Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rewriting Ontological Queries into Small Nonrecursive Datalog Programs

We consider the setting of ontological database access, where an A-box is given in form of a relational database D and where a Boolean conjunctive query q has to be evaluated against D modulo a T-box Σ formulated in DL-Lite or Linear Datalog±. It is well-known that (Σ, q) can be rewritten into an equivalent nonrecursive Datalog program P that can be directly evaluated over D. However, for Linear Datalog± or for DL-Lite versions that allow for role inclusion, the rewriting methods described so far result in a nonrecursive Datalog program P of size exponential in the joint size of Σ and q. This gives rise to the interesting question of whether such a rewriting necessarily needs to be of exponential size. In this paper we show that it is actually possible to translate (Σ, q) into a polynomially sized equivalent nonrecursive Datalog program P.
Bicyclist detection in large scale naturalistic driving video

Monocular based bicyclist detection in naturalistic driving video is a very challenging problem due to the high variance of the bicyclist appearance and complex background of naturalistic driving environment. In this paper, we propose a two-stage multi-modal bicyclist detection scheme to efficiently detect bicyclists with varied poses for further behavior analysis. A new motion based region of interest (ROI) detection is first applied to the entire video to refine the region for sliding-window detection. Then an efficient integral feature based detector is applied to quickly filter out the negative windows. Finally, the remaining candidate windows are encoded and tested by three pre-learned pose-specific detectors. The experimental results on our TASI 110 car naturalistic driving dataset show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. The proposed method outperforms the traditional.
Colon Cancer: A Civilization Disorder

Colorectal cancer arises in individuals with acquired or inherited genetic predisposition who are exposed to a range of risk factors. Many of these risk factors are associated with affluent Western societies. More than 95% of colorectal cancers are sporadic, arising in individuals without a significant hereditary risk. Geographic variation in the incidence of colorectal cancer is considerable with a higher incidence observed in the West. Environmental factors contribute substantially to this variation. A number of these risk factors are associated with a Western lifestyle and could be considered a product of ‘civilization’. Recently, smoking has been recognized as a risk factor. Energy consumption also influences colorectal cancer risk, with obesity increasing risk and exercise reducing risk. However, the strongest contribution to environmental risk for colorectal cancer is dietary. Consumption of fat, alcohol and red meat is associated with an increased risk. Fresh fruit and vegetables and dietary fibre may be protective. Much has been learnt recently about the molecular pathogenesis of colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer always arises in the context of genomic instability. There is inactivation of the tumour suppressor genes adenomatous polyposis coli, p53, transforming growth factor-β, activation of oncogene pathways including K-ras, and activation of the cyclooxygenase-2, epidermal growth factor receptor and vascular endothelial growth factor pathways. The mechanisms by which some environmental factors modify the mutation risk in these pathways have been described.
Pathology imaging informatics for quantitative analysis of whole-slide images

Objectives With the objective of bringing clinical decision support systems to reality, this article reviews histopathological whole-slide imaging informatics methods, associated challenges, and future research opportunities. Target audience This review targets pathologists and informaticians who have a limited understanding of the key aspects of whole-slide image (WSI) analysis and/or a limited knowledge of state-of-the-art technologies and analysis methods. Scope First, we discuss the importance of imaging informatics in pathology and highlight the challenges posed by histopathological WSI. Next, we provide a thorough review of current methods for: quality control of histopathological images; feature extraction that captures image properties at the pixel, object, and semantic levels; predictive modeling that utilizes image features for diagnostic or prognostic applications; and data and information visualization that explores WSI for de novo discovery. In addition, we highlight future research directions and discuss the impact of large public repositories of histopathological data, such as the Cancer Genome Atlas, on the field of pathology informatics. Following the review, we present a case study to illustrate a clinical decision support system that begins with quality control and ends with predictive modeling for several cancer endpoints. Currently, state-of-the-art software tools only provide limited image processing capabilities instead of complete data analysis for clinical decision-making. We aim to inspire researchers to conduct more research in pathology imaging informatics so that clinical decision support can become a reality.
Automatic floating-point to fixed-point conversion for DSP code generation

The development of methodologies for the automatic implementation of floating-point algorithms in fixed-point architectures is required for the minimization of cost, power consumption and time to market of digital signal processing applications. In this paper, a new methodology of implementation in Digital Signal Processors (DSP) under accuracy constraint is presented. In comparison with the existing methodologies, the DSP architecture is completely taken into account for optimizing the execution time under accuracy constraint. The justification and the different stages of our methodology are presented.
ADAPTIVE DISTANCE AND THE GENETIC BASIS OF HETEROSIS

