Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tape Mbo'e: A First Experimental Assessment

The development of software not only needs to consider the construction process, but also other aspects such as cost, human resources and communication among stakeholders. The lack of simplicity into this context becomes explicit when some restrictions, such as service oriented architecture, must be considered as the basic style to build sustainable applications into environments were practitioners are not aware of this software technology. In addition to this, most of the available software processes are not directly applicable nor are they reusable, so learning times becomes risk for the development of the project. Therefore, Tape Mbo’e (TME) has been proposed to support the building of such applications, into development environments like developing countries where we can have economic constraints and scarcity of procient practitioners. The rst application of TME has been to develop a service-based application whose goal is to provide the interoperability among legacy systems of dierent public agencies in Paraguay. Initial results of this experience indicated the feasibility and simplicity of TME when applied in this eld. The evaluation process, its results and conclusions are described in this paper.
Speech enhancement usinga modulation domain Kalman filter post-processor with a Gaussian Mixture noise model

We propose a speech enhancement algorithm that applies a Kalman filter in the modulation domain to the output of a conventional enhancer operating in the time-frequency domain. We show that the prediction residual signal of the spectral amplitude errors at the output of the baseline MMSE enhancer do not follow a Gaussian distribution. Accordingly, the Kalman filter used in our enhancement algorithm combines a colored noise model with a Gaussian mixture model of the residual noise. We evaluate the performance of the speech enhancement algorithm on the core TIMIT test set and demonstrate that it gives consistent performance improvements over the baseline enhancer and over a previously proposed Kalman filter post-processor.
Identification of Logic Relationships between Genes and Subtypes of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) has two major subtypes: adenocarcinoma (AC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). The diagnosis and treatment of NSCLC are hindered by the limited knowledge about the pathogenesis mechanisms of subtypes of NSCLC. It is necessary to research the molecular mechanisms related with AC and SCC. In this work, we improved the logic analysis algorithm to mine the sufficient and necessary conditions for the presence states (presence or absence) of phenotypes. We applied our method to AC and SCC specimens, and identified lower and higher logic relationships between genes and two subtypes of NSCLC. The discovered relationships were independent of specimens selected, and their significance was validated by statistic test. Compared with the two earlier methods (the non-negative matrix factorization method and the relevance analysis method), the current method outperformed these methods in the recall rate and classification accuracy on NSCLC and normal specimens. We obtained biomarkers. Among biomarkers, genes have been used to distinguish AC from SCC in practice, and other six genes were newly discovered biomarkers for distinguishing subtypes. Furthermore, NKX2-1 has been considered as a molecular target for the targeted therapy of AC, and other genes may be novel molecular targets. By gene ontology analysis, we found that two biological processes (‘epidermis development’ and ‘cell adhesion’) were closely related with the tumorigenesis of subtypes of NSCLC. More generally, the current method could be extended to other complex diseases for distinguishing subtypes and detecting the molecular targets for targeted therapy.
Draft Genome Sequence of Hydrocarbon-Degrading Pseudomonas putida Strain KG-4, Isolated from Soil Samples Collected from Krishna-Godavari Basin in India

ABSTRACT We report here the 5.58-Mb draft genome of Pseudomonas putida strain KG-4 obtained from the oil fields of the Krishna-Godavari basin, Andhra Pradesh, India. The genome sequence is expected to facilitate identification and understanding of genes associated with hydrocarbon metabolism, which can help in developing strategies for managing oil spills and bioremediation.
New active galactic nuclei detected in ROSAT All Sky Survey galaxies - II. The complete dataset

