Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adapting Downlink Power in Fronthaul-Constrained Hierarchical Software-Defined RANs

The proof-of-concept software-defined radio access network (RAN) is not flexible enough due to the inherent delay and the necessity of high-capacity fronthaul links. We are hence motivated to propose a hierarchical software-defined RAN architecture, over which the base stations (BSs) are abstracted into multiple virtual local controllers while these local controllers are administered by a high-level controller. Under such a hierarchical network architecture, we particularly investigate in this paper how to adapt the BS transmit power over a long term according to the network dynamics under the constraints of mobile user queue stability and limited fronthaul capacity. We first formulate an off-line stochastic power adaptation problem. Through developing the Lyapunov method, we transform the problem into an approximate on-line optimization task. However, the challenge arises from the introduced per-cluster fronthaul capacity constraint. To solve the task efficiently and avoid extensive information exchange between the high-level controller and the local controllers, we put forward a novel low-complexity algorithm by designing a non- cooperative power adaptation game among the local controllers. Simulations are provided to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed studies.
Runtime analysis of different Approaches to select conflicting auxiliary objectives in the generalized OneMax problem

It has been shown that single-objective optimization may be improved by introducing auxiliary objectives. Ideally, auxiliary objectives should be designed to be independent. However, in practice, this is not always easy or possible and the objectives may be conflicting. Particularly, this happens in the Job-Shop Scheduling problem and in certain search-based software engineering problems. We theoretically analyse different approaches of using auxiliary objectives on the general ONEMAX problem with conflicting auxiliary objectives ONEMAX and ZEROMAX. In most of the considered methods, the optimized objectives are selected dynamically. We also consider a method, where the same objectives are optimized during the whole run. We show that dynamic selection of conflicting auxiliary objectives combined with explicit optimization of the target objective has the best runtime of O(nlogn) among all the considered methods.
Intelligent Agent Communication by Using DAML to Build Agent Community Ontology

— This paper presents a new approach for intelligent agent communication based on ontology for agent community. DARPA agent markup language (DAML) is used to build the community ontology. This paper extends the agent management specification by the foundation for intelligent physical agents (FIPA) to develop an agent role called community facilitator (CF) that manages community directory and community ontology. CF helps build agent community. Precise description of agent service in this community can thus be achieved. This facilitates agent communication. Furthermore, through ontology update, agents with different ontology are capable of communicating with each other. An example of advanced traveler information system is included to illustrate practicality of this approach.
Extended Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

In this paper the Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control strategy for vehicles platooning is extended to the case when each vehicle can communicate with a subset of vehicles in the fleet. The control objective is to guarantee that the fleet moves forward with a given spacing policy at the leader velocity. To this aim each vehicle decides its control action using information from all neighboring vehicles through wireless communication. In so doing, a network of dynamical systems is formed, and it is shown that achieving platooning is equivalent to find a control algorithm so that the resulting network is asymptotically stable. A network protocol able to deal with heterogeneous time-varying communication delays is then proposed to solve the problem. A consistent proof of stability of the closed-loop system is provided and numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the approach and its robustness with respect to variations of the leader velocity, as well as to generic topologies of the underlying network emerging from the communication features.
Simultaneous Estimation of Temporal Basis Functions and Fully 4D PET Images

Fully 4D joint-estimation of temporal basis functions and dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) images was recently proposed by the authors. The method alternately estimates both a global set of temporal basis functions and the corresponding coefficient for each basis function for each image voxel. A fully 4D version of the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is used with two different models of the mean of the Poisson measured data, each model allowing either the coefficients or the basis functions to be estimated. However, the current (alternating) method requires distinctly separate steps to estimate the two sets of unknowns. In this work the backprojected data within the EM algorithm are exploited to permit a simultaneous update of both the basis functions and the coefficients - hence reducing calculation time by almost a factor of two and also removing the need to specify the number of iterations performed for each step before switching between the estimation processes. The improvements in image quality obtained with the original fully 4D alternating method are retained with the simultaneous estimation method.
Online and dynamic embeddings of approximate ultrametrics

In many network applications it would be useful for individual nodes to have knowledge of distances (e.g. latency or bandwidth) in the network. If every node stored all distances then it would take Ω(<i>n</i><sup>2</sup>) space at every node, and furthermore when a new node joins it would have to send an Ω(<i>n</i>)-bit message to Ω(<i>n</i>) other nodes, for a total communication complexity of Ω(<i>n</i><sup>2</sup>) per update. In this paper we consider a specific class of metrics, those obeying an <i>ε-three point condition</i>, and show that by embedding these metrics into ultrametrics we can use only <i>O</i>(<i>n</i>) space at every node, have amortized communication complexity of <i>O</i>(<i>n</i><sup>4/3</sup>) (allowing nodes to join and leave the network), and still estimate distances up to a (1+ε)<sup>log <i>n</i> + 5</sup>-stretch factor.
CONQUER: A Methodology for Context-Aware Query Processing on the World Wide Web

