Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Cross Layered MAC and Clustering Scheme for Efficient Broadcast in VANETs

In this paper, we illustrate the design of a cross-layered MAC and clustering solution for supporting the fast propagation of broadcast messages in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). A distributed dynamic clustering algorithm is proposed to create a dynamic virtual backbone in the vehicular network. The vehicle-members of the backbone are responsible for implementing an efficient messages propagation. The backbone creation and maintenance are proactively performed aiming to balance the stability of backbone connections as well as the cost/efficiency trade-off and the hops-reduction when forwarding broadcast messages. A fast multi-hop MAC forwarding mechanism is defined to exploit the role of backbone vehicles, under a cross-layered approach. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the mutual support of proactive clustering and MAC protocols for efficient dissemination of broadcast messages in VANETs.
Kalman filter estimation of the number of competing terminals in an IEEE 802.11 network

Throughput performance of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) is very sensitive to the number n of competing stations. The contribute of this paper is threefold. First, we show that n can be expressed as function of the collision probability encountered on the channel; hence, it can be estimated based on run-time measurements. Second, we show that the estimation of n, based on exponential smoothing of the measured collision probability (specifically, an ARMA filter), results to be a biased estimation, with poor performance in terms of accuracy/tracking trade-offs. Third, we propose a methodology to estimate n, based on an extended Kalman filter coupled with a change detection mechanism. This approach shows both high accuracy as well as prompt reactivity to changes in the network occupancy status. Numerical results show that, although devised in the assumption of saturated terminals, our proposed approach results effective also in non-saturated conditions, and specifically in tracking the average number of competing terminals.
A Reward Optimization Method Based on Action Subrewards in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one kind of interactive learning methods. Its main characteristics are “trial and error” and “related reward. ” A hierarchical reinforcement learning method based on action subrewards is proposed to solve the problem of “curse of dimensionality,” which means that the states space will grow exponentially in the number of features and low convergence speed. The method can reduce state spaces greatly and choose actions with favorable purpose and efficiency so as to optimize reward function and enhance convergence speed. Apply it to the online learning in Tetris game, and the experiment result shows that the convergence speed of this algorithm can be enhanced evidently based on the new method which combines hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm and action subrewards. The “curse of dimensionality” problem is also solved to a certain extent with hierarchical method. All the performance with different parameters is compared and analyzed as well.
Configurations and coordination for global information technology governance: complex designs in a transnational European context

The paper describes an exploratory study of configurations and coordination mechanisms for IT governance in European-based transnational companies. IT governance is traditionally defined as the formal allocation of IT decision-making authority. Rooted in organisation design theory, a research framework is proposed and comparative case study research is conducted in three large financial service companies. The findings indicate that financial institutions adopt distinct hybrid configurations and coordination mechanisms, contingent on their strategic context. The results suggest that whatever formal configuration is chosen for IT governance, mechanisms for lateral coordination need to be addressed if performance targets are to be achieved. Effective mechanisms for lateral coordination move beyond the level of structure, and focus on the different stakeholders involved in the IT governance process. An organisation's capability to deal with globalisation and IT is dependent on the complexity of both the configuration and coordination for IT governance.
Auditory Display of Hyperspectral Colon Tissue Images Using Vocal Synthesis Models

The human ability to recognize, identify and compare sounds based on their approximation of particular vowels provides an intuitive, easily learned representation for complex data. We describe implementations of vocal tract models specically designed for sonification purposes. The models described are based on classical models including Klatt[1] and Cook[2]. Implementation of these models in MatLab, STK[3], and PD[4] is presented. Various sonication methods were tested and evaluated using data sets of hyperspectral images of colon cells 1 2 .
Measuring Feedback Using the Intergalactic Medium State and Evolution Inferred from the Soft X-Ray Background

We explore the intergalactic medium (IGM) as a potential source of the unresolved soft X-ray background (XRB) and the feasibility of extracting the IGM state and evolution from XRB observations. We build two analytical models, the continuum field model and the halo model, to calculate the IGM XRB mean flux, angular autocorrelation, and cross-correlation with galaxies. Our results suggest that the IGM may contribute a significant fraction to the unresolved soft XRB flux and correlations. We calibrated non-Gaussian errors estimated against our 5123 moving mesh hydro simulation and estimate that the ROSAT All-Sky Survey plus Sloan Galaxy Photometric Redshift Survey would allow a ~10% accuracy in the IGM XRB-galaxy cross-correlation power spectrum measurement for 800 < l < 5000 and a ~20% accuracy in the redshift-resolved X-ray emissivity-galaxy cross-correlation power spectrum measurement for z ≲ 0.5. At small scales, nongravitational heating, i.e., feedback, dominates over gravity and leaves unique signatures in the IGM XRB, which allows a comparable accuracy in the measurement of the amount of nongravitational heating and the length scales where nongravitational energy balances gravity.
Impact of T8 Transgenic Rice Containing an Isopentenyl Transferase Gene on Soil Bacterial Biomass