Smouse (1986) proposed an analysis of marker-associated heterosis which he claimed would aid in distinguishing whether it was due to overdominance or directional dominance. I analyze two of the cases most likely to cause heterosis due to directional dominance, nonrandom mating and linkage between a marker and a selected locus, and show that the consequences in the Smouse model are precisely equivalent to overdominance at the marker locus. The Smouse model is therefore unlikely to be useful in determining the genetic basis of heterosis. Plant and animal breeders have long known that crosses between genetically dissimilar parents often produce superior offspring, and crosses of closely related individuals tend to produce inferior ones (Darwin 1868). These observations, termed heterosis and inbreeding depression, respectively, are genetically the same phenomenon. There are two genetic mechanisms which can explain both heterosis and inbreeding depression: directional dominance and overdominance. The overdominance hypothesis supposes that heterosis is due to increased heterozygosity for loci at which the heterozygote is superior to both homozygotes. The directional dominance hypothesis builds on the observation that deleterious genes tend to be recessive. Heterosis on crossing is due to reduced homozygosity for these recessives. Heterosis and inbreeding depression are descriptions of the phenomena; dominance and overdominance are genetic mechanisms which can explain them (Charlesworth and Charlesworth 1987).
Extending Pereboom's Quarantine System

Derk Pereboom (2014) argues that human beings do not have the kind of free will required for moral responsibility. Pereboom argues that we should use a system of incarceration for criminal offenders based on a quarantine analogy. Patients in quarantine scenarios are not responsible for their sickness, are separated from society because of the danger they pose, and are prepared for release as soon as possible. By analogy, criminal offenders should also be separated from society and rehabilitated to prepare them for release. In this thesis, I extend the ethical applicability of Pereboom’s quarantine system by engaging with an objection from Saul Smilansky. I extend Pereboom’s quarantine system in an additional way by discussing what constraints should be put on the use of direct brain interventions to rehabilitate criminal offenders. In doing so, I start a conversation about how the quarantine system could be implemented in a liberal democratic society. INDEX WORDS: Free will, Moral responsibility, Incarceration, Quarantine, Direct brain intervention, Rehabilitation, Pereboom EXTENDING PEREBOOM’S QUARANTINE SYSTEM
Social Network Analysis of Developers' and Users' Mailing Lists of Some Free Open Source Software

As reported by Kevin Crowston and co-authors in a recent paper, free open source software is a very important social phenomenon that involves nearly one million programmers, a myriad of software development firms, millions of users, and its financial impact is huge since for instance the cost of recreating available free software is estimated in tens of billions of euros. Free open source software projects generally have one mailing list for developers and another one for users. This large number of mailing lists changes constantly and shows a great variety with respect to membership and topics covered. This makes them very difficult to monitor. One way of overcoming this Big Data Challenge is to identify some easily computable global indicators that can be used for instance to detect important events. We illustrate this approach here by making a social network analysis and comparison of developers' and users' mailing lists of four free open source software projects: CentOS, GnuPG, Mailman and Samba. We show that these mailing lists have some common characteristics: the number of messages, the time durations and the interlink times can be fitted using power and lognormal laws with suitable scales and parameters, for the interlink time, the analysis is done using the temporal delta density inspired by the delta density introduced by Viard and Latapy. This similarity between the characteristics of mailing lists also applies to the structure of dominant groups. For the time evolution of the number of messages, GnuPG exhibits a particular behavior. The interpretation of the different parameters gives very interesting insights into the membership and the type of topics covered by the mailing lists. The analysis carried out here and similar studies cited in this paper can therefore be considered as a first step towards the designing of building blocks for monitoring mailing lists.
The Socio-scientific Construction of Global Climate Crisis

ABSTRACT This article adapts and applies a securitisation framework to produce an analytical explanation for the heightened geopolitical status of climate change over the past decade, as demonstrated by the breakthrough Paris Agreement of 2015. Rather than speech acts invoking security, the focus of this analysis is on the socio-scientific discourse of global climate crisis that emerged in the several year period leading to the 2009 COP 15 conference in Copenhagen. Two types of experts—contributory and interactional—are identified as the essential and interdependent actors that engaged in ‘crisification’, a novel crisis-based perspective on political agenda setting, in which climate crisis served as a primary discursive device employed by prominent advocates of urgent action. Contributory experts, that is, authoritative climate scientists and their institutions, together with interactional experts—non-scientist social actors who appropriated and mediated scientific data and knowledge in framing climate change as a global crisis—constituted an extended epistemic community of climate advocates. Through an array of speech acts, this extended community effectively co-constructed a convincing climate crisis discourse that consisted of quantitative data artefacts based on CO2 concentration and global mean temperature, and qualitative invocations of existential threat to human civilisation, which contributed to the ascent of climate change on the global political agenda. In proposing crisification as a complement to securitisation, the article offers a theoretical innovation that facilitates constructivist analysis of issues framed as crises, including geopolitical problems in certain non-military sectors where crisis is a favoured label for perceived threats to core values.
Review of kinetics of chemical and photocatalytical oxidation of Arsenic(III) as influenced by pH

