Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Achieving Fairness in BitTorrent

By harnessing the collective storage capacity and bandwidth of Internet users, peer-to-peer le sharing systems have proved invaluable for storage and distribution of les. However, such systems have a clear and fundamental problem: users have an obvious incentive to download, but no inherent incentive to upload. In naive le sharing protocols, this results in a prisoner's dilemma: the pareto-optimal outcome is for everyone to upload as much as they can, and download as much as they want, resulting in high download rates for all users and the costs involved in uploading evenly distributed across peers; however, any single agent stands to bene t from defection. By reducing uploads, an agent can both improve his download rate and reduce his total upload. This being the case, the Nash equilibrium occurs where users share little, or nothing at all. BitTorrent, a popular and e ective peer-to-peer le sharing system, attempts to increase incentives to share in order to achieve, or at least approach, the pareto-optimal outcome. However, analysis and practice have revealed aws with the existing implementation of BitTorrent, and have suggested methods and strategies which a peer can use to minimize his own uploads without signi cant reprecussions. We introduce and motivate the BitTorrent protocol, and introduce some of the models that have been used to analyse it. We then examine some of the aws that have been discovered and exploited. Finally, we introduce some of the strategies and methods that have been proposed to combat the free rider problem, leading users to a more appealing and socially equitable equilibrium.
Relative Information Contributions of Model vs. Data to Constraints of Short- and Long-Term Forecasts of Forest Carbon Dynamics

Biogeochemical models have been used to evaluate long-term ecosystem responses to global change on decadal and century time scales. Recently, data assimilation has been applied to improve these models for ecological forecasting. It is not clear what the relative information contributions of model (structure and parameters) vs. data are to constraints of shortand long-term forecasting. In this study, we assimilated eight sets of ten-year data (foliage, woody, and fine root biomass, litter fall, forest floor carbon (C), microbial C, soil C, and soil respiration) collected from Duke Forest into a Terrestrial ECOsystem model (TECO). The relative information contribution was measured by Shannon information index calculated from probability density functions (PDF) of carbon pool sizes. The null knowledge without a model or data was defined by the uniform PDF within a prior range. The relative model contribution was information content in the PDF of modeled carbon pools minus that in the uniform PDF while the relative data contribution was the information content in the PDF of modeled carbon pools after data was assimilated minus that before data assimilation. Our results showed that the information contribution of the model to constrain carbon dynamics increased with time whereas the data contribution declined. The eight data sets contributed more than the model to constrain C dynamics in foliage and fine root pools over the 100-year forecasts. The model, however, contributed more than the data sets to constrain the litter, fast soil organic matter (SOM), and passive SOM pools. For the two major C pools, woody biomass and slow SOM, the model contributed less information in the first few decades and then more in the following decades than the data. The knowledge on relative information contributions of model vs. data is useful for model development, uncertainty analysis, future data collection, and evaluation of ecological 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
Traffic Trender : Exploring Bottlenecks at a Systematic Level

The quantity of well-structured traffic incident data collected by government organizations continues to expand at an alarming rate. While the number of transportation information visualization applications has grown over the past several years, there remain few infovis applications dedicated to helping road planners analyze trends of traffic data over long periods of time. In this paper, we present Traffic Trender, a systematic level traffic bottleneck viewer that combines a zoomable Treemap, a set of line charts, and a rich set of filters to uniquely assist planners in identifying insights. In particular, we attempt to enhance the ability of these analysts to find trends in traffic incidents per geographic region and over time, and to assist them easily identify outliers and anomalies. We then reflect on how our design makes progress towards these goals by providing results of a usability study which identify continued problems and areas for improvement.
Eligibility of stroke units in Poland for administration of intravenous thrombolysis

Systemic thrombolysis treatment was approved in Poland in 2003 and should be performed in specialist stroke units (SU). We performed a survey to determine stroke service preparedness for thrombolysis treatment in Poland. We sent a questionnaire evaluating the neurological departments in Poland, where stroke patients are treated. We divided them into four categories: (i) class A SU (fulfilling criteria of the National Program for Stroke Prevention and Therapy and European Stroke Initiative guidelines), (ii) class B (conditionally fulfilling criteria), (iii) class C (not fulfilling criteria), and (iv) departments without SU. Only class A units are eligible for implementing thrombolysis. We obtained response from 194 of 222 (87.4%) departments; 90 (46.4%) declared having an SU. According to criteria, 20 class A, 56 class B, 14 class C. During one year, 71 208 patients were admitted to hospitals; 69 982 (98.2%) to neurological departments. A total of 10 959 (15.4%) were treated in class A SU, 23 650 (33.2%) in class B, 5153 (7.2%) in class C, whereas 30 220 (42.4%) in neurological departments without SU. Our survey showed that only 15.4% stroke patients in Poland are admitted to high‐quality SU, where thrombolysis may potentially be administered. Improvement of SU quality in Poland is necessary for wide implementation of new methods of stroke therapy.
How do they compare? Automatic identification of comparable entities on the Web

