Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Shortest path and distance queries on road networks: towards bridging theory and practice

Given two locations s and t in a road network, a distance query returns the minimum network distance from s to t, while a shortest path query computes the actual route that achieves the minimum distance. These two types of queries find important applications in practice, and a plethora of solutions have been proposed in past few decades. The existing solutions, however, are optimized for either practical or asymptotic performance, but not both. In particular, the techniques with enhanced practical efficiency are mostly heuristic-based, and they offer unattractive worst-case guarantees in terms of space and time. On the other hand, the methods that are worst-case efficient often entail prohibitive preprocessing or space overheads, which render them inapplicable for the large road networks (with millions of nodes) commonly used in modern map applications. This paper presents Arterial Hierarchy (AH), an index structure that narrows the gap between theory and practice in answering shortest path and distance queries on road networks. On the theoretical side, we show that, under a realistic assumption, AH answers any distance query in Õ(log α) time, where α = dmax/dmin, and dmax (resp. dmin) is the largest (resp. smallest) L∞ distance between any two nodes in the road network. In addition, any shortest path query can be answered in Õ(k + log α) time, where k is the number of nodes on the shortest path. On the practical side, we experimentally evaluate AH on a large set of real road networks with up to twenty million nodes, and we demonstrate that (i) AH outperforms the state of the art in terms of query time, and (ii) its space and pre-computation overheads are moderate.
Econometric analysis of agricultural production: new primal perspectives

Keywords: Agricultural production, production function, asymmetric specification, growth inputs, facilitating inputs, input requirement, excess capital, endogeneity , productivity growth, capital structure This thesis seeks to rebuild and extend the primal approach in production analysis by: a) developing a new paradigm for agricultural production analysis that acknowledges the relevance of the agronomic aspects of the production processes; b) defining factor demand in agricultural production from a primal, technical perspective. The theory and approach developed are used to address aspects of environmental and economic sustainability of agriculture in the Netherlands . This research advocates that production models should respect and incorporate prior knowledge into production analysis. The research recognizes that inputs used in agricultural production have distinct functionalities and this must be accounted for explicitly in the model. Input functionality is first defined as productive inputs, damage-abating inputs, and inputs that have both functionalities. Then the research further generalizes this distinction by defining a dichotomy of growth inputs and facilitating inputs. Growth inputs are directly involved in the biological process of crop growth and include land, seed, fertilizer, and water; facilitating inputs help create or alter growth conditions, under which growth inputs take effect, and include labor, capital, and pesticides. Based on this dichotomy, a conceptual framework is developed. The framework connects agronomy and economics, presenting a new paradigm for production analysis. The empirical analyses use data from Dutch arable farms. Test results reject the traditional translog model, in favor of the new model proposed in this research. Next, the research addresses input demand from a primal, technical perspective. A capital requirement model is proposed, and the factors that affect the capital requirement in production are investigated. Using the capital requirement model, this research defines a concept of excess capital and finds excess capital widely exists in Dutch arable farming. The presence of excess capital implies mismeasurement and simultaneity of capital in production. Its implications in econometric analysis of production are demonstrated with a production frontier model. Results show that models not addressing these problems would yield biased and inconsistent efficiency estimates. In addition to the separate studies of product supply and input demand, this research further combines the two aspects and conducts an analysis on the total factor productivity growth in Dutch agriculture, focusing on the impacts of capital structure, investment, and governmental subsidies.
An Experimental Analysis of the Entanglement Problem in Neural-Network-based Music Transcription Systems

Several recent polyphonic music transcription systems have utilized deep neural networks to achieve state of the art results on various benchmark datasets, pushing the envelope on framewise and note-level performance measures. Unfortunately we can observe a sort of glass ceiling effect. To investigate this effect, we provide a detailed analysis of the particular kinds of errors that state of the art deep neural transcription systems make, when trained and tested on a piano transcription task. We are ultimately forced to draw a rather disheartening conclusion: the networks seem to learn combinations of notes, and have a hard time generalizing to unseen combinations of notes. Furthermore, we speculate on various means to alleviate this situation.
Software Defects: Stay Away from Them. Do Inspections!

