Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predictability analysis on expressway vehicle mobility using electronic toll collection data

This paper assesses the predictability of individual vehicle's mobility in Beijing expressway system using Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) data records. By examining the uncertainties of movements using entropy, considering both the frequencies and sequential correlations of vehicles' trajectories, we draw to the conclusion that the average limit of predictability of expressway vehicles mobility is 91%. Furthermore, we concluded that the individual property is negatively correlated to its mobility property such as visited station, average travel distance and radius of gyration. Finally, we applied Markov chain (MC) based models to predict the actual accuracy of predictability and found that MC(1) model is adequate to produce a good result and extending the order of the model won't give substantial bonus, thus the first-order Markov property of expressway vehicles' trajectory is proved. Our findings indicate that individual vehicles' mobility in expressway system is far from random and highly dependent on its historical trajectory.
Integrin traffic

Cell adhesion, migration and the maintenance of cell polarity are all processes that depend on the correct targeting of integrins and the dynamic remodelling of integrin-containing adhesion sites. The importance of the endo/exocytic cycle of integrins as a key regulator of these functions is increasingly recognized. Several recent publications have provided mechanistic insight into how integrin traffic is regulated in cells. Increasing evidence suggests that small GTPases such as Arf6 and members of the Rab family control integrin internalization and recycling back to the plasma membrane along microtubules. The fine tuning of these trafficking events seems to be mediated by specific guanine-nucleotide-exchange factors (GEFs) and GTPase-activating proteins (GAPs). In addition, several kinases regulate integrin traffic. The identification of their substrates has demonstrated how these kinases regulate integrin traffic by controlling small GTPases or stabilizing cytoskeletal tracks that are crucial for efficient traffic of integrins to the plasma membrane.
Reactive Search, a history-based heuristic for MAX-SAT

The Reactive Search (RS) method proposes the integration of a simple history-based feedback scheme into local search for the on-line determination of free parameters. In this paper a new RS algorithm is proposed for the approximated solution of the Maximum Satissability problem: a component based on local search with temporary prohibitions is complemented with a reactive scheme that determines (\learns") the appropriate value of the prohibition parameter by monitoring the Hamming distance along the search trajectory (algorithm H-RTS). In addition, the non-oblivious functions recently introduced in the framework of approximation algorithms are used to discover a better local optimum in the initial part of the search. The algorithm is developed in two phases. First the bias-diversiication properties of individual candidate components are analyzed by extensive empirical evaluation, then a reactive scheme is added to the winning component, based on Tabu Search. The nal tests on a benchmark of random MAX{3{SAT and MAX{4{SAT problems demonstrate the superiority of H-RTS with respect to alternative heuristics.
Chapter 1 Mobility Models for Systems Evaluation

Mobility models are used to simulate and evaluate the performance of mobile wireless systems and the algorithms and protocols at the basis of them. The definition of realistic mobility models is one of the most critical and, at the same time, difficult aspects of the simulation of applications and systems designed for mobile environments. There are essentially two possible types of mobility patterns that can be used to evaluate mobile network protocols and algorithms by means of simulations: traces and synthetic models [15]. Traces are obtained by means of measurements of deployed systems and usually consist of logs of connectivity or location information, whereas synthetic models are mathematical models, such as sets of equations, which try to capture the movement of the devices. Currently, there are very few and very recent public data repository of traces capturing movement of people. Examples are GPS traces and Bluetooth connectivity traces (i.e., traces containing the Bluetooth identifiers of the devices that have been in radio range of a device). For instance, researchers at the Intel Research Laboratory and the University of Cambridge distributed Bluetooth devices to people, in order to collect data about human movements and study the characteristics of the colocation patterns among people. These experiments were firstly conducted among students and researchers in Cambridge [17] and then among the participants of INFOCOM 2005 [37]. Examples of similar projects are the Wireless Topology Discovery project at UCSD [57] and the campus-wide WiFi traffic measurements that have been carried out at Dartmouth College [31]. At this institution, a project with the aim of creating a repository of publicly available traces for the mobile networking community has also been started [46]. In general, synthetic models have been largely preferred [15]. The reasons of this choice are many. First of all, as mentioned, the publicly available traces are limited. Telecommunication companies usually collect and ana-
Sequential blind source separation based exclusively on second-order statistics developed for a class of periodic signals

