Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Communication-Avoiding Parallel Sparse-Dense Matrix-Matrix Multiplication

Multiplication of a sparse matrix with a dense matrix is a building block of an increasing number of applications in many areas such as machine learning and graph algorithms. However, most previous work on parallel matrix multiplication considered only both dense or both sparse matrix operands. This paper analyzes the communication lower bounds and compares the communication costs of various classic parallel algorithms in the context of sparse-dense matrix-matrix multiplication. We also present new communication-avoiding algorithms based on a 1D decomposition, called 1.5D, which - while suboptimal in dense-dense and sparse-sparse cases - outperform the 2D and 3D variants both theoretically and in practice for sparse-dense multiplication. Our analysis separates one-time costs from per iteration costs in an iterative machine learning context. Experiments demonstrate speedups up to 100x over a baseline 3D SUMMA implementation and show parallel scaling over 10 thousand cores.
Salivary IgA as a risk factor for upper respiratory infections in elite professional athletes.

UNLABELLED The relationship between physiological and psychological stress and immune function is widely recognized; however, there is little evidence to confirm a direct link between depressed immune function and incidence of illness in athletes. PURPOSE To examine the relationship between salivary immunoglobulin A (s-IgA) and upper respiratory infections (URI) in a cohort of professional athletes over a prolonged period. METHODS Thirty-eight elite America's Cup yacht racing athletes were studied over 50 wk of training. Resting, unstimulated saliva samples were collected weekly (38 h after exercise, consistent time of day, fasted) together with clinically confirmed URI, training load, and perceived fatigue rating. RESULTS s-IgA was highly variable within (coefficients of variation [CV] = 48%) and between subjects (CV = 71%). No significant correlation was found between absolute s-IgA concentration and the incidence of URI among athletes (r = 0.11). However, a significant (28%, P < 0.005) reduction in s-IgA occurred during the 3 wk before URI episodes and returned to baseline by 2 wk after a URI. When an athlete did not have, or was not recovering from URI, a s-IgA value lower than 40% of their mean healthy s-IgA concentration indicated a one in two chance of contracting an URI within 3 wk. CONCLUSION On a group basis, relative s-IgA determined a substantial proportion of the variability in weekly URI incidence. The typical decline in an individual's relative s-IgA over the 3 wk before a URI appears to precede and contribute to URI risk, with the magnitude of the decrease related to the risk of URI, independent of the absolute s-IgA concentration. These findings have important implications for athletes and coaches in identifying periods of high URI risk.
Interrelation of Sport Participation, Physical Activity, Social Capital and Mental Health in Disadvantaged Communities: A SEM-Analysis

Background The Health through Sport conceptual model links sport participation with physical, social and psychological outcomes and stresses the need for more understanding between these outcomes. The present study aims to uncover how sport participation, physical activity, social capital and mental health are interrelated by examining these outcomes in one model. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted in nine disadvantaged communities in Antwerp (Belgium). Two hundred adults (aged 18–56) per community were randomly selected and visited at home to fill out a questionnaire on socio-demographics, sport participation, physical activity, social capital and mental health. A sample of 414 adults participated in the study. Results Structural Equation Modeling analysis showed that sport participation (β = .095) and not total physical activity (β = .027) was associated with better mental health. No association was found between sport participation and community social capital (β = .009) or individual social capital (β = .045). Furthermore, only community social capital was linked with physical activity (β = .114), individual social capital was not (β = -.013). In contrast, only individual social capital was directly associated with mental health (β = .152), community social capital was not (β = .070). Conclusion This study emphasizes the importance of sport participation and individual social capital to improve mental health in disadvantaged communities. It further gives a unique insight into the functionalities of how sport participation, physical activity, social capital and mental health are interrelated. Implications for policy are that cross-sector initiatives between the sport, social and health sector need to be supported as their outcomes are directly linked to one another.
Just What the Doctor Tweeted: Physicians’ Challenges and Rewards of Using Twitter

ABSTRACT More than 75,000 health care professionals worldwide share information and discuss treatments on Twitter, making it one of the most popular and influential social media sites for health. This engaging medium has enormous potential for establishing relationships and disseminating information among physicians, their colleagues, and patients. However, little is known about how physicians navigate Twitter and what challenges and benefits come from using the platform. By conducting in-depth interviews with 17 physicians who interact with Twitter at least once per week, it was revealed that physicians overcome concerns of privacy and time constraints to learn and share new research, connect with colleagues, manage online personas, and develop relationships with patients on a new level that goes beyond the typical office visit. Implications include the possibility of enriched patient–provider relationships due to physicians divulging opinions and personal information in a public forum to minimize established power structures and enable better communication. This exploratory study establishes that Twitter is fertile ground for future research to explore how the medium can influence patient behavior, alter attitudes, and influence communication between patients and providers.
To Find Influential's in Twitter based on Information Propagation

