Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Verification of JavaSpaces/spl trade/ parallel programs

We illustrate a formal verification method for distributed JavaSpaces applications by analyzing a nontrivial fault tolerant algorithm that solves a typical coordination problem. The problem consists of the computation of an extensive task, performed in parallel by splitting it into smaller and more manageable parts. The proposed solution, based on JavaSpaces coordination primitives, transactions and timeouts, is verified by translating it to the formal language /spl mu/CRL, together with the previously developed /spl mu/CRL-model of the JavaSpaces architecture, and by using model checking techniques.
ACADEMIC AFFAIRS COUNCIL MEETING

1. ANNOUNCMENTS DON FEKE  Patricia Underwood, Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the School of Nursing, was unable to make today’s meeting; however, she wanted to inquire of the Council if it was interested in discussing the university’s purchasing system. She feels it hinders processes in the nursing school, and wondered if any other departments are facing the same issues. There was a general consensus among the members that yes; this would definitely be a beneficial topic for a future meeting. A discussion then ensued on the fairness of the payment schedule of independent contractors.  Professor Feke introduced Dan Coleman, the new program coordinator for the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center. Dan comes from Indiana University and Capital University. Dan explained that this is his third position in the LGBT field; he has also been very active in political campaigns and as a gay activist.  Update on University Librarian search: There are now four finalists for the position. Three of the four finalists have had their second interviews. They are from the University of Kansas; the University of California, Santa Barbara; the University of Miami in Ohio, and Lyrasis, Inc. in Atlanta, GA. There are three opportunities to hear the candidates speak: one public presentation and two open meetings.  Handouts for the Fulbright Scholar Program were distributed. Please contact Lynn Singer, Deputy Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, with any questions.  Dorothy Miller, Director of the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women, announced a save-the-date for the Women in Achievement luncheon. It will be on Friday, September 24, 2010. Sarah Andrews Richard Bischoff Fred Collopy Adrienne Dziak Donald Feke Elaine Greaves (for Alyson Alber) Jean Gubbins
An Efficient Hardware-Based Higher Radix Floating Point MAC Design

This article proposes an effective way of implementing a multiply accumulate circuit (MAC) for high-speed floating point arithmetic operations. The real-world applications related to digital signal processing and the like demand high-performance computation with greater accuracy. In general, digital signals are represented as a sequence of signed/unsigned fixed/floating point numbers. The final result of a MAC operation can be computed by feeding the mantissa of the previous MAC result as one of the partial products to a Wallace tree multiplier or Braun multiplier. Thus, the separate accumulation circuit can be avoided by keeping the circuit depth still within the bounds of the Wallace tree multiplier, namely O(log2 n), or Braun multiplier, namely O(n). In this article, three kinds of floating point MACs are proposed. The experimental results show 48.54% of improvement in worst path delay achieved by the proposed floating point MAC using a radix-2 Wallace structure compared with a conventional floating point MAC without a pipeline using a 45nm technology library. The same proposed design gives 39.92% of improvement in worst path delay without a pipeline using a radix-4 Braun structure as compared with a conventional design. In this article, a radix-32 Q32.32-formatbased floating point MAC is proposed using a Wallace tree/Braun multiplier. Also this article discusses the msb prediction problem and its solution in floating point arithmetic that is not available in modern fused multiply-add designs. The performance results show comparisons between the proposed floating point MAC with various floating point MAC designs for radix-2,-4,-8, and -16. The proposed design has lesser depth than a conventional floating point MAC as well as a lower area requirement than other ways of floating point MAC implementation, both with/without a pipeline.
Psychophysiological Interactions in a Visual Checkerboard Task: Reproducibility, Reliability, and the Effects of Deconvolution

Psychophysiological interaction (PPI) is a regression based method to study task modulated brain connectivity. Despite its popularity in functional MRI (fMRI) studies, its reliability and reproducibility have not been evaluated. We investigated reproducibility and reliability of PPI effects during a simple visual task, and examined the effect of deconvolution on the PPI results. A large open-access dataset was analyzed (n = 138), where a visual task was scanned twice with repetition times (TRs) of 645 ms and 1400 ms, respectively. We first replicated our previous results by using the left and right middle occipital gyrus as seeds. Then ROI-wise (regions of interest) analysis was performed among twenty visual-related thalamic and cortical regions, and negative PPI effects were found between many ROIs with the posterior fusiform gyrus as a hub region. Both the seed-based and ROI-wise results were similar between the two runs and between the two PPI methods with and without deconvolution. The non-deconvolution method and the short TR run in general had larger effect sizes and greater extents. However, the deconvolution method performed worse in the 645 ms TR run than the 1400 ms TR run in the voxel-wise analysis. Given the general similar results between the two methods and the uncertainty of deconvolution, we suggest that deconvolution may be not necessary for PPI analysis on block-designed data. Lastly, intraclass correlations between the two runs were much lower for the PPI effects than the activation main effects, which raise cautions on performing inter-subject correlations and group comparisons on PPI effects.
Categorical and contextual bases of person memory and stereotyping.

