Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
QUIST: A System for Semantic Query Optimization in Relational Databases

Semanfic query ophizotion is an approach to query optimization that uses knowledge of the semantics of the data to transform a query into another query that has the same answer but can be processed more efficiently. However, the indiscriminate application of semantic transformations can itself be excessively costly when there are many semantic rules upon which transformations can be based. This paper describes a semantic query optimization system called QUIST (Query lmprovement through Semantic Transformation). QUIST demonstrates significant cost reductions for a class of relational database queries. At the same time, QUIST uses knowledge about relational database structures and processing methods to insure that semantic transformations are applied selectively. This knowledge reflects cost models and optimization techniques developed in recent query optimization research. To integrate semantic, structure, and processing knowledge, QUIST analyzes a query at several levels of detail, along the lines of the plan-generate-test paradigm of artificial intelligence systems.
Lack of Specific Amyloid-β(1-42) Suppression by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs in Young, Plaque-Free Tg2576 Mice and in Guinea Pig Neuronal Cultures

Recent studies indicating that some nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) selectively modulate γ-secretase cleavage of amyloid precursor protein (APP) while sparing Notch processing have generated interest in discovery of novel γ-secretase modulators with the “NSAID-like” efficacy profile. The objective of the present studies was to compare the efficacy of a subset of NSAIDs with previously reported classical γ-secretase inhibitors LY-411575 [N2-[(2S)-2-(3,5-difluorophenyl)-2-hydroxyethanoyl]-N1-[(7S)-5-methyl-6-oxo-6,7-dihydro-5H-dibenzo[b,d]azepin-7-yl]-l-alaninamide]and DAPT [N-[N- (3,5-difluorophenacetyl)-l-alanyl]-S-phenylglycine t-butyl ester] in Tg2576 mice. Flurbiprofen (10 and 25 mg/kg/day) was overtly toxic and elicited significant (but nonselective) reductions in both Aβ(1-40) and Aβ(1-42) in the plasma in one of two studies. Flurbiprofen also produced a small reduction in Aβ(1-40) in the cortex at 25 mg/kg/day but did not affect Aβ levels in hippocampus or cerebrospinal fluid. Ibuprofen and sulindac sulfide were neither overtly toxic nor efficacious at doses up to 50 mg/kg/day. The effects of NSAIDs LY-411575 and DAPT were tested in guinea pig embryonic neuronal cultures to determine whether the selective reductions in Aβ(1-42) observed in cell lines overexpressing human mutant APP can be reproduced in a neuronal model of physiological Aβ production and secretion. Flurbiprofen and sulindac nonselectively reduced Aβ(1-40) and Aβ(1-42) at concentrations ≥125 μM, although cytotoxicity was noted at ≥250 μM sulindac. Ibuprofen had no effect at concentrations up to 500 μM. In contrast, DAPT and LY-411575 potently and completely inhibited Aβ(1-40), Aβ(1-42), and Aβ(1-38) in the absence of cytotoxicity. The divergence of the present data from published reports raises the need to examine the conditions necessary to perceive selective Aβ(1-42) reduction by NSAIDs in neuronal tissue.
A note on the decomposition of the health concentration index.

In recent work, the concentration index has been widely used as a measure of income-related health inequality. The purpose of this note is to illustrate two different methods for decomposing the overall health concentration index using data collected from a Short Form (SF-36) survey of the general Australian population conducted in 1995. For simplicity, we focus on the physical functioning scale of the SF-36. Firstly we examine decomposition 'by component' by separating the concentration index for the physical functioning scale into the ten items on which it is based. The results show that the items contribute differently to the overall inequality measure, i.e. two of the items contributed 13% and 5%, respectively, to the overall measure. Second, to illustrate the 'by subgroup' method we decompose the concentration index by employment status. This involves separating the population into two groups: individuals currently in employment; and individuals not currently employed. We find that the inequality between these groups is about five times greater than the inequality within each group. These methods provide insights into the nature of inequality that can be used to inform policy design to reduce income related health inequalities.
DARPA's GaN technology thrust

DARPA/MTO has sponsored III-N electronics programs to combine associated high intrinsic breakdown voltages, high electron saturation velocities, and large sheet carrier densities. The WBGS-RF program has developed GaN HEMTs for high power RF electronics resulting in sufficiently mature transistors to confidently predict > 10E6 hours of MTTF for up to 40GHz power device operation. The latest NEXT program further pushes III-N-based HEMTs toward its frequency (size) scaling limits by simultaneously minimizing carrier transit time, maximizing electron density, and reducing access resistances with innovative epitaxial structures and dielectric heterointerfaces. The goals of the Phase I of NEXT project are to demonstrate 300 GHz D-mode and 200 GHz E-mode HEMTs while maintaining the breakdown voltage and transistor cutoff frequency product ≥ 5 THz●Volt. The final goal of the NEXT program is to enable 1000-transistor, high-yield, 500 GHz E/D-mode GaN technology for mixed signal applications.
Greedy map generalization by iterative point removal