All software system fails. However, as more defects the development team can identify and remove as lower will be the probability of software to fail. Identifying and removing defects throughout the software development process represent an important approach to improve software quality. There is evidence about the feasibility, efficiency and efficacy of using software inspections to support the identification of defects. Besides their low cost, the performance of inspections can be positively influenced by the technique used to detect defects. Despite all these benefits, the use of inspections is not common place in the software industry. Therefore, this Quatic 2014 keynote speech intends to discuss the benefits of Software Inspections (the method and techniques) and their use in software projects.
Proline Residues as Switches in Conformational Changes Leading to Amyloid Fibril Formation

Here we discuss studies of the structure, folding, oligomerization and amyloid fibril formation of several proline mutants of human stefin B, which is a protein inhibitor of lysosomal cysteine cathepsins and a member of the cystatin family. The structurally important prolines in stefin B are responsible for the slow folding phases and facilitate domain swapping (Pro 74) and loop swapping (Pro 79). Moreover, our findings are compared to β2-microglobulin, a protein involved in dialysis-related amyloidosis. The assessment of the contribution of proline residues to the process of amyloid fibril formation may shed new light on the critical molecular events involved in conformational disorders.
Efficient HZD gait generation for three-dimensional underactuated humanoid running

Dynamic humanoid locomotion is a challenging control problem, and running is especially difficult to achieve, given the underactuation inherent to aerial domains. Previous work developed a gait-generating optimization framework for dynamic locomotion in the context of hybrid zero dynamics, producing stable 3D walking on the humanoid hardware platform DURUS. Here, we demonstrate that this optimization method also extends to stable 3D running. Gaits generated from the optimization, which utilizes the dynamics of all 23 degrees of freedom to maximize energy economy, results in stable running in a DURUS simulation model. Notably, the presented running is underactuated in all domains, due to DURUS' spring-legged design. Further, we generate 25 different running gaits, over a range of speeds (1.5-3.0 m/s), to demonstrate the reliability of solving the large-scale nonlinear program. We report statistical performance of the optimization in successfully generating stable running (average computation time: 323 seconds) in an effort to establish a benchmark for large-scale gait generation. We inspected this array of gaits across speeds, noting recognizable trends in optimized strategies from prior studies on lower-order models-e.g., both increased step frequency and step length with speed-along with the first reported cost-of-transport curve for a 3D humanoid running model. We consider this result an important step toward humanoid running on the DURUS hardware platform.
Thermodynamics of Helix-Coil Transitions Studied by Multicanonical Algorithms

Thermodynamics of helix-coil transitions in amino acid homo-oligomers are studied by the recently proposed multicanonical algorithms. Homo-oligomers of length 10 are considered for three characteristic amino acids, alanine (helix former), valine (helix indifferent), and glycine (helix breaker). For alanine other lengths (15 and 20) are also considered in order to examine the length dependence. From one multicanonical production run with completely random initial conformations, we have obtained the lowest-energy conformations and various thermodynamic quantities (average helicity, Zimm-Bragg s and {sigma} parameters, free energy differences between helix and coil states, etc.) as functions of temperature. The results confirm the fact that alanine is helix-forming, valine is helix-indifferent, and glycine is helix-breaking. 36 refs., 10 figs., 5 tabs.
VOLTAGE CLAMP STUDIES ON INSECT SKELETAL MUSCLE

SUMMARY Membrane currents in the muscle fibre of larval mealworm, Tenebrio molitor were investigated under voltage-clamp conditions. An initial inward current, a transient outward current and a delayed outward current were distinguished. Increasing external calcium concentration increased the size of the inward current and shifted the reversal potential in a positive direction. The inward current persisted in Na-free media and TTX-saline. However, the current was suppressed by 15 mM-cobalt ions. Therefore, it was concluded that the inward current was carried by calcium ions. Although the inward current was markedly reduced when external sodium was replaced with glucose, it was concluded that the contribution of Na ions to the current was small. Calcium conductance showed voltage and time dependence. The inactivation variable fell below unity with increasing strength of hyperpolarizing prepulses.
P2P File-Download Control Method Associated with Router Network Parameters

P2P applications impose an enormous traffic load on the Internet. Actually, however, topological difference between P2P network and underlying physical network (Internet network) is creating inefficient use of the physical network resources. To this problem, we propose P2P download control methods using router network parameters (e.g., number of router-hops, TCP window size and RTT) that can achieve effective use of router network resources, thus relieve ISP traffic burden and improve the response time of P2P applications. To evaluate proposed methods, network topologies of P2P network and router network were established and simulation was performed. As for network topology, BA model is used for P2P network and modified FKP model is used for router network. Simulation results revealed the effectiveness of the proposed control methods.
Comparing social attention in autism and amygdala lesions: Effects of stimulus and task condition

