Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A dynamic frame of signal sorting based on data stream clustering

In order to solve the contradiction between the accuracy and the real-time in signal sorting, a dynamic signal sorting frame based on data stream clustering was proposed. The frame can be divided into two parts: on-line part and off-line part. In on-line part, the reconnaissance data was transformed and saved as grid frame; in off-line part, the grid frame was sorted with the algorithm of grid-based clustering. Experimental results show that the proposed frame can sort the high density and complex reconnaissance data stream without any prior knowledge, and is not sensitive to the influence of noise. The requirement of accuracy and real-time in signal sorting can be satisfied with this frame.
Therapeutic benefit of lentiviral-mediated neonatal intracerebral gene therapy in a mouse model of globoid cell leukodystrophy

Globoid cell leukodystrophy (GLD) is an inherited lysosomal storage disease caused by β-galactocerebrosidase (GALC) deficiency. Gene therapy (GT) should provide rapid, extensive and lifetime GALC supply in central nervous system (CNS) tissues to prevent or halt irreversible neurologic progression. Here we used a lentiviral vector (LV) to transfer a functional GALC gene in the brain of Twitcher mice, a severe GLD model. A single injection of LV.GALC in the external capsule of Twitcher neonates resulted in robust transduction of neural cells with minimal and transient activation of inflammatory and immune response. Importantly, we documented a proficient transduction of proliferating and post-mitotic oligodendroglia, a relevant target cell type in GLD. GALC activity (30–50% of physiological levels) was restored in the whole CNS of treated mice as early as 8 days post-injection. The early and stable enzymatic supply ensured partial clearance of storage and reduction of psychosine levels, translating in amelioration of histopathology and enhanced lifespan. At 6 months post-injection in non-affected mice, LV genome persisted exclusively in the injected region, where transduced cells overexpressed GALC. Integration site analysis in transduced brain tissues showed no aberrant clonal expansion and preferential targeting of neural-specific genes. This study establishes neonatal LV-mediated intracerebral GT as a rapid, effective and safe therapeutic intervention to correct CNS pathology in GLD and provides a strong rationale for its application in this and similar leukodystrophies, alone or in combination with therapies targeting the somatic pathology, with the final aim of providing an effective and timely treatment of these global disorders.
Acquisition of direct sequence spread spectrum acoustic communication signals

Acquisition of the code timing in DS/SS systems is addressed for time-varying frequency-selective underwater acoustic channels. Acquisition algorithm based on adaptive channel estimation and filtering is proposed. The algorithm employs feedback of pre-cursor and post-cursor inter-chip interference to provide a channel estimate from which the code timing is acquired. The channel estimate is also used to filter the signal prior to making the acquisition decision. Channel estimation/filtering procedure eliminates the need for explicit equalization, and enables a computationally efficient implementation. Simulation results show excellent performance in low-SNR regime, as well as in the presence of multiple-access interference and fast fading.
Exponential separation of quantum and classical communication complexity

Communication complexity has become a central complexity model. In that model, we count the amount of communication bits needed between two parties in order to solve certain computational problems. We show that for certain communication complexity problems quantum communication protocols are exponentially faster than classical ones. More explicitly, we give an example for a communication complexity relation (or promise problem) P such that:
How to Deal with Lock Holder Preemption

Spinlocks are a synchronization primitive widely used in current operating system kernels. With spinlocks a thread waiting to acquire a lock will wait actively monitoring the lock. With sleeping locks in contrast a waiting thread will block, yielding the CPU to other threads. While sleeping locks seem to provide better functionality and overall system performance, there are cases in wich spinlocks are the better alternative. First, under some circumstances, e.g. in interrupt handler top halves, blocking is not feasible. Second, saving and restoring a thread’s state, as sleeping locks do when yielding the CPU, costs time. If the lock-protected critical section is very short waiting for the lock to be released offers better performance. In both cases spinlocks provide advantages over sleeping locks. But spinlocks are used for very short critical sections only to avoid wasting CPU time waiting actively. Virtual machine monitors (VMMs) schedule virtual CPUs (VCPUs) on physical CPUs for time slices to achieve pseudo-parallel execution. At the end of a time slice the current VCPU is preempted, the VCPU state is saved and the next VCPU starts executing. If a VCPU is preempted inside the guest kernel while holding a spinlock this lock stays acquired until the VCPU is executed again. This problem is called lock holder preemption, identified and analyzed by Uhlig et al.[3] for a paravirtualized version of Linux 2.4 running on top of the L4 microkernel. This work investigates the influence of lock holder preemption in the Xen hypervisor, a commodity virtualization system. We show that lock holder preemption can have a severe performance impact in today’s systems. Furthermore, we describe two approaches to counteract the performance degradation, give some details to our implementation of one of the approaches, and show that we are able to fully prevent any performance degradation caused by lock holder preemption.
Overlapping on partitioned facial images