A sequential algorithm for the blind separation of a class of periodic source signals is introduced in this paper. The algorithm is based only on second-order statistical information and exploits the assumption that the source signals have distinct periods. Separation is performed by sequentially converging to a solution which in effect diagonalizes the output covariance matrix constructed at a lag corresponding to the fundamental period of the source we select, the one with the smallest period. Simulation results for synthetic signals and real electrocardiogram recordings show that the proposed algorithm has the ability to restore statistical independence, and its performance is comparable to that of the equivariant adaptive source separation (EASI) algorithm, a benchmark high-order statistics-based sequential algorithm with similar computational complexity. The proposed algorithm is also shown to mitigate the limitation that the EASI algorithm can separate at most one Gaussian distributed source. Furthermore, the steady-state performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with that of EASI and the block-based second-order blind identification (SOBI) method.
Timing errors in LDPC decoding computations with overscaled supply voltage

Decoders for Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes, used commonly in communication networks, possess inherent tolerance to random internal computation errors. Consequently, it is possible to apply voltage over-scaling (VOS) in their implementation to save energy. In this paper, the impact of VOS on timing errors is characterized for a typical min-sum LDPC decoder architecture using circuit simulations. Failure modes are analyzed for arithmetic circuits performing variable and check node computations. It is shown that a rather unconventional register placement in the variable node unit is beneficial for voltage scaling, and that the check node unit may be designed such that only the least significant bits are more likely to experience errors. Insights into timing error characteristics obtained through this analysis can be used to estimate the limits of voltage scaling and associated energy saving in practical LDPC decoder designs.
Gossip-based density estimation in dynamic heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

The density estimation of diverse sensor types in a heterogeneous sensor network is an important service that can be used in clustering schemes, node redeployment and sleep scheduling strategies. Similar to any wireless sensor network service, energy efficiency is one of the main requirements. The service has to provide an updated estimation at each node. Network dynamics, especially node mobility, introduce new challenges. Moreover, churn makes the problem even more complicated. In this paper we introduce a new approach called Gossip based Density Estimation GDE for heterogeneous dynamic networks. The devised method is able to cope with node mobility and churn, as well as redeployment of new nodes. It is fully distributed and adaptive to network dynamics. We analyse the effect of mobility as well as increased scale in the number of clusters and the quantity of nodes. The simulation results support the idea that our algorithm has a fast convergence speed and provides more accurate estimation compared to similar approaches.
Learning to Ground in Spoken Dialogue Systems

Machine learning methods such as reinforcement learning applied to dialogue strategy optimization has become a leading subject of researches since the mid 90's. Indeed, the great variability of factors to take into account makes the design of a spoken dialogue system a tailoring task and reusability of previous work is very difficult. Yet, techniques such as reinforcement learning are very demanding in training data while obtaining a substantial amount of data in the particular case of spoken dialogues is time-consuming and therefore expansive. In order to expand existing data sets, dialogue simulation techniques are becoming a standard solution. In this paper, we present a user model for realistic spoken dialogue simulation and a method for using this model so as to simulate the grounding process. This allows including grounding subdialogues as actions in the reinforcement learning process and learning adapted strategy.
Heterogeneous routing architecture for low-power FPGA fabric

In this study, we present design techniques to implement low power FPGA routing architecture by combining fast and slow routing resources, where the circuit design of slow resource is optimized to reduce leakage power. Timing-driven placement and routing experiments along with power modeling are used to identify the type and percentage of resources that can be slowed down. Based on our analysis, we present a heterogeneous (HT) routing architecture to reduce standby power dissipation of FPGA routing fabric by 33% without any area penalty and at the cost of less than 5% performance degradation.
Stochastic optimization of bipedal walking using gyro feedback and phase resetting

We present a method to optimize the walking pattern of a humanoid robot for forward speed using suitable metaheuristics. Our starting point is a hand-tuned open-loop gait that we enhance with two feedback control mechanisms. First, we employ a P-controller that regulates the foot angle in order to reduce angular velocity of the robot's body. Second, we introduce a phase resetting mechanism that starts the next step at the moment of foot contact. Using a physics-based simulation, we demonstrate that such feedback control is essential for achieving fast and robust locomotion.
Relationship Building in Virtual Teams: An Academic Case Study

Information Technology (IT) provides the infrastructure for communication and collaboration tools for virtual teams, but Henttonen and Blomqvist (2005) suggest that it is the relational communication and factors of trust, commitment and communication that attention. This case study presents a team building strategy for such interaction. Off-campus students in an undergraduate course apply technological design concepts for social mechanisms in communication and collaboration to virtual teamwork. Students utilise the themes of conversation, awareness and coordination and document their reflection on their use over the team lifecycle. All functioning teams indicated that these social mechanisms helped to build team trust and commitment. Seventy-two percent of students indicated positive team experience, despite constraints of workload, time pressure, technology tools, distance and uncooperative team members. This study argues that use of guided and iterative reflections on social mechanisms support virtual team functioning and strengthen relationships.
Qué drogas se prefieren para las relaciones sexuales en contextos recreativos