In three studies, subjects observed slide and tape portrayals of interacting small groups that were of mixed sex or mixed race. Hypotheses tested were (a) that social perceivers encode person information by race and sex; (b) that this fact leads to minimizing within-group differences and exaggerating between-group differences; (c) that perceivers stereotype accordingly; (d) that within-group attributes, both stereotyped and nonstereotyped, are exaggerated in inverse proportion to the size of the minority subgroup; (e) that better discriminations are made within smaller subgroups; (f) that imputations of attributes to groups as a whole are also sensitive to the makeup of the group; and (g) that all these behaviors are attenuated when the perceiver is a member of the subgroup evaluated. All but the last hypothesis received at least partial support. Results are discussed in terms of categorizatio n processes and suggest that normal cognitive processes explain the process of stereotyping quite well.
Development of experimental legged robot for inspection and disaster response in plants

In this paper, a new experimental legged robot for inspection and disaster response in social infrastructures designed for humans, such as factories and power plants is presented. The robot has distinctive features to climb up and down ladders with a narrow cage, to pass through narrow environments, to move upon scattered debris at disaster sites and to deal with sudden and unexpected contact. The robot also satisfies environmental requirements related to dust, water, and temperature. To implement environmental resistance to a slim body for movement in a narrow environment, cooling of heat sources such as CPUs is a serious problem. Therefore a new cooling structure for humanoid robots is proposed. The proposed robot experiments on the above features are also shown in this paper.
Evidence for Transmission of Bluetongue Virus Serotype 26 through Direct Contact

The aim of this study was to assess the mechanisms of transmission of bluetongue virus serotype 26 (BTV-26) in goats. A previous study, which investigated the pathogenicity and infection kinetics of BTV-26 in goats, unexpectedly revealed that one control goat may have been infected through a direct contact transmission route. To investigate the transmission mechanisms of BTV-26 in more detail an experimental infection study was carried out in which three goats were infected with BTV-26, three goats were kept uninfected, but were housed in direct contact with the infected goats, and an additional four goats were kept in indirect contact separated from infected goats by metal gates. This barrier allowed the goats to have occasional face-to-face contact in the same airspace, but feeding, watering, sampling and environmental cleaning was carried out separately. The three experimentally infected goats did not show clinical signs of BTV, however high levels of viral RNA were detected and virus was isolated from their blood. At 21 dpi viral RNA was detected in, and virus was isolated from the blood of the three direct contact goats, which also seroconverted. The four indirect barrier contact goats remained uninfected throughout the duration of the experiment. In order to assess replication in a laboratory model species of Culicoides biting midge, more than 300 Culicoides sonorensis were fed a BTV-26 spiked blood meal and incubated for 7 days. The dissemination of BTV-26 in individual C. sonorensis was inferred from the quantity of virus RNA and indicated that none of the insects processed at day 7 possessed transmissible infections. This study shows that BTV-26 is easily transmitted through direct contact transmission between goats, and the strain does not seem to replicate in C. sonorensis midges using standard incubation conditions.
The relative roles of follicle-stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone in maintaining spermatogonial maturation and spermiation in normal men.

CONTEXT Male hormonal contraception via gonadotropin and intratesticular androgen withdrawal disrupts spermatogenesis at two principal sites: 1) spermatogonial maturation, and 2) spermiation. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to explore the relative dependence of each stage of germ cell development on FSH and LH/intratesticular androgen action. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Eighteen men enrolled in this prospective, randomized 14-wk study at Prince Henry's Institute. INTERVENTIONS Subjects (n = 6/group) were assigned to 6 wk of 1) testosterone (T) implant (4 x 200 mg sc once)+depot medroxy progesterone acetate (DMPA; 150 mg im once); 2) T implant+DMPA+FSH (300 IU sc twice weekly); and 3) T implant+DMPA+human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG; 1000 IU sc twice weekly as an LH substitute). Men then underwent a vasectomy and testicular biopsy with previously reported control data used for comparison. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Germ cell number (assessed by the optical disector stereological approach) and intratesticular androgen levels were determined. RESULTS T+DMPA alone significantly suppressed type B spermatogonia, preleptotene through to pachytene spermatocytes, and round spermatids from control (P < 0.05). All germ cell subtypes were maintained at control levels by either FSH or LH activity, except pachytene spermatocytes, which were found to be lower in the hCG vs. FSH (P < 0.01) and control groups (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS FSH and LH maintained spermatogenesis independently in this gonadotropin-suppressed model. Compared with LH, FSH showed better maintenance of pachytene spermatocyte number, whereas improved conversion to round spermatids was suggested with hCG treatment. Future contraceptive treatment strategies must consider independent regulation of spermatogenesis by both FSH and LH/intratesticular androgens for maximum efficacy.
Turkish Validation and Adaptation of Children's Chronotype Questionnaire (CCTQ).

