Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Schemes for quantum key distribution with higher-order alphabets using single-photon fractional Fourier optics

We propose generalized quantum key distribution schemes using spatially encoded $d$-dimensional qudits based on fractional Fourier transform operations. We determine the necessary conditions on the orders of the transforms which ensure a shared secret random key string and briefly discuss the transmission rate and a possible encoding procedure. We also show that the fractional Fourier transform can be used to analyze more general eavesdropping strategies, including an intermediate-basis attack. The error rate and information gain for the intercept-resend and intermediate-basis attacks are briefly analyzed for a particular example. Effects of atmospheric turbulence in a free-space transmission are considered.
Robust 3D object pose estimation from a single 2D image

In this paper, we propose a robust algorithm for 3D object pose estimation from a single 2D image. The proposed pose estimation algorithm is based on modifying the traditional image projection error function to a sum of squared image projection errors weighted by their associated distances. By using an Euler angle representation, we formulate the energy minimization for the pose estimation problem as searching a global minimum solution. Based on this framework, the proposed algorithm employs robust techniques to detect outliers in a coarse-to-fine fashion, thus providing very robust pose estimation. Our experiments show that the algorithm outperforms previous methods under noisy conditions.
Multiplicity Control, School Uniforms, and Other Perplexing Debates

Researchers in psychology are frequently confronted with the issue of analysing multiple relationships simultaneously. For example, this could involve multiple outcome variables or multiple predictors in a regression framework. Current recommendations typically steer researchers toward familywise or false-discovery rate Type I error control to limit the probability of incorrectly rejecting the null hypothesis. Stepwise modified-Bonferroni procedures are suggested for following this recommendation. However, longstanding arguments against multiplicity control combined with a modern distaste for null hypothesis significance testing have warranted revisiting this debate. This paper is an exploration of both sides of the multiplicity control debate, with the goal of educating concerned parties regarding best practices for conducting multiple related tests.
CFTR Regulates Early Pathogenesis of Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease in βENaC-Overexpressing Mice

Background Factors determining the onset and severity of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease remain poorly understood. Previous studies demonstrated that airway surface dehydration in βENaC-overexpressing (βENaC-Tg) mice on a mixed genetic background caused either neonatal mortality or chronic obstructive lung disease suggesting that the onset of lung disease was modulated by the genetic background. Methods To test this hypothesis, we backcrossed βENaC-Tg mice onto two inbred strains (C57BL/6 and BALB/c) and studied effects of the genetic background on neonatal mortality, airway ion transport and airway morphology. Further, we crossed βENaC-Tg mice with CFTR-deficient mice to validate the role of CFTR in early lung disease. Results We demonstrate that the C57BL/6 background conferred increased CFTR-mediated Cl− secretion, which was associated with decreased mucus plugging and mortality in neonatal βENaC-Tg C57BL/6 compared to βENaC-Tg BALB/c mice. Conversely, genetic deletion of CFTR increased early mucus obstruction and mortality in βENaC-Tg mice. Conclusions We conclude that a decrease or absence of CFTR function in airway epithelia aggravates the severity of early airway mucus obstruction and related mortality in βENaC-Tg mice. These results suggest that genetic or environmental factors that reduce CFTR activity may contribute to the onset and severity of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and that CFTR may serve as a novel therapeutic target.
TECHNOLOGY An Implementation of Text Dependent Speaker Independent Isolated Word Speech Recognition Using HMM

Speech is the powerful tool of information exchang e. There are different aspects related to speech li ke speech recognition, speech verification, speech syn thesis, speaker recognition, speaker identification etc. Speech Recognition is the process of determining which spe ech is present based on individual’s utterance. Thi s paper gives an implementation& performance evaluation of Text Dependent Speaker Independent Isolated Word Speech Recognition System is using HMM. Here MFCC is used for speech parameterization. These feature paramete rs are used for HMM training. In HMM modeling forward backward algorithm with EM principle is used for parameter estimation & optimization. Initially K means algori thm is used for dividing feature dataset into small er parts and then means are calculated.GMM is used to model the distribution of speech features for each state of H MM. Finally the computed HMM parameters for words are stored in respective HMM models as a reference database. To recognize the spoken word the likelihood of generat ion of test speech observations and the most likely path sequence through each stored HMM model models is calculated. Finally the one with maximum likelihood p ath is selected as recognized word. The system is implemented in MATLAB 7.9. The system is trained with own created database consisting 60 speech samples of selected w ords & is tested for speaker independent mode. For selected three words recognition accuracy of 92%, 92% & 88% respectively is obtained in noisy environment.
Composition-Safe re-parametrization in Distributed Component-based WSN Applications