Identification of Influencers in Social Networks and targeting them for viral marketing is fast becoming the core idea in designing the strategies for brand building. The influential individuals stimulate “word-of-mouth” effects in their network[14]. This leads to triggering of long cascades of influence that convince their peers to perform a similar action (Participate in Survey , click on advertisement, „like‟ a community etc). Targeting these influentials usually leads to a vast spread of the information across the network. Hence it is important to identify such individuals in a network. Last five years have seen tremendous growth of social media People having access to Internet are spending considerable amount of time on various platforms generating huge data content by participating in survey, approving a thought, endorsing some view, building social profile and sharing knowledge. This has resulted in social influence emerging as a complex force, governing the diffusion of the influence in the network. Individual‟s social influence on the network tempts various companies to go beyond the conventional marketing for finding new customers, thereby making profitable marketing decisions. In this work we have examined the identification of Influencials in the increasingly popular online social network, Twitter using Google‟s PageRank Algorithm [16] and have optimized the calculation of ranking score by taking into account the dynamism of „Retweet‟ or „Mention‟ functionality used by the twitter users which actually signify their actual participation in the idea propagation and subsequent cascade of influence in their network. The idea is to improve further on the intuition that the users with most number of followers are also the most influential in the given network. The improved PageRank algorithm not only considers the number of followers the user has , but also the number of times their tweet have been retweeted or their user name have been mentioned in the their follower‟s tweets. General Terms Algorithm, Online Social Network, Social Network Analysis
Document Type Class Location Class Temporal Class Document Object Class Version , Event and Manager Classes Aggregation Inheritance

It is already widely accepted that the use of data abstraction in object oriented modelling enables real world objects to be well represented in information systems. In this work we are particularly interested with the use of object oriented techniques for document management. Object orientation is well suited for such systems, which require the ability to handle multiple types content. However, the matter of how to deal with the reuse and management of existing documents over time remains a major issue. This paper aims to investigate a conceptual model, based on object versioning techniques, that will represent the semantics in order to allow the continuity and pattern of changes of documents to be determined over time.
Topic Modeling of Everyday Sexism Project Entries

The Everyday Sexism Project documents everyday examples of sexism reported by volunteer contributors from all around the world. It collected 100,000 entries in 13+ languages within the first 3 years of its existence. The content of reports in various languages submitted to Everyday Sexism is a valuable source of crowdsourced information with great potential for feminist and gender studies. In this paper, we take a computational approach to analyze the content of reports. We use topic-modelling techniques to extract emerging topics and concepts from the reports, and to map the semantic relations between those topics. The resulting picture closely resembles and adds to that arrived at through qualitative analysis, showing that this form of topic modeling could be useful for sifting through datasets that had not previously been subject to any analysis. More precisely, we come up with a map of topics for two different resolutions of our topic model and discuss the connection between the identified topics. In the low-resolution picture, for instance, we found Public space/Street, Online, Work related/Office, Transport, School, Media harassment, and Domestic abuse. Among these, the strongest connection is between Public space/Street harassment and Domestic abuse and sexism in personal relationships. The strength of the relationships between topics illustrates the fluid and ubiquitous nature of sexism, with no single experience being unrelated to another.
Lifetime Stress Cumulatively Programs Brain Transcriptome and Impedes Stroke Recovery: Benefit of Sensory Stimulation

Prenatal stress (PS) represents a critical variable affecting lifetime health trajectories, metabolic and vascular functions. Beneficial experiences may attenuate the effects of PS and its programming of health outcomes in later life. Here we investigated in a rat model (1) if PS modulates recovery following cortical ischemia in adulthood; (2) if a second hit by adult stress (AS) exaggerates stress responses and ischemic damage; and (3) if tactile stimulation (TS) attenuates the cumulative effects of PS and AS. Prenatally stressed and non-stressed adult male rats underwent focal ischemic motor cortex lesion and were tested in skilled reaching and skilled walking tasks. Two groups of rats experienced recurrent restraint stress in adulthood and one of these groups also underwent daily TS therapy. Animals that experienced both PS and AS displayed the most severe motor disabilities after lesion. By contrast, TS promoted recovery from ischemic lesion and reduced hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity. The data also showed that cumulative effects of adverse and beneficial lifespan experiences interact with disease outcomes and brain plasticity through the modulation of gene expression. Microarray analysis of the lesion motor cortex revealed that cumulative PS and AS interact with genes related to growth factors and transcription factors, which were not affected by PS or lesion alone. TS in PS+AS animals reverted these changes, suggesting a critical role for these factors in activity-dependent motor cortical reorganization after ischemic lesion. These findings suggest that beneficial experience later in life can moderate adverse consequences of early programming to improve cerebrovascular health.
The Heterotic String

