Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MORP: makespan optimization for processors with an embedded reconfigurable fabric

Processors with an embedded runtime reconfigurable fabric have been explored in academia and industry started production of commercial platforms (e.g. Xilinx Zynq-7000). While providing significant performance and efficiency, the comparatively long reconfiguration time limits these advantages when applications request reconfigurations frequently. In multi-tasking systems frequent task switches lead to frequent reconfigurations and thus are a major hurdle for further performance increases. Sophisticated task scheduling is a very effective means to reduce the negative impact of these reconfiguration requests. In this paper, we propose an online approach for combined task scheduling and re-distribution of reconfigurable fabric between tasks in order to reduce the makespan, i.e. the completion time of a taskset that executes on a runtime reconfigurable processor. Evaluating multiple tasksets comprised of multimedia applications, our proposed approach achieves makespans that are on average only 2.8% worse than those achieved by a theoretical optimal scheduling that assumes zero-overhead reconfiguration time. In comparison, scheduling approaches deployed in state-of-the-art reconfigurable processors achieve makespans 14%-20% worse than optimal. As our approach is a purely software-side mechanism, a multitude of reconfigurable platforms aimed at multi-tasking can benefit from it.
Impact of Intraoperative Cone Beam Computed Tomography on Reduction Quality and Implant Position in Treatment of Tibial Plafond Fractures

Background: The intraoperative assessment of the articular surface in displaced intra-articular distal tibia fractures can be challenging using conventional fluoroscopy. The aim of the study was to determine the frequency and the method of intraoperative corrections of fracture reductions or implant placements during open reduction, internal fixation by using cone beam computed tomography (CT) after conventional fluoroscopy. Methods: Displaced intra-articular distal tibia fractures were retrospectively analyzed from August 2001 until December 2011. The fractures were classified according to the standards of the AO/OTA as type B or C and treated with open reduction and internal plate fixation. After primary reduction using conventional fluoroscopy, an additional cone beam CT scan was used to determine the alignment of the joint line and the implant position. The number of intraoperative revisions of the primary reduction due to the use of cone beam CT was analyzed. Results: A total of 143 patients with an intra-articular tibial plafond fracture were included in the analysis. In 43 patients (30%), an intraoperative correction was performed after the cone beam CT scan. In 34 (24%) of these cases, intraoperative correction was required because of inadequate joint line reduction. Nine (6%) corrections were required as a result of a malposition of the implant. The revision rate did not differ by fracture classification. Conclusion: Despite its acceptance as the standard method of imaging, intraoperative conventional fluoroscopy for the assessment of implant positioning and fracture reduction of tibial plafond fractures is limited. The intraoperative utilization of cone beam CT provided additional information for the surgeon to detect insufficient reduction or implant malposition. Level of Evidence: Level III, retrospective comparative series.
A new entity relation tuples filtration method for weakly supervised relation extraction

The phenomenon of invalid entity relation tuples generating more invalid tuples in the next cycle is called as “circular dependencies” in relation extraction. In order to prevent the existence of the phenomenon of “circular dependencies”, we present a entity relation tuples filtration method that filters the invalid entity relation tuples for Weakly Supervised Relation Extraction. In our article, tuples are filtered with Expectation-Maximization algorithm according the confidence of templates based on the assumption that the more seed tuples generated are, the more reliable the templates generating the seed tuples are. If the confidence of the tuples below a certain threshold, it will be discarded as an invalid relation tuple. The experiment shows that the accuracy have improve to varying degrees compared with some methods for the relation of couple, the relation of the hometown and the relation of minister of finance. The improvement is up to about 1 percent, 13 percents, 20 percents for the relation of minister of finance, the relation of the hometown and the relation of couple. It implies that our method can filter the invalid entity relation tuples effectively.
Zidovudine treatment of the AIDS dementia complex: Results of a placebo‐controlled trial

The efficacy of two doses of zidovudine was examined for the treatment of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) dementia complex in a randomized, double‐blinded, placebo‐controlled trial conducted at nine study centers. For the initial 16 weeks, 40 subjects with mild to moderate AIDS dementia complex were randomized to one of three treatment arms: 400 mg of zidovudine five times daily, 200 mg of zidovudine five times daily, or placebo five times daily. After week 16, patients initially randomized to the placebo group were rerandomized to one of the two zidovudine treatment arms. The primary efficacy end point was improvement in performance on a battery of seven neuropsychological tests; the secondary end point was improvement on a protocol neurological evaluation directed at the cardinal features of the AIDS dementia complex. For the initial 16‐week period, average z scores based on the neuropsychological test battery revealed a significant improvement in the combined treatment groups compared to the placebo group; however, when the two treatment groups were compared separately to the placebo group, only the group receiving the higher zidovudine dose exhibited significant improvement. After rerandomization of the placebo patients to one of the two treatment arms at week 16, this group also showed significant improvement in the average neuropsychological z score by week 32. These results extend previous observations that indicate a therapeutic benefit of zidovudine for the treatment of AIDS dementia complex.
Energy-Aware Co-Operative (ECO) Relay-Based Packet Transmission in Wireless Networks