Contemporary Wireless Sensor Networks like Smart Offices and Smart Cities are evolving to become multi-purpose application hosting platforms. These WSN platforms can simultaneously support multiple applications which may be managed by multiple actors. Reconfigurable component models have been shown to be viable solutions to reducing the complexity of managing and developing these applications while promoting software re-use. However, implicit parameter dependencies between components make reconfiguration complex and error-prone. Our approach achieves automatic composition-safe re-parametrization of distributed component compositions. To achieve this, we propose the use of language annotations that allow component developers to make these dependencies explicit and constraint-aware network protocols to ensure constraint propagation and enforcement.
The roles of mutS, sbcCD and recA in the propagation of TGG repeats in Escherichia coli.

A 24 triplet TGG.CCA repeat array shows length- and orientation-dependent propagation when present in the plasmid pUC18. When TGG(24) is present as template for leading-strand synthesis, plasmid recovery is normal in all strains tested. However, when it acts as template for lagging-strand synthesis, plasmid propagation is seriously compromised. Plasmids carrying deletions in the 5' side of this sequence can be isolated and products carrying 15 TGG triplets do not significantly interfere with plasmid propagation. Mutations in sbcCD, mutS and recA significantly improve the recovery of plasmids with TGG(24) on the lagging-strand template. These findings suggest that TGG(24) can fold into a structure that can interfere with DNA replication in vivo but that TGG(15) cannot. Furthermore, since the presence of the MutS and SbcCD proteins are required for propagation interference, it is likely that stabilisation of mismatched base pairs and secondary structure cleavage are implicated. In contrast, there is no correlation of triplet repeat expansion and deletion instability with predicted DNA folding. These results argue for a dissociation of the factors affecting DNA fragility from those affecting trinucleotide repeat expansion-contraction instability.
Planning fine motions for a digital factotum

This paper presents a motion planner for a digital mannequin carrying objects in cluttered environments. The goal is to account for 3-dimensional obstacle avoidance, eye-convincing locomotion as well as manipulation constraints within an integrated motion planning approach. This approach combines probabilistic path planning methods, a motion capture based walking controller and inverse kinematics techniques.
CPR: Composable performance regression for scalable multiprocessor models

Uniprocessor simulators track resource utilization cycle by cycle to estimate performance. Multiprocessor simulators, however, must account for synchronization events that increase the cost of every cycle simulated and shared resource contention that increases the total number of cycles simulated. These effects cause multiprocessor simulation times to scale superlinearly with the number of cores. Composable performance regression (CPR) fundamentally addresses these intractable multiprocessor simulation times, estimating multiprocessor performance with a combination of uniprocessor, contention, and penalty models. The uniprocessor model predicts baseline performance of each core while the contention models predict interfering accesses from other cores. Uniprocessor and contention model outputs are composed by a penalty model to produce the final multiprocessor performance estimate. Trained with a production quality simulator, CPR is accurate with median errors of 6.63, 4.83 percent for dual-, quad-core multiprocessors. Furthermore, composable regression is scalable, requiring 0.33x the simulations required by prior regression strategies.
The Role of Interest Rate Policy in the Generation and Propagation of Business Cycles: What Has Changed Since the 30's?

Governments have two broad classes of macroeconomic impact. One has to do with the way government liabilities, including cash, interact with other traded assets in the financial system. The other has to do with government absorption and production of real resources through nonneutral taxation and provision of government goods and services like roads, schooling, and public health measures. Some evidence suggests that fluctuations in the latter class of impact are important,1 and it can be shown theoretically that the effects could be substantial and are hard to pin down quantitatively on the basis of a priori reasoning.2 Policy discussion and the macroeconomic literature may have overemphasized the former, financial class of impacts. Nonetheless, this paper focuses on the financial impact. It presents empirical evidence, similar to much that has appeared previously using time series statistical modeling, that only a small portion of business cycle variation in the United States since 1948 can be attributed to fluctuations in monetary policy. Though this conclusion is not universally accepted, it is far from new. This paper therefore goes on to consider two additional possible ways of demonstrating important effects of monetary policy. It expands the usual time frame of the literature, extending its model to the interwar period, and it examines the behavior of the model with counterfactual variations in the equation describing policy behavior. The paper presents evidence that the same methods of identifying the effects of monetary policy that have proved useful in the analysis of
The Performance of Alternative Exchange Rate Regimes and their Countries' Condition: Matching Analysis and Selection Model Building