The safety study of transgenic plants has an actual significance for creating new species and commercializing transgenic plants. Based on PCR and Southern blotting tests of transgene, the genetic stability of ipt gene in an advanced-generation of transgenic rice plants was studied. Use a plate colony counting technique, the influence of ipt rice plants on bacteria number of rhizospheric soil was investigated. Molecular detection showed foreign ipt gene was stable genetic in the genome of T8 transgenic rice with a single copy. The amounts of bacteria from the root soil of transgenic lines were distinct from non-transgenic controls during the tillering stage, heading stage and filling stage. Nevertheless, this variability was not significant during the growing season described above (P>0.05). These results reveal that T8-ipt rice cannot affect the soil bacteria biomass during plants field-growth.
Calling International Rescue: knowledge lost in literature and data landslide!

We live in interesting times. Portents of impending catastrophe pervade the literature, calling us to action in the face of unmanageable volumes of scientific data. But it isn't so much data generation per se, but the systematic burial of the knowledge embodied in those data that poses the problem: there is so much information available that we simply no longer know what we know, and finding what we want is hard – too hard. The knowledge we seek is often fragmentary and disconnected, spread thinly across thousands of databases and millions of articles in thousands of journals. The intellectual energy required to search this array of data-archives, and the time and money this wastes, has led several researchers to challenge the methods by which we traditionally commit newly acquired facts and knowledge to the scientific record. We present some of these initiatives here – a whirlwind tour of recent projects to transform scholarly publishing paradigms, culminating in Utopia and the Semantic Biochemical Journal experiment. With their promises to provide new ways of interacting with the literature, and new and more powerful tools to access and extract the knowledge sequestered within it, we ask what advances they make and what obstacles to progress still exist? We explore these questions, and, as you read on, we invite you to engage in an experiment with us, a real-time test of a new technology to rescue data from the dormant pages of published documents. We ask you, please, to read the instructions carefully. The time has come: you may turn over your papers…
Highly efficient surface enhanced Raman scattering with ZnS@Fe3O4@Ag composite structures as probes

Development of novel composite materials with enhanced optical properties and modified surface morphology is highly significant in surface enhanced Raman spectroscopic (SERS) applications. Dielectric-plasmonic multilayer composites are found to serve this purpose due to the feasibility of tuning their plasmon resonances even to IR region, far away from electronic resonance of analyte molecules. In this work, we introduce a new composite material that can have enormous potential in sensing applications at trace level. Here we demonstrate surface enhanced Raman scattering activity of ZnS@Fe3O4@Ag composite structures using rhodamine 6G (Rh6G) dye molecule as the model analyte. The SERS substrate is prepared by coating these structures on borosilicate glass substrate. ZnS particles of size 300 nm coated successively with Fe3O4 (40 nm thick) and Ag (20 nm thick) nanoparticles are found to be capable of detecting even 10−11 M concentration of Rh6G. Obtained results are compared with SERS activity of ZnS@Ag particles which could detect only up to 10−8 M of Rh6G. It is observed that inclusion of Fe3O4 layer increases SERS enhancement by a factor of 102 compared to that of ZnS@Ag. SERS substrates fabricated out of ZnS@Fe3O4@Ag particles resulted in SERS enhancement factor (EF) of around 109 which is large enough for single molecule detection. Theoretical investigations on SERS activity of these structures are carried out using finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. SERS EFs obtained using FDTD are found to be in good agreement with experimental results.
Contactless palmprint verification based on SIFT and iterative RANSAC

Contactless palmprint recognition is an effective technology for improving the user friendliness of palmprint recognition. The main challenge of contactless palmprint recognition is the intra-class variations due to the hand deformation caused by contactless image acquisition. Traditional palmprint feature extraction and matching algorithms usually require that the query image is well aligned with the gallery image, which cannot be always assured in contactless occasions. In this work, the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) is applied for contactless palmprint feature extraction and matching. SIFT features are invariant to image rotation, translation, and scale variations, and hence are promising to solve the deformation problem. Moreover, an iterative RANSAC algorithm is proposed to refine the matched SIFT points. The iterative RANSAC retains more matched SIFT points than the traditional RANSAC algorithm despite the points comply with different transformation models. Experiments show a great improvement of verification accuracy on a public contactless palmprint database.
Suppression of methanogenesis in hydrogen fermentation by intermittent feeding

