Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Complexity and Familiarity with Computer Assistance when Making Ill-Structured Business Decisions

Using high-level tasks typical of managerial decisions, this experimental study examined the influence of computer assistance on solving ill-structured problems. Of specific interest were the influences of complex and simple assistance on decision performance and decision maker attitudes. Our findings suggest that performance and user attitudes can be enhanced by technology that provides clear and simple instruction in good problem-solving practices. However, when that technology adds a complex array of technical options and features, the assistance may fail to improve or/and may even diminish performance and damage user attitudes. Familiarization with such complex technology may not improve these outcomes. The findings regarding the relationship between assistance complexity and decision performance are consistent with those of studies that suggest complexity has a curvilinear influence on performance. When considering the application of technological assistance to ill-structured decision tasks, the complexity of the assistance should not be ignored.
Tracing Requirements and Source Code during Software Development: An Empirical Study

[Context and motivation] In practice, trace ability links between requirements and code are often not created, because this would require increased development effort. To address this weakness, we developed in previous work an approach that semi-automatically captures trace ability links between requirements and code during development. We do this by using work items from project management that typically are stored in issue trackers. [Question/problem] Practitioners and researchers have discussed the practice of using work items to capture links between requirements and code, but there has been no systematic study of this practice. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we present such an empirical study based on the application of our approach. We applied our approach in three different software development projects conducted with undergraduate students. We evaluated the feasibility and practicability of our approach and its tool support. The feasibility results indicate that our approach creates correct trace ability links between all artifacts with high precision and recall during development. At the same time the practicability results indicate that the subjects found our approach and its tool support easy to use. [Contribution] The empirical evaluation in this paper contributes valuable insights into the tracing of requirements and code during software development.
Implicit Modeling - A Generalization of Discriminative and Generative Approaches

We propose a new modeling approach that is a generalization of generative and discriminative models. The core idea is to use an implicit parameterization of a joint probability distribution by specifying only the conditional distributions. The proposed scheme combines the advantages of both worlds -- it can use powerful complex discriminative models as its parts, having at the same time better generalization capabilities. We thoroughly evaluate the proposed method for a simple classification task with artificial data and illustrate its advantages for real-word scenarios on a semantic image segmentation problem.
A structure based clustering algorithm with applications to VLSI physical design

Clustering plays an important role in VLSI physical design. In this paper, we present a new structure and connectivity based clustering algorithm. The proposed clustering algorithm emphasizes capturing natural circuit clusters, i.e., highly interconnected cell groups. We apply the proposed clustering algorithm to 2-way and k-way partitionings on ISPD98 benchmark suite as stated in C. J. Alpert (1998), and 2-way partitioning to part of ISPD2005 benchmark suite based in G. -J. Nam et al. (2005). The experimental results show that the proposed clustering algorithm can maintain the partitioning solution qualities while reducing the sizes of large scale circuits.
Using Prefix Tree to Improve the Performance of Chinese Sentiment Analysis

As social media services (e.g. Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and so on) become more and more popular, it is of greater research interest to raise the efficiency of using Sentiment Analysis to predict future opinion trends. Based on the naïve Bayes classifier, this research proposes a novel emotion classifier, CCLM (Combined CKIP Language Model), to enhance the precision of opinion classification. Due to the fact that CCLM tends to produce a larger size of item sets than other language models, the prefix tree is adopted to improve the overall performance. This study adopts short messages retrieved from Plurk to explore sentiment analysis of Chinese texts, while making additional effort to observe change in execution time after adding the Prefix Tree.
A negative-resistance sense amplifier for low-voltage operating STT-MRAM

This paper exhibits a 65-NM 8-Mb spin transfer torque magnetoresistance random access memory (STT-MRAM) operating at 0.38V. The proposed sense amplifier comprises a boosted-gate nMOS and negative-resistance pMOSes as loads, which maximizes the readout margin. The STT-MRAM achieves a cycle time of 1.9 μs (= 0.526 MHz) at 0.38 V. The operating power is 1.70 μW at that voltage.
Impact of Complex Logic Cell Layout on the Single-Event Transient Sensitivity

The design methodology based on standard cells is widely used in a broad range of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) applications. Furthermore, several optimization algorithms can be employed to address different constraints such as power consumption or reliability. This paper evaluates the implications of the usage of complex logic cells from a 45-nm standard-cell library to the single-event transient (SET) sensitivity under heavy ions. Results show that even though a reduction in the layout area is obtained when adopting complex logic gates, a slight reduction in the total sensitive area of the circuit is observed. Moreover, the effectiveness of the logical masking can be suppressed, leading to a higher SET cross section for high particle linear energy transfer (LET).
Reasoning with Uncertainties Over Existence of Objects