In infrastructure wireless networks, nodes at the edge of the coverage area need to spend more energy to transmit their packets than those close to the Access Point (AP). Less energy is required if intermediate nodes can be used to forward data. To enable this, intermediate nodes need an incentive and there must be a mechanism for selecting these nodes. In this paper we propose Energy-aware Co-Operative (ECO) relaying for selecting relays to forward packets. The technique is based on the idea of Relative Energy Usage (REU), which reflects the proportion of energy that a node saves by forwarding its packets through relays. A node which saves more energy by using relays is more likely to be chosen as a relay. Conversely, nodes are only permitted to use relays proportionate to the amount of energy they themselves have spent as relays. We compare our scheme with direct transmission, minimum energy path (MnEP), and maximum residual energy path (MxRE). We show that ECO can transmit 50% more data than direct transmission, while using less energy on average. Although MnEP and MxRE can also transmit more data than direct transmission, they do so at severe energy cost to a small number of nodes, doubling the average energy usage, making them ill-suited to commercial networks.
System-level synthesis using re-programmable components

The authors formulate the synthesis problem of complex behavioral descriptions with performance constraints as a hardware-software co-design problem. The target system architecture consists of a software component as a program running on a re-programmable processor assisted by application-specific hardware components. System synthesis is performed by first partitioning the input system description into hardware and software portions and then by implementing each of them separately. The synthesis of dedicated hardware is then achieved by means of hardware synthesis tools (D.D. Mitchell, D.C.Ku, F. Mailhot, and T. Truong, 'The Olympus Synthesis System for digital design' IEEE Design and Test Magazine, p.37-53, Oct. 1990), while the software component is generated using software compiling techniques. The authors consider the problem of identifying potential hardware and software components of a system described in a high-level modeling language and they present a partitioning procedure. They then describe the results of partitioning a network coprocessor. <<ETX>>
A Novel Link Scheduling Algorithm for Spatial Reuse in Wireless Networks

In this paper, we study the problem of one-slot scheduling under the exact SINR interference model, which aims to find a maximum subset of links to be scheduled simultaneously in one slot. We present a novel link scheduling algorithm (DIVISION) to give an effect solution for link scheduling. Algorithm DIVISION seeks to schedule the wireless links by their geometric locations, which provides a new angle to explore the spatial reuse in wireless networks. Combined with numerical results, it is pointed out that the proposed algorithm has the same complexity as the typical algorithm GOW* which is also based on space scheduling, but yields potential better performance of the network throughput.
The Collection Fusion Problem

This paper examines the feasibility of merging the results of retrieval runs on separate, autonomous document collections into an effective combined result. In particular, we examine two collection fusion techniques that use the results of past queries to compute the number of documents to retrieve from each of a set of subcollections such that the total number of retrieved documents is equal to N, the number of documents to be returned to the user. The fusion techniques are independent of the particular weighting schemes, similarity measures, and retrieval models used by the component collections. Our official TREC-3 runs are fusion runs in which N = 1000 ; other runs investigate the effects of varying N. These results show that the precision averaged over the 50 queries is within 10% of the precision of an effective single collection run for a wide range of values of N.
Anchoring of DNA to the bacterial cytoplasmic membrane through cotranscriptional synthesis of polypeptides encoding membrane proteins or proteins for export: a mechanism of plasmid hypernegative supercoiling in mutants deficient in DNA topoisomerase I

A homologous set of plasmids expressing tet, lacY, and melB, genes encoding integral cytoplasmic membrane proteins, and tolC and ampC, genes encoding proteins for export through the cytoplasmic membrane, was constructed for studying the effects of transcription and translation of such genes on the hypernegative supercoiling of plasmids in Escherichia coli cells deficient in DNA topoisomerase I. The results support the view that intracellular bacterial DNA is anchored to the cytoplasmic membrane at many points through cotranscriptional synthesis of membrane proteins or proteins designated for export across the cytoplasmic membrane; in the latter case, the presence of the signal peptide appears to be unnecessary for cotranscriptional membrane association.
Tracking Null Checks in Open-Source Java Systems

