Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spaceprint: a Mobility-based Fingerprinting Scheme for Public Spaces

In this paper, we address the problem of how automated situation-awareness can be achieved by learning real-world situations from ubiquitously generated mobility data. Without semantic input about the time and space where situations take place, this turns out to be a fundamental challenging problem. Uncertainties also introduce technical challenges when data is generated in irregular time intervals, being mixed with noise, and errors. Purely relying on temporal patterns observable in mobility data, in this paper, we propose Spaceprint, a fully automated algorithm for finding the repetitive pattern of similar situations in spaces. We evaluate this technique by showing how the latent variables describing the category, and the actual identity of a space can be discovered from the extracted situation patterns. Doing so, we use different real-world mobility datasets with data about the presence of mobile entities in a variety of spaces. We also evaluate the performance of this technique by showing its robustness against uncertainties.
The Relative Abundance of the Juvenile Phase of the Eastern Red-Spotted Newt at Harvard Forest Prior to the Arrival of the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid

Abstract The invasive insect pest Adelges tsugae (Hemlock Woolly Adelgid) threatens the ecologically unique Tsuga canadensis (Eastern Hemlock)-dominated forest type throughout its range. Relatively little is known about how the loss of this forest type will affect the relative abundance of amphibians. This study assessed the relative abundance of the juvenile phase of Notophthalmus viridescens viridescens (Eastern Red-spotted Newt, Red Eft) in Eastern Hemlock-dominated stands (n = 5) and mixed deciduous stands (n = 5) at Harvard Forest in Petersham, MA, using both transect surveys of the forest floor surface (n = 368 Red Eft observations over four seasons), and intensive searches of quadrats (n = 27 Red Eft observations over two seasons). Using data from transect surveys, the average relative abundance of Red Efts was more than two times greater in Eastern Hemlock-dominated stands than in mixed deciduous stands, however the differences were not statistically significant (P = 0.146). Quadrat surveys yielded relative abundance estimates for Red Efts that were more than 5 times greater in Eastern Hemlock-dominated stands than in mixed deciduous stands, but again the differences were not statistically significant (P = 0.213).
Remote base station controller design for common frequency broadcasting network based on KG510

This paper introduces a 25-core expander interface of a base station based on KG150, and uses the technique of simulcast to design near-end and far-end control equipment, and build a control system for common frequency simulcast base stations. The control system uses existing private and public networks to realize unattended transferring simulcast stations and real time voice interconnections. The control system is characterized by small size, privacy and digitization. This system is used in the communication of major projects such as, People's Armed Police, wireless fireproofing and police emergency.
The role of p21ras in CD28 signal transduction: triggering of CD28 with antibodies, but not the ligand B7-1, activates p21ras

CD28 is a 44-kD homodimer expressed on the surface of the majority of human T cells that provides an important costimulus for T cell activation. The biochemical basis of the CD28 accessory signals is poorly understood. Triggering of the T cell antigen receptor (TCR) activates the p21ras proteins. Here we show that ligation of CD28 by a monoclonal antibody (mAb) also stimulates p21ras and induces Ras- dependent events such as stimulation of the microtubule-associated protein (MAP) kinase ERK2 and hyperphosphorylation of Raf-1. One physiological ligand for CD28 is the molecule B7-1. In contrast to the effect of CD28 mAb, the present studies show that interactions between CD28 and B7-1 do not stimulate p21ras signaling pathways. Two substrates for TCR-regulated protein tyrosine kinases (PTKs) have been implicated in p21ras activation in T cells: p95vav and a 36-kD protein that associates with a complex of Grb2 and the Ras exchange protein Sos. Triggering CD28 with both antibodies and B7-1 activates cellular PTKs, and we have exploited the differences between antibodies and B7-1 for p21ras activation in an attempt to identify critical PTK-controlled events for Ras activation in T cells. The data show that antibodies against TCR or CD28 induce tyrosine phosphorylation of both Vav and p36. B7-1 also induces Vav tyrosine phosphorylation but has no apparent effect on tyrosine phosphorylation of the Grb2-associated p36 protein. The intensity of the Vav tyrosine phosphorylation is greater in B7-1 than in TCR-stimulated cells. Moreover the kinetics of Vav tyrosine phosphorylation is prolonged in the B7-1-stimulated cells. These studies show that for CD28 signaling, the activation of p21ras correlates more closely with p36 tyrosine phosphorylation than with Vav tyrosine phosphorylation. However, the experiments demonstrate that Vav is a major substrate for B7-activated PTKs and hence could be important in CD28 signal transduction pathway.
National strategy for violence prevention in the Austrian public school system: Development and implementation