People love comparing things: from home mortgages and digital cameras to travel destinations and political philosophies. Today, we are mostly limited to browsing documents after issuing comparative queries to Web search engines, such as “15-year vs. 30-year mortgage”, “Nikon D90 / Canon 40D”, “Oahu or Maui”, and “communism vs. fascism”. There is an opportunity to improve the search experience by automatically offering comparisons to users. In this paper, we propose a first step towards this goal of comparative analysis by mining a broad class of comparable entities from search query logs and a large Web crawl. Example comparables that we extract include medicines, appliances, electronics, vacation destinations, and many more. We present an extensive empirical analysis showing that our methods generate comparables with high precision and recall, and showing that Web search query logs are a superior source for mining such entities as compared to Web pages, typically used for extraction tasks. We further compare the performance of our methods with “related entities” reported by Google Sets, and show a gain of 39% in average precision and a gain of 30% in NCDG.
Maximum entropy modeling of short sequence motifs with applications to RNA splicing signals

We propose a framework for modeling sequence motifs based on the Maximum Entropy principle (MEP). We recommend approximating short sequence motif distributions with the Maximum Entropy Distribution (MED) consistent with low-order marginal constraints estimated from available data, which may include dependencies between non-adjacent as well as adjacent positions.Finally, we suggest mechanistically-motivated ways of comparing models.
Toward Homosuccinate Fermentation: Metabolic Engineering of Corynebacterium glutamicum for Anaerobic Production of Succinate from Glucose and Formate

ABSTRACT Previous studies have demonstrated the capability of Corynebacterium glutamicum for anaerobic succinate production from glucose under nongrowing conditions. In this work, we have addressed two shortfalls of this process, the formation of significant amounts of by-products and the limitation of the yield by the redox balance. To eliminate acetate formation, a derivative of the type strain ATCC 13032 (strain BOL-1), which lacked all known pathways for acetate and lactate synthesis (Δcat Δpqo Δpta-ackA ΔldhA), was constructed. Chromosomal integration of the pyruvate carboxylase gene pyc P458S into BOL-1 resulted in strain BOL-2, which catalyzed fast succinate production from glucose with a yield of 1 mol/mol and showed only little acetate formation. In order to provide additional reducing equivalents derived from the cosubstrate formate, the fdh gene from Mycobacterium vaccae, coding for an NAD+-coupled formate dehydrogenase (FDH), was chromosomally integrated into BOL-2, leading to strain BOL-3. In an anaerobic batch process with strain BOL-3, a 20% higher succinate yield from glucose was obtained in the presence of formate. A temporary metabolic blockage of strain BOL-3 was prevented by plasmid-borne overexpression of the glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase gene gapA. In an anaerobic fed-batch process with glucose and formate, strain BOL-3/pAN6-gap accumulated 1,134 mM succinate in 53 h with an average succinate production rate of 1.59 mmol per g cells (dry weight) (cdw) per h. The succinate yield of 1.67 mol/mol glucose is one of the highest currently described for anaerobic succinate producers and was accompanied by a very low level of by-products (0.10 mol/mol glucose).
Validação da Escala de Julgamento e Significado do Produto

The meaning that a product has for the consumer - which can be considered as symbolic or utilitarian - and the judgment made by an individual to evaluate the product meaning are both variables that have been studied to predict the buying behavior. The objective of this study was to verify the reliability of the model proposed by Allen (1997), through the translation and validation of the Scale of Judgment and Meaning of the Product. The study sample was composed by 588 participants, with a good distribution between sex and age. Results indicated the presence of two factors: Rational Judgment and Meaning (18.33% of explained variance, with alpha of 0.76) and Emotional Judgment and Meaning (15.97% of explained variance, with alpha of 0.73). After the analysis, all 19 original items of the scale were retained. The obtained data indicated the need for adaptation and enhancement of the scale to the national reality. Apparently, the contradiction between the model proposed by Allen (1997) and results found in this study reveals psychometric problems of the scale, suggesting the need for new studies to confirm this possibility.
Active perception of deformable objects using 3D cameras

Perception and manipulation of rigid objects has received a lot of attention, and several solutions have been proposed. In contrast, dealing with deformable objects is a relatively new and challenging task because they are more complex to model, their state is difficult to determine, and self-occlusions are common and hard to estimate. In this paper we present our progress/results in the perception of deformable objects both using conventional RGB cameras and active sensing strategies by means of depth cameras.We provide insights in two different areas of application: grasping of textiles and plant leaf modelling.
Design-Specific Optimization Considering Supply and Threshold Voltage Variations