It is widely acknowledged that null values should be avoided if possible or carefully used when necessary in Java code. The careless use of null has negative effects on maintainability, code readability, and software performance. However, a study on understanding null usage is still missing. In this paper we analyze null checks in 810 open-source Java systems and manually inspect 100 code samples to understand when and why developers use null. We find that 35% of all conditional statements contain null checks. A deeper investigation reveals many questionable practices with respect to using null. Uninitialized member variables, returning null in methods, and passing null as a method parameter are among the most recurrent reasons for introducing null checks. Developers often return null in methods to signal errors instead of throwing a proper exception. As a result, 71% of the values checked for null are returned from method calls. Our study provides a novel evidence of an overuse of null checks and of the null value itself in Java, and at the same time, reveals actionable recommendations to reduce this null usage.
FORMULATIONS AND HEURISTICS FOR MINIMAL SPANNING TREES WITH MINIMUM DEGREE CONSTRAINTS

Let G = (V, E) be a connected undirected graph, where V = {1, . , n} is the set of nodes and E the set of edges. Consider that there are associated positive costs, ce, to each edge e ∈ E. Given a positive integer valued function d : V → N on the nodes, the Min-Degree Constrained Minimum Spanning Tree (md-MST) problem consists in finding a spanning tree T of G with minimum total edge cost, given by ∑
Left ventricle relative wall thickness and plasma leptin levels: baseline relationships and effects of 4 months of walking training in healthy overweight postmenopausal women

Objective:Whether leptin has positive or negative influences on cardiac structure and function in healthy sedentary overweight postmenopausal women is unknown. We investigated the role of leptin in cardiac health and whether aerobic fitness enhancement influences any relationships revealed between leptin and echocardiographic measurements. Methods:Thirty-nine sedentary postmenopausal women were enrolled after an initial screening. The women underwent blood sampling for hormone levels, anthropometric and echocardiographic measurements, dietary habits investigation, and fitness testing, both before and after 4 months of walking training. Results:After the intervention, the women who had an adherence to training of 75% or higher showed significantly reduced percentage fat mass (P = 0.006) and plasma leptin levels (P < 0.001), whereas their maximum oxygen consumption increased significantly (P < 0.001). The women showed a significant reduction in left ventricle relative wall thickness (P = 0.039) and significant increases in both left ventricular end-diastolic diameter (P = 0.040) and left ventricular mass index (P = 0.043). At baseline, a negative correlation was seen between plasma leptin levels and left ventricle relative wall thickness (r = −0.553; P = 0.009). Further negative correlations were seen for the changes in left ventricle relative wall thickness with leptin levels (r = −0.456; P = 0.038) and with tricipital skinfold (r = −0.436; P = 0.05). Conclusions:In healthy overweight sedentary postmenopausal women with low fitness level, high plasma leptin levels seem to have a protective role against left ventricle relative wall thickness hypertrophy and to participate in its remodeling after 4 months of aerobic training.
Muscle-propelled force feedback: bringing force feedback to mobile devices

Force feedback devices resist miniaturization, because they require physical motors and mechanics. We propose mobile force feedback by eliminating motors and instead actuating the user's muscles using electrical stimulation. Without the motors, we obtain substantially smaller and more energy-efficient devices. We present a prototype that fits on the back of a mobile phone. It actuates users' forearm muscles via four electrodes, which causes users' muscles to contract involuntarily, so that they tilt the device sideways. As users resist this motion using their other arm, they perceive force feedback. We demonstrate the interaction at the example of an interactive videogame in which users steer an airplane through winds rendered using force feedback. In a first user study, we found our device to cause users to produce up to 18.7N of force, when used to actuate their palm flexors. In a second study, participants played the video game de-scribed above; all ten participants reported to prefer the experience of muscle-propelled force feedback to vibrotactile feedback.
A rectification method for quick response code image

In this paper, a rectification method for quick response code (QR code) using kernel based Hough transform is proposed. The kernel based Hough transform shows significantly better performance than the standard Hough transform in terms of computational cost, while maintaining robust results. QR code consists of black and white modules. Morphological operations are applied to the QR code image as preprocessing to fill white modules with black modules. The boundary surrounding the QR code can be obtained using Kernel based Hough transform. Once the boundary is determined, the QR code image can be rectified by applying a perspective transformation to the image. Experimental results show that the proposed method can efficiently rectify QR Code images.
A longitudinal study of infant sleep and its effects on cognitive development

