Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Variability Modeling for Questionnaire-based System Configuration

Variability management, be it at the level of models or at the level of code, is a recurrent issue in systems engineering. It arises for example in enterprise systems, where modules are configured and composed to meet the requirements of individual customers based on modifications to a reference model. It also manifests itself in the context of software product families, where variants of a system are built from a common code base. This paper presents a formal foundation for representing system variability for the purpose of generating questionnaires that guide users during system configuration. The generated questionnaires are interactive, in the sense that questions are only posed if and when they can be answered, and the space of allowed answers to a question is determined by previous answers. The approach has been implemented and tested against a reference model from the logistics domain.
X.509 Check: A Tool to Check the Safety and Security of Digital Certificates

Digital certificates, the primary mechanism for providing secure communications in the Internet, have been widely deployed. In this paper, we propose X.509 Check, a tool designed to analyze the security properties and the quality of digital certificates. X.509 Check can be used to verify digital certificates and provide a deep analysis on the quality and configuration of any digital certificate using more than 30 security features. It can be useful for auditors, system administrators, and security officers. This paper aims to create a straightforward evaluation approach, allowing auditors and administrators to use the X.509 Check tool to examine any digital certificate without the need to become X.509 standard experts. We also report our findings of using this tool to check against one hundred X.509 digital certificates. Our results reveal the existence of many issues and problems that could lead to serious security risks.
Optimal Load Shedding for Voltage Stability Enhancement by Ant Colony Optimization

Voltage stability has become a serious treat of modern power system operation nowadays. To tackle this problem properly, load shedding is one of the effective countermeasures. However, its consequences might result in huge technical and economic losses. Therefore, this control measure should be optimally and carefully carried out. This paper proposes an ant colony optimization (ACO) based algorithm for solving the optimal load shedding problem. Two principal concerns of the problem are addressed. The appropriate load buses for the shedding are identified by sensitivities of voltage stability margin with respect to the load change at different buses. Then, the amount of load shedding at each bus is determined by applying ACO to solve a nonlinear optimization problem formulated in the optimal power flow framework. The performance of the proposed ACO based method is illustrated with a critical operating condition of the IEEE 30-bus test system.
Title Long-term effects of antenatal betamethasone on lung function : 30 year follow-up of a randomised controlled trial

Short title Spirometry after antenatal steroids Key words Neonatal respiratory distress syndrome Antenatal glucocorticoids Long-term follow-up Lung function Asthma Word count Abstract 176. ABSTRACT Background Antenatal betamethasone is routinely used for the prevention of neonatal respiratory distress syndrome in preterm infants. However little is known of the long-term effects of exposure to antenatal betamethasone on lung function in adulthood.
Bacteriocins produced by wild Lactococcus lactis strains isolated from traditional , 1 starter-free cheeses made of raw milk 2 3 RUNNING TITLE : Bacteriocins from wild Lactococcus lactis 4 5

1 Departamento de Microbiología y Bioquímica and 2 Departamento de Tecnología y 8 Biotecnología, Instituto de Productos Lácteos de Asturias (IPLA), Consejo Superior de 9 Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Carretera de Infiesto, s/n, 33300-Villaviciosa, Asturias, 10 Spain, and 3 Proquiga S.A. , Polígono industrial de Bergondo, C/ Parroquia de Rois, S/N 11 Parcela D-2, 15165-Bergondo, A Coruña, Spain 12 13
0 Ju n 20 03 Time-dependent unidirectional communication in multi-agent systems

We study a simple but compelling model of n interacting agents via time-dependent, unidirectional communication. The model finds wide application in a variety of fields including synchronization, swarming and distributed decision making. In the model, each agent updates his current state based upon the current information received from other agents. Necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the convergence of the individual agents’ states to a common value are presented, extending recent results reported in the literature. Unlike previous, related studies, the approach of the present paper does not rely on algebraic graph theory and is of a completely nonlinear nature. It is rather surprising that with these nonlinear tools, extensions may be obtained even for the linear cases discussed in the literature. The proof technique consists of a blend of graph-theoretic and system-theoretic tools integrated within a formal framework of set-valued Lyapunov theory and may be of independent interest. Further, it is also observed that more communication does not necessarily lead to better convergence and may eventually even lead to a loss of convergence, even for the simple models discussed in the present paper.
Frequency domain secondary pulse estimation

