Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparative Study and Application-Oriented Classification of Vehicular Map-Matching Methods

Vehicular map-matching aims to identify the position of a vehicle in a road-network. Different map-matching applications make use of different formulations of the problem leading to some ambiguous usage. This work intends to make a step towards resolution of this issue. We cross-link mapmatching methods, classes and applications in order to provide insight into this area of study. A selection of current map-matching methods is reviewed, classified and appropriately linked with other methods. Conclusions on trends and influential ideas are drawn with respect to the specific flavor of individual applications. Finally, the trade-offs that must be considered when selecting a map-matching method are discussed and selection guidelines are provided.
Labbag® - a versatile bag-based cultivation system for expansion, differentiation and cryopreservation of human stem cells

Abstract Novel approaches in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering are highly promoted by human induced pluripotent stem cells. Typical workflows include the expansion, differentiation and/or cryopreservation of these cells. Often, the differentiation, cytotoxicity tests or disease modelling rely on multicellular aggregates. Here, we present the novel bag-based system “Labbag®” to address workflows required for these applications. As a unique feature, the Labbag® provides a chemical spot pattern to allow the formation of several hundreds of hanging droplets within a few seconds with standard laboratory equipment. In this study, we describe the general concept of the Labbag® and show aggregate formation of stem cells as first stem cell workflow successfully transferred.
Allergic Rhinitis and Its Relationship with IL-10, IL-17, TGF-β, IFN-γ, IL 22, and IL-35

Background We aimed in our study to research the role of new cytokines such as IL-35, IL-22, and IL-17 that may form a target for novel treatment approaches. Methods IL-10, IL-17, TGF-β, IFN-γ, IL-22, and IL-35 serum levels of allergic rhinitis (AR) patients were measured using ELISA method. Allergic sensitization was demonstrated by the skin prick test. Patients only with olive tree sensitivity were evaluated for seasonal AR (SAR). Patients only with mite sensitivity were included in the study for perennial AR (PAR). AR clinic severity was demonstrated by the nasal symptom scores (NSS). Results In total, 65 AR patients (patient group), having 31 PAR and 34 SAR patients, and 31 healthy individuals (control group) participated in the study. Cytokine levels between the patient group and the control group were compared; IL-17 (p = 0.038), IL-22 (p = 0.001), and TGF-β (p = 0.031) were detected as high in the patient group, and IFN-γ (p < 0.001) was detected as low in the patient group. When correlation analysis was made between age, gender, prick test result, NSS, AR duration, and cytokine levels in the patient group, a negative correlation was detected only between IFN-γ (p = 0.032/r = −0.266) level and NSS. Conclusions Accompanied by the literature information, these results made us think that T cell subgroups and cytokines have an important role in AR immunopathogenesis. It is thought that future studies to be conducted relating to this subject will form new targets in treatment.
Vibrational Artificial Subtle Expressions: Conveying System's Confidence Level to Users by Means of Smartphone Vibration

Artificial subtle expressions (ASEs) are machine-like expressions used to convey a system's confidence level to users intuitively. So far, auditory ASEs using beep sounds, visual ASEs using LEDs, and motion ASEs using robot movements have been implemented and shown to be effective. In this paper, we propose a novel type of ASE that uses vibration (vibrational ASEs). We implemented the vibrational ASEs on a smartphone and conducted experiments to confirm whether they can convey a system's confidence level to users in the same way as the other types of ASEs. The results clearly showed that vibrational ASEs were able to accurately and intuitively convey the designed confidence level to participants, demonstrating that ASEs can be applied in a variety of applications in real environments.
Unified Threat Management System Approach for Securing SME's Network Infrastructure

For many smaller and larger entities over the last couple of decades, information systems and technologies have become an integral part of their operations and played a major role in drastically changing and often improving their business processes. As computers become more and more integrated into our business organizations, we end up leaving and storing confidential, vital business and sensitive information on them. In general, larger organizations have the technical expertise and resources to better secure computing services. The Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEâs), however, often lack the platforms, infrastructure, technical expertise, and the required financial resources to be able to utilize modern secure technologies for computing services. This paper discussed the importance of network security, analyzed different type of threats to network infrastructure, different methodologies that can be used to mitigate network infrastructure threats and have proposed an approach for securing SMEâs network infrastructure. This approach suggested Unified Threat Management (UTM) as the first line of protection to the network, based on the links between each distribution switch layers which offers a zone based monitoring and controlling system to prevent the network from any possible threats.
Firefly: A Social Wearable to Support Physical Connection of Larpers