A major impediment to accurate information retrieval from the World Wide Web is the inability of search engines to incorporate semantics in the search process. This research presents a methodology, CONQUER (CONtext-aware QUERy processing), that enhances the semantic content of Web queries using two complementary knowledge sources: lexicons and ontologies. The methodology constructs a semantic net using the original query as a seed, and refines the net with terms from the two knowledge sources. The enhanced query, represented by the refined semantic net, can be executed by search engines. This paper describes the methodology and its implementation in a prototype. An empirical evaluation shows that queries suggested by the prototype produce more relevant results than those obtained by the original queries. The research, thus, provides a successful demonstration of the use of existing knowledge sources to enhance the semantic content of Web queries. The paper concludes by identifying potential uses of such enhancements of search technology in organizational contexts.
The App-Runx1 Region Is Critical for Birth Defects and Electrocardiographic Dysfunctions Observed in a Down Syndrome Mouse Model

Down syndrome (DS) leads to complex phenotypes and is the main genetic cause of birth defects and heart diseases. The Ts65Dn DS mouse model is trisomic for the distal part of mouse chromosome 16 and displays similar features with post-natal lethality and cardiovascular defects. In order to better understand these defects, we defined electrocardiogram (ECG) with a precordial set-up, and we found conduction defects and modifications in wave shape, amplitudes, and durations in Ts65Dn mice. By using a genetic approach consisting of crossing Ts65Dn mice with Ms5Yah mice monosomic for the App-Runx1 genetic interval, we showed that the Ts65Dn viability and ECG were improved by this reduction of gene copy number. Whole-genome expression studies confirmed gene dosage effect in Ts65Dn, Ms5Yah, and Ts65Dn/Ms5Yah hearts and showed an overall perturbation of pathways connected to post-natal lethality (Coq7, Dyrk1a, F5, Gabpa, Hmgn1, Pde10a, Morc3, Slc5a3, and Vwf) and heart function (Tfb1m, Adam19, Slc8a1/Ncx1, and Rcan1). In addition cardiac connexins (Cx40, Cx43) and sodium channel sub-units (Scn5a, Scn1b, Scn10a) were found down-regulated in Ts65Dn atria with additional down-regulation of Cx40 in Ts65Dn ventricles and were likely contributing to conduction defects. All these data pinpoint new cardiac phenotypes in the Ts65Dn, mimicking aspects of human DS features and pathways altered in the mouse model. In addition they highlight the role of the App-Runx1 interval, including Sod1 and Tiam1, in the induction of post-natal lethality and of the cardiac conduction defects in Ts65Dn. These results might lead to new therapeutic strategies to improve the care of DS people.
An experimental system for the study of ultrasound exposure of isolated blood vessels

An experimental system designed for the study of the effects of diagnostic or therapeutic ultrasound exposure on isolated blood vessels in the presence or absence of intraluminal contrast agent is described. The system comprised several components. A microscope was used to monitor vessel size (and thus vessel functionality), and potential leakage of intraluminal 70 kDa FITC-dextran fluorescence marker. A vessel chamber allowed the mounting of an isolated vessel whilst maintaining its viability, with pressure regulation for the control of intraluminal pressure and induction of flow for the infusion of contrast microbubbles. A fibre-optic hydrophone sensor mounted on the vessel chamber using a micromanipulator allowed pre-exposure targeting of the vessel to within 150 µm, and monitoring of acoustic cavitation emissions during exposures. Acoustic cavitation was also detected using changes in the ultrasound drive voltage and by detection of audible emissions using a submerged microphone. The suitability of this system for studying effects in the isolated vessel model has been demonstrated using a pilot study of 6 sham exposed and 18 high intensity focused ultrasound exposed vessels, with or without intraluminal contrast agent (SonoVue) within the vessels.
Family communication patterns, family environment, and the impact of parental alcoholism on offspring self-esteem

This study examined the role of perceptions of family environment and family communication as mediators of the effects of parental alcoholism on the self-esteem of adult children of alcoholics. Participants (N = 227) completed self-reports of parental alcoholism, family environment, family communication patterns (FCP), and self-esteem. Results indicated a negative relationship between the seriousness of both maternal and paternal alcoholism and self-esteem. Paternal and maternal alcoholism were related to the two dimensions of family environment, family stressors and parental disregard, although the effect for paternal alcoholism was larger. The relationship between maternal alcoholism and offspring self-esteem was partially mediated by parental disregard, whereas the relationship between paternal alcoholism and self-esteem was mediated by parental disregard and perceptions of a conversation-orientation FCP.
Emergence of hyper empathy after right amygdalohippocampectomy