In this paper we consider planning problems in relationalMarkov processes where objects may “appear” or “disap-pear”, perhaps depending on previous actions or propertiesof other objects. For instance, problems which require to ex-plicitly generate or discover objects fall into this category. Inour formulation this requires to explicitly represent the un-certainty over the number of objects (dimensions or factors)in a dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN). Many formalisms(also existing ones) are conceivable to formulate such prob-lems. We aim at a formulation that facilitates inference andplanning. Based on a specific formulation we investigate twoinference methods—rejection sampling and reversible-jumpMCMC—to compute a posterior over the process conditionedon the first and last time slice (start and goal state). We willdiscuss properties, efficiency, and appropriateness of eachone.
S2ORM: exploiting syntactic and semantic information for opinion retrieval

Opinion retrieval is the task of finding documents that express an opinion about a given query. A key challenge in opinion retrieval is to capture the query-related opinion score of a document. Existing methods rely mainly on the proximity information between the opinion terms and the query terms to address the key challenge. In this study, we propose to incorporate the syntactic and semantic information of terms into a probabilistic language model in order to capture the query-related opinion score more accurately.
Expertise, Working Memory and Articulatory Suppression Effect: Their Relation with Simultaneous Interpreting Performance

Simultaneous interpreting is a complex bilingual verbal activity that involves the auditory perception of an oral communication and the production of a coherent discourse. One of the cognitive functions underlying simultaneous interpreting is working memory. The aim of this work was to study the relationship between expertise, working memory capacity and articulatory suppression effect, and the ability to perform simultaneous interpreting. For this purpose, four working memory tasks and one simultaneous interpreting task were administered to thirty Spanish-speaking professional English interpreters. Results showed that simultaneous interpreting ability might be supported by the working memory´s capacity to store or process information, but also by the ability of the interpreter to cope with the articulatory suppression effect. We conclude that interpreters may have or develop resources to support the effect caused by articulatory suppression.
Dietary haem iron and coronary heart disease in women.

AIMS A role for iron in the risk of ischaemic heart disease has been supported by in vitro and in vivo studies. We investigated whether dietary haem iron intake is associated with coronary heart disease (CHD) risk in a large population-based cohort of middle-aged women. METHODS AND RESULTS We used data of 16 136 women aged 49-70 years at recruitment between 1993 and 1997. Follow-up was complete until 1 January 2000 and 252 newly diagnosed CHD cases were documented. Cox proportional hazards analysis was used to estimate hazard ratios of CHD for quartiles of haem iron intake, adjusted for cardiovascular and nutritional risk factors. We stratified by the presence of additional cardiovascular risk factors, menstrual periods, and antioxidant intake to investigate the possibility of effect modification. High dietary haem iron intake was associated with a 65% increase in CHD risk [hazard ratio (HR)=1.65; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.07-2.53], after adjustment for cardiovascular and nutritional risk factors. This risk was not modified by additional risk factors, menstruation, or antioxidant intake. CONCLUSION The results indicate that middle-aged women with a relatively high haem iron intake have an increased risk of CHD.
A Flow Cytometry-Based Assay for Quantifying Non-Plaque Forming Strains of Yellow Fever Virus

Primary clinical isolates of yellow fever virus can be difficult to quantitate by standard in vitro methods because they may not form discernable plaques or induce a measurable cytopathic effect (CPE) on cell monolayers. In our hands, the Dakar strain of yellow fever virus (YFV-Dakar) could not be measured by plaque assay (PA), focus-forming assay (FFA), or by measurement of CPE. For these reasons, we developed a YFV-specific monoclonal antibody (3A8.B6) and used it to optimize a highly sensitive flow cytometry-based tissue culture limiting dilution assay (TC-LDA) to measure levels of infectious virus. The TC-LDA was performed by incubating serial dilutions of virus in replicate wells of C6/36 cells and stained intracellularly for virus with MAb 3A8.B6. Using this approach, we could reproducibly quantitate YFV-Dakar in tissue culture supernatants as well as from the serum of viremic rhesus macaques experimentally infected with YFV-Dakar. Moreover, the TC-LDA approach was >10-fold more sensitive than standard plaque assay for quantitating typical plaque-forming strains of YFV including YFV-17D and YFV-FNV (French neurotropic vaccine). Together, these results indicate that the TC-LDA technique is effective for quantitating both plaque-forming and non-plaque-forming strains of yellow fever virus, and this methodology may be readily adapted for the study and quantitation of other non-plaque-forming viruses.
Targeting p53 in an Established Murine Effect of an Attenuated Poxvirus Vaccine CTLA-4 Blockade Enhances the Therapeutic

