Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Problems? We All Know We Have Them. Do We Have Solutions Too? A Literature Review on Problems and Their Solutions in Global Software Development

Distribution of development processes has become common as a side effect of globalization. Working in a distributed setting brings challenges inherent to distance. The Software Engineering community has been investigating these challenges for over a decade, and issues regarding communication, coordination, and trust are frequently reported in literature. However, a few studies discuss solutions for these challenges. Frequently, best practices are described in a general context. In this paper we report our findings from a systematic literature review that aimed at identifying reported challenges and the proposed solutions to solve such challenges. In a time that distributed development has established its roots, it is important to move towards solutions to well-known problems. Our report aims to establish a baseline of problems that still need solutions. This baseline brings awareness to the global software engineering community. We finish discussing the implications for furthering the body of knowledge in the field.
Commitment to the East African community customs union protocol, 2004-2009

The thesis analyses commitment to the EAC customs union protocol. In contrast to previous studies, this research compares state preferences at the negotiation stage with their adherence to each provision in the protocol during the transposition, enforcement and application stages of the protocol. Based on data from fifty semi-structured interviews plus secondary sources, the analysis reveals that partner states are more successful at adhering to the customs related- than trade related provisions in the protocol. Drawing on enforcement, management and constructivist approaches in integration literature, the research identifies three factors that explain inadequate commitment by partner states: the weakness of the EAC secretariat’s monitoring and sanctioning system, strategic preferences of partner states to protect domestic business interests, and overlapping membership to multiple regional arrangements with different rules which affects adequate interpretation and compliance with the protocol. The findings call for more attention to the concept of ‘completeness’ of transposition and show that a disaggregated level of analysis that takes the preferences of partner states at the negotiation stage into consideration better accounts for the inadequate commitment to regional directives. The findings call for larger multi-sectoral case studies and include assessment of the design of regional arrangements.
Effects of communication delay on string stability in vehicle platoons

The throughput of vehicles on highways can be greatly increased by forming vehicle platoons. The control law that maintains stable operation of a platoon is dependent on the lead and preceding vehicle's position, velocity and acceleration profiles. These profiles guarantee string stability of a platoon and are transmitted via wireless communication networks. Communication networks generally introduce delays and drop packets. However, these communication faults are not typically taken into account in controller designs. In this paper, we examine the robustness of current longitudinal controller designs to communication delays. The results show that string stability is seriously compromised by communication delays introduced by the network when the controllers are triggered by the receipt of either the lead vehicle information or the preceding vehicle information. We find that when all the vehicles are synchronized to update their controllers at the same time, string stability can be maintained if the delay in preceding vehicle information is small. An upper bound on the preceding vehicle information delay is derived through a simple partial fraction expansion approach. We also point out a potential problem due to the clock jitters associated with the synchronization among vehicles.
On AC0 implementations of fusion trees and atomic heaps

Addressing a question of Fredman and Willard from STOC'90, we show that fusion trees cannot be implemented using the AC<sup>0</sup> operations available through a standard programming language such as C. However, they can be implemented using AC<sup>0</sup> operations on emerging multimedia processors such as the Pentium 4.A fusion node is a linear space representation of an integer set <i>X</i> of size <i>O</i>(√<i>W</i>), where W ≥ log <i>n</i> is the word-length. The fusion node supports searches in <i>X</i> in constant time. Here, a search for <i>y</i> in <i>X</i> returns max{<i>x</i> ε <i>X</i>|<i>x</i> ≤ <i>y</i>}. Using fusion nodes in a <i>O</i>(√<i>W</i>)-degree fusion tree gave Fredman and Willard <i>O</i>(log <i>n</i>/log <i>W</i>) searching for general <i>n</i>, beating the comparison based lower-bound. However, the search routine uses multiplication which is not an AC<sup>0</sup> operation.Fredman and Willard asked if multiplication instructions could be avoided. We show that the answer is "no" unless you have room for a multiplication table. More precisely, restricting ourselves to the AC<sup>0</sup> operations available through C, we show that constant time look-ups or searches in sets of any non-constant size require space 2<sup>Ω(<i>W</i>)</sup>. However, if we have that much space, i.e., 2<sup>ε<i>W</i></sup> for some constant ε > 0, then we can tabulate multiplication of (ε<i>W</i>/2)-bit numbers, and then we get constant time multiplication of words using additions and shifts. Previous related lowerbounds all disallowed some common AC<sup>0</sup> instructions in C such as shifts.We note that even on the weaker "Practical RAM" the above 2<sup>Ω(<i>W</i>)</sup> space lower-bound for constant look-ups was only known for sets of size Ω(<i>W</i><sup>2</sup>) (Miltersen, ICALP'96). Our Ω(1) set size is best possible since sets of constant size can be searched directly in constant time.Contrasting the above result, we show that using the AC<sup>0</sup> operations available on Intel's new Pentium 4, we can implement both fusion trees and Fredman and Willard's later atomic heaps from FOCS'90. Among the many consequences, we get linear time and space AC<sup>0</sup> implementations of minimum spanning tree and undirected single source shortest paths. Also, we get optimal Θ(log <i>n</i>/log log <i>n</i>) implementations of dynamic rank and 1½ dimensional range searching. Previous optimal solutions required either multiplication or the use of self-designed AC<sup>0</sup> instructions not available on existing processors.
Hardware-software co-design of embedded reconfigurable architectures