Variations in supply (<i>V</i> <sub>dd</sub>) and threshold voltages (<i>V</i> <sub>th</sub>) significantly impact parametric yield. These variations also affect <i>V</i> <sub>dd</sub> and <i>V</i> <sub>th</sub> scaling, two power reduction techniques that effectively reduce dynamic and static power consumption. This paper presents a statistical methodology for maximizing yield and optimizing supply and threshold voltage scaling under the <i>V</i> <sub>dd</sub> and <i>V</i> <sub>th</sub> variations. A design-specific feasible region is constrained by a minimum performance and maximum temperature in the <i>V</i> <sub>th</sub> - <i>V</i> <sub>dd</sub> plane. A tolerance box is placed in the feasible region so that its center provides the nominal values for <i>V</i> <sub>dd</sub> and <i>V</i> <sub>th</sub> such that the design has a maximum immunity to the variations and maximizes the yield for the given constraints. It is demonstrated that the location of the tolerance box and, therefore, the values of <i>V</i> <sub>dd</sub> and <i>V</i> <sub>th</sub> depend on the design metrics, circuit switching activity, transistor sizing, and the given constraints. Monte Carlo simulations indicate a 25% increase in the yield for 90-nm CMOS technology. In addition, the methodology can be adopted as a variability-aware guideline in a design specific power and performance optimization and is applicable to both continuous and discrete voltage scaling. SPECTRE simulations verify the developed method.
New Developments in Lattice-Based Search Strategies in SRI’s Hub4 System

We describe new developments in SRI’s lattice-based progressive search strategy. These developments include the implementation of a new bigram lattice algorithm, lattice optimization techniques, and expansion of bigram lattices to trigram lattices. The new bigram lattice generation algorithm is based on generation of backtrace entries using a word-dependent N-best list decoding pass, followed by lattice generation from the backtrace entries. We present an algorithm to reduce the size of the bigram lattices while maintaining all valid paths. This algorithm is shown to reduce the size of the lattice by about 50%, allowing easier processing in later stages such as expansion to trigram lattices. We describe two algorithms to expand bigram lattices to trigram lattices. The first is a conventional method, while the second is a novel approach that results in compact trigram lattices that were found to be a factor of six smaller than lattices created with the conventional approach. Decoding with the new trigram lattices gave a 5% improvement in word error rate as compared to our previous search strategy which used trigram LMs to rescore N-best lists.
Altered Expression of Sialylated Glycoproteins in Breast Cancer Using Hydrazide Chemistry and Mass Spectrometry*

Sialylation is one of the altered protein glycosylations associated with cancer development. The sialoglycoproteins in cancer cells, however, largely remain unidentified because of the lack of a method for quantitative analysis of sialoglycoproteins. This manuscript presents a high throughput method for quantitative analysis of N-linked sialoglycoproteins using conditional hydrazide chemistry, liquid chromatography, and tandem mass spectrometry. We further applied the sialoglycoproteomic method to the profiling of breast cancer tissues and compared findings with the results from the total glycoproteomic analysis using the original hydrazide chemistry method. We identified altered expression of sialoglycoproteins, as well as the total glycoprotein changes associated with breast cancer. Using lectin and Western blot analysis, we characterized one of the sialoglycoproteins, versican, and confirmed that versican was most sialylated and elevated in breast cancer. Furthermore, we showed that versican was detected in both cancer epithelial cells and peritumoral stromal cells using immunohistochemistry. Tissue microarray analysis revealed that epithelial expression of versican had significant relations to lymph node metastasis and pathological stages. This is the first quantitative sialoglycoproteomic and glycoproteomic analysis of breast cancer and noncancerous tissues. These findings present a significant addition of the method to the identification of altered expression of sialylated glycoproteins associated with breast cancer development.
A Resource-Efficient Flow Monitoring System

Network flow monitoring provides critical information for many network applications, and several approaches have been proposed to address flow monitoring. However they either lack flexibility in adapting to ever-changing network traffic (e.g. NetFlow), or require intensive computing resources (e.g. ANF). In this paper, we propose a resource-efficient flow monitoring system (called REFMS), which consists of pre-sampling module, sample & hold module, and flow removal module. Our REFMS can improve sampling accuracy and effectively utilize measurement resource with multiple sampling algorithms.
Motives, Mechanisms, and Emotions