The effect of overlapped classifiers on partitioning-based face recognition is presented. The features of facial images are extracted by appearance-based statistical dimensionality reduction algorithms for the recognition of horizontally and vertically partitioned facial images. The proposed approaches employ a divide-and-conquer strategy which aims to improve the recognition performance of holistic methods by emphasizing locally important features over horizontal or vertical segments. Additionally, computational complexity is also reduced significantly since feature extractions are performed over smaller facial regions. Analysis of the obtained results demonstrate that both vertical and horizontal partitioning achieve better recognition performance compared to the holistic counterparts. It is also observed that, for some of the statistical methods, overlapped feature extraction results in better recognition performance compared to disjoint partitioning approach. The proposed implementations achieved particularly superior performance for LDA- and ICA-based classifiers, for which the proposed approaches demonstrated the best so far published results.
A pinchable aerial virtual sphere by acoustic ultrasound stationary wave

In this paper, we propose a system to generate aerial virtual spheres which invokes tactile sensation and is omni-directionally pinchable. The acoustic radiation force of ultrasound stationary waves is known in the field of non-contact micro manipulation. This force applied to a small object in the stationary wave is in proportion to the gradient of the square of the acoustic pressure and directing from anti-node to node. We demonstrate a prototype system consisting of 996 transducers which generates a focal anti-node point at the center of the workspace. We performed the acoustic pressure distribution analysis and subjective experiments. As a result, it is discovered that the virtual sphere was sensed as the same size as theoretically expected.
The Assembly of the Poor in Thailand: From Local Struggles to National Protest Movement

List of Maps, Tables, and DiagramsList of PhotographsIntroductionOriginsFrom Local Struggles to National Social Movement: An Overview of the AssemblyThe Rise of a Villagers' Movement: A Case Study of the Mun River Villagers' Committee"Candles in the Darkness" or a "Third Hand"? : NGO Activists in the MovementThe Village of the Poor Confronts the State: The Life of a ProtestDemocratizing Civil Society? : Grassroots Democracy and Power within the AssemblyThailand's Economic Crisis and the Assembly of the PoorConclusion: Sources of Power and Social TransformationNotesList of OrganizationsReferencesIndex
Gaussian dictionary for Compressive Sensing of the ECG signal

Compressive Sensing (CS) is a newly introduced signal processing technique that enables to recover sparse signals from fewer samples than the Shannon sampling theorem would typically require. It is based on the assumption that, for a sparse signal, a small collection of linear measurements contains enough information to allow its reconstruction. Combining the acquisition and compression stages, CS is a very promising technique to develop ultra low power wireless bio-signal monitoring systems. In this paper we present a Compressive Sensing framework for ECG signals based on a universal Gaussian over-complete dictionary that permits to successfully increase the reconstruction quality performance. The purpose of the proposed dictionary is to improve ECG signal sparsity in order to achieve a higher compression ratio. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our method achieves improved performance with respect to state-of-the-art CS schemes.
Automatic Synchronization of Wearable Sensors and Video-Cameras for Ground Truth Annotation -- A Practical Approach

The common practice of manual synchronization of body-worn, logging accelerometers and video cameras is impractical for integration into everyday practice for applications such as real-world behavior analysis. We significantly extend an existing technique for automatic cross-modal synchronization and evaluate its performance in a realistic experimental setting. Distinctive gestures, captured by a camera, are matched with recorded acceleration signal(s) using cross-correlation based time-delay estimation. PCA-based data pre-processing makes the procedure robust against orientation mismatches between the marking gesture and the camera plane. We evaluated five different marker gestures and report very promising results for actual use.
The Structural Basis of Myosin V Processive Movement as Revealed by Electron Cryomicroscopy

The processive motor myosin V has a relatively high affinity for actin in the presence of ATP and, thus, offers the unique opportunity to visualize some of the weaker, hitherto inaccessible, actin bound states of the ATPase cycle. Here, electron cryomicroscopy together with computer-based docking of crystal structures into three-dimensional (3D) reconstructions provide the atomic models of myosin V in both weak and strong actin bound states. One structure shows that ATP binding opens the long cleft dividing the ac-tin binding region of the motor domain, thus destroying the strong binding actomyosin interface while rearranging loop 2 as a tether. Nucleotide analogs showed a second new state in which the lever arm points upward, in a prepower-stroke configuration (lever arm up) bound to actin before phosphate release. Our findings reveal how the structural elements of myosin V work together to allow myosin V to step along actin for multiple ATPase cycles without dissociating .
A ‘Union for the Mediterranean’ … or for the EU?