The amygdala plays a critical role in orienting gaze and attention to socially salient stimuli. Previous work has demonstrated that SM a patient with rare bilateral amygdala lesions, fails to fixate and make use of information from the eyes in faces. Amygdala dysfunction has also been implicated as a contributing factor in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), consistent with some reports of reduced eye fixations in ASD. Yet, detailed comparisons between ASD and patients with amygdala lesions have not been undertaken. Here we carried out such a comparison, using eye tracking to complex social scenes that contained faces. We presented participants with three task conditions. In the Neutral task, participants had to determine what kind of room the scene took place in. In the Describe task, participants described the scene. In the Social Attention task, participants inferred where people in the scene were directing their attention. SM spent less time looking at the eyes and much more time looking at the mouths than control subjects, consistent with earlier findings. There was also a trend for the ASD group to spend less time on the eyes, although this depended on the particular image and task. Whereas controls and SM looked more at the eyes when the task required social attention, the ASD group did not. This pattern of impairments suggests that SM looks less at the eyes because of a failure in stimulus-driven attention to social features, whereas individuals with ASD look less at the eyes because they are generally insensitive to socially relevant information and fail to modulate attention as a function of task demands. We conclude that the source of the social attention impairment in ASD may arise upstream from the amygdala, rather than in the amygdala itself.
Collaborative Composition with Creative Systems: Reflections on the First Musebot Ensemble

In this paper, we describe the musebot and the musebot ensemble, and our creation of the first implementations of these novel creative forms. We discuss the need of new opportunities for practitioners in the field of musical metacreation to explore collaborative methodologies in order to make meaningful creative and technical contributions in the field. With the release of the musebot specification, such opportunities are possible through an open-source, communitybased approach in which individual software agents are combined to create ensembles that produce a collective composition. We describe the creation of the first ensemble of autonomous musical agents created by the authors, and the questions and issues raised in its implementation.
Re-framing mobility in older adults: an adapted comprehensive conceptual framework

ABSTRACT Although there is widespread acceptance regarding the importance of mobility in older adults, there have been few attempts to bridge disciplines and move beyond the predominant focus on functional aspects of mobility. In this article, we present an adapted mobility framework with the goal of continued development to acknowledge the subjective and temporal elements of movement in order to comprehensively conceptualize mobility. The adapted framework of mobility offers a physiological, subjective, contextual and temporal approach, that provides a more comprehensive conceptualization of the nature and processes of older adults’ mobility. The use of a sliding scale in our framework reveals the dynamic, fluid and experiential nature of mobility by analyzing factors within and between people and their environments, over time. Adopting this framework reframes how mobility can be conceptualized and approached across a potential range of users and user groups. Our framework presents theoretical concepts that can be transported and tested in research studies. Our framework can also be used in clinical or community settings.
Fast Calculation of Short-Term Depressing Synaptic Conductances

An efficient implementation of synaptic transmission models in realistic network simulations is an important theme of computational neuro-science. The amount of CPU time required to simulate synaptic interactions can increase as the square of the number of units of such networks, depending on the connectivity convergence. As a consequence, any realistic description of synaptic phenomena, incorporating biophysical details, is computationally highly demanding. We present a consolidating algorithm based on a biophysical extended model of ligand-gated postsynaptic channels, describing short-term plasticity such as synaptic depression. The considerable speedup of simulation times makes this algorithm suitable for investigating emergent collective effects of short-term depression in large-scale networks of model neurons.
MIMO Minimum Total MSE Transceiver Design With Imperfect CSI at Both Ends

This paper presents new results on joint linear transceiver design under the minimum total mean-square error (MSE) criterion, with channel mean as well as both transmit and receive correlation information at both ends of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) link. The joint design is formulated into an optimization problem. The optimum closed-form precoder and decoder are derived. Compared to the case with perfect channel state information (CSI), linear filters are added at both ends to balance the suppression of channel noise and the noise from imperfect channel estimation. The impact of channel estimation error as well as channel correlation on system performance is assessed, based on analytical and simulation results.
Working with motivation to increase performance.