Sleep is a common behaviour in all animals and crucial for physiological, social, emotional, and cognitive functioning. Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of sleep for cognition in adults, in particular with respect to attention and memory (Maquet, 2001; Diekelmann & Born, 2010). However, the role of sleep in developing infants has hitherto been relatively neglected. For instance, we do not know exactly whether and how sleep impacts on cognitive functioning nor which aspects of sleep matter more than others during this decisive period of life. We designed a cross-sectional and longitudinal study in order to explore these questions. Forty infants were followed longitudinally, measuring their sleep patterns with actigraphy for a week at months 4, 6, 8, and 10. Additionally, parents filled in a sleep diary and monthly questionnaires on sleep, cognitive, social, and motor development, as well as infant and parent sleep problems. Furthermore, three cognitive tasks using eye-tracking were conducted at each age. Sleep patterns changed most between 4 and 6 months: older infants had longer and less fragmented sleep duration. Regarding the eye-tracking tasks, we found a non-linear response over developmental time on the short-term memory task as well as an amelioration in number processing and shorter disengagement latencies. Habitual sleep was found to relate to short-term memory performance and number processing but not to reaction time or disengagement of attention. The association of sleep to cognition was stronger with respect to sleep fragmentation than to sleep duration. In general, infants with less time awake during the night performed better on the eye-tracking tasks. The discussion proposes explanations for what drives the differential associations of cognition with sleep duration/fragmentation and examines how the limitations of this work can inform future studies.
Supporting parallel applications on clusters of workstations: The intelligent network interface approach

This paper presents a novel networking architecture designed for communication intensive parallel applications running on clusters of workstations (COWs) connected by high speed network. This architecture permits: (1) the transfer of selected communication-related functionality the host machine to the network interface coprocessor and (2) the exposure of this functionality directly to applications as instructions of a Virtual Communication Machine (VCM) implemented by the coprocessor. The user-level code interacts directly with the network coprocessor as the host kernel only 'connects' the application to the VCM and does not participate in the data transfers. The distinctive feature of our design is its flexibility: the integration of the network with the application can be varied to maximize performance. The resulting communication architecture is characterized by a very low overhead on the host processor by latency and bandwidth close to the hardware limits, and by an application interface which enables zero-copy messaging and eases the port of some shared-memory parallel applications to COWs. The architecture admits low cost implementations based only on off-the-shelf hardware components. Additionally, its current ATM-based implementation can be used to communicate with any ATM-enabled host.
Analysis of Markov model on different web Prefetching and caching schemes

The World Wide Web is growing rapidly in terms of number of users and number of web application. With this growth the response time of retrieving the web document is increasing. User's experience on the internet can be improved by minimizing user's web access latency. This can be done by predicting the next step taken by user towards the accessing of web page in advance, so that the predicted web page can be prefetched and cached. This prefetching and caching is useful for reducing departure of user from the website and improving the quality of service. In this paper three different schemes for web Prefetching and caching are proposed i.e. Prefetching only, Prefetching with Caching and Prefetching from Caching. Prediction of the next accessed web page for prefetching and caching is achieved by modeling the web log using Dynamic Nested Markov model. Dynamic Nested Markov model is analyzed on these three Prefetching and Caching schemes. Experiments have been conducted on real world data sets.
Spin-orbit interaction and spin coherence in narrow-gap semiconductor and semimetal wires

Spin-dependent quantum transport experiments on InSb and InAs heterostructures and Bi thin films are discussed, focusing on mesoscopic geometries where spin-orbit interaction and quantum coherence determine the properties. The narrow-bandgap semiconductors InSb and InAs, and the semimetal Bi have substantial spin-orbit interaction. The experiments use antilocalization to study spin-orbit interaction and spin coherence lengths in nanolithographic wires fabricated on the materials. In the three systems the spin coherence lengths increase with decreasing wire widths if other parameters stay constant, of technological importance for spin-based devices. The experiments also indicate that Bi has surface states with Rashba-like spin-orbit interaction. A quasi-one-dimensional model of antilocalization, as fitted to the data, is explained and its consequences for quantum coherence in mesoscopic structures is explored. A united understanding of the experiments is presented relying on the duality between the Aharonov-Bohm and the Aharonov-Casher phases, the latter resulting from spin-orbit interaction. The duality strengthens the analogy between phenomena under magnetic fields and under spin-orbit interaction.
An adaptive hybrid elasticity controller for cloud infrastructures

Cloud elasticity is the ability of the cloud infrastructure to rapidly change the amount of resources allocated to a service in order to meet the actual varying demands on the service while enforcing SLAs. In this paper, we focus on horizontal elasticity, the ability of the infrastructure to add or remove virtual machines allocated to a service deployed in the cloud. We model a cloud service using queuing theory. Using that model we build two adaptive proactive controllers that estimate the future load on a service. We explore the different possible scenarios for deploying a proactive elasticity controller coupled with a reactive elasticity controller in the cloud. Using simulation with workload traces from the FIFA world-cup web servers, we show that a hybrid controller that incorporates a reactive controller for scale up coupled with our proactive controllers for scale down decisions reduces SLA violations by a factor of 2 to 10 compared to a regression based controller or a completely reactive controller.