The decision of the European Council, meeting in Brussels on 13–14 March 2008, to ‘approve the principle’ of a Union for the Mediterranean is potentially a significant turning point in the Barcelona Process. Arising from the call for a ‘Mediterranean Union’ (UM) first made by Nicolas Sarkozy during the French presidential election campaign in February 2007, the idea has been very substantially diluted during a year of intermittent negotiations, as reflected in changes to its name and consequently its initials – from UM (or UPM in French versions) to UMed. Driving its modification has been the determination of most EU actors to make the UM compatible with the Barcelona Process and the EU’s institutional decision-making structures and mechanisms, which initially it seemed to ignore – promising instead an entirely new framework for, and approach to, pan-Mediterranean cooperation. The name adopted (at least provisionally) in Brussels, ‘Barcelona Process: Union for the Mediterranean’ expresses continuity, despite the implication that the original official name of this process, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), will be replaced at the Euro-Med summit to be held in Paris on 13 July. Rather than renew or replace the substance of the EMP, the outcome is likely to be the addition of a new UMed ‘track’ to the Barcelona Process. None the less, this could involve some qualitative change as well as new projects so long as new institutional arrangements remain on the agenda. The importance of the French initiative, in its original form, lay in the tacit recognition that, while the EMP has brought forward some positive developments in Euro-Mediterranean relations, the major objectives outlined in the Barcelona Declaration of 1995 have remained elusive, especially in regard to the ultimate goals of prosperity, security and political reform. Curiously, the more recent initiative launched from the Elysée Palace did not arise from a fundamental review of the original Barcelona project, and thus its strategic logic (much questioned within the academic world) is likely to survive the changes that are made during 2008.
Correlation of CT perfusion and CT volumetry in patients with Alzheimer’s disease

Summary Background: Both brain atrophy and decrease of perfusion are observed in dementive diseases. The aim of the study was to correlate the results of brain perfusion CT (pCT) and CT volumetry in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Material/Methods: Forty-eight patients with AD (mean age of 71.3 years) underwent brain pCT and CT volumetry. The pCT was performed at the level of basal ganglia after the injection of contrast medium (50 ml, 4 ml/sec.) with serial scanning (delay 7 sec, 50 scans, 1 scan/sec). Volumetric measurements were carried out on the basis of source images, with the use of a dedicated CT software combined with manual outlining of the regions of interest in extracerebral and intraventricular CSF spaces. Perfusion parameters of the cerebral blood flow (CBF) and cerebral blood volume (CBV) from the grey matter of frontal and temporal as well as basal ganglia were compared statistically with the volumetric measurements of frontal and temporal cortical atrophy as well as subcortical atrophy. Results: A statistically significant positive correlation was found between the values of CBF and CBV in the basal ganglia and the volumes of the lateral and third ventricles. The comparison of CBF and CBV results with the volumetric measurements in the areas of the frontal and temporal lobes showed mostly negative correlations, but none of them was of statistical significance. Conclusions: In patients with AD, the degree of cortical atrophy is not correlated with the decrease of perfusion in the grey matter and subcortical atrophy is not correlated with the decrease of perfusion in the basal ganglia region. It suggests that functional and structural changes in AD are not related to each other.
Happenstance, Strategies and Tactics: Intrinsic Design in a Volunteer-based Community

This paper presents the study of a volunteer community, its technologies, and the processes in and through which it develops, sustains and makes its community artifact ecology work. Based on previous work proposing the concept of community artifact ecology as a way of understanding the constellation of technologies a community owns, has access to and uses in their practices, we examine the dynamics and development of such a community artifact ecology in detail. The findings indicate that in volunteer communities developing a working community artifact ecology is a process mixing happenstance, community strategies and everyday tailoring and appropriation tactics. Additionally, much of the design and infrastructuring work in shaping the community artifact ecology and making it work both blurs with use and can be considered as intrinsic design as it is conducted by members of the community, with no input from the outside. Based on the empirical findings we expand on multiple positions within the theoretical space of design-in-use and intrinsic practice transformation mediated by technology and conclude with a more multi-faceted understanding of the shaping of technology in volunteer-based communities.
Use of spherical harmonic deconvolution methods to compensate for nonlinear gradient effects on MRI images

Spatial encoding in MR techniques is achieved by sampling the signal as a function of time in the presence of a magnetic field gradient. The gradients are assumed to generate a linear magnetic field gradient, and typical image reconstruction relies upon this approximation. However, high‐speed gradients in the current generation of MRI scanners often sacrifice linearity for improvements in speed. Such nonlinearity results in distorted images. The problem is presented in terms of first principles, and a correction method based on a gradient field spherical harmonic expansion is proposed. In our case, the amount of distortion measured within a typical field of view (FOV) required for head imaging is sufficiently large that without the use of some distortion correction technique, the images would be of limited use for stereotaxy or longitudinal studies, where precise volumetric information is required. Magn Reson Med 52:115–122, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
An atomic model for message-passing