OBJECTIVE Chronotype refers to the time of the day that a person's physical and cognitive functions are active. Simply this is a circadian phase preference of a person. While some of the people are morning active (so called larks) others are more active at nights (The owls). The study of circadian rhythms, known as chronobiology, is all about the metabolic and psychiatric differences between people who have different chronotypes. A few tests are used to determine chronotypes. The CCTQ (Children's Chronotype Questionnaire) is a parent-report, 27-item mixed format questionnaire measuring chronotype of children in multiple domains : the midsleep point on free days (MSF), a morningness/eveningness scale(M/E) score, and a five-point chronotype (CT) score. The aim of this study is adapting Children's Chronotype Questionnaire (CCTQ) into Turkish language and validating the instrument in Turkish population. MATERIALS AND METHODS 101 children aged nine through eighteen constitude the sample of the study. The sample was composed of clinical (n=51) and community groups (n=50). CCTQ and Morningness Eveningness Scale for Children (MESC) questionnaires were applied to children and parents, then the CCTQ and MESC scores were compared to examine the validity of CCTQ. RESULTS The internal consistency and external validity of the Turkish CCTQ was sufficient to compare MESC-Turkish. As a result of this research carried out in accordance with methodological research principles, correlation between the M/E scores of CCTQ and MESC was significant. CONCLUSION The Turkish version of CCTQ has been found to be valid and reliable in Turkish children.
3 D Acquisition of Mirroring Objects Research Report MPI-I-2003-4001 March 2003

Objects with mirroring optical characteristics are left out of the scope of most 3D scanning methods. We present here a new automatic acquisition approach, shape-from-distortion, that focuses on that category of objects, requires only a still camera and a color monitor, and produces range scans (plus a normal and a reflectance map) of the target. Our technique consists of two steps: first, an improved environment matte is captured for the mirroring object, using the interference of patterns with different frequencies in order to obtain sub-pixel accuracy. Then, the matte is converted into a normal and a depth map by exploiting the self coherence of a surface when integrating the normal map along different paths. The results show very high accuracy, capturing even smallest surface details. The acquired depth maps can be further processed using standard techniques to produce a complete 3D mesh of the object.
The Chandra Multiwavelength Project: Optical Follow-up of Serendipitous Chandra Sources

We present follow-up optical g′, r′, and i′ imaging and spectroscopy of serendipitous X-ray sources detected in six archival Chandra images included in the Chandra Multiwavelength Project (ChaMP). Of the 486 X-ray sources detected between 3 × 10-16 and 2 × 10-13 (with a median flux of 3 × 10-15) ergs cm-2 s-1, we find optical counterparts for 377 (78%), or 335 (68%) counting only unique counterparts. We present spectroscopic classifications for 125 objects, representing 75% of sources with r* < 21 optical counterparts (63% to r* = 22). Of all classified objects, 63 (50%) are broad-line active galactic nuclei (AGNs), which tend to be blue in (g*-r*) colors. X-ray information efficiently segregates these quasars from stars, which otherwise strongly overlap in these SDSS colors until z > 3.5. We identify 28 sources (22%) as galaxies that show narrow emission lines, while 22 (18%) are absorption line galaxies. Eight galaxies lacking broad-line emission have X-ray luminosities that require they host an AGN (logLX > 43). Half of these have hard X-ray emission suggesting that high gas columns obscure both the X-ray continuum and the broad emission line regions. We find objects in our sample that show signs of X-ray or optical absorption, or both, but with no strong evidence that these properties are coupled. ChaMP's deep X-ray and optical imaging enable multiband selection of small and/or high-redshift groups and clusters. In these six fields we have discovered three new clusters of galaxies, two with z > 0.4, and one with photometric evidence for a similar redshift.
FALL DETECTION AND ACTIVITY RECOGNITION METHODS FOR THE CONFIDENCE PROJECT: A SURVEY

The Confidence project is designed to support independent living of the elderly. The main goal of the project is reconstructing the user’s posture to detect falls in real time and to detect other abnormalities in behavior. This paper presents a survey of methods for fall detection and activity recognition and discusses how suitable they are for the Confidence project. The presented methods use accelerometers, velocity profiles and visual markers.
Recent concepts in non‐alcoholic fatty liver disease