p53 is overexpressed by half of all cancers, and is an attractive target for a vaccine approach to immunotherapy. p53 overex-pression is frequently the result of point mutations, which leaves the majority of the protein in its wild-type form. Therefore, the majority of p53 sequence is wild type, making it a self-protein for which tolerance plays a role in limiting immune responses. To overcome tolerance to p53, we have expressed wild-type murine p53 in the nonpathogenic attenuated poxvirus, modiﬁed vaccinia virus Ankara (recombinant modiﬁed vaccinia virus Ankara expressing wild-type murine p53 (rMVAp53)). Mice immunized with rMVAp53 vaccine developed vigorous p53-speciﬁc CTL responses. rMVAp53 vaccine was evaluated for its ability to inhibit the outgrowth of the syngeneic murine sarcoma Meth A, which overexpresses mutant p53. Mice were inoculated with a lethal dose (5 (cid:1) 10 5 cells injected s.c. ) of Meth A tumor cells and vaccinated by i.p. injection 3 days later with 5 (cid:1) 10 7 PFU of rMVAp53. The majority of mice remained tumor free and resistant to rechallenge with Meth A tumor cells. We wished to determine whether rMVAp53 immunization could effect the rejection of an established, palpable Meth A tumor. In subsequent experiments, mice were injected with 10 6 Meth A tumor cells, and treated 6 days later with anti-CTLA-4 Ab (9H10) and rMVAp53. The majority of treated mice had complete tumor regression along with lasting tumor immunity. In vivo Ab depletion conﬁrmed that the antitumor effect was primarily CD8 and to a lesser extent CD4 dependent. These experiments demonstrate the potential of a novel
Multi-variable constrained control approach for a three-dimensional eel-like robot

In this paper, a multi-variable feedback design for the 3D movement of an eel-like robot is presented. Such a robot is under construction in the context of a national French robotic project. The proposed feedback enables the tracking of a desired 3D position of the eelpsilas head as well as the stabilization of the rolling angle. The control design is based on a recently developed reduced model that have been validated using a 3D complete continuous model described in [3]. Several scenarios are proposed to assess the efficiency of the proposed feedback law.
Chapter 1 COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY ANALYSIS OF GENETIC PROGRAMMING-INITIAL RESULTS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The computational complexity analysis of evolutionary algorithms working on binary strings has significantly increased the rigorous understanding on how these types of algorithm work. Similar results on the computational complexity of genetic programming would fill an important theoretic gap. They would significantly increase the theoretical understanding on how and why genetic programming algorithms work and indicate, in a rigorous manner, how design choices of algorithm components impact its success. We summarize initial computational complexity results for simple tree-based genetic programming and point out directions for future research.
Ultrathin Solar Absorber Layers of Silver Bismuth Sulfide from Molecular Precursors.

Here we present a robust molecular precursor-based approach to synthesize high-quality thin films of silver bismuth sulfide (AgBiS2). Pure-phase cubic AgBiS2 thin films are prepared, which are smooth and dense down to thicknesses less than 40 nm. Comprehensive structural and morphological analysis of the as-prepared films as a function of processing temperature and composition is presented, including X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy. The optical properties of the films and their electronic band structure are also presented. The as-prepared films show impressive light absorption properties with absorption coefficients reaching 105 cm-1 for energies above ca. 950 nm. Finally, their photoactivity is demonstrated through photoconductivity measurements on lateral electrodes. The methods outlined herein enable the fabrication of AgBiS2 semiconductor thin films at low processing temperatures (150 °C) with a dense morphology and tunable Ag/Bi composition. Such films provide an excellent platform for the fabrication of AgBiS2-based optoelectronic devices, specifically solar cells.
Polarisation Switches in Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers

The polarization dynamics of a vertical cavity surface emitting laser is investigated as a nonlinear stochastic dynamical system. The polarization switches in the device are considered as activation processes in a two dimensional system with a saddle cycle; the optimal way of switching is determined as the solution of a boundary value problem. The theoretical results are in good agreement with the numerical simulations.
OsGA2ox5, a Gibberellin Metabolism Enzyme, Is Involved in Plant Growth, the Root Gravity Response and Salt Stress