The kinetics and stoichiometry of As(III) oxidation by chemical oxidants is presented. The reactions are first-order with respect to each reactant. The second-order rate constants vary with pH and have a range in magnitude of 104−107 M−1s−1 for free available chlorine (FAC), O3, and FeO4 2− in a pH range of 6.0–9.0. In this pH range, the reactions of As(III) with chloroamine (NH2Cl) and H2O2 are quite slow with rate constants of 2.9–4.3 × 10−1 M−1s−1 and 2.6 × 10−2–4.5× 101 M−1s−1 for chloroamine and H2O2, respectively. The pH dependence of the oxidation reactions can be described using acid-base equilibria of both As(III) species and the oxidant. FAC, O3, and FeO4 2− oxidize As(III) instantaneously at pH 7.0 with half-lives of milliseconds if 2 mg/L excess dose of oxidant is applied. One major advantage of FeO4 2− ions over the other oxidants is its ability to remove arsenic in water by two mechanisms; it oxidizes As(III) and also subsequently coagulates As(V) through Fe(III) hydroxide produced from Fe(VI) reduction. Photocatalytic oxidation of As(III) to As(V) follows zero-order kinetics and the oxidation is completed in minutes with no significant pH dependence. The removal of dissolved arsenic to values below the World Health Organization drinking water limit of 10 μ g/L can be achieved through photocatalytic oxidation of As(III) to As(V) in acidic solution followed by adsorption of As(V) onto TiO2 surfaces.
Hyperspectral Sensors as a Management Tool to Prevent the Invasion of the Exotic Cordgrass Spartina densiflora in the Doñana Wetlands

We test the use of hyperspectral sensors for the early detection of the invasive dense-flowered cordgrass (Spartina densiflora Brongn.) in the Guadalquivir River marshes, Southwestern Spain. We flew in tandem a CASI-1500 (368–1052 nm) and an AHS (430–13,000 nm) airborne sensors in an area with presence of S. densiflora. We simplified the processing of hyperspectral data (no atmospheric correction and no data-reduction techniques) to test if these treatments were necessary for accurate S. densiflora detection in the area. We tested several statistical signal detection algorithms implemented in ENVI software as spectral target detection techniques (matched filtering, constrained energy minimization, orthogonal subspace projection, target-constrained interference minimized filter, and adaptive coherence estimator) and compared them to the well-known spectral angle mapper, using spectra extracted from ground-truth locations in the images. The target S. densiflora was easy to detect in the marshes by all algorithms in images of both sensors. The best methods (adaptive coherence estimator and target-constrained interference minimized filter) on the best sensor (AHS) produced 100% discrimination (Kappa = 1, AUC = 1) at the study site and only some decline in performance when extrapolated to a new nearby area. AHS outperformed CASI in spite of having a coarser spatial resolution (4-m vs. 1-m) and lower spectral resolution in the visible and near-infrared range, but had a better signal to noise ratio. The larger spectral range of AHS in the short-wave and thermal infrared was of no particular advantage. Our conclusions are that it is possible to use hyperspectral sensors to map the early spread S. densiflora in the Guadalquivir River marshes. AHS is the most suitable airborne hyperspectral sensor for this task and the signal processing techniques target-constrained interference minimized filter (TCIMF) and adaptive coherence estimator (ACE) are the best performing target detection techniques that can be employed operationally with a simplified processing of hyperspectral images.
The SOH estimation of LiFePO4 battery based on internal resistance with Grey Markov Chain

The state of health (SOH) of batteries in electric vehicles (EVs) results in the powertrain performance of EVs. However, to predicate the accurate SOH become a challenge due to the complicated factors, such as open circuit voltage, current, temperature, state of charge (SOC), internal resistance and the combination which affect the battery SOH. It is of primary importance that the SOH can be predicted on-line and real-time. This paper proposes a novel SOH prediction method based on Grey-Markov Chain (GMC) to determine the battery health state by taking into account the battery internal resistance. A real-time battery internal resistance monitor device is designed and applied in experimental. The results show that the proposed GMC model is effective and efficient in estimating SOH for LiFePO4 Power Battery.
Data exchange and incomplete information