The Firefly is a wearable designed to encourage the physical and emotional connection of players of a larp (live action role play game). It is worn as a bracelet whose color changes depending to their connection to another Firefly. This wearable design reflects the positive personal and emotional impact that casual and deeper social interactions may have on people. Preliminary observations of the Firefly within the context of a LARP shows its potential to support collaboration and close interactions for collocated wearers. The Fireflies can inspire others designing social wearables, i.e. wearable technology that supports and enhances social experiences, within and outside the realms of play and games.
Effects of Enhanced Gaze Presentation on Gaze Leading in Remote Collaborative Physical Tasks

With respect to collaborative physical tasks, gaze and gestures play significant roles when referring to physical objects. In video-mediated communication, however, such nonverbal cues become "ineffectual" when they are presented via a 2D monitor, making video-mediated collaborative physical tasks inefficient. This study focuses on gaze cues to support remote collaborative physical tasks and uses an eye-shaped display, "ThirdEye," a simple add-on display that represents a remote participant's gaze direction. ThirdEye is expected to be especially effective when used with mobile terminals. We investigated whether the ThirdEye's gaze shift is effective in leading a local observer's attention toward objects in the local environment, even when ThirdEye is presented with the actual face image of a remote person. Experimental results show that ThirdEye can lead the local participant's attention to intended objects faster than without ThirdEye.
Design and Implementation of a Web-based Application to Assess Cognitive Impairment in Affective Disorder

Affective disorder causes mood disturbance and includes depression and bipolar disorder. Cognitive impairment is one of the determinants of poor functioning in patients suffering from an affective disorder. For example, memory impairment in bipolar patients brings about confusion in their daily life. Other cognitive domains include attention, executive function, and psychomotor speed. Cognitive function of these patients are assessed by means of neuropsychological tests such as California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) and Trail Making Test (TMT) that are used to examine verbal memory and psychomotor speed, respectively.
An Audit Model for ISO 9001 Traceability Requirements in Agile-XP Environments

Software organizations that develop their software products using the agile software processes such as Extreme Programming (XP) face a number of challenges in their effort to demonstrate that their process activities conform to ISO 9001 requirements, a major one being product traceability: software organizations must provide evidence of ISO 9001 conformity, and they need to develop their own procedures, tools, and methodologies to do so. This paper proposes an auditing model for ISO 9001 traceability requirements that is applicable in agile (XP) environments. The design of our model is based on evaluation theory, and includes the use of several auditing “yardsticks” derived from the principles of engineering design, the SWEBOK Guide, and the CMMI-DEV guidelines for requirement management and traceability for each yardstick. Finally, five approaches for agile-XP traceability approaches are audited based on the proposed audit model. Index Terms— Agile Software Certification, Extreme Programming, Software Process Improvement, ISO 9001
Quorum Sensing Signaling and Quenching in the Multidrug-Resistant Pathogen Stenotrophomonas maltophilia

Stenotrophomonas maltophilia is an opportunistic Gram-negative pathogen with increasing incidence in clinical settings. The most critical aspect of S. maltophilia is its frequent resistance to a majority of the antibiotics of clinical use. Quorum Sensing (QS) systems coordinate bacterial populations and act as major regulatory mechanisms of pathogenesis in both pure cultures and poly-microbial communities. Disruption of QS systems, a phenomenon known as Quorum Quenching (QQ), represents a new promising paradigm for the design of novel antimicrobial strategies. In this context, we review the main advances in the field of QS in S. maltophilia by paying special attention to Diffusible Signal Factor (DSF) signaling, Acyl Homoserine Lactone (AHL) responses and the controversial Ax21 system. Advances in the DSF system include regulatory aspects of DSF synthesis and perception by both rpf-1 and rpf-2 variant systems, as well as their reciprocal communication. Interaction via DSF of S. maltophilia with unrelated organisms including bacteria, yeast and plants is also considered. Finally, an overview of the different QQ mechanisms involving S. maltophilia as quencher and as object of quenching is presented, revealing the potential of this species for use in QQ applications. This review provides a comprehensive snapshot of the interconnected QS network that S. maltophilia uses to sense and respond to its surrounding biotic or abiotic environment. Understanding such cooperative and competitive communication mechanisms is essential for the design of effective anti QS strategies.
Validation and calibration of structural models that combine information from multiple sources