Aims. The ROSAT ALL Sky Survey Bright Source Catalogue (RASS-BSC) has been correlated with the Catalogue of Principal Galaxies (PGC) to identify new extragalactic counterparts. 550 reliable optical counterparts have been detected. However there existed no optical spectra for about 200 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) candidates before the ROSAT ALL Sky Survey (RASS) was completed. Methods. We took optical spectra of 176 X-ray candidates and companions at ESO, Calar Alto observatory and McDonald observatory. When necessary we used a line profile decomposition to measure line fluxes, widths and centers to classify their type of activity. Results. We discuss the redshift-, linewidth-, as well as optical and X-ray luminosity distribution of our ROSAT selected sample. 139 galaxies of our 166 X-ray counterparts have been identified as AGN with 93 being Seyfert 1 galaxies (61%). Eighteen of them (20%) are Narrow Line Seyfert 1 galaxies. 34 X-ray candidates (21%) are LINERs and only eight candidates (5%) are Seyfert 2. The ratio of the number of Seyfert 1 galaxies to Seyfert 2 galaxies is about 11/1. Optical surveys result in ratios of 1/1.4. The high fraction of detected Seyfert 1 galaxies is explained by the sensitivity of the ROSAT to soft X-rays which are heavily absorbed in type 2 AGN. Two X-ray candidates are HII-galaxies and 25 candidates (15%) show no signs of spectral activity. The AGN in our RASS selected sample exhibit slightly higher optical luminosities ( M B = (-20.71 ± 1.75) mag) and similar X-ray luminosities (log($L_{\mathrm{X}}$ [ erg s -1 ] ) = 42.9 ± 1.7) compared to other AGN surveys. The H α line width distribution ( FWHM ) of our newly identified ROSAT AGN sample is similar to the line widths distribution based on SDSS AGN. However, our newly identified RASS AGN have rather reddish colors explaining why they have not been detected before in ultraviolet or blue excess surveys.
Family communication patterns that predict perceptions of upheaval and psychological well-being for emerging adult children following late-life divorce

ABSTRACT This study examined the experiences of emerging adult children following their parents’ divorce in later life. Drawing on family communication patterns theory, we examined each parent’s conformity orientation and conversation orientation as predictors of young adult children’s perceptions of family turbulence and feeling caught, which in turn predicted depressive symptoms and resilience. Young adult children (N = 171) who were over the age of 18 at the time of their parents’ divorce completed surveys about their family communication patterns and their perceptions of individual and family outcomes following the divorce. Our findings point to differing conformity and conversation orientations enacted by each parent. Mothers’ and fathers’ conformity orientations were associated with turbulence and feeling caught, but only fathers’ conversation orientation was associated with feeling caught. Perceptions of turbulence were positively associated with depressive symptoms and negatively associated with resilience for emerging adult children, but feeling caught was only positively associated with depressive symptoms.
Protocol Formats Reverse Engineering Based on Association Rules in Wireless Environment

With the wide deployment of wireless networks, attackers may exploit Wi-Fi network vulnerabilities to transfer data secretly, or covert communication channels to spread malicious codes. The protocol formats reverse engineering technique can be used to detect such attacks, however, previous works are focused on the application layer protocol analysis, and can hardly work under the scenarios that the captured data is only in binary format due to the lack of semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol formats reverse engineering framework, which utilizes the association rules of feature sequences to identify unknown protocols from captured binary data. We first convert the captured binary data into a bit stream, and segment it into frames. The improved AC algorithm is adopted to analyze the binary sequences. After which, we extract the feature sequences and analyze their association rules to detect potential unknown protocols. The experimental results show that our framework can identify 100% ARP packets and 98% ICMP packets from captured binary data.
Smart mobility – for all?