The traditional model of speech production models voiced speech signals as the output of a minimum phase linear filter excited by a periodic impulse train. There exists a body of evidence which suggests that there are actually additional, secondary pulses in the excitation. This thesis investigates a frequency domain technique for estimating the locations and amplitudes of these secondary pulses. The estimator operates directly on the measured phase of the speech signal spectrum. While the estimator is shown to perform reliably on synthetic waveforms produced by exciting a minimum phase filter with a periodic excitation consisting of primary and secondary pulses, it fails when used on actual speech or even synthetic speech with non-impulsive excitation. The reasons for this failure are found to lie in extreme sensitivity of the signal spectrum to inaccuracies of the linear model. The results of exploratory experiments involving frequency domain speech coding using secondary pulse phase modelling are also presented
Ambry: LinkedIn's Scalable Geo-Distributed Object Store

The infrastructure beneath a worldwide social network has to continually serve billions of variable-sized media objects such as photos, videos, and audio clips. These objects must be stored and served with low latency and high throughput by a system that is geo-distributed, highly scalable, and load-balanced. Existing file systems and object stores face several challenges when serving such large objects. We present Ambry, a production-quality system for storing large immutable data (called blobs). Ambry is designed in a decentralized way and leverages techniques such as logical blob grouping, asynchronous replication, rebalancing mechanisms, zero-cost failure detection, and OS caching. Ambry has been running in LinkedIn's production environment for the past 2 years, serving up to 10K requests per second across more than 400 million users. Our experimental evaluation reveals that Ambry offers high efficiency (utilizing up to 88% of the network bandwidth), low latency (less than 50 ms latency for a 1 MB object), and load balancing (improving imbalance of request rate among disks by 8x-10x).
Endogenous Neurogenesis Replaces Oligodendrocytes and Astrocytes after Primate Spinal Cord Injury

Neurogenesis has been described in various regions of the CNS throughout life. We examined the extent of natural cell division and replacement from 7 weeks to 7 months after cervical spinal cord injury in four adult rhesus monkeys. Bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) injections revealed an increase of >80-fold in the number of newly divided cells in the primate spinal cord after injury, with an average of 725,000 BrdU-labeled cells identified per monkey in the immediate injury zone. By 7 months after injury, 15% of these new cells expressed mature markers of oligodendrocytes and 12% expressed mature astrocytic markers. Newly born oligodendrocytes were present in zones of injury-induced demyelination and appeared to ensheath or remyelinate host axons. Thus, cell replacement is an extensive natural compensatory response to injury in the primate spinal cord that contributes to neural repair and is a potential target for therapeutic enhancement.
Testing the Harrod Balassa Sameulson Hypothesis: The Case of Pakistan

For a small open economy of Pakistan, exchange rate is determined through the two alternative theories; the nominal theory of exchange rate named by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) and the real theory known as Harrod Balassa Sameulson (HBS). According to the requirements of theories, two kinds of real exchange rate have been employed for the yearly data of 1972-2008. As, both of the theories are disputed at the ground of their long run relationship with real exchange rate, therefore, the VAR based Johenson Co-integration approach has been utilised to see the long run relationships. PPP has shown less satisfactory results either in its form of absolute version or relative version. Because, real exchange rate in Pakistan is a non-stationary process by Augmented Dickey Fuller unit-root test, predicting some pushing force behind the non-tradable sector. While favouring the PPP in tradable sector, the ADF and KPSS are indicating the presence of the HBS in Pakistan. On the other hand, the analysis of the HBS through co-integration is showing that relative productivity difference has an opposite relationship with relative non-tradable sector prices and with RER. However, the relationship between relative non-tradable sector prices and RER is much stronger and according to the theory. So, there have been incorporated some demand side and external factors to reduce the mis-specification of the simple HBS model. Therefore, in the extended HBS model, productivity difference, government consumption expenditure, terms of trade and world oil prices are appreciating the RER and money supply (a control variable) is pursuing depreciation in RER. So, these results yield some policy implications for Pakistan which can be useful for developing countries as well.
Internet Applications Usage Accounting Based on Flow

Due to the highly dynamic nature of the development and the use of the Internet applications, traditional traffic identification methods based on well-known port numbers are not appropriate for the identification of new type of Internet application. This paper proposes methodologies for application traffic analysis, such as signature inspection, dynamic port identification. We have incorporated our methodologies into a system, to analyze Internet traffic between our university network and the Internet, and characterize all in/out Internet traffic.
Power gating strategies on GPUs