ABSTRACT Introduction: Mathematical models that attempt to capture structural relationships between their components and combine information from multiple sources are increasingly used in medicine. Areas covered: We provide an overview of methods for model validation and calibration and survey studies comparing alternative approaches. Expert commentary: Model validation entails a confrontation of models with data, background knowledge, and other models, and can inform judgments about model credibility. Calibration involves selecting parameter values to improve the agreement of model outputs with data. When the goal of modeling is quantitative inference on the effects of interventions or forecasting, calibration can be viewed as estimation. This view clarifies issues related to parameter identifiability and facilitates formal model validation and the examination of consistency among different sources of information. In contrast, when the goal of modeling is the generation of qualitative insights about the modeled phenomenon, calibration is a rather informal process for selecting inputs that result in model behavior that roughly reproduces select aspects of the modeled phenomenon and cannot be equated to an estimation procedure. Current empirical research on validation and calibration methods consists primarily of methodological appraisals or case-studies of alternative techniques and cannot address the numerous complex and multifaceted methodological decisions that modelers must make. Further research is needed on different approaches for developing and validating complex models that combine evidence from multiple sources.
Edge-Oriented Computing Paradigms

While cloud computing has brought paradigm shifts to computing services, researchers and developers have also found some problems inherent to its nature such as bandwidth bottleneck, communication overhead, and location blindness. The concept of fog/edge computing is therefore coined to extend the services from the core in cloud data centers to the edge of the network. In recent years, many systems are proposed to better serve ubiquitous smart devices closer to the user. This article provides a complete and up-to-date review of edge-oriented computing systems by encapsulating relevant proposals on their architecture features, management approaches, and design objectives.
Design and implementation of network management with two-layer fairness approach in campus network environment

Accelerated growth in Internet bandwidth and Internet users have been increased network management complexity. This issue is more pronounced in campus networks as the scale of such networks has increased dramatically. This work proposes a layer-based network bandwidth management framework that significantly decreases the implementation complexity, achieves fair bandwidth allocation and resolves the problem of stolen IP addresses. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves fair bandwidth usage in the subnet and backbone. By the way, we also realise the system with embedded platform to reveal the algorithm and performance.
SysRT: A modular multiprocessor RTOS simulator for early design space exploration

Modern embedded systems increasingly accommodate several applications running concurrently on a multiprocessor platform managed by a real-time operating system (RTOS). The increasing design complexity of such systems calls for good design tools to evaluate real-time performance during the very early stages of design. To this end, fast system-level simulators that allow for efficient hardware/software co-simulation are essential. In this paper, we present SysRT, a generic and highlevel RTOS simulator that is highly suited for early design space exploration (DSE). The simulator contains different types of application models and a modular RTOS kernel model, all developed in SystemC. Efficient and precise modeling of preemptive scheduling is achieved via an event-driven simulation approach, allowing simulations to be performed much faster than cycle-accurate simulations. At the same time, the kernel model is developed to be generic and modular to support for easy plugin of new schedulers as well as new resource sharing protocols. Comparing SysRT with state-of-art simulators, it achieves faster simulation speeds with an identically small simulation error. We demonstrate the flexibility of SysRT and its benefits for early DSE using experiments with a mixed workload executing on multiprocessor platforms with different numbers of cores.
Cellular Connectivity for UAVs: Network Modeling, Performance Analysis, and Design Guidelines

The growing use of aerial user equipments (UEs) in various applications requires ubiquitous and reliable connectivity for safe control and data exchange between these devices and ground stations. Key questions that need to be addressed when planning the deployment of aerial UEs are whether the cellular network is a suitable candidate for enabling such connectivity and how the inclusion of aerial UEs might impact the overall network efficiency. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of user and network-level performance of a cellular network that serves both unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and ground users in the downlink. Our results show that the favorable propagation conditions that UAVs enjoy due to their height often backfire on them, as the increased load-dependent co-channel interference received from neighboring ground base stations (BSs) is not compensated by the improved signal strength. When compared with a ground user in an urban area, our analysis shows that a UAV flying at 100 m can experience a throughput decrease of a factor 10 and a coverage drop from 76% to 30%. Motivated by these findings, we develop UAV and network-based solutions to enable an adequate integration of UAVs into cellular networks. In particular, we show that an optimal tilting of the UAV antenna can increase the coverage from 23% to 89% and throughput from 3.5 to 5.8 b/s/Hz, outperforming ground UEs. Furthermore, our findings reveal that depending on the UAV altitude and its antenna configuration, the aerial user performance can scale with respect to the network density better than that of a ground user. Finally, our results show that network densification and the use of microcells limit the UAV performance. Although UAV usage has the potential to increase the area spectral efficiency (ASE) of cellular networks with a moderate number of cells, they might hamper the development of future ultradense networks.
A Self-Powered Wearable Pressure Sensor and Pyroelectric Breathing Sensor Based on GO Interfaced PVDF Nanofibers