Gibberellin (GA) 2-oxidases play an important role in the GA catabolic pathway through 2β-hydroxylation. There are two classes of GA2oxs, i.e., a larger class of C19-GA2oxs and a smaller class of C20-GA2oxs. In this study, the gene encoding a GA 2-oxidase of rice, Oryza sativa GA 2-oxidase 5 (OsGA2ox5), was cloned and characterized. BLASTP analysis showed that OsGA2ox5 belongs to the C20-GA2oxs subfamily, a subfamily of GA2oxs acting on C20-GAs (GA12, GA53). Subcellular localization of OsGA2ox5-YFP in transiently transformed onion epidermal cells revealed the presence of this protein in both of the nucleus and cytoplasm. Real-time PCR analysis, along with GUS staining, revealed that OsGA2ox5 is expressed in the roots, culms, leaves, sheaths and panicles of rice. Rice plants overexpressing OsGA2ox5 exhibited dominant dwarf and GA-deficient phenotypes, with shorter stems and later development of reproductive organs than the wild type. The dwarfism phenotype was partially rescued by the application of exogenous GA3 at a concentration of 10 µM. Ectopic expression of OsGA2ox5 cDNA in Arabidopsis resulted in a similar phenotype. Real-time PCR assays revealed that both GA synthesis-related genes and GA signaling genes were expressed at higher levels in transgenic rice plants than in wild-type rice; OsGA3ox1, which encodes a key enzyme in the last step of the bioactive GAs synthesis pathway, was highly expressed in transgenic rice. The roots of OsGA2ox5-ox plants exhibited increased starch granule accumulation and gravity responses, revealing a role for GA in root starch granule development and gravity responses. Furthermore, rice and Arabidopsis plants overexpressing OsGA2ox5 were more resistant to high-salinity stress than wild-type plants. These results suggest that OsGA2ox5 plays important roles in GAs homeostasis, development, gravity responses and stress tolerance in rice.
Convolution as a Unifying Concept

A notion of convolution is presented in the context of formal power series together with lifting constructions characterising algebras of such series, which usually are quantales. A number of examples underpin the universality of these constructions, the most prominent ones being separation logics, where convolution is separating conjunction in an assertion quantale; interval logics, where convolution is the chop operation; and stream interval functions, where convolution is proposed for analysing the trajectories of dynamical or real-time systems. A Hoare logic can be constructed in a generic fashion on the power-series quantale, which applies to each of these examples. In many cases, commutative notions of convolution have natural interpretations as concurrency operations.
Your Name Is Your Lifesaver: Anglicization of Names and Moral Dilemmas in a Trilogy of Transportation Accidents

Can immigrants’ names determine whether they receive help or not? Drawing on a partial in-group membership framework, we adapted intergroup versions of moral dilemmas (a trilogy of transportation accidents) to test how Anglicizing ethnic names affects intergroup decision-making in hypothetical life-and-death situations. Study 1 showed that White American participants were equally likely to help White and Asian immigrants with Anglicized names but were less likely to help Asian immigrants with original ethnic names. The same effect emerged in Study 2 but only among male White American participants. In Study 3, White pro-assimilationists were more likely to help White than Arab immigrants (with either Anglicized or original ethnic names), but White pro-multiculturalists were more likely to help Arab immigrants with Anglicized names than White targets. The results suggest that name Anglicization as a cultural assimilation practice may reduce intergroup bias, but the precise pattern of effects is context-dependent.
First-order Logic: Modality and Intensionality

Contemporary use of the term 'intension' derives from the traditional logical Frege-Russell's doctrine that an idea (logic formula) has both an extension and an intension. From the Montague's point of view, the meaning of an idea can be considered as particular extensions in different possible worlds. In this paper we analyze the minimal intensional semantic enrichment of the syntax of the FOL language, by unification of different views: Tarskian extensional semantics of the FOL, modal interpretation of quantifiers, and a derivation of the Tarskian theory of truth from unified semantic theory based on a single meaning relation. We show that not all modal predicate logics are intensional, and that an equivalent modal Kripke's interpretation of logic quantifiers in FOL results in a particular pure extensional modal predicate logic (as is the standard Tarskian semantics of the FOL). This minimal intensional enrichment is obtained by adopting the theory of properties, relations and propositions (PRP) as the universe or domain of the FOL, composed by particulars and universals (or concepts), with the two-step interpretation of the FOL that eliminates the weak points of the Montague's intensional semantics. Differently from the Bealer's intensional FOL, we show that it is not necessary the introduction of the intensional abstraction in order to obtain the full intensional properties of the FOL. Final result of this paper is represented by the commutative homomorphic diagram that holds in each given possible world of this new intensional FOL, from the free algebra of the FOL syntax, toward its intensional algebra of concepts, and, successively, to the new extensional relational algebra (different from Cylindric algebras), and we show that it corresponds to the Tarski's interpretation of the standard extensional FOL in this possible world.