This study investigated whether intermittent feeding by using a concentrated carbon source is an appropriate method for selective enrichment of hydrogenesis by means of methanogen suppression. In a conventional reactor fed continuously for 10 d, methanogens increased from 2.8 × 107 to 1.1 × 109 gene copy number (GCN)/mg-cell dry weight, and methane concentration in the resulting biogas was 5.8%. However, when a carbon source was intermittently supplied for 10 d to the reactor, the number of methanogens was reduced 98.9% from 2.77 × 107 to 1.2 × 103 GCN/mg-cell dry weight, and methane was not detected during this period of intermittent feeding. Intermittent feeding shifted the dominants in the reactor from Clostridiaceae (70.5%) and Lactobacillaceae (11.0%) to Acetobacteraceae (62.0%) and Clostridiaceae (38.0%). In the reactor operated in continuous feeding mode after intermittent feeding, methane concentration was below 0.3% and the portion of methanogens in the bacterial community was maintained below 0.2%. These results suggest that the intermittent feeding of a carbon source during hydrogen production processes is a suitable method to suppress the activity of methanogens.
Characterization of scientific workflows

Researchers working on the planning, scheduling and execution of scientific workflows need access to a wide variety of scientific workflows to evaluate the performance of their implementations. We describe basic workflow structures that are composed into complex workflows by scientific communities. We provide a characterization of workflows from five diverse scientific applications, describing their composition and data and computational requirements. We also describe the effect of the size of the input datasets on the structure and execution profiles of these workflows. Finally, we describe a workflow generator that produces synthetic, parameterizable workflows that closely resemble the workflows that we characterize. We make these workflows available to the community to be used as benchmarks for evaluating various workflow systems and scheduling algorithms.
ree Stages in the Derivation of Free Relatives

In this paper, I argue for a Comp account of free relatives that is based on the idea that the covert external head of the relative clause is part of thewh-phrase. ereby, the approach derives the close link between the covert head and the wh-phrase and is able to account for the puzzling behavior of free relatives with respect to the position of the wh-phrase. Concretely, I assume that the derivation of a free relative clause proceeds in three stages: in the rst stage, the covert head is created out of the wh-item in the lexical array via pre-syntactic copying. In the second stage, the syntactic structure is built, whereby the wh-item ismerged inside the embedded clause and the covert head is merged as the CPexternal head of the relative clause. Finally in the third stage, the additional features created by pre-syntactic copying are deleted post-syntactically.
Interspecies Recombination Contributes Minimally to Fluoroquinolone Resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae

ABSTRACT Analysis of 71 ciprofloxacin-resistant (MIC ≥ 4 μg/ml)Streptococcus pneumoniae clinical isolates revealed only 1 for which the quinolone resistance-determining regions of theparC, parE, and gyrB genes were genetically related to those of viridans group streptococci. Our findings support the occurrence of interspecies recombination of type II topoisomerase genes; however, its contribution to the emergence of quinolone resistance among pneumococci appears to have been minimal.
Self‐healing techniques utilizing virtual path concept for ATM networks

Strong international effort has been made toward the realization of a B-ISDN based on ATM techniques. This paper proposes self-healing techniques for enhancing ATM network reliability. Self-healing is defined here as failed path restoration with distributed control mechanism by using cross-connects. First, the characteristics of virtual paths (VPs) are compared with those of digital paths in STM networks. It is clarified that VP benefits can be exploited for network restoration upon failure. Two high-speed self-healing algorithms that make the best use of VP characteristics are then proposed for restoring single-link failures. A technique for multiple-link failure restoration also is proposed. Finally, restoration performance is evaluated by computer simulation. It is confirmed that the proposed algorithm enables faster restoration than that possible using the existing algorithm for STM networks.
A novel edge detection approach on active contour for tumor segmentation