As a result of a quick succession of several spectacular events in schools, and the ensuing public discussion on the high rates of bullying in Austria, a national strategy for violence prevention in schools and preschools has been developed. In formulating the strategy, a systematic procedure involving international experts and a number of local stakeholders was applied. Six activity domains—(a) policy and advocacy, (b) information and public relations, (c) networking and cooperation, (d) knowledge transfer and education, (e) prevention and intervention, (f) evaluation and research—and the steps necessary for implementation were defined. This paper presents the national strategy. One measure, the Viennese Social Competence Training (ViSC) program, and the results obtained with prior implementations of it on the class level, are described in greater detail. Finally, a summary and a brief outlook for future prospects are provided.
Where Is the Soho of Rome? ∗ Measures and Algorithms for Finding Similar Neighborhoods in Cities

Data generated on location-aware social media provide rich information about the places (shopping malls, restaurants, caf´es, etc) where citizens spend their time. That information can, in turn, be used to describe city neighborhoods in terms of the activity that takes place therein. For example, the data might reveal that citizens visit one neighborhood mainly for shopping, while another for its dining venues. In this paper, we present a methodology to analyze such data, describe neighborhoods in terms of the activity they host, and discover similar neighborhoods across cities. Using millions of Foursquare check-ins from cities in Europe and the US, we conduct an extensive study on features and measures that can be used to quantify similarity of city neighborhoods. We ﬁnd that the earth-mover’s distance outperforms other candidate measures in ﬁnding similar neighborhoods. Subsequently, using the earth-mover’s distance as our measure of choice, we address the issue of computational efﬁ-ciency: given a neighborhood in one city, how to efﬁciently retrieve the k most similar neighborhoods in other cities. We pro-pose a similarity-search strategy that yields signiﬁcant speed improvement over the brute-force search, with minimal loss in accuracy. We conclude with a case study that compares neighborhoods of Paris to neighborhoods of other cities.
A Newton-CG Augmented Lagrangian Method for Semidefinite Programming

We consider a Newton-CG augmented Lagrangian method for solving semidefinite programming (SDP) problems from the perspective of approximate semismooth Newton methods. In order to analyze the rate of convergence of our proposed method, we characterize the Lipschitz continuity of the corresponding solution mapping at the origin. For the inner problems, we show that the positive definiteness of the generalized Hessian of the objective function in these inner problems, a key property for ensuring the efficiency of using an inexact semismooth Newton-CG method to solve the inner problems, is equivalent to the constraint nondegeneracy of the corresponding dual problems. Numerical experiments on a variety of large-scale SDP problems with the matrix dimension $n$ up to $4,110$ and the number of equality constraints $m$ up to $2,156,544$ show that the proposed method is very efficient. We are also able to solve the SDP problem fap36 (with $n=4,110$ and $m=1,154,467$) in the Seventh DIMACS Implementation Challenge much more accurately than in previous attempts.
Data Access Partitioning for Fine-grain Parallelism on Multicore Architectures

The recent design shift towards multicore processors has spawned a significant amount of research in the area of program parallelization. The future abundance of cores on a single chip requires programmer and compiler intervention to increase the amount of parallel work possible. Much of the recent work has fallen into the areas of coarse-grain parallelization: new programming models and different ways to exploit threads and data-level parallelism. This work focuses on a complementary direction, improving performance through automated fine-grain parallelization. The main difficulty in achieving a performance benefit from fine-grain parallelism is the distribution of data memory accesses across the data caches of each core. Poor choices in the placement of data accesses can lead to increased memory stalls and low resource utilization. We propose a profile-guided method for partitioning memory accesses across distributed data caches. First, a profile determines affinity relationships between memory accesses and working set characteristics of individual memory operations in the program. Next, a program-level partitioning of the memory operations is performed to divide the memory accesses across the data caches. As a result, the data accesses are proactively dispersed to reduce memory stalls and improve computation parallelization. A final detailed partitioning of the computation instructions is performed with knowledge of the cache location of their associated data. Overall, our data partitioning reduces stall cycles by up to 51 % versus data-incognizant partitioning, and has an overall speedup average of 30% over a single core processor.
Relationship between protein thermodynamic constraints and variation of evolutionary rates among sites

Evolutionary-rate variation among sites within proteins depends on functional and biophysical properties that constrain protein evolution. It is generally accepted that proteins must be able to fold stably in order to function. However, the relationship between stability constraints and among-sites rate variation is not well understood. Here, we present a biophysical model that links the thermodynamic stability changes due to mutations at sites in proteins ( Δ Δ G ? > ) to the rate at which mutations accumulate at those sites over evolutionary time. We find that such a ‘stability model’ generally performs well, displaying correlations between predicted and empirically observed rates of up to 0.75 for some proteins. We further find that our model has comparable predictive power as does an alternative, recently proposed ‘stress model’ that explains evolutionary-rate variation among sites in terms of the excess energy needed for mutants to adopt the correct active structure ( Δ Δ G * ? > ). The two models make distinct predictions, though, and for some proteins the stability model outperforms the stress model and vice versa. We conclude that both stability and stress constrain site-specific sequence evolution in proteins.
A Scaling Law to Predict the Finite-Length Performance of Spatially-Coupled LDPC Codes

Spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes are known to have excellent asymptotic properties. Much less is known regarding their finite-length performance. We propose a scaling law to predict the error probability of finite-length spatially coupled code ensembles when transmission takes place over the binary erasure channel. We discuss how the parameters of the scaling law are connected to fundamental quantities appearing in the asymptotic analysis of these ensembles and we verify that the predictions of the scaling law fit well to the data derived from simulations over a wide range of parameters. The ultimate goal of this line of research is to develop analytic tools for the design of SC-LDPC codes under practical constraints.
Myocardial Work During Endurance Training and Resistance Training: A Daily Comparison, from Workout Session 1 Through Completion of Cardiac Rehabilitation

Patients in cardiac rehabilitation are typically advised to complete a period of supervised endurance training before beginning resistance training. In this study, however, we compared the peak rate-pressure product (RPP, a calculated indicator of myocardial work) of patients during two types of exercise—treadmill walking and chest press—from workout session 1 through completion of cardiac rehabilitation. Twenty-one patients (4 women and 17 men, aged 35 to 70 years) were enrolled in the study; they were referred for cardiac rehabilitation after myocardial infarction, percutaneous coronary intervention, or both. The participants did treadmill walking and chest press exercises during each workout session. Peak values for heart rate (HR) and systolic blood pressure (SBP) were recorded, and the peak RPP was calculated (peak HR x peak SBP). Paired t tests were used to compare the data collected during the two types of exercise across 19 workout sessions. The mean peak values for HR, SBP, and RPP were lower during resistance training than during endurance training; the differences were statistically significant (P < 0.05), with only one exception (the SBP for session 1). Across all 19 workout sessions, the participants performed more myocardial work, as indicated by the peak RPP, during treadmill walking than during the chest press.
Jenga: Software-defined cache hierarchies

Caches are traditionally organized as a rigid hierarchy, with multiple levels of progressively larger and slower memories. Hierarchy allows a simple, fixed design to benefit a wide range of applications, since working sets settle at the smallest (i.e., fastest and most energy-efficient) level they fit in. However, rigid hierarchies also add overheads, because each level adds latency and energy even when it does not fit the working set. These overheads are expensive on emerging systems with heterogeneous memories, where the differences in latency and energy across levels are small. Significant gains are possible by specializing the hierarchy to applications. We propose Jenga, a reconfigurable cache hierarchy that dynamically and transparently specializes itself to applications. Jenga builds virtual cache hierarchies out of heterogeneous, distributed cache banks using simple hardware mechanisms and an OS runtime. In contrast to prior techniques that trade energy and bandwidth for performance (e.g., dynamic bypassing or prefetching), Jenga eliminates accesses to unwanted cache levels. Jenga thus improves both performance and energy efficiency. On a 36-core chip with a 1 GB DRAM cache, Jenga improves energy-delay product over a combination of state-of-the-art techniques by 23% on average and by up to 85%.
Microfluidic device for capillary electrochromatography‐mass spectrometry

A novel microfabricated device that integrates a monolithic polymeric separation channel, an injector, and an interface for electrospray ionization‐mass spectrometry detection (ESI‐MS) was devised. Microfluidic propulsion was accomplished using electrically driven fluid flows. The methacrylate‐based monolithic separation medium was prepared by photopolymerization and had a positively derivatized surface to ensure electroosmotic flow (EOF) generation for separation of analytes in a capillary electrochromatography (CEC) format. The injector operation was optimized to perform under conditions of nonuniform EOF within the microfluidic channels. The ESI interface allowed hours of stable operation at the flow rates generated by the monolithic column. The dimensions of one processing line were sufficiently small to enable the integration of 4–8 channel multiplexed structures on a single substrate. Standard protein digests were utilized to evaluate the performance of this microfluidic chip. Low‐ or sub‐fmol amounts were injected and detected with this arrangement.
EFFECT OF SALINITY STRESS ON SEED GERMINATION AND ANTIOXIDATIVE DEFENSE SYSTEM OF Catharanthus roseus

In this study the effect of responses of Catharanthus roseus to NaCl stress has been explored. Periwinkle plants were exposed to different concentrations of salt and the effect of treatment on germination, growth parameter and antioxidative defense system investigated. Seeds were presoaked in solutions with different salinity after sterilization. Experimental samples irrigated once every two days with solutions containing given NaCl concentration. Increasing the NaCl concentration to 25, 50, 75 and 100 μM salt reduced germination percentage by 8, 29, 41 and 81 percent respectively. Plant fresh and dry weights of treated plants showed a decrease, compare to the control. Ascorbic acid content increased to 42, 56, 129 and 218 percent when treated by 25, 50, 75 and 100 μM salt, respectively, compared to the control. Glutathione concentration showed a significant (P<0.05) increase at all treatments. NaCl caused to significant decrease of SOD activity. Salinity enhanced the activities of catalase, peroxidase and glutathione reductase. The MDA content increased with the increasing concentrations of NaCl. MDA content of samples treated by 100 μM NaCl increased up to 45 percent more than the control.
Dialogue on Paulo Freire