This paper describes a map generalization program we submitted to the ACM SIGSPATIAL Cup 2014. In this competition, the goal is to remove as many points in a set of polygonal lines as quickly as possible with respect to two constraints. The topological relationships among the lines must not change, and the relationships between a set of control points and the lines must not change. Inspired by Visvalingam-Whyatt Algorithm, we iteratively examine successive triplets along each line, and remove the middle point if no control point or point of other lines is in the associated triangle. Based on the features of the training datasets, we further introduce many optimization techniques to speed up the computation.
Evolution of the single-mode Rayleigh-Taylor instability under the influence of time-dependent accelerations.

From nonlinear models and direct numerical simulations we report on several findings of relevance to the single-mode Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability driven by time-varying acceleration histories. The incompressible, direct numerical simulations (DNSs) were performed in two (2D) and three dimensions (3D), and at a range of density ratios of the fluid combinations (characterized by the Atwood number). We investigated several acceleration histories, including acceleration profiles of the general form g(t)∼t^{n}, with n≥0 and acceleration histories reminiscent of the linear electric motor experiments. For the 2D flow, results from numerical simulations compare well with a 2D potential flow model and solutions to a drag-buoyancy model reported as part of this work. When the simulations are extended to three dimensions, bubble and spike growth rates are in agreement with the so-called level 2 and level 3 models of Mikaelian [K. O. Mikaelian, Phys. Rev. E 79, 065303(R) (2009)10.1103/PhysRevE.79. 065303], and with corresponding 3D drag-buoyancy model solutions derived in this article. Our generalization of the RT problem to study variable g(t) affords us the opportunity to investigate the appropriate scaling for bubble and spike amplitudes under these conditions. We consider two candidates, the displacement Z and width s^{2}, but find the appropriate scaling is dependent on the density ratios between the fluids-at low density ratios, bubble and spike amplitudes are explained by both s^{2} and Z, while at large density differences the displacement collapses the spike data. Finally, for all the acceleration profiles studied here, spikes enter a free-fall regime at lower Atwood numbers than predicted by all the models.
High-precision flexible fabrication of tissue engineering scaffolds using distinct polymers

Three-dimensional porous structures using biodegradable materials with excellent biocompatibility are critically important for tissue engineering applications. We present a multi-nozzle-based versatile deposition approach to flexibly construct porous tissue engineering scaffolds using distinct polymeric biomaterials such as thermoplastic and photo-crosslinkable polymers. We first describe the development of the deposition system and fabrication of scaffolds from two types of biodegradable polymers using this system. The thermoplastic sample is semi-crystalline poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) that can be processed at a temperature higher than its melting point and solidifies at room temperature. The photo-crosslinkable one is polypropylene fumarate (PPF) that has to be dissolved in a reactive solvent as a resin for being cured into solid structures. Besides the direct fabrication of thermoplastic PCL scaffolds, we specifically develop a layer molding approach for the fabrication of crosslinkable polymers, which traditionally can only be fabricated by stereolithography. In this approach, a thermoplastic supporting material (paraffin wax) is first deposited to make a mold for each specific layer, and then PPF is deposited on demand to fill the mold and cured by the UV light. The supporting material can be removed to produce a porous scaffold of crosslinked PPF. Both PCL and crosslinked PPF scaffolds fabricated using the developed system have been characterized in terms of compressive mechanical properties, morphology, pore size and porosity. Mouse MC3T3-E1 pre-osteoblastic cell studies on the fabricated scaffolds have been performed to demonstrate their capability of supporting cell proliferation and ingrowth, aiming for bone tissue engineering applications.
Analysis of Actual Sampled Data System in Fractional Fourier Transform Domain

Sampling and reconstruction is a basic issue in signal processing. The known sampling theory in the fractional Fourier transform (FRFT) domain is based on the assumption of ideal uniform impulse train sampling. However, this assumption is not valid for engineering application. This paper analyzes the actual sample-and-hold system in the FRFT domain, and then constructs a new sample-and-hold system in the FRFT domain to recovery the original input signal. The result obtained in this paper realizes the application of the sampling theorem for the FRFT domain in engineering.
Privacy and security in e-health applications