A new type of superstring theory is constructed as a chiral combination of the closed D=26 bosonic and D=10 fermionic strings. The theory is supersymmetric, Lorentz invariant, and free of tachyons. Consistency requires the gauge group to be Spin(32)Z2 or E8×E8.
An SVM Ensemble Approach Combining Spectral, Structural, and Semantic Features for the Classification of High-Resolution Remotely Sensed Imagery

In recent years, the resolution of remotely sensed imagery has become increasingly high in both the spectral and spatial domains, which simultaneously provides more plentiful spectral and spatial information. Accordingly, the accurate interpretation of high-resolution imagery depends on effective integration of the spectral, structural and semantic features contained in the images. In this paper, we propose a new multifeature model, aiming to construct a support vector machine (SVM) ensemble combining multiple spectral and spatial features at both pixel and object levels. The features employed in this study include a gray-level co-occurrence matrix, differential morphological profiles, and an urban complexity index. Subsequently, three algorithms are proposed to integrate the multifeature SVMs: certainty voting, probabilistic fusion, and an object-based semantic approach, respectively. The proposed algorithms are compared with other multifeature SVM methods including the vector stacking, feature selection, and composite kernels. Experiments are conducted on the hyperspectral digital imagery collection experiment DC Mall data set and two WorldView-2 data sets. It is found that the multifeature model with semantic-based postprocessing provides more accurate classification results (an accuracy improvement of 1-4% for the three experimental data sets) compared to the voting and probabilistic models.
Analog complex gammatone filter for cochlear implant channels

According to recent physiological experiments, the envelope and phase of speech signals are required to enhance the perceptive capability of a cochlear implant processor. In this paper, the design of an analog complex gammatone filter is introduced in order to extract both envelope and phase information of the incoming speech signals as well as to emulate the basilar membrane spectral selectivity. The gammatone impulse response is first transformed into the frequency domain and the resulting 8th-order transfer function is subsequently mapped onto a state-space description of an orthonormal ladder filter. Using this approach, the real and imaginary transfer functions that share the same denominator can be extracted using two different C matrices. This results in a compact filter structure. The proposed filter is designed using Gm-C integrators and sub-threshold CMOS devices in AMIS 0. 35μm technology. Simulation results using Cadence RF Spectre confirm the design principle and ultra low power operation.
Ovarian Transcriptome Analysis of Portunus trituberculatus Provides Insights into Genes Expressed during Phase III and IV Development

Enhancing the production of aquatic animals is crucial for fishery management and aquaculture applications. Ovaries are specialized tissues that play critical roles in producing oocytes and hormones. Significant biochemical changes take place during the sexual maturation of Portunus trituberculatus, but the genetics of this process has not been extensively studied. Transcriptome sequencing can be used to determine gene expression changes within specific periods. In the current study, we used transcriptome sequencing to produce a comprehensive transcript dataset for the ovarian development of P. trituberculatus. Approximately 100 million sequencing reads were generated, and 126,075 transcripts were assembled. Functional annotation of the obtained transcripts revealed important pathways in ovarian development, such as those involving the vitellogenin gene. Also, we performed deep sequencing of ovaries in phases III and IV of sexual maturation in P. trituberculatus. Differential analysis of gene expression identified 506 significantly differentially expressed genes, which belong to 20 pathway, transporters, development, transcription factors, metabolism of other amino acids, carbohydrate and lipid, solute carrier family members, and enzymes. Taken together, our study provides the first comprehensive transcriptomic resource for P. trituberculatus ovaries, which will strengthen understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the sexual maturation process and advance molecular nutritional studies of P. trituberculatus.
Joint effects of chlorpyrifos and mancozeb on the terrestrial isopod Porcellionides pruinosus: A multiple biomarker approach

The exposure to pesticides by nontarget soil biota has long been regarded as a serious downside of modern agricultural regimes and the subject of heated debate. Of utmost relevance is the exposure to pesticide mixtures because their effects have been shown to not necessarily reflect the individual toxicity of their components, and even the simple addition of effects may lead to consequences not clearly anticipated. In the present study, a multiple biomarker approach was employed to identify the mechanistic and time effects underlying several single and mixture treatments of chlorpyrifos (CPF) and mancozeb (MCZ) in juveniles and adults of the terrestrial isopod Porcellionides pruinosus. The effects of the individual pesticides and the mixtures at recommended doses were mostly transitory under these controlled conditions and one‐pulse exposure. Whereas imbalances were identified on detoxification and oxidative stress‐related enzymes, the isopods generally showed the ability to recover through the end of the experiment. However, juveniles displayed greater vulnerability than adults. Most of the differences between life stages occurred in energy‐related parameters where distinct performances and stress‐handling behaviors were observed, suggesting higher metabolic costs to juveniles. Our results stress that understanding the time dependence of the underlying mechanisms governing the joint effects of the pesticides can help in assessing and anticipating the effects of the pesticide mixtures. Moreover, we emphasize the importance of taking life stage–related differences into consideration when evaluating the environmental risks of pesticides and pesticide mixtures. Environ Toxicol Chem 2018;37:1446–1457. © 2018 SETAC
5-aminolevulinic acid-incorporated nanoparticles of methoxy poly(ethylene glycol)-chitosan copolymer for photodynamic therapy