This paper reports a self-powered, flexible, piezo- and pyro-electric hybrid nanogenerator (NG) device that can be fixed on different locations of human skin for detecting static and dynamic pressure variations and can also monitor temperature fluctuations during the respiration process. An efficient and cost-effective fabrication strategy has been developed to create electrospun poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF)/graphene oxide (GO) nanofibers, which are used to create a highly sensitive wearable pressure sensor and pyroelectric breathing sensor. The sensor can accurately and rapidly detect pressures as low as 10 Pa with a high sensitivity (4.3 V/kPa), a key performance indicator for wearable sensors. Importantly, the sensor exhibits a high sensitivity to bending and stretching by finger, wrist, and elbow. The pressure sensor is also highly sensitive to vocal vibrations when attached to the human throat. The device can generate a maximum output power density of ∼6.2 mW/m2 when subjected to a compressive st.
Making strategy process intelligent with business intelligence: an empirical investigation

With the advancements in information systems, 'business intelligence BI' has gained considerable ground in business and strategic decision making. A number of studies show the relation between BI and business value, and provide ample evidence of uses of BI. The present study contributes to the growing body of literature on BI and strategic management by attempting to find out the relation between BI applications and tightness/looseness of strategy process structuring with the help of binary logistic regression. It is found from the empirical investigation that more use of BI systems increases the odds of tightly structured strategy process in a significant way, i.e., increased control systems, higher focus on goals and strategies, more objectivity in performance measurement, etc. Also some of the BI measures, like spreadsheet analytics, dashboards, etc. dominate the information systems but a need for improved systems is felt by businesses.
Performance Comparison and Optimization of ICN Prototypes

Information Centric Networking paradigm is a solid proposal to update the original Internet design. While the research community is still working on technical improvement, the technology has reached a stage that allows the design, testing and deployment of ICN specific applications. To this goal, the development of testbeds allowing researchers to evaluate their applications in a real setup is of key importance. There are few existing ICN prototypes that would allow experimenters to work in this direction. Their performance is fundamental, so that they do not create artificial bottlenecks affecting test reliability. Unfortunately, existing solutions have been designed to demonstrate the feasibility of the ICN solution, thus lacking of optimization and scalability required to run reliable scalability tests. In this paper we address this problem by first, offering a performance comparison between available ICN prototypes and, second by proposing a revisited system design, CCN-par, to increase scalability, and remove bottlenecks that hamper current software-based testbeds.
Document level polarity classification with attention gated recurrent unit

Reviews can be categorized into two extreme polarities, that is, positive or negative. These reviews from different consumers on a product or service can help a new consumer to make a good decision. Document level sentiment classification aims to understand user generated content or opinion towards certain products or services. In this paper, we propose a recurrent neural network model in classifying positive and negative reviews using gated recurrent unit and attention mechanism. Effectiveness of our proposed model is evaluated using Yelp Review dataset obtained from Yelp Dataset Challenge. Experimental results show that our proposed model can outperform existing models for document level sentiment classification.
Oblivious RAM: A Dissection and Experimental Evaluation

Many companies choose the cloud as their data and IT infrastructure platform. The remote access of the data brings the issue of trust. Despite the use of strong encryption schemes, adversaries can still learn valuable information regarding encrypted data by observing the data access patterns. To that end, one can hide the access patterns, which may leak sensitive information, using Oblivious RAMs (ORAMs). Numerous works have proposed different ORAM constructions, but they have never been thoroughly compared against and tested on large databases. There are also no open source implementation of these schemes. These limitations make it difficult for researchers and practitioners to choose and adopt a suitable ORAM for their applications. To address this issue, we provide a thorough study over several practical ORAM constructions, and implement them under the same library. We perform extensive experiments to provide insights into their performance characteristics with respect to efficiency, scalability, and communication cost.
Extracting Regular FOV Shots from 360 Event Footage

Video summaries are a popular way to share important events, but creating good summaries is hard. It requires expertise in both capturing and editing footage. While hiring a professional videographer is possible, this is too costly for most casual events. An alternative is to place 360 video cameras around an event space to capture footage passively and then extract regular field-of-view (RFOV) shots for the summary. This paper focuses on the problem of extracting such RFOV shots. Since we cannot actively control the cameras or the scene, it is hard to create "ideal' shots that adhere strictly to traditional cinematography rules. To better understand the tradeoffs, we study human preferences for static and moving camera RFOV shots generated from 360 footage. From the findings, we derive design guidelines. As a secondary contribution, we use these guidelines to develop automatic algorithms that we demonstrate in a prototype user interface for extracting RFOV shots from 360 videos.