There is much discussion on the performance and selection of exchange rate regimes, and it is still in controversy. For the failure in the works, we collect more data including recent years and removing the periods of the currency crisis, then analyze the matching relationship between the exchange rate regimes and the condition of countries in the exhaustive CHAID decision tree, and build the exchange rate regime selection model in the exhaustive prune neural network. The conclusion shows the good performance of exchange rate regimes need different condition of countries to match, especially the integrate effect of condition factors is more important, then we build the exchange rate regime selection model in the exhaustive prune neural network, and the comparison and robust testing shows it is effective.
Modeling approach for a flexible manufacturing control system

Within research and development different agent based control architectures are presented. Up to now there is no existing approach to validate the applicability of an agent architecture to control problems. This paper presents the first results of an ongoing research activity towards an interdisciplinary modeling approach to validate the quality of Multi-Agent System (MAS) architectures for the implementation of flexible control systems. It is based on the description of the methodology and its example application to a special supervisor based agent architecture.
Vision Following Extended Congenital Blindness

Animal studies suggest that early visual deprivation can cause permanent functional blindness. However, few human data on this issue exist. Given enough time for recovery, can a person gain visual skills after several years of congenital blindness? In India, we recently had an unusual opportunity to work with an individual whose case history sheds light on this question. S.R. D. was born blind, and remained so until age 12. She then underwent surgery for the removal of dense congenital cataracts. We evaluated her performance on an extensive battery of visual tasks 20 years after surgery. We found that although S.R. D. 's acuity is compromised, she is proficient on mid- and high-level visual tasks. These results suggest that the human brain retains an impressive capacity for visual learning well into late childhood. They have implications for current conceptions of cortical plasticity and provide an argument for treating congenital blindness even in older children.
Asymmetric Virtual Machine Scheduling Model Based on Workload Classification

Multi-core virtualization platform is an essential basement of modern computing environment including server consolidation and cloud computing. However hidden contention for physical resources between different workloads always causes serious performance interference and thus reduces system performance and efficiency. In order to address this issue, we exploit the possibility of scheduling virtual machine asymmetrically based on workload classification and multi-core partitioning. In this model, available processor cores of system are divided into several individual subsets which employ specific scheduling algorithms to undertake CPU-intensive and I/O-intensive missions respectively, and different optimizations are applied based on workload characteristic. We implement a prototype based on Xen virtual machine and preliminary test results demonstrate that this scheduling model can efficiently reduce the performance interference caused by scheduling competition in multi-core virtual machine system.
Semantic Web Enabled Record Linkage Attacks on Anonymized Data

Big Data analytics holds the promise of enabling new discoveries in medicine, more efficient business practices, and other important advances. However, much of the data involved in such analyses contains personally identifiable information (PII) that needs to be removed or obscured prior to release in order to protect individuals’ privacy. Anonymizing a dataset is not as easy as it seems, however, and many supposedly anonymous datasets are vulnerable to a record linkage attack. Most of these attacks are currently conducted manually and can be labor-intensive, but as semantic web technologies continue to gain popularity, the potential for automating various aspects of these attacks increases. This paper explores the components of a record linkage attack and how semantic web technologies could play a role in facilitating them.
Dietary intervention at middle age: caloric restriction but not dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate increases lifespan and lifetime cancer incidence in mice.