We report a fascinating case of a patient with a hyper empathy that appeared after resective epilepsy surgery. This behavioral modification has remained unchanged since the surgery took place 13 years ago. Recent neuropsychological objective assessments confirmed hyper empathy in a self-report questionnaire, and revealed higher affective theory of mind than controls in a “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task. ” Temporal lobe epilepsy is the most common form of epilepsy and the investigation of emotional processes after surgery in these patients deserves to be related.
Threading news video topics

We introduce a method to extract topic threads throughout a large-scale news video corpus as well as an interface that provides the users with the facility to browse through the corpus guided by the thread structure. The thread-based interface enables thorough understanding of a topic of interest, and moreover, it is designed to reduce the number of candidates provided during the tracking process which lightens the burden of selection imposed on the users. In this paper, we introduce the details of topic segmentation, tracking/threading, followed by the evaluation of the segmentation and the introduction of a prototype interface. The evaluation showed practical ability, and the trial use of the interface turned out to be effective and informative.
Un análisis transnivel de las relaciones de la calidad de servicio y la confirmación de expectativas con la satisfacción de los usuarios

A cross-level analysis of the links between service quality and disconfirmation of expectations and customer satisfaction. This article examines links between disconfirmation of expectations and functional and relational service quality perceived by employees and customer satisfaction. A total of 156 employees, who were working in 52 work units, participated in the research study. In addition, 517 customers who were assisted by these work units were surveyed. Using a cross-level approach, we used a random coefficient model to test the aforementioned relationships. A strong relationship between disconfirmation of expectations and customer satisfaction was observed. Also, the results confirmed that functional service quality maintains an additional and significant association with customer satisfaction. In contrast, there were no significant relationships between relational service quality and customer satisfaction. The article concludes with a discussion of these results.
Alternative Estimates of the Effect of Family Structure during Adolescence on High School Graduation

Abstract Many studies have reported significant empirical associations between family structure during childhood and children's outcomes later in life. It may be that living in a nonintact family has adverse consequences for children. On the other hand, it may be that some unobserved process jointly determines family structure and children's outcomes. How then should one interpret the empirical evidence on the relationship between family structure and children's outcomes? The answer depends on the question asked and on the prior information available to the researcher. We seek to interpret the association between family structure and high school graduation found among respondents in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. We seek to answer the traditional question of the literature on treatment effects: How would the probability of high school graduation vary with family structure if family structure were not selected by parents but were, instead, an exogenously assigned “treatment,” as in a clinical tr.
Multilateral Context Analysis based on the Novel Visualization of Network Tomography: Poster

In this paper, we present a novel method for visualizing the tomography of network flows. We offer visual cues to spot correlated network flows by conducting co-occurrence and sequence mining. We can focus the analysis of network flows on particular layer and map workflows of networked applications to the tomography. We show that our visualization method offers more intuitive means to track down the complicated symptoms of advanced and covert security threats.
Genetic Variability of HIV-1 for Drug Resistance Assay Development

A hybridization-based point-of-care (POC) assay for HIV-1 drug resistance would be useful in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where resistance testing is not routinely available. The major obstacle in developing such an assay is the extreme genetic variability of HIV-1. We analyzed 27,203 reverse transcriptase (RT) sequences from the Stanford HIV Drug Resistance Database originating from six LMIC regions. We characterized the variability in a 27-nucleotide window surrounding six clinically important drug resistance mutations (DRMs) at positions 65, 103, 106, 181, 184, and 190. The number of distinct codons at each DRM position ranged from four at position 184 to 11 at position 190. Depending on the mutation, between 11 and 15 of the 24 flanking nucleotide positions were variable. Nonetheless, most flanking sequences differed from a core set of 10 flanking sequences by just one or two nucleotides. Flanking sequence variability was also lower in each LMIC region compared with overall variability in all regions. We also describe an online program that we developed to perform similar analyses for mutations at any position in RT, protease, or integrase.
Gene Expression Profiling of Immune-Competent Human Cells Exposed to Engineered Zinc Oxide or Titanium Dioxide Nanoparticles