The introduction of e-Health and extramural applications in the personal healthcare domain has raised serious concerns about security and privacy of health data. Novel digital technologies require other security approaches in addition to the traditional "purely physical" approach. Furthermore, privacy is becoming an increasing concern in domains that deal with sensitive information such as healthcare, which cannot absorb the costs of security abuses in the system. Once sensitive information about an individual’s health is uncovered and social damage is done, there is no way to revoke the information or to restitute the individual. Therefore, in addition to legal means, it is very important to provide and enforce privacy and security in healthcare by technological means. In this chapter, the authors analyze privacy and security requirements in healthcare, explain their importance and review both classical and novel security technologies that could fulfill these requirements.
Estimation of Gap Between Current Language Models and Human Performance

Language models (LMs) have gained dramatic improvement in the past years due to the wide application of neural networks. This raises the question of how far we are away from the perfect language model and how much more research is needed in language modelling. As for perplexity giving a value for human perplexity (as an upper bound of what is reasonably expected from an LM) is difﬁcult. Word error rate (WER) has the disadvantage that it also measures the quality of other components of a speech recognizer like the acoustic model and the feature extraction. We therefore suggest evaluating LMs in a generative setting (which has been done before on selected hand-picked examples) and running a human evaluation on the generated sentences. The results imply that LMs need about 10 to 20 more years of research before human performance is reached. More-over, we show that the human judgement scores on the generated sentences and perplexity are closely correlated. This leads to an estimated perplexity of 12 for an LM that would be able to pass the human judgement test in the setting we suggested.
The Long-Term Impact of New-Product Introductions and Promotions on Financial Performance and Firm Value

Year after year, managers strive to improve financial performance and firm value by marketing actions such as new product introductions and promotional incentives. The current study investigates the short-term and long-term impact of such marketing actions on financial metrics, including top-line, bottom-line and stock market performance. While product introductions increase long-term financial performance and firm value, promotions do not. Managers may use these results to justify product innovation efforts and to weight short-term and long-term consequences of promotional incentives.
A Dynamic Hybrid Counting Procedure for eMBMS of 3GPP

In this paper, we identify two inefficiencies in the counting procedure of the evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) in 3GPP: (1) it may consume too much network resources in determining the number of User Equipments (UEs) which are interested in receiving MBMS services, and (2) it is too conservative in that the counting results may be smaller than actual numbers because those UEs in the RRC_IDLE state are ignored (for avoiding RACH congestion). We then propose a new dynamic method by combining the theory of Geometric Splitting-based Estimation (GSE) and the theory of probability to accelerate the eMBMS counting procedure. Compared to the original eMBMS counting procedure, which only counts the UEs in the RRC_CONNECTED state, our scheme also counts the UEs in the RRC_IDLE state. However, our method still improves the accuracy of counting results and saves radio resources.
Energy efficient layered cluster based hierarchical routing protocol with Dual Sink

In recent days lifetime of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an important issue to consider. The lifetime of a WSN depends on the energy consumption of sensor nodes. In this paper a new hierarchical routing protocol Layer Based Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LB-LEACH) is proposed to increase the lifetime of WSN in which layer factor is considered as a cluster head selection parameter to improve the performance of cluster head selection algorithm proposed in LEACH, EECHS and energy aware LEACH. We also use the concept of Dual Sink i.e. a static sink and multiple mobile sinks to increase the efficiency of data collection. Simulation result shows that our proposed algorithm LB-LEACH performs better than LEACH, Energy aware LEACH and EECHS.
Adaptive Current-Mode Control of a High Step-Up DC–DC Converter

A new adaptive current-mode control of a high step-up dc–dc converter is presented. The converter gives a very high voltage gain without using a transformer and maintains low voltage stress across the power devices. The adaptive controller is formed by combining the existing current-mode control law and an adaptive law that generates the inverse of the load resistance. The structure of the proposed adaptive law is such that the derivative of the estimate is both optimized and bounded. To facilitate the controller design, the derived averaged state-space model of the converter with parasitic elements is used. An approximate stability analysis is carried out to gain some insight into the behavior of the adaptive-controlled system. Some experimental results comparing the performance of the proposed adaptive current-mode controller with that of the existing current-mode controller are also presented.
Software Patents and Firm Value: A Real Options Perspective on the Role of Innovation Orientation and Environmental Uncertainty