Purpose The aim of this study was to make 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA)-incorporated nanoparticles using methoxy polyethylene glycol/chitosan (PEG-Chito) copolymer for application in photodynamic therapy for colon cancer cells. Methods 5-ALA-incorporated (PEG-Chito-5-ALA) nanoparticles were prepared by ion complex formation between 5-ALA and chitosan. Protoporphyrin IX accumulation in the tumor cells and phototoxicity induced by PEG-Chito-5-ALA nanoparticles were assessed using CT26 cells in vitro. Results PEG-Chito-5-ALA nanoparticles have spherical shapes with sizes diameters 200 nm. More specifically, microscopic observation revealed a core-shell structure of PEG-Chito-5-ALA nanoparticles. 1H NMR spectra showed that 5-ALA was incorporated in the core of the nanoparticles. In the absence of light irradiation, all components such as 5-ALA, empty nanoparticles, and PEG-Chito-5-ALA nanoparticles did not affect the viability of cells. However, 5-ALA or PEG-Chito-5-ALA nanoparticles induced tumor cell death under light irradiation, and the viability of tumor cells was dose-dependently decreased according to the increase in irradiation time. In particular, PEG-Chito-5-ALA nanoparticles induced increased phototoxicity and higher protoporphyrin IX accumulation into the tumor cells than did 5-ALA alone. Furthermore, PEG-Chito-5-ALA nanoparticles accelerated apoptosis/necrosis of tumor cells, compared to 5-ALA alone. Conclusion PEG-Chito-5-ALA nanoparticles showed superior delivery capacity of 5-ALA and phototoxicity against tumor cells. These results show that PEG-Chito-5-ALA nanoparticles are promising candidates for photodynamic therapy of colon cancer cells.
Characterization of Colletotrichum isolates causing avocado anthracnose and first report of C. gigasporum infecting avocado in Sri Lanka

Colletotrichum can be identified as the major causative fungal agent of avocado anthracnose all over the world. In Sri Lanka, Colletotrichum gloeosporioides reported to be the sole causative agent of avocado anthracnose. This paper presents a morphological, genetic and pathogenic study conducted using Colletotrichum isolates collected from different avocado cultivating areas of Sri Lanka. Here, the identity of C. gloeosporioides has been confirmed using multi locus phylogeny as the major causative agent and provides Colletotrichum gigasporum as a causative agent of avocado anthracnose for the first time in Sri Lanka. Difference of these two species also confirmed by banding patterns obtained using Inter Sequence Simple Repeat (ISSR) primers.
Metformin Protects Skeletal Muscle from Cardiotoxin Induced Degeneration

The skeletal muscle tissue has a remarkable capacity to regenerate upon injury. Recent studies have suggested that this regenerative process is improved when AMPK is activated. In the muscle of young and old mice a low calorie diet, which activates AMPK, markedly enhances muscle regeneration. Remarkably, intraperitoneal injection of AICAR, an AMPK agonist, improves the structural integrity of muscles of dystrophin-deficient mdx mice. Building on these observations we asked whether metformin, a powerful anti-hyperglycemic drug, which indirectly activates AMPK, affects the response of skeletal muscle to damage. In our conditions, metformin treatment did not significantly influence muscle regeneration. On the other hand we observed that the muscles of metformin treated mice are more resilient to cardiotoxin injury displaying lesser muscle damage. Accordingly myotubes, originated in vitro from differentiated C2C12 myoblast cell line, become more resistant to cardiotoxin damage after pre-incubation with metformin. Our results indicate that metformin limits cardiotoxin damage by protecting myotubes from necrosis. Although the details of the molecular mechanisms underlying the protective effect remain to be elucidated, we report a correlation between the ability of metformin to promote resistance to damage and its capacity to counteract the increment of intracellular calcium levels induced by cardiotoxin treatment. Since increased cytoplasmic calcium concentrations characterize additional muscle pathological conditions, including dystrophies, metformin treatment could prove a valuable strategy to ameliorate the conditions of patients affected by dystrophies.