A comprehensive in vitro assessment of two commercial metal oxide nanoparticles, TiO2 and ZnO, was performed using human monocyte-derived macrophages (HMDM), monocyte-derived dendritic cells (MDDC), and Jurkat T cell leukemia-derived cell line. TiO2 nanoparticles were found to be non-toxic whereas ZnO nanoparticles caused dose-dependent cell death. Subsequently, global gene expression profiling was performed to identify transcriptional response underlying the cytotoxicity caused by ZnO nanoparticles. Analysis was done with doses 1 µg/ml and 10 µg/ml after 6 and 24 h of exposure. Interestingly, 2703 genes were significantly differentially expressed in HMDM upon exposure to 10 µg/ml ZnO nanoparticles, while in MDDCs only 12 genes were affected. In Jurkat cells, 980 genes were differentially expressed. It is noteworthy that only the gene expression of metallothioneins was upregulated in all the three cell types and a notable proportion of the genes were regulated in a cell type-specific manner. Gene ontology analysis revealed that the top biological processes disturbed in HMDM and Jurkat cells were regulating cell death and growth. In addition, genes controlling immune system development were affected. Using a panel of modified ZnO nanoparticles, we obtained an additional support that the cellular response to ZnO nanoparticles is largely dependent on particle dissolution and show that the ligand used to modify ZnO nanoparticles modulates Zn2+ leaching. Overall, the study provides an extensive resource of transcriptional markers for mediating ZnO nanoparticle-induced toxicity for further mechanistic studies, and demonstrates the value of assessing nanoparticle responses through a combined transcriptomics and bioinformatics approach.
Enforcing scalable authorization on SPARQL queries

With the adoption of the Linked Data Paradigm in the enterprise context effective measures for securing sensitive data are in higher demand than ever before. Exemplary, integrating enterprise systems containing millions of assets and fine granular access control rules with large public background knowledge graphs leads to both a high number of triples and a high number of access control axioms, which traditional methods struggle to process. Therefore, we introduce novel approaches for enforcing access control on SPARQL queries and evaluate their implementation using an extension of the Berlin SPARQL Benchmark.
The Epistemology of Fact Checking (Is Still Naìve): Rejoinder to Amazeen

ABSTRACT Michelle Amazeen's rebuttal of Uscinski and Butler 2013 is unsuccessful. Amazeen's attempt to infer the accuracy of fact checks from their agreement with each other fails on its own terms and, in any event, could as easily be explained by fact checkers’ political biases as their common access to the objective truth. She also ignores the distinction between verifiable facts and unverifiable claims about the future, as well as contestable claims about the causes of political, social, and economic phenomena. The social benefits that she claims for the fact-checking enterprise must, at the very least, be weighed against the strong possibility that what passes for fact checking is actually just a veiled continuation of politics by means of journalism rather than being an independent, objective counterweight to political untruths.
Newer Therapeutic Strategies to Alter High-Density Lipoprotein Level and Function

Measurements of low levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol have been identified as a risk factor for premature coronary artery disease, however, to date, current pharmacologic approaches for raising HDL have provided little benefit, if at all, in reducing cardiovascular outcomes. It has been shown that HDL can modify many aspects of plaque pathogenesis. Its most established role is in reverse cholesterol transportation, but HDL can also affect oxidation, inflammation, cellular adhesion, and vasodilatation. Considering these potential benefits of HDL, newer treatments have been developed to modify HDL activity, which include the use of oral cholesteryl ester transfer protein inhibitors, apolipoprotein (apo)A-I infusions, apoA-I mimetics, drugs to increase apoA-I synthesis, and agonists of the liver X receptor. These new therapies are reviewed in this article.
An integrating approach for developing distributed software systems-combining formal methods, software reuse, and the experience base

The development of complex software systems is driven by many diverse and sometimes contradictory requirements such as correctness and maintainability of resulting products, development costs, and time-to-market. To alleviate these difficulties, we propose a development method for distributed systems that integrates different basic approaches. First, it combines the use of the formal description technique SDL with software reuse concepts. This results in the definition of a use-case driven, incremental development method with SDL patterns as the main reusable artifacts. Experience with this approach has shown that there are several other factors of influence, such as the quality of reuse artifacts or the experience of the development team. Therefore, we further combined our SDL pattern approach with an improvement methodology known from the area of experimental software engineering. In order to demonstrate the validity of this integrating approach, we sketch some representative outcomings of a case study.
Efficient reinforcement learning

In this paper we propose a new formal model for studying reinforcement learning, based on Valiant's PAC framework. In our model the learner does not have direct access to every state of the environment. Instead, every sequence of experiments starts in a fixed initial state and the learner is provided with a “reset” operation that interrupts the current sequence of experiments and starts a new one (from the initial state). We do not require the agent to learn the optimal policy but only a good approximation of it with high probability. More precisely, we require the learner to produce a policy whose expected value from the initial state is ε-close to that of the optimal policy, with probability no less than 1−δ. For this model, we describe an algorithm that produces such an (ε,δ)-optimal policy for any environment, in time polynomial in <italic>N,K</italic>,1/ε,1/δ,1/(1−β) and <italic>r<subscrpt>max</subscrpt></italic>, where <italic>N</italic> is the number of states of the environment, <italic>K</italic> is the maximum number of actions in a state, β is the discount factor and <italic>r<subscrpt>max</subscrpt></italic> is the maximum reward on any transition.