This paper presents a simple atomic model of message-passing net work syst ems. Within one synchronous time step each processor can receive one atomic message, perform local computation, and send one message. When several messages are destined to the same processor then one is transmitted and the rest are blocked. Blocked messages cannot be retrieved by their sending processors; each processor must wait for its blocked message to clear before sending more messages into the network. Depending on the traffic pattern, messages can remain blocked for arbitrarily long periods. The model is conservative when compared with exisiting message-passing systems. Nonetheless, we prove linear speedup for backtrack and branchand-bound searches using simple randomized algorithms,
Activation of focal adhesion kinase enhances the adhesion of Fusarium solani to human corneal epithelial cells via the tyrosine-specific protein kinase signaling pathway

Purpose To determine the role of the integrin-FAK signaling pathway triggered by the adherence of F. solani to human corneal epithelial cells (HCECs). Methods After pretreatment with/without genistein, HCECs were incubated with F. solani spores at different times (0–24 h). Cell adhesion assays were performed by optical microscopy. Changes of the ultrastructure were observed using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The expression of F-actin and Paxillin (PAX) were detected by immunofluorescence and western blotting to detect the expression of these key proteins with/without genistein treatment. Results Cell adhesion assays showed that the number of adhered spores began to rise at 6 h after incubation and peaked at 8 h. SEM and TEM showed that the HCECs exhibited a marked morphological alteration induced by the attachment and entry of the spores. The expression of PAX increased, while the expression of F-actin decreased by stimulation with F. solani. The interaction of F. solani with HCECs causes actin rearrangement in HCECs. Genistein strongly inhibited FAK phosphorylation and the activation of the downstream protein (PAX). F. solani-induced enhancement of cell adhesion ability was inhibited along with the inhibition of FAK phosphorylation. Conclusions Our results suggest that the integrin-FAK signaling pathway is involved in the control of F. solani adhesion to HCECs and that the activation of focal adhesion kinase enhances the adhesion of human corneal epithelial cells to F. solani via the tyrosine-specific protein kinase signaling pathway.
Articulatory Phonology: An Overview

Abstract An overview of the basic ideas of articulatory phonology is presented, along with selected examples of phonological patterning for which the approach seems to provide a particularly insightful account. In articulatory phonology, the basic units of phonological contrast are gestures, which are also abstract characterizations of articulatory events, each with an intrinsic time or duration. Utterances are modeled as organized patterns (constellations) of gestures, in which gestural units may overlap in time. The phonological structures defined in this way provide a set of articulatorily based natural classes. Moreover, the patterns of overlapping organization can be used to specify important aspects of the phonological structure of particular languages, and to account, in a coherent and general way, for a variety of different types of phonological variation. Such variation includes allophonic variation and fluent speech alternations, as well as ‘coarticulation’ and speech errors. Finally, it is suggested that the gestural approach clarifies our understanding of phonological development, by positing that prelinguistic units of action are harnessed into (gestural) phonological structures through differentiation and coordination.
Workflow-Based Composite Job Scheduling for Decentralized Distributed Systems

The development of distributed systems has been accelerated in this recent years through the development of P2P, grid, and cloud computing. Nevertheless, job scheduling is still a major challenge for distributed system design and implementation. Such issue can be more complex when dealing with workflow-based composite jobs, i.e. each job has multiple tasks with dependencies between them. In this paper we prove that, when task dependency in such kind of jobs is pre-defined with workflow templates, finding minimal execution time for multiple jobs is an NP-complete problem. So, we propose a heuristic algorithm for this problem. The experimental results show that this algorithm can find near optimal solutions to the problem with a polynomial computation time.
Detecting a Tweet's Topic within a Large Number of Portuguese Twitter Trends

In this paper we propose to approach the subject of Twitter Topic Detection when in the presence of a large number of trending topics. We use a new technique, called Twitter Topic Fuzzy Fingerprints, and compare it with two popular text classification techniques, Support Vector Machines (SVM) and k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN). Preliminary results show that it outperforms the other two techniques, while still being much faster, which is an essential feature when processing large volumes of streaming data. We focused on a data set of Portuguese language tweets and the respective top trends as indicated by Twitter.
Degrees of Separation in Social Networks

Social networks play an increasingly important role in today's society. Special characteristics of these networks make them challenging domains for the search community. In particular, social networks of users can be viewed as search graphs of nodes, where the cost of obtaining information about a node can be very high. This paper addresses the search problem of identifying the degree of separation between two users. New search techniques are introduced to provide optimal or near-optimal solutions. The experiments are performed using Twitter, and they show an improvement of several orders of magnitude over greedy approaches. Our optimal algorithm finds an average degree of separation of 3.43 between two random Twitter users, requiring an average of only 67 requests for information over the Internet to Twitter. A near-optimal solution of length 3.88 can be found by making an average of 13.3 requests.