This research study examined how organizations might apply the wealth of research about employee motivation into business practice. Incorporating the knowledge from behavioural economics and psychological studies positively influences the following: employee motivation, productivity, well-being, engagement (Pink, 2011). In turn, this helps reduce the stunning loss of productivity, due to employee demotivation, quoted between USD 480-600 billion a year (State of the American Workplace 2016, Gallup). To conduct my research study, I relied on qualitative research methods including literature review of scholarly sources, an overview of grey literature, with some insights from semi-structured interviews. My research looked to both North American and European sources. Scandinavian countries are known for their leadership in management practice (Eriksen et al, 2006) and attracting, developing, and retaining top talent (IMD, 2017). According to the Varieties of Capitalism framework, which outlines the differences in economic and political institutions, USA and Canada and the Nordic countries belong to two contrasting economies, and have profoundly distinct approach to law, development of labour market, inter-firm and employee relations (Hall, Soskice, 2001). This awareness is important to situate both approaches to company-employee relationship in economic and political context. I illustrated the ways the findings from behavioural economics and psychological studies have been harnessed in innovative ways. This manifests through creative management initiatives such as Results-Only Workplace Environment, reduced work hours, and Holacracy. This growing understanding of changing employee needs leads to the rise in team members’ motivation and furthers general engagement, decreases turnover and increases profit for business.
Naturopathic Practice at North American Academic Institutions: Description of 300,483 Visits and Comparison to Conventional Primary Care

This study collected patient visit data to explore similarities and differences between conventional and naturopathic primary care (PC). Administrative data from practice management software systems from the main teaching clinics of four of the eight accredited North American naturopathic academic institutions were abstracted into an integrated database containing five years (2006–2010) of visit, patient, laboratory, and prescribing data. Descriptive analyses of healthcare services were compared to the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS). Over the five-year period, 300,483 patient visits to naturopathic doctors occurred at clinics, excluding visits at clinics operated by the schools in community settings. Patients were 69% female; mean age was 39 (SE 0.09). Older adults (>65) comprised 9% of the population and children (<16) comprised 8%. Comparing academic naturopathic clinics to national conventional PC (NAMCS), we found more patients paid out of pocket at naturopathic clinics (50 vs. 4%) and naturopathic clinics more frequently offered discounted care (26 vs. 0.3%). There was a 44% overlap in the most frequent 25 diagnoses for PC at conventional community clinics. Overall, these data suggest substantial similarities in care offered by academic naturopathic clinics, at which most Naturopathic Doctor (ND) students are trained, and by conventional PC practices.
Planware-domain-specific synthesis of high-performance schedulers

Planware is a domain-specific generator of high-performance scheduling software, currently being developed at the Kestrel Institute. Architecturally, Planware is an extension of the Specware system with domain-independent and domain-dependent parts. The domain-independent part includes a general algorithm design facility (including mechanisms to synthesize global-search and constraint propagation algorithms), as well as support for theorem-proving and witness finding. The domain-dependent part includes scheduling domain knowledge and architecture representations, and other domain-specific refinement knowledge that relates the scheduling domain to general algorithm design and data type refinement. Using Planware, the user interactively specifies a problem and then the system automatically generates a formal specification and refines it.
Semantic Features of Math Problems: Relationships to Student Learning and Engagement

The creation of crowd-sourced content in learning systems is a powerful method for adapting learning systems to the needs of a range of teachers in a range of domains, but the quality of this content can vary. This study explores linguistic differences in teacher-created problem content in ASSISTments using a combination of discovery with models and correlation mining. Specifically, we find correlations between semantic features of mathematics problems and indicators of learning and engagement, suggesting promising areas for future work on problem design. We also discuss limitations of semantic tagging tools within mathematics domains and ways of addressing these limitations.
An 3D interactive virtual reality software toolkit for minimally invasive vascular surgery

Recently, much more attention has been paid to the development of minimally invasive vascular surgery. Simulating behaviors of a catheter/guide wire in a realistic 3D vascular model for minimally invasive vascular surgery is a challenging subject. One of the main problems for an 3D computer-based virtual reality simulator is how to design a software toolkit primarily targeted to medical simulation. In this paper, we describe an 3D interactive virtual reality software toolkit and present an example of application to a virtual minimally invasive vascular surgery procedure. Finally, experimental results are given to show that the 3D interactive virtual reality software toolkit is effective and promising.
Integrating Open Source Software Repositories on the Web through Linked Data

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the problem of integrating code forges based on metadata (e.g., programming language, database, intended audience, operating system), similar software projects and software developers. We review the current problems in integrating metadata of different code forges and argue that Semantic Web technologies are suitable for representing and integrating knowledge contained inside these code forges. Further, we show the advantages of interlinking metadata of software projects to other relevant data sources on the Web, which will enable querying more information from the Web. Moreover, we compute the overlapping between code forges based on similar software developers and argue the benefit of interlinking similar software developers and software projects across different code forges through examples.