ntre los adolescentes el consumo de alcohol y otras drogas esta frecuentemente vinculado al contexto recreativo nocturno, al igual que la busqueda y experimentacion en sexualidad. Cada una de las sustancias tiene efectos en el comportamiento, en la experiencia sexual y en las consecuencias. Aqui se explora como experimentan los adolescentes espanoles la relacion y el rol que ocupan las drogas en la experimentacion de la sexualidad en estos contextos recreativos. Se ha utilizado metodologia cualitativa para explorar la relacion entre sexualidad y drogas en 100 jovenes de ambos sexos de 4 ciudades espanolas, que les gustase salir los fines de semana y con experiencia sexual. Se les localiza mediante el sistema de bola de nieve y se les hace entrevistas en profundidad. Los resultados confirman la importancia que adquiere el contexto recreativo nocturno en la busqueda y experiencia sexual entre los jovenes. Los jovenes tienen una idea muy precisa de como cada una de ellas funciona en relacion con distintas practicas sexuales. El alcohol es con mucho la mas popular y la que tiene mas ventajas en las cuatro practicas sexuales analizadas (facilitar el encuentro sexual, involucrarse en experiencias mas arriesgadas, aumentar la excitacion y prolongar la relacion sexual), excepto para prolongar la relacion que se prefiere la cocaina. El cannabis no gusta porque relaja y no hay interes en el extasis por sus efectos sobre la sexualidad. A las mujeres les gusta mucho el alcohol para experiencias arriesgadas, aumentar sensaciones y prolongar sexo y utilizarian menos cocaina.
Neural correlates of hand-tool interaction

Background: The recent advent of non-invasive functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) has helped us understand how visual information is processed in the visual system, and the functional organising principles of high-order visual areas beyond striate cortex. In particular, evidence has been reported for a constellation of high-order visual areas that are highly specialised for the visual processing of different object domains such as faces, bodies, and tools. A number of accounts of the underlying principle of functional specialisation in high-order visual cortex propose that visual properties and object domain drive the category selectivity of these areas. However, recent evidence has challenged such accounts, showing that non-visual object properties and connectivity constraints between specialised brain networks can, in part, account for the visual system’s functional organisation. Methodology: Here I will use fMRI to examine how areas along the visual ventral stream and dorsal action stream process visually presented hands and tools. These categories are visually dissimilar but share similar functions. By using different statistical analyses, such as univariate group and single-subject region of interest (ROI) analyses, multivariate multivoxel pattern analyses, and functional connectivity analyses, I will investigate the topics of category-selectivity and the principles underlying the organisation of high-order visual areas in left occipitotemporal and left parietal cortex. Principle Findings: In the first part of this thesis I report novel evidence that, similar to socially relevant faces and bodies, the human high-order visual areas in left occipitotemporal and left parietal cortex houses areas that are selective for the visual processing of human hands. In the second part of this thesis, I show that the visual representation of hands and tools in these areas show large anatomical overlap and high similarity in the response patterns to these categories. As hands and tools differ in visual appearance and object domain yet share action-related properties, the results demonstrate that these category-selective responses in the visual system reflect responses to non-visual action-related object properties common to hands and tools rather than to purely visual properties or object domain. This proposition is further supported by evidence of selective functional connectivity patterns between hand/tool occipitotemporal and parietal areas. Conclusions/Significance: Overall these results indicate that high-order visual cortex is functionally organised to process both visual properties and non-visual object dimensions (e.g., action-related properties). I propose that this correspondence between hand and tool representations in ventral ‘visual’ and parietal ‘action’ areas is constrained by the necessity to connect visual object information to functionally-specific downstream networks (e.g., frontoparietal action network) to facilitate hand-tool action-related processing.
Genetic divergence in cocoa progenies for backcrossing program to witches' broom disease resistance

Backcrossing has been little used in cacao breeding, particularly due to the long time required to transfer genes and recover the genetic background of the recurrent parent. The objective of this study was to select individuals, resulting from the backcross CEPEC-42 x SIC-19, genetically related to the recurrent parent SIC-19 by using RAPD molecular markers, among those with resistance to witches’ broom. Of the 31 plants that clustered with SIC-19, 18 from the replanted material remained free of the disease in the field, with good vegetative aspect and, therefore can be used for backcross to reach the desired objective.
GLOBALLY DESCRIBING THE CURRENT DAY LAND SURFACE AND HISTORICAL LAND COVER CHANGE IN CCSM 3 . 0 USING AVHRR AND MODIS DATA AT FINE SCALES