Data exchange is the problem of finding an instance of a target schema, given an instance of a source schema and a specification of the relationship between the source and the target, and answering queries over target instances in a way that is semantically consistent with the information in the source. Theoretical foundations of data exchange have been actively explored recently. It was also noticed that the standard certain answers semantics may behave in very odd ways.In this paper I explain that this behavior is due to the fact that the presence of incomplete information in target instances has been ignored; in particular, proper query evaluation techniques for databases with nulls have not been used, and the distinction between closed and open world semantics has not been made. I present a concept of target solutions based on the closed world assumption, and show that the space of all solutions has two extreme points: the canonical universal solution and the core, well studied in data exchange. I show how to define semantics of query answering taking into account incomplete information, and show that the well-known anomalies go away with the new semantics. The paper also contains results on the complexity of query answering, upper approximations to queries (maybe-answers), and various extensions.
Alkaline‐extractable silicon from land to ocean: A challenge for biogenic silicon determination

The biogeochemical cycling of silicon (Si) along the land‐to‐ocean continuum is studied by a variety of research fields and for a variety of scientific reasons. However, there is an increasing need to refine the methodology and the underlying assumptions used to determine biogenic silica (BSi) concentrations. Recent evidence suggests that contributions of nonbiogenic sources of Si dissolving during alkaline extractions, not corrected by standard silicate mineral dissolution correction protocols, can be substantial. The ratio between dissolved Si and aluminum (Al) monitored continuously during the alkaline extraction can be used to infer the origin of the Si fractions present. In this study, we applied both a continuous analysis method (0.5 M NaOH) and a traditional 0.1 M Na2CO3 extraction to a wide array of samples: (1) terrestrial vegetation, (2) soils from forest, cropland and pasture, (3) lake sediments, (4) suspended particulate matter and sediments from rivers, (5) sediments from estuaries and salt marshes and (6) ocean sediments. Our results indicate that the 0.1 M Na2CO3 extraction protocol can overestimate the BSi content, by simultaneously dissolving Si fractions of nonbiogenic origin that may represent up to 100% of the Si traditionally considered as biogenic, hampering interpretation especially in some deeper soil horizons, rivers and coastal oceanic sediments. Moreover, although the term amorphous Si was coined to reflect a growing awareness of nonbiogenic phases we show it is actually inappropriate in samples where silicate minerals may account for a large part of the extracted Si even after linear mineral correction.
The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science

Cognitive science is a cross-disciplinary enterprise devoted to understanding the nature of the mind. In recent years, investigators in psychology, the neurosciences, artificial intelligence, philosophy and a host of other disciplines have come to appreciate how much they can learn from one another about the various dimensions of cognition. The result has been the emergence of one of the most exciting and fruitful areas of interdisciplinary research in the history of science. This volume of original essays surveys foundational, theoretical and philosophical issues across the discipline, and introduces the foundations of cognitive science, the principal areas of research and the major research programs. With a focus on broad themes rather than detailed technical issues, the volume will be valuable not only to cognitive scientists and philosophers of cognitive science, but also to those in other disciplines looking for an authoritative and up-to-date introduction to the field.
Bacterial community analysis of Tatsoi cultivated by hydroponics

ABSTRACT Tatsoi (Brassica narinosa) is a popular Asian salad green that is mostly consumed as a source of fresh produce. The purpose of this study was to assess the microbial diversity of Tatsoi cultivated in a hydroponic system and of its ecosystem. Tatsoi leaves, nutrient solution, and perlite/earth samples from a trickle feed system (TFS) and an ebb-and-flow system (EFS) were collected and their microbial communities were analyzed by pyrosequencing analysis. The results showed that most bacteria in the leaves from the TFS contained genus Sporosarcina (99.6%), while Rhizobium (60.4%) was dominant in the leaves from the EFS. Genus Paucibacter (18.21%) and Pelomonas (12.37%) were the most abundant microbiota in the nutrient solution samples of the TFS. In the EFS, the nutrient solution samples contained mostly genus Rhodococcus and Acinetobacter. Potential microbial transfer between the leaves and the ecosystem was observed in the EFS, while samples in the TFS were found to share only one species between the leaves, nutrient solution, and earth. Together, these results show that the bacterial populations in Tatsoi and in its ecosystem are highly diverse based on the cultivation system.
An Accurate Fractional Period Delay Generation System

An all-digital technique is proposed for generating an accurate delay irrespective of the inaccuracies of a controllable delay line. A subsampling technique-based delay measurement unit (DMU) capable of measuring delays accurately for the full period range is used as the feedback element to build accurate fractional period delays based on input digital control bits. The proposed delay generation system periodically measures and corrects the error and maintains it at the minimum value without requiring any special calibration phase. Up to 40 improvement in accuracy is demonstrated for a commercial programmable delay generator chip. The time-precision trade-off feature of the DMU is utilized to reduce the locking time. Loop dynamics are adjusted to stabilize the delay after the minimum error is achieved, thus avoiding additional jitter. Measurement results from a high-end oscilloscope also validate the effectiveness of the proposed system in improving accuracy.