Abstract Intelligent animals are solutions to a design problem posed by: the varying requirements of individuals, the more permanent requirements of species and social groups, the constraints of the environment, and the available biological mechanisms. Analysis of this design problem, especially the implications of limited knowledge and a continuous flow of information in a rapidly changing environment, leads to a theory of how new motives are processed in an intelligent system. The need for speed leads to architectures and algorithms that are fallible in ways that explain why intelligent agents are susceptible to emotions and errors. This holds also for intelligent robots. A study of such mechanisms and processes is a step towards a computational theory of emotions, attitudes, moods, character traits, and other aspects of mind so far not studied in Artificial Intelligence. In particular, it turns out that no special emotional subsystem is required. This framework clarifies and refines ordinary concepts o.
High society Are our social sciences as relevant to government as they might be

Taking up a theme raised by Stuart Cunningham in a recent issue of the AUR – that the innovations of Australia’s humanities, creative arts, and social sciences are not getting the recognition that they deserve from the nation’s government – this paper, dealing only with the social sciences, offers a cautionary note. If the social sciences are to hold the serious attention of the government of any modern Western nation, including Australia’s, they cannot continue to fall prey to the tendency, displayed by too many of their practitioners, to criticise ceaselessly such government. That is, to employ a style of criticism called here ‘unengaged critique’. This style of criticism targets modern Western governments because they are not seeking perfection, because they are seeking only to do the best they can with the resources they have at hand. The paper offers an explanation of the basis of this tendency, an explanation focusing on one of two understandings of ‘the social’ or ‘society’ available to the social sciences – the abundant reason-natural morality understanding – and it offers a means of avoiding it, by using the rival to this understanding – the politico-legal understanding.
Negative-Ion Enhancements in Electron-Stimulated Desorption of CF2Cl2 Coadsorbed with Nonpolar and Polar Gases on Ru(0001)

Electron-stimulated desorption of F and Cl from submonolayer CF2Cl2-covered Ru(0001) is strongly affected by coadsorption of polar molecules (H2O and NH3) and nonpolar rare-gas atoms (Xe, Kr, and Ar). Giant anionic enhancements (up to 102-104) are observed for polar molecules, which are several orders of magnitude higher than by nonpolar atoms. The giant enhancements are attributed to enhanced dissociation of CF2Cl2 by attachment of self-trapped electrons in polar molecules. [S0031-9007(99)09120-6]
Forbearance in Optimal Multilateral Trade Agreements

I present a theory of optimal multilateral trade agreements with public political shocks. I first show that "forbearance"-- where one country withholds retaliation when its trading partner receives a shock-- is a feature of an optimal agreement. This provides a rationale for countries not acting on retaliatory rights granted under GATT. Second I show that there is a limit to forbearance allowable in a self-enforcing agreement. This limit is increasing in the number of countries in the agreement, increasing in the common discount factor, and increasing in the size of the export sector.
Variational Bayesian learning of directed graphical models with hidden variables

A key problem in statistics and machine learning is inferring suitable structure of a model given some observed data. A Bayesian approach to model comparison makes use of the marginal likelihood of each candidate model to form a posterior distribution over models; unfortunately for most models of interest, notably those containing hidden or latent variables, the marginal likelihood is intractable to compute. We present the variational Bayesian (VB) algorithm for directed graphical mod- els, which optimises a lower bound approximation to the marginal likelihood in a procedure similar to the standard EM algorithm. We show that for a large class of models, which we call conjugate exponential, the VB algorithm is a straightfor- ward generalisation of the EM algorithm that incorporates uncertainty over model parameters. In a thorough case study using a small class of bipartite DAGs con- taining hidden variables, we compare the accuracy of the VB approximation to existing asymptotic-data approximations such as the Bayesian Information Crite- rion (BIC) and the Cheeseman-Stutz (CS) criterion, and also to a sampling based gold standard, Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS). We nd that the VB algo- rithm is empirically superior to CS and BIC, and much faster than AIS. Moreover, we prove that a VB approximation can always be constructed in such a way that guarantees it to be more accurate than the CS approximation.
Multivoiced supervision of Master’s students: a case study of alternative supervision practices in higher education

This article describes and analyzes an alternative supervision model at the Master of Education Programme at the University of Bergen aimed at improving research supervision. A three‐pronged approach was introduced, combining supervision groups, student colloquia and individual supervision. The supervision groups consisted of two supervisors and their Master’s students, while the student colloquia consisted of the same students without teachers. The case study of this alternative supervision practice is based on sociocultural perspectives on knowledge and learning, combining theoretical concepts from Lave and Wenger and Bakhtin. The three arenas were found to supplement one another: while student colloquia provided personal support, and served as a first filter for ideas and texts, the supervision groups provided multivoiced feedback on student texts and enculturation into the discipline. Individual supervision provided more specific advice. Critical factors for supervision groups were regular attendance, mutual obligation, structure and clear rules.