In this paper we describe a new hardware/software partitioning approach for embedded reconfigurable architectures consisting of a general-purpose processor (CPU), a dynamically reconfigurable datapath (e.g. an FPGA), and a memory hierarchy. We have developed a framework called Nimble that automatically compiles system-level applications specified in C to executables on the target platform. A key component of this framework is a hardware/software partitioning algorithm that performs fine-grained partitioning (at loop and basic-block levels) of an application to execute on the combined CPU and datapath. The partitioning algorithm optimizes the global application execution time, including the software and hardware execution times, communication time and datapath reconfiguration time. Experimental results on real applications show that our algorithm is effective in rapidly finding close to optimal solutions.
Learning behind the Scenes: Development of Mentors through their Participation in Design Research

We report how our design group members as mentors developed their pedagogical content knowledge and epistemology through their participation in design research practice. In designing a pre-service teacher course curriculum for four years, we have been also concerned with a hidden curriculum for mentors to develop their knowledge in their community. Based on twelve determinants of knowledge building community (Scardamalia, 2002), we embodied four design frameworks for our design group as a dynamic knowledge building community: (1) learning through participation in authentic problem solving, (2) learning through collaboration, (3) learning by taking collective cognitive responsibility, and (4) learning by explaining. Results of analyses on two students who succeeded in developing pedagogical content knowledge and epistemology manifested that their development was based on the change in authenticity to participate in the practice (from preparation for future teaching work to engagement in the design research) and their concerns with the organizational structure of the design group as a community of practice.
Topological determinants of protein unfolding rates

For proteins that fold by two‐state kinetics, the folding and unfolding processes are believed to be closely related to their native structures. In particular, folding and unfolding rates are influenced by the native structures of proteins. Thus, we focus on finding important topological quantities from a protein structure that determine its unfolding rate. After constructing graphs from protein native structures, we investigate the relationships between unfolding rates and various topological quantities of the graphs. First, we find that the correlation between the unfolding rate and the contact order is not as prominent as in the case of the folding rate and the contact order. Next, we investigate the correlation between the unfolding rate and the clustering coefficient of the graph of a protein native structure, and observe no correlation between them. Finally, we find that a newly introduced quantity, the impact of edge removal per residue, has a good overall correlation with protein unfolding rates. The impact of edge removal is defined as the ratio of the change of the average path length to the edge removal probability. From these facts, we conclude that the protein unfolding process is closely related to the protein native structure. Proteins 2005. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A principal component analysis ensemble classifier for P300 speller applications

Recent advances in developing Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have opened up a new realm for designing efficient systems that could enable disabled people to communicate. The P300 speller is one important BCI application that allows the selection of characters on a virtual keyboard by analyzing recorded electroencephalography (EEG) activity. In this work, we propose an ensemble classifier that uses Principal Component Analysis (PCA) features to identify evoked P300 signals from EEG recordings. We examine the performance of the proposed method, using different linear classifiers, on the datasets provided by the BCI competition III. Results demonstrate a classification accuracy of 91% using the proposed method. In addition, our results indicate a significant improvement in classification accuracy compared to traditional feature extraction and classification approaches. The proposed method results in low across-subjects variability compared to other methods with minimal parameter tuning required which could be useful in mobile platform P300 applications.
A Dynamically Recon gurable Systolic Array 1 BioSCAN : A Dynamically Recon gurable Systolic Array for Biosequence

