex conditions of the receptive language task. Increased length and syntactic complexity negatively affected performance in both groups of speakers. CONCLUSIONS These findings provide a novel window into the speech deficits associated with PD by examining performance on longer, sentence-level utterances in contrast to earlier investigations of single-word or nonword productions. Speech motor control processes and language comprehension were adversely affected in the majority of our participants with mild to moderate PD compared to the control group. Finally, increased syntactic complexity and sentence length affected both the healthy aging and PD groups' speech production performance at the behavioral and kinematic levels.
Exact Discrete-time Realizations of the Gammatone Filter

The paper derives an exact discrete-time state space realization of the popular gammatone filter. No such realization appears to be available in the literature. The proposed realization is computationally attractive: a gammatone filter with exponent N requires less than 6N multiplications and additions per sample. The integer coefficients of the realization can be computed by a simple recursion. The proposed realization also yields a closed-form expression for the frequency response. The proposed primary realization is not quite in a standard form, but it is easily transformed into another realization whose state transition matrix is in Jordan canonical form.
Broadband Doherty power amplifiers

In this paper, the transformer-less load-modulated (TLLM) architecture for designing broadband Doherty amplifiers is presented. In this architecture, the quarter-wave impedance transformers of the Doherty amplifier are not used. As a result, the design will be much more compact and large operational bandwidths can be obtained. The simulation results for an amplifier implemented using this architecture shows that drain efficiency of higher than 47% is obtainable at 6dB power back-off in 1.7-2.8GHz frequency range (50% fractional bandwidth).