As technology continues to shrink, reducing leakage is critical to achieving energy efficiency. Previous studies on low-power GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) focused on techniques for dynamic power reduction, such as DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling) and clock gating. In this paper, we explore the potential of adopting architecture-level power gating techniques for leakage reduction on GPUs. We propose three strategies for applying power gating on different modules in GPUs. The Predictive Shader Shutdown technique exploits workload variation across frames to eliminate leakage in shader clusters. Deferred Geometry Pipeline seeks to minimize leakage in fixed-function geometry units by utilizing an imbalance between geometry and fragment computation across batches. Finally, the simple time-out power gating method is applied to nonshader execution units to exploit a finer granularity of the idle time. Our results indicate that Predictive Shader Shutdown eliminates up to 60% of the leakage in shader clusters, Deferred Geometry Pipeline removes up to 57% of the leakage in the fixed-function geometry units, and the simple time-out power gating mechanism eliminates 83.3% of the leakage in nonshader execution units on average. All three schemes incur negligible performance degradation, less than 1%.
A Hierarchical Classificaton of Landsat Tm Imagery for Landcover Mapping

Information about current land-cover in forests is important for management and conservation of these areas. Up to the last decade traditional per pixel classification algorithms were used to be utilized in extracting land-cover information. However, they are poorly equipped to monitor land-cover in images acquired by current generation of satellite sensors with adequate accuracy. A good understanding and classification of an image can be done by gathering critical a priory knowledge about the study area and an effective use of channels involved in the procedure. It is important to make use additional spectral and spatial knowledge in order to improve the classification accuracy. In this study, a knowledge based hierarchical approach is proposed in order to classify and detect forest types in the Ömerli Dam Lake Region. The method makes use of the fact that land-cover types and their associated knowledge form a natural hierarchy. Hierarchical classification is a powerful approach in solving classification problems by decomposing the image into a hierarchical tree structure. This also results in sub-dividing the area into spectrally consistent regions and helps dealing with spectral variability within each subarea. Three types of knowledge were involved in the rule-based classification of the study area: Domain spectral knowledge, Spectral classification rules obtained from training data and Spatial knowledge. Sub-dividing the area into smaller homogeneous regions in hierarchical classification increased the accuracy, while supervised classification technique yielded 47 per cent in the same area. Spatial reclassification involved in the hierarchical classification method increased overall accuracy, yielding new classes like coast.
Structural Budget Balances: The Method Applied by the OECD

Since 1994, the Economics Department of the OECD calculates structural budget balance indicators using potential output estimates based on a production function approach. The results are published twice a year in the OECD Economic Outlook and are also used regularly for the annual surveys of the individual OECD member countries. Wim Suyker’s paper provides a brief description of the method used, gives some results and contains a section on possible future developments.
A flexible floating-point logarithm for reconfigurable computers

The advent of reconﬁgurable co-processors based on ﬁeld-programmable gate arrays has renewed interest in hardware architectures for elementary functions. This article studies operators for the logarithm function in the context of this target technology. An old algorithm is generalized, ﬁne-tuned and implemented as an architecture generator, exposing a wide range of trade-offs between resources (memory, logic and multipliers) and performance (frequency and pipeline depth). A single pipelined operator computes ﬁve times more double-precision ﬂoating-point logarithms per second than a high-end processor core, while consuming only a few percents of the resources of a high-end FPGA. This generator is available under the LGPL as part of the FloPoCo project.
All-in-One Nanowire-Decorated Multifunctional Membrane for Rapid Cell Lysis and Direct DNA Isolation

This paper describes a handheld device that uses an all-in-one membrane for continuous mechanical cell lysis and rapid DNA isolation without the assistance of power sources, lysis reagents, and routine centrifugation. This nanowire-decorated multifunctional membrane was fabricated to isolate DNA by selective adsorption to silica surface immediately after disruption of nucleus membranes by ultrasharp tips of nanowires for a rapid cell lysis, and it can be directly assembled with commercial syringe filter holders. The membrane was fabricated by photoelectrochemical etching to create microchannel arrays followed by hydrothermal synthesis of nanowires and deposition of silica. The proposed membrane successfully purifies high-quality DNA within 5 min, whereas a commercial purification kit needs more than an hour.
The far-IR/radio correlation in the ISO era. The warm and cold far-IR/radio correlations.

We present the correlation between the far-infrared (FIR) and radio emissions from a composite sample of 72 nearby normal galaxies observed with the ISOPHOT instrument on board the Infrared Space Observatory. The galaxies in the sample have measurements at three FIR wavelengths (60, 100 and 170 ${\mu}$m), which allowed a direct determination of the warm and cold FIR emission components. This is the first time that the correlation has been established for the total FIR luminosity, of which most is carried by the cold dust component predominantly emitting longwards of the spectral coverage of IRAS. The slope of this correlation is slightly non-linear ($1.10\pm 0.03$). Separate correlations between the warm and cold FIR emission components and the radio emission have also been derived. The slope of the warm FIR/radio correlation was found to be linear ($1.03 \pm 0.03$). For the cold FIR/radio correlation we found a slightly non-linear ($1.13 \pm 0.04$) slope. We qualitatively interpret the correlations in terms of star formation rate and find that both the FIR and radio emissions may be consistent with a non-linear dependence on star formation rate for galaxies not undergoing starburst activity.
Dynamic Channel Assignment for Large-Scale Cellular Networks Using Noisy Chaotic Neural Network