Tian et al., (2004a), Oleson et al., (2003), and Tian et al., (2004b) recently identified significant differences between the current land surface parameters of the Community Land Model (CLM) used with the Community Climate System Model (CCSM), and global land surface descriptions from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite mapping. Specifically these investigations identified significant differences in Leaf Area Index (LAI), Fraction of Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FPAR), and land surface albedo. Tian et al., (2004a) suggested that these differences in land surface representation, especially land surface albedo, may significantly affect the accuracy of climate simulation of the CCSM model. To asses whether these differences in land surface representation do have significant impacts on the climate modeled in the CLM and the CCSM, new land surface parameters have been developed from land surface data derived from NOAA Pathfinder Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and MODIS satellite data that minimise these differences. The impact on the climate simulated in the CCSM with these new parameters was assessed through a climate sensitivity experiment with the new parameters against a control experiment with the current land surface parameters. The climate modeled in these sensitivity experiments were compared with globally observed climate data to evaluate the climate impacts that the new land surface parameters had at global, continental and regional scales.
An Asynchronous Task-based Fan-Both Sparse Cholesky Solver

Author(s): Jacquelin, Mathias; Zheng, Yili; Ng, Esmond; Yelick, Katherine | Abstract: Systems of linear equations arise at the heart of many scientific and engineering applications. Many of these linear systems are sparse; i.e., most of the elements in the coefficient matrix are zero. Direct methods based on matrix factorizations are sometimes needed to ensure accurate solutions. For example, accurate solution of sparse linear systems is needed in shift-invert Lanczos to compute interior eigenvalues. The performance and resource usage of sparse matrix factorizations are critical to time-to-solution and maximum problem size solvable on a given platform. In many applications, the coefficient matrices are symmetric, and exploiting symmetry will reduce both the amount of work and storage cost required for factorization. When the factorization is performed on large-scale distributed memory platforms, communication cost is critical to the performance of the algorithm. At the same time, network topologies have become increasingly complex, so that modern platforms exhibit a high level of performance variability. This makes scheduling of computations an intricate and performance-critical task. In this paper, we investigate the use of an asynchronous task paradigm, one-sided communication and dynamic scheduling in implementing sparse Cholesky factorization (symPACK) on large-scale distributed memory platforms. Our solver symPACK relies on efficient and flexible communication primitives provided by the UPC++ library. Performance evaluation shows good scalability and that symPACK outperforms state-of-the-art parallel distributed memory factorization packages, validating our approach on practical cases.
Acceleration of Yeast Actin Polymerization by Yeast Arp2/3 Complex Does Not Require an Arp2/3-activating Protein*

The Arp2/3 complex creates filament branches leading to an enhancement in the rate of actin polymerization. Work with Arp complexes from different sources indicated that it was inactive by itself, required an activating factor such as the Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome protein (WASP), and might exhibit a preference for ATP or ADP-Pi actin. However, with yeast actin, Pi release is almost concurrent with polymerization, eliminating the presence of an ADP-Pi cap. We thus investigated the ability of the yeast Arp2/3 complex (yArp2/3) to facilitate yeast actin polymerization in the presence and absence of the Arp2/3-activating factor Las17p WA. yArp2/3 significantly accelerates yeast actin but not muscle actin polymerization in the absence of Las17p WA. The addition of Las17p WA further enhances yeast actin polymerization by yArp2/3 and allows the complex to now assist muscle actin polymerization. This actin isoform difference is not observed with bovine Arp2/3 complex, because the neural WASP VCA fragment is required for polymerization of both actins. Observation of individual branching filaments showed that Las17p WA increased the persistence of filament branches. Compared with wild type actin, the V159N mutant actin, proposed to be more ATP-like in behavior, exhibited an enhanced rate of polymerization in the presence of the yArp2/3 complex. yArp2/3 caused a significant rate of Pi release prior to observation of an increase in filament mass but while branched structures were present. Thus, yeast F-actin can serve as a primary yArp2/3-activating factor, indicating that a newly formed yeast actin filament has a topology, unlike that of muscle actin, that is recognized specifically by yArp2/3.
Resolution of the Direct Position Problem of Parallel Kinematic Platforms Using the Geometrical-Iterative Method

This paper presents the application of the procedure known as the Geometrical-Iterative Method to the resolution of the direct position problem in spatial mechanisms, and in particular parallel platforms. This procedure is based on the successive application of geometric constraints used for modelling the mechanism. The application sequence of these is defined from a search algorithm directed at satisfying two basic convergence conditions. The method is a competitive alternative for the Newton-Raphson procedure in the kinematic control of parallel platforms.