Non‐alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is present in up to one‐third of the general population and in the majority of patients with metabolic risk factors such as obesity and diabetes. Insulin resistance is a key pathogenic factor resulting in hepatic fat accumulation. Recent evidence demonstrates NAFLD in turn exacerbates hepatic insulin resistance and often precedes glucose intolerance. Once hepatic steatosis is established, other factors, including oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, gut‐derived lipopolysaccharide and adipocytokines, may promote hepatocellular damage, inflammation and progressive liver disease. Confirmation of the diagnosis of NAFLD can usually be achieved by imaging studies, however, staging the disease requires a liver biopsy. NAFLD is associated with an increased risk of all‐cause death, probably because of complications of insulin resistance such as vascular disease, as well as cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma, which occur in a minority of patients. NAFLD is also now recognized to account for a substantial proportion of patients previously diagnosed with ‘cryptogenic cirrhosis’. Diabetes, obesity and the necroinflammatory form of NAFLD known as non‐alcoholic steatohepatitis, are risk factors for progressive liver disease. Current treatment relies on weight loss and exercise, although various insulin‐sensitizing medications appear promising. Further research is needed to identify which patients will achieve the most benefit from therapy.
Fault Attack revealing Secret Keys of Exponentiation Algorithms from Branch Prediction Misses

Performance monitors are provided in modern day computers for observing various features of the underlying microarchitectures. However the combination of underlying microarchitectural features and performance counters lead to sidechannels which can be exploited for attacking cipher implementations. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge we study for the first time, the combination of branch-predictor algorithms and performance counters to demonstrate a fault attack on the popular square-and-multiply based exponentiation algorithm, used in RSA. The attacks exploiting branching event like branch taken can be foiled by Montgomery Ladder based implementation of the exponentiation algorithm, while attacks based on branch miss are more devastating. We demonstrate the power of the attack exploiting branch misses from performance monitors by formalizing a fault attack model, where the adversary is capable of performing a bit flip at a desired bit position of the secret exponent. The paper characterizes the branch predictors using the popular two-bit predictor and formulates the dependence on the number of branch misses on the fault induced. This characterization is exploited to develop an iterative attack algorithm where knowledge of the previously determined key-bits and the difference of branch misses (as gathered from the performance counters) are utilized to determine the next bit. The attack has been validated on several standard Intel platforms, and puts to threat several implementations of exponentiation algorithms ranging from standard square-andmultiply, Montgomery Ladder to RSA-CRT and which are often used as side-channel counter measures. The attacks show that using the fault attack targeting branch predictors one can attack implementations of exponentiation: both square and multiply, and Montgomery ladder, which forms the central algorithm for several standard public key ciphers. Keywords-Fault attacks, branch misses, performance counters, Branch Prediction Unit, Square and Multiply Algorithm, Montgomery Ladder Algorithm, RSA-CRT.
About catties and tokens: re-using adder circuits for arbitration

This paper explores the analogies among the carry propagation within binary adders and the token passing within arbiter implementations. This analysis identifies a common design space, thus decreasing the design costs and time by efficient re-use beyond individual application domains. The immediate utilization of available carry-propagation networks is outlined and justified. This, for instance, enables designers to choose directly from a large pool of well-studied parallel prefix networks. While these solutions are, due to their regularity, favorable for VLSI ASIC designs, they do usually not synthesize well on FPGAs. Extending the analogy between carry propagation and token passing to this domain, the appropriate utilization of carry chains commonly available on FPGAs is demonstrated to yield small and fast arbiters.
Glutamate Induces Rapid Upregulation of Astrocyte Glutamate Transport and Cell-Surface Expression of GLAST

Glutamate transporters clear glutamate from the extracellular space by high-affinity binding and uptake. Factors that regulate glutamate transporter expression and activity can thereby influence excitatory neurotransmission. Transporter function in GABAergic and other systems has been shown to be regulated by transporter substrates. Here, glutamate regulation of glutamate transport was studied using primary murine astrocyte cultures that express the GLAST (EAAT1) and GLT-1 (EAAT2) transporter subtypes. Glutamate was found to stimulate glutamate transport capacity (Vmax) in a dose- and time-dependent manner. The maximal increase was 100%, with an ED50 of 40 μm glutamate and with onset beginning ∼15 min after onset of glutamate exposure. The uptake stimulation was reproduced byd-aspartate, which is also a transporter substrate, but not by nontransported glutamate receptor agonists. Moreover, glutamate incubation did not stimulate transport when performed in a sodium-free medium, suggesting that the stimulatory effect of glutamate is triggered by increased transporter activity rather than receptor activation. Treatment with the actin-disrupting agents cytochalasin B or cytochalasin D prevented the glutamate-induced increase in glutamate uptake. Biotinylation labeling of membrane surface proteins showed that glutamate incubation produced an increase in GLAST expression at the astrocyte cell surface. These results suggest that cell-surface expression of GLAST can be rapidly regulated by glutamate through a process triggered by GLAST activity and involving the actin cytoskeleton. This feedback loop provides a mechanism by which changes in extracellular glutamate concentrations could rapidly modulate astrocyte glutamate transport capacity.