We describe the design, implementation, and deployment via the Internet of BioSCAN, an application-speciic computer system for the rapid determination of statistically signiicant alignments of biopolymer (DNA, RNA, protein) sequences. BioSCAN continues to outperform other systems designed to perform this basic task of molecular biology, which continues to grow in magnitude and importance. The BioSCAN system is hosted by a general-purpose workstation containing a special-purpose hardware engine that accelerates the core algorithm for comparing two biosequences. Careful partitioning of the computational tasks between hardware and software provides not only high performance but also programmability. The BioSCAN system can compare a sequence of up to 12,992 characters with an arbitrarily large database containing arbitrarily long sequences at a rate of 2 million database characters per second. This rate is nearly 1,000 times greater than the rate achieved by a state-of-the-art workstation using software alone. This network-sharable computational resource is accessible interactively via the World Wide Web using Mosaic, Netscape or other client software. 1 MOTIVATION Searching sequence databases is a basic task of not only text and biopolymer comparison but also speech and handwriting recognition. A sequence is an ordered set of characters from a small alphabet. The general task is to compare a given query sequence with each entry sequence of a given database. Each sequence within a biosequence database is searched in order to detect signiicant relationships between gene (DNA, RNA) sequences or gene product (protein) sequences of living organisms. Detection of similar segments between two sequences can provide powerful insights into the biological roles of these molecules. Ongoing worldwide initiatives to sequence the complete genomes of a variety of organisms are resulting in the acquisition and accumulation of biosequence data at ever increasing rates. For example, the GenBank Release 94.0 database contains ve hundred million characters in over seven hundred thousand DNA and RNA sequences. This database is doubling in size every 15 to 18 months. This growth rate is rapidly outpacing the speed-up of general-purpose computers. Software tools that ran acceptably fast a few years ago now require days to scan the latest releases of this database. Computational tools have been implemented to address this problem using a general-purpose uniproces-sor, general-purpose multiprocessor, or special-purpose multiprocessor system. Two popular heuristic-based search tools that run on a general-purpose uniprocessor are FASTA (Pearson and Lipman, 1988) and BLAST (Altschul et al., 1990). Parallel processing programs developed to run on a …
Two Algorithms for Transfer Learning

Transfer learning aims at improving the performance on a target task given some degree of learning on one or more source tasks. This chapter introduces two transfer learning algorithms that can be employed when the source and target domains share the same feature space and class labels. The first algorithm is a hierarchical Bayesian extension of naive Bayes; the second is a version of logistic regression in which the prior distribution over the weight values is learned from an ensemble of source tasks. The methods are tested on a real-world task of predicting whether a person will accept or decline a meeting invitation. The results demonstrate consistent successful transfer of learning when there is an ensemble of source tasks.
A 2.5-GHz Receiver Front-End With  $Q$-Boosted Post-LNA  $N$-Path Filtering in 40-nm CMOS

This paper presents the analysis, design, and measurements of a 2.5-GHz receiver front-end in a 40-nm CMOS technology. The front-end utilizes RLC-resonator quality factor (Q) boosting and four-phase N-path filtering to improve the blocker filtering capabilities of the low-noise amplifier (LNA). Systematic analysis is performed in order to obtain a thorough design approach. Particular attention is paid to the passive mixer switches in the RLC case, for which we show that minimum switch resistance does not provide best noise figure (NF), nor best relative blocker attenuation. Moreover, the N-path filter extends the stable operating region of a Q-boosted LNA, and adding a noisy Q-boosting circuit can actually improve the receiver NF in practical realizations. The experimental CMOS front-end is flip-chip packaged, and a parasitic-aware input matching method for the electrostatic-discharge-protected LNA is proposed, analyzed, and verified. In nominal operation, the programmable front-end achieves a measured gain of 39 dB, an NF of 3.5 dB, and an out-of-band input-referred third order intercept point of > 0 dBm, while consuming 48 mA from a 1.1-V supply.
A New Mid-Infrared Map of the BN/KL Region Using the Keck Telescope

We present a new mid-infrared (12.5 μm) map of the BN/KL high-mass star-forming complex in Orion using the LWS instrument on Keck I. Despite poor weather we achieved nearly diffraction-limited images (FWHM = 0.″38) over a roughly 25″ × 25″ region centered on IRc2 down to a flux limit of ≈250 mJy. Many of the known IR sources in the region break up into smaller subcomponents. We have also detected six new mid-IR sources. Nearly all of the sources are resolved in our mosaic. The near-IR source "n" is slightly elongated in the mid-IR along a northwest-southeast axis and perfectly bisects the double-peaked radio source "L. " Source n has been identified as a candidate for powering the large IR luminosity of the BN/KL region (L = 105 L⊙). We postulate that the 12 μm emission arises in a circumstellar disk surrounding source n. The morphology of the mid-IR emission and the Orion "hot core" (as seen in NH3 emission), along with the location of water and OH masers, is very suggestive of a bipolar cavity centered on source n and aligned with the rotation axis of the hypothetical circumstellar disk. IRc2, once thought to be the dominant energy source for the BN/KL region, clearly breaks into four subsources in our mosaic, as seen previously at 3.8–5.0 μm. The anticorrelation of mid-IR emission and NH3 emission from the nearby hot core indicates that the IRc2 sources are roughly coincident (or behind) the dense hot core. The nature of IRc2 is not clear: neither self-luminous sources (embedded protostars) nor external heating by source "I" can be definitively ruled out. We also report the discovery of a new arclike feature southwest of the BN object and some curious morphology surrounding near-IR source "t. "
Incremental diagram layout for automated model migration