While software patents have been growing steadily since 1996 when the restrictions on the patentability of software were eliminated, their value and impacts on firm’s profits remain unclear and ambiguous. Drawing on the real option theory and the literature on exploration and exploitation, we develop a novel theoretical framework to assess the value of software patent. Moreover, we examine the impact of contextual factors related to the nature of innovation underlying firms’ patent portfolios (exploitative vs. explorative) and the environmental uncertainty (competitiveness and dynamism) on the value of software patents. Specifically, we examine the interaction effect of a firm’s software patent stock and its innovation orientation on firm in markets exhibiting different levels of environmental uncertainty. Based on a large panel dataset consisting of 602 US firms, our results indicates that a software patent portfolio having higher levels of explorative orientation is associated with higher firm value (as measured by Tobin’s q) in market environments exhibiting low dynamism and high competitiveness. In contrast, a software patent portfolio with higher levels of exploitative orientation is associated with higher firm value in market environments exhibiting high dynamism and low competitiveness. We discuss the implications for research and practice.
Orientation Contrast and Entropy Contrast in the Genesis of Subjective Contours along Thin Lines

Subjective contours are widely considered to be an aspect of the perception of occlusion, but considerations of occlusion do not always drive predictions of their strength. Occluding surfaces have no necessary relationship to the contours they occlude, yet it is commonly predicted that subjective contours will be strongest for inducer alignments that are orthogonal to inducer orientations. In several papers we have proposed that a lack of relationship between inducers and their alignment promotes seeing subjective contours. We explore this further here using horizontal or near-horizontal thin-line inducers arranged vertically with linearly aligned terminations along central gaps. Subjective contour strength was measured using the method of paired comparison in two experiments. The weakest subjective contours were found when the gap was orthogonal to the inducers and parallel to the outer edges of the line set. Subjective contours were strengthened by orientation contrast, defined either as a nonorthogonal relationship between the gap and the inducers or as nonparallelism between the gap and the outer alignments of the inducers. The effect was replicated at both high and low line densities. We also confirmed a strong effect of high inducer entropy (variations in inducer orientation and separation) with thin-line inducers. The results support the view that the lack of a relationship of alignments to what is aligned is a major determinant of subjective contour strength.
An Exploratory Analysis of Cash Holdings and Pay-Performance Sensitivity before and after IFRS Adoption

This paper documents an association between firms’ cash holdings and CEO’s pay performance sensitivity. Controlling whether CEOs are both president, firm size, leverage, auditor specialization and the ratio of independent board, we find that firms with more cash holdings are more likely to constrain executives’ pay-performance sensitivity than firms with less cash holdings do. Empirical evidence also shows a increasing pay-performance sensitivity after adopting IFRS in China. The changes of the fair value for investment property are recognized from the equity to income statement may influence executives contract. After using propensity score matching research design, we further find that decreasing sensitive compensation due to firms with great corporate cash holdings is more pronounced after IFRS adoption than before IFRS adoption. The results support alignment hypothesis, which argues that managers with high incentive compensation will engage to making risky decisions which may harm firms’ value in the future. Therefore, compensation committee should redesign managers’ compensation contract for limiting their risk-taking behavior. Compare with pre-IFRS period, firms maintaining sufficient liquidity are more likely to decrease CEOs’ incentive compensation for avoiding them pursuing real activities manipulation during post-IFRS period.
Relationships between plasma membrane microdomains and HIV‐1 assembly

Advances in cell biology and biophysics revealed that cellular membranes consist of multiple microdomains with specific sets of components such as lipid rafts and TEMs (tetraspanin‐enriched microdomains). An increasing number of enveloped viruses have been shown to utilize these microdomains during their assembly. Among them, association of HIV‐1 (HIV type 1) and other retroviruses with lipid rafts and TEMs within the PM (plasma membrane) is well documented. In this review, I describe our current knowledge on interrelationships between PM microdomain organization and the HIV‐1 particle assembly process. Microdomain association during virus particle assembly may also modulate subsequent virus spread. Potential roles played by microdomains will be discussed with regard to two post‐assembly events, i.e., inhibition of virus release by a raft‐associated protein BST‐2/tetherin and cell‐to‐cell HIV‐1 transmission at virological synapses.
UNITN: Part-Of-Speech Counting in Relation Extraction

This report describes the UNITN system, a Part-Of-Speech Context Counter, that participated at Semeval 2010 Task 8: Multi-Way Classification of Semantic Relations Between Pairs of Nominals. Given a text annotated with Part-of-Speech, the system outputs a vector representation of a sentence containing 20 features in total. There are three steps in the system's pipeline: first the system produces an estimation of the entities' position in the relation, then an estimation of the semantic relation type by means of decision trees and finally it gives a predicition of semantic relation plus entities' position. The system obtained good results in the estimation of entities' position (F1=98.3%) but a critically poor performance in relation classification (F1=26.6%), indicating that lexical and semantic information is essential in relation extraction. The system can be used as an integration for other systems or for purposes different from relation extraction.