This paper presents a novel dynamic channel assignment (DCA) technique for large-scale cellular networks (LCNs) using noisy chaotic neural network. In this technique, an LCN is first decomposed into many subnets, which are designated as decomposed cellular subnets (DCSs). The DCA process is independently performed in every subnet to alleviate the signaling overheads and to apportion the DCA computational load among the subnets. Then a novel energy function is formulated to avoid causing mutual interference among neighboring subnets based on the real-time interference channel table. In each subnet, the proposed energy function also satisfies three interference constraints among cells and the number of required channels of each cell, and simultaneously minimizes the total number of assigned channels to improve spectrum utilization. A typical 441-cell LCN with 70 available channels, which can be decomposed into nine 49-cell DCSs, is examined to demonstrate the validity of the proposed technique by blocking probability, including uniform and hot spot traffic patterns.
Adaptation and Incentive Design in Large Scale Task Systems

My thesis focuses on understanding and influencing the behavior and performance of users in large scale task systems. In task systems, multiple participants work independently to solve problems that are presented to them by a computer. From e-learning systems like Khan Academy and Coursera, to citizen science systems like Zooniverse and BugGuide, large scale task oriented systems are booming on the Internet and are growing in number and in size. These systems provide a gold mine of data, containing information about the ways human beings engage with tasks of various natures. In my work I tackle three challenges which are central to the design of successful task systems: (1) understanding and modeling users' behavior in large scale task systems (2) designing incentive mechanisms for influencing users' behavior and improving their performance (3) adapting interaction in task systems to the needs and strengths of individual users. My research activities combine computational models, algorithms and empirical methodologies to meet the challenges above. They are conducted in the context of two different types of large scale task domains consisting of e-learning systems and citizen science systems. I will evaluate my approach in real world environments. My preliminary results demonstrate my proposed approach by significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art methods in personalization of tasks to students in two separate e-learning datasets.
Using computer modeling to help identify patient subgroups in clinical data repositories

OBJECTIVE The ability to accurately and efficiently identify patient cases of interest in a hospital information system has many important clinical, research, educational and administrative uses. The identification of cases of interest sometimes can be difficult. This paper describes a two-stage method for searching for cases of interest. DESIGN First, a Boolean search is performed using coded database variables. The user classifies the retrieved cases as being of interest or not. Second, based on the user-classified cases, a computer model of the patient cases of interest is constructed. The model is then used to help locate additional cases. These cases provide an augmented training set for constructing a new computer model of the cases of interest. This cycle of modeling and user classification continues until halted by the user. MEASUREMENTS This paper describes a pilot study in which this method is used to identify the records of patients who have venous thrombosis. RESULTS The results indicate that computer modeling enhances the identification of patient cases of interest.
Prototypic and Arkypallidal Neurons in the Dopamine-Intact External Globus Pallidus

Studies in dopamine-depleted rats indicate that the external globus pallidus (GPe) contains two main types of GABAergic projection cell; so-called “prototypic” and “arkypallidal” neurons. Here, we used correlative anatomical and electrophysiological approaches in rats to determine whether and how this dichotomous organization applies to the dopamine-intact GPe. Prototypic neurons coexpressed the transcription factors Nkx2-1 and Lhx6, comprised approximately two-thirds of all GPe neurons, and were the major GPe cell type innervating the subthalamic nucleus (STN). In contrast, arkypallidal neurons expressed the transcription factor FoxP2, constituted just over one-fourth of GPe neurons, and innervated the striatum but not STN. In anesthetized dopamine-intact rats, molecularly identified prototypic neurons fired at relatively high rates and with high regularity, regardless of brain state (slow-wave activity or spontaneous activation). On average, arkypallidal neurons fired at lower rates and regularities than prototypic neurons, and the two cell types could be further distinguished by the temporal coupling of their firing to ongoing cortical oscillations. Complementing the activity differences observed in vivo, the autonomous firing of identified arkypallidal neurons in vitro was slower and more variable than that of prototypic neurons, which tallied with arkypallidal neurons displaying lower amplitudes of a “persistent” sodium current important for such pacemaking. Arkypallidal neurons also exhibited weaker driven and rebound firing compared with prototypic neurons. In conclusion, our data support the concept that a dichotomous functional organization, as actioned by arkypallidal and prototypic neurons with specialized molecular, structural, and physiological properties, is fundamental to the operations of the dopamine-intact GPe.