A range of successful modeling tools to develop complex systems use node-link-style diagrams as their underlying language. Over the years such languages can change, for instance as part of a tool update. When migrating existing models, changes in syntax directly affect the placement of elements in their diagrams. Increasing the size of certain nodes may for example result in node overlaps. In this paper we propose two methods based on graph drawing techniques to adjust the layout of existing diagrams after migration. Although we designed these techniques for diagram migration, they are applicable to other scenarios as well, such as users interactively adding or resizing nodes. We evaluate the techniques based on real world diagrams from the LabVIEW suite and discuss the scenarios each technique seems best suited for.
FFT based detection of Diabetic Retinopathy in Fundus Retinal Images

We presented neural network based classifier for diabetic retinopathy detection in fundus images. The Multi Layer Perception Neural Network (MLPNN) based classifier is used to categorize fundus retinal images as normal and abnormal. Feature vector is composed of transform domain features and different statistical parameters of fundus retinal images. 64-point Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used as transform domain feature and Entropy, mean, standard deviation, average, Euler number, contrast, correlation, energy and homogeneity are used as statistical parameters. This feature vector is used as input to MLPNN based classifier. The classifier performance is calculated on DIARETDB0 database. The % classification accuracy on train and CV data sets is 99.48% and 100 respectively.
MPB-07 Reduces the Inflammatory Response to Pseudomonas aeruginosa in CF Bronchial Cells

Chronic lung inflammation in cystic fibrosis (CF) is specifically characterized by predominant endobronchial neutrophil infiltrates, colonization by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and elevated levels of cytokines and chemokines, first of all IL-8. The extensive inflammatory process in CF lungs is the basis of progressive tissue damage and is largely considered detrimental, making antiinflammatory approaches a relevant therapeutic target. This neutrophil-dominated inflammation seems to be related to an excessive proinflammatory signaling, originating from the same surface epithelial cells expressing the defective CF transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) protein, although the underlying mechanisms have not been completely elucidated. To investigate the relationship between defective CFTR and the inflammatory response to P. aeruginosa in CF airway cells, we studied the effect of the DeltaF508 CFTR corrector, benzo(c)quinolizinium (MPB)-07 (Dormer et al., J Cell Science 2001;114:4073-4081). CF bronchial epithelial IB3-1 and CuFi-1 cells overproduced the inflammatory molecules, IL-8 and intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM)-1, in response to P. aeruginosa, compared with the wild-type, CFTR-expressing bronchial cells, S9, and NuLi-1 cells. In both IB3-1 and CuFi-1 cells, the corrector MPB-07 dramatically reduces the IL-8 and ICAM-1 mRNA expression elicited by P. aeruginosa infection. Correction of CFTR-dependent Cl- efflux was confirmed in MPB-07-treated IB3-1 and CuFi-1 cells. In conclusion, the DeltaF508 CFTR corrector MPB-07 produces an antiinflammatory effect in CF bronchial cells exposed to P. aeruginosa in vitro.
Multirobot Formations Based on the Queue-Formation Scheme With Limited Communication

In this paper, we investigate the operation of the queue-formation structure (or Q-structure) in multirobot teams with limited communication. Information flow can be divided into two time scales: (1) the fast-time scale where the robots' reactive actions are determined based only on local communication and (2) the slow-time scale, where information required is less demanding, can be collected over a longer time, and intermittent information loss can be afforded. Therefore, there is no need for global information at all times, reducing the overall communication load. In addition, a dynamic target determination algorithm, based on the Q-structure, is used to produce a series of targets that incrementally guide each robot into formation. It provides greater control over the distance between robots on the same queue, instead of relying on inter robot repulsive distance, and, allows better formation scaling. An analysis of the convergence of the system of robots and realistic simulation studies are provided.