Active contour methods for image segmentation allow a contour to deform iteratively to partition an image into various regions. A novel region-based active contour model proposed by Kaihua Zhang which take advantages of both geodesic active contours and Chan-Vese model is discussed in this paper. This method uses region-based signed pressure force (SPF) to stop the contours at weak or blurred edges. In practise, this method is useful only for images with clear boundary. Second, this method is strongly depends on parameter α which controls the propagation of moving curve. α value depends on size of region to be extracted. There is no fixed α value which works well for all images. In this paper, we proposed new method of edge detection for active contours based on local adaptive threshold technique via variational energy minimization to stop the contour at desired object boundary. By using proposed method, we can control the evaluation of curve with moderate value of α for all images. As an application, our method has been used for tumor segmentation from magnetic resonance images and experimental results show desirable performances of our method.
Isolation and Functional Analysis of Homogentisate Phytyltransferase from Synechocystis sp . PCC 6803 and Arabidopsis 1

Tocopherols, collectively known as vitamin E, are lipid-soluble antioxidants synthesized exclusively by photosynthetic organisms and are required components of mammalian diets. The committed step in tocopherol biosynthesis involves condensation of homogentisic acid and phytyl diphosphate (PDP) catalyzed by a membrane-bound homogentisate phytyltransferase (HPT). HPTs were identified from Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 and Arabidopsis based on their sequence similarity to chlorophyll synthases, which utilize PDP in a similar prenylation reaction. HPTs from both organisms used homogentisic acid and PDP as their preferred substrates in vitro but only Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 HPT was active with geranylgeranyl diphosphate as a substrate. Neither enzyme could utilize solanesyl diphosphate, the prenyl substrate for plastoquinone-9 synthesis. In addition, disruption of Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 HPT function causes an absence of tocopherols without affecting plastoquinone-9 levels, indicating that separate polyprenyltransferases exist for tocopherol and plastoquinone synthesis in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803. It is surprising that the absence of tocopherols in this mutant had no discernible effect on cell growth and photosynthesis.
Study of sensing properties and contrastive analysis of metal coating optical fiber grating

Optical fiber grating (FBG) has been widely used in the measurement of parameters such as temperature and strain. However, FBG is too slim to broken, whose outside protective layer tends to shedding easily, and it is also hard to change the temperature and strain sensitivity. In order to overcome the above disadvantages and to further expand the application range of FBG, this paper improves the technology of fiber grating metal film plating process firstly. It adopts a compositive method including chemical plating and electroplating to gild FBG, copper FBG and galvanize FBG, which all get good metal coating. Then, the temperature and strain sensing properties of metalized FBG is studied in detail. Multiple metal coating FBGs were put in high-low temperature test-box together, and then the test-box worked continuously at the temperature range of 0°C～95°C. After several experiments, it concludes that metal plating enhances the temperature sensitivity of fiber grating, and the one with galvanization has the highest temperature sensitivity of 0.0235. At last, FBGs with various cladding were pasted on carbon fiber cantilever beam respectively and the pressure on the top of the cantilever increased gradually. The experimental results show that wavelength of fiber grating shift toward the long wavelength with the increase of the pressure, and the one with galvanization has the maximum strain sensitivity which has minimal impact on fiber properties.
The ontogeny of scale-free syntax networks through language acquisition

The evolution of human language allowed the efficient propagation of nongenetic information, thus creating a new form of evolutionary change. Language development in children offers the opportunity of exploring the emergence of such complex communication and is considered as a window to the transition from protolanguage to language. Here we analyze available information from the CHILDES database and we study the emergence of syntax in terms of complex networks where words are connected through syntactic links, providing a global view of the organization of syntactic relations. A previously unreported, sharp transition is shown to occur at ≈ 2 years from a tree-like structure to a scale-free, small world syntax network. The nature of such transition supports the presence of an innate component pervading the emergence of full syntax.
RetroShape: Leveraging Rear-Surface Shape Displays for 2.5D Interaction on Smartwatches

The small screen size of a smartwatch limits user experience when watching or interacting with media. We propose a supplementary tactile feedback system to enhance the user experience with a method unique to the smartwatch form factor. Our system has a deformable surface on the back of the watch face, allowing the visual scene on screen to extend into 2.5D physical space. This allows the user to watch and feel virtual objects, such as experiencing a ball bouncing against the wrist. We devised two controlled experiments to analyze the influence of tactile display resolution on the illusion of virtual object presence. Our first study revealed that on average, a taxel can render virtual objects between 70% and 138% of its own size without shattering the illusion. From the second study, we found visual and haptic feedback can be separated by 4.5mm to 16.2mm for the tested taxels. Based on the results, we developed a prototype (called RetroShape) with 4×4 10mm taxels using micro servo motors, and demonstrated its unique capability through a set of tactile-enhanced games and videos. A preliminary user evaluation showed that participants welcome RetroShape as a useful addition to existing smartwatch output.