Reflecting on education means analyzing the context in which one intends to work. Otherwise, when the context is not taken into account, education can be reduced to theoretical thinking. Real educational praxis must be linked to its social context and to the complexity of its environment. A theory cannot be a vehicle that secludes praxis, but rather an instrument of critical analysis that is embedded in our own praxis. From my point of view, one of the deepest teachings of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy is the dialectic between theory and practice. Theory without practice would be mere abstract thinking, just as practice without theory would be reduced to naive action.
AMA1-Deficient Toxoplasma gondii Parasites Transiently Colonize Mice and Trigger an Innate Immune Response That Leads to Long-Lasting Protective Immunity

ABSTRACT The apical membrane antigen 1 (AMA1) protein was believed to be essential for the perpetuation of two Apicomplexa parasite genera, Plasmodium and Toxoplasma, until we genetically engineered viable parasites lacking AMA1. The reduction in invasiveness of the Toxoplasma gondii RH-AMA1 knockout (RH-AMA1KO) tachyzoite population, in vitro, raised key questions about the outcome associated with these tachyzoites once inoculated in the peritoneal cavity of mice. In this study, we used AMNIS technology to simultaneously quantify and image the parasitic process driven by AMA1KO tachyzoites. We report their ability to colonize and multiply in mesothelial cells and in both resident and recruited leukocytes. While the RH-AMA1KO population amplification is rapidly lethal in immunocompromised mice, it is controlled in immunocompetent hosts, where immune cells in combination sense parasites and secrete proinflammatory cytokines. This innate response further leads to a long-lasting status immunoprotective against a secondary challenge by high inocula of the homologous type I or a distinct type II T. gondii genotypes. While AMA1 is definitively not an essential protein for tachyzoite entry and multiplication in host cells, it clearly assists the expansion of parasite population in vivo.
Designing solid objects using interactive sketch interpretation

Before the introduction of Computer Aided Design and solid modeling systems, designers had developed a set of techniques for designing solid objects by sketching their ideas on pencil and paper and refining them into workable designs. Unfortunately, these techniques are different from those for designing objects using a solid modeler. Not only does this waste avast reserve of talent and experience (people typically start drawing from the moment they can hold a crayon), but it also has a more fundamental problem: designers can use their intuition more effectively when sketching than they can when using a solid modeler. Viking is a solid modeling system whose user-interface is based on interactive sketch interpretation. Interactive sketch interpretation lets the designer create a line-drawing of a desired object while Viking generates a three-dimensional object description. This description is consistent with both the designer’s line-drawing, and a set of geometric constraints either derived from the line-drawing or placed by the designer. Viking’s object descriptions are fully compatible with the object descriptions used by traditional solid modelers. As a result, interactive sketch interpretation can be used with traditional solid modeling techniques, combining the advantages of both sketching and solid modeling.
Fully Coupled Multiphysics Simulation of Crosstalk Effect in Bipolar Resistive Random Access Memory

A versatile multiphysics simulation packet for investigating different resistive random acces memories (RRAMs) is developed in this paper. Heat transfer, electrical conduction, and ion migration in such heterogeneous structure are all taken into consideration. Three fully coupled partial differential equations are solved using our self-developed finite-difference algorithm, where Scharfetter–Gummel method is adopted to simulate ion migration with fast convergence achieved. This packet is validated in comparison with the commercial software based on the finite-element method. With its implementation, complete and clear pictures for crosstalk effect in vertically integrated RRAM are captured and compared, where the effects of key physical and geometrical factors are characterized and understood. Some useful suggestions to mitigate its unfavorable influences are given.
The Relationship Between Uncertainty and Desire for Feedback: A Test of Competing Hypotheses

The relationship between uncertainty and desire for feedback was investigated in 2 studies. Results of Study 1 showed support for a curvilinear relationship. People were interested in feedback at high and low levels of uncertainty, as opposed to moderate levels of uncertainty, indicating the activation of both uncertainty reduction and self-verification motives. In Study 2, the curvilinear relationship with uncertainty was replicated for indirect feedback-seeking behavior. In contrast, we found a negative relationship between direct feedback seeking and uncertainty, moderated by certainty orientation. People seemed more motivated by self-verification vs. uncertainty reduction strivings, depending on their certainty orientation. These findings suggest that the relationship between uncertainty and desire for feedback is less simple than previously thought.