Dietary manipulations to prevent cancer and other diseases of aging have drawn broad public and scientific attention. One indicator of this interest is that dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) supplements are widely consumed by those who hope that this hormone may keep them "younger longer. " However, key data to support this belief are lacking. For example, the influence of DHEA treatment on spontaneous cancer and life span in healthy, long-lived strains of mice or rats is unknown. This is in contrast to the situation for caloric restriction (CR), which is known to oppose cancer development and increase maximum life span in rodents. To address this issue, we assigned 300 middle age (12-month-old) male C57BL/6 mice to one of four groups (n = 75 for each group) and evaluated them for longevity and spontaneous disease patterns. Two groups were fed a normal diet (ND), and two others were fed a calorie-restricted diet (RD). One ND group and one RD group were also given 25 microg/ml DHEA sulfate (DHEAS) in their drinking water. Although urine samples from DHEAS-treated mice contained 10-fold more DHEA and DHEAS than did samples from unsupplemented mice, DHEAS administration did not affect body weight, life span, or cancer patterns. The RD lowered body weight by 26% and increased maximum life span by approximately 15%. The incidence of the most prevalent cancer, plasma cell neoplasm, was higher in RD mice (66%) than in ND mice (41%). Thus, DHEAS, as administered here, influenced neither cancer nor longevity at two caloric intakes. In contrast, CR from middle age increased longevity, the age at which tumor-bearing mice died, and the percentage of mice dying with cancers, suggesting that CR may retard promotion and/or progression of existing lymphoid cancers.
Spitzer and ISO galaxy counts in the mid-infrared

Galaxy source counts that simultaneously fit the deep mid-infrared surveys at 24 microns and 15 microns made by the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO), respectively, are presented for two phenomenological models. The models are based on starburst and luminous infrared galaxy dominated populations. Both models produce excellent fits to the counts in both wavebands and provide an explanation for the high-redshift population seen in the longer Spitzer 24-micron band supporting the hypothesis that they are luminous-ultraluminous infrared galaxies at z = 2-3, being the mid-infrared counterparts to the submillimetre galaxy population. The source counts are characterized by strong evolution to redshift unity, followed by less drastic evolution to higher redshift. The number-redshift distributions in both wavebands are well explained by the effect of the many mid-infrared features passing through the observation windows. The sharp upturn at around a millijansky in the 15-μm counts in particular depends critically on the distribution of mid-infrared features around 12 μm, in the assumed spectral energy distribution.
Gene-by-age effects on BMI from Birth to Adulthood: The Fels Longitudinal Study

Genome wide association studies have shown 32 loci to influence BMI in European‐American adults but replication in other studies is inconsistent and may be attributed to gene‐by‐age effects. The aims of this study were to determine if the influence of the summed risk score of these 32 loci (GRS) on BMI differed across age from birth to 40 years, and to determine if additive genetic effects other than those in the GRS differed by age.
A New Lexical Chain Algorithm Used for Automatic Summarization

Lexical chains are widely used as a representation of text for Natural Language Processing tasks. However, efficient algorithms for the construction of lexical chains often resort to local decisions. We propose a new algorithm for Lexical Chaining, based on a global function optimization through Relaxation Labelling. A preliminary evaluation of the performance of our approach has been performed on a Catalan agency news corpus. The comparison to an efficient state-of-the-art algorithm for Lexical Chaining gives promising results. The resulting lexical chainer has been used for a complete multilingual Automatic Summarization system, available on-line.
SINAI at GeoCLEF 2006: Expanding the Topics with Geographical Information and Thesaurus

This paper describes the rst participation of the SINAI (Intelligent Systems of Access Information) group of the University of Jaen in GeoCLEF 2006. We have developed a system made up of three main modules. The rst one is the translation subsystem, that works with queries into Spanish, Portuguese and Deutsche. The second one is the query expansion subsystem, that integrates a Named Entity Recognizer, a Gazetteer, a Thesaurus expansion module and a Geographical information module. The last subsystem is the Information Retrieval module, that works with collections and queries into English, and returns the result le. We have made several runs, that combines these modules to resolve the monolingual and the bilingual tasks. The results obtained shown that the use of geographical and thesaurus information for query expansion does not improve the retrieval, but this is the rst step to try to improve the system in the future.
Simulation Study of the Dependence of Submicron Polysilicon Thin-Film Transistor Output Characteristics on Grain Boundary Position

We investigate the impact of varying the grain boundary (GB) position on the output (Id–Vd) characteristics of submicron single GB polysilicon thin film transistors (TFTs), by two-dimensional (2D), drift-diffusion based, device simulation. We employ a localized GB trapping model with a distribution of both donor-like and acceptor-like trap states over the forbidden energy gap of the GB region. We show that for devices with channel lengths in the deep submicron regime, significant variations in output conductance (gd) occur as the GB position is varied. Specifically, we find that output conductance increases as the GB approaches the drain edge. Furthermore, the sensitivity of output conductance to the GB position increases as channel length decreases. The findings have important implications for any future analogue three-dimensional (3D) IC design that uses polysilicon as a device material.