“Smart mobility” has become a prominent issue in recent conversations about the “future of transport”. Typically the focus is on urban transport where more and more new options to move through the city are provided. Together these options operate under the name of “new mobility concepts” suggesting that they will deliver new services to be highly flexible on one’s way – wherever the destination and whatever the time of the day. Interestingly, new mobility concepts are used above all by men – young adults of the age group up to 35y, living in 1 to 2 person-households, above average formal education, above average income. It is often suggested that women are less interested in (mobility) innovation in general, as it belongs to the more technical context of transportation. The talk will investigate how the options provided in the framework of new mobility concepts apply to the needs of different population groups thus producing specific gender gaps. It will also discuss its consequences for travel mode choice in the urban context.
[PatentMT] Summary Report of Team III_CYUT_NTHU

In this report paper, we investigate two issues facing phrase-based machine translation (MT) systems such as Moses (Koehn et al., 2007): out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words and singletons. MT systems typically ignore and directly output unknown or OOV source words into the target translation. On the other hand, for words which do not couple with their preceding or following words as phrases, as referred to as singletons, MT systems typically leave their translation disambiguation to language model within which knowledge is somewhat limited and determined by the preset length of words. In this paper, we first analyze the proportion of OOV words and singletons in translation task, summarize types of OOV words, and manually evaluate the impact of singletons on phrase-based MT systems. We also introduce methods for dealing with these two issues without changing the underlying phrase-based decoder.
An EGF receptor/Ral‐GTPase signaling cascade regulates c‐Src activity and substrate specificity

c‐Src is a membrane‐associated tyrosine kinase that can be activated by many types of extracellular signals, and can regulate the function of a variety of cellular protein substrates. We demonstrate that epidermal growth factor (EGF) and β‐adrenergic receptors activate c‐Src by different mechanisms leading to the phosphorylation of distinct sets of c‐Src substrates. In particular, we found that EGF receptors, but not β2‐adrenergic receptors, activated c‐Src by a Ral‐GTPase‐dependent mechanism. Also, c‐Src activated by EGF treatment or expression of constitutively activated Ral‐GTPase led to tyrosine phosphorylation of Stat3 and cortactin, but not Shc or subsequent Erk activation. In contrast, c‐Src activated by isoproterenol led to tyrosine phosphorylation of Shc and subsequent Erk activation, but not tyrosine phosphorylation of cortactin or Stat3. These results identify a role for Ral‐GTPases in the activation of c‐Src by EGF receptors and the coupling of EGF to transcription through Stat3 and the actin cytoskeleton through cortactin. They also show that c‐Src kinase activity can be used differently by individual extracellular stimuli, possibly contributing to their ability to generate unique cellular responses.
Memory Garbage Collection for an Object-Oriented Processor

A model of two-level memory garbage collection with reference counting object cache has been introduced. Reference counting cache together with mark-sweep heap provides a concurrent memory garbage collection method without memory leaks. Evaluation of the performance of the reference counting cache has been conducted based on CaffeineMark benchmark. We found that only a small size of cache is sufficient to reclaim memory concurrently, but a larger size is required to produce reasonable hit ratio
Iris based biometric identification system

Widespread internet usage has led to data protection and accurate verification of personnel, resulting in extensive use of biometrics. In the proposed work, we have discussed Daugman's algorithm, a commercially prevalent iris biometric system. The main aim is to compute false accept rate (FAR) and false reject rate (FRR) for any standard iris database. Initial stages involve removal of specular reflections, thresholding & elimination of local minima. After segmenting iris using Daugman's operator, it is normalized into a dimensionally constant rectangular block. Feature extraction is done using Gabor filter. Hamming distance is employed for matching binary encoded iris templates, and two templates are a match if the mismatch ratio is less than 0.27. All the simulations have been performed using MATLAB®. The algorithm was applied for 995 images of MMU2 iris database. The accuracy of the algorithm for segmentation is approx. 86.94% i.e. 865 out of 995 segmented successfully. For 3 iris samples, FAR is 3.93% and FRR is 0.12%.
An optimized adaptive broadcast scheme for inter-vehicle communication

A vehicular network topology changes rapidly due to the high mobility of network nodes. This network is formed spontaneously to support high speed and guaranteed communications, which in turn makes the delivery of emergency warning packets (EWPs) through dynamic routing protocols not guaranteed and unreliable. Hence, we propose a broadcast scheme through which the EWPs in the ad hoc part in client-server ad-hoc (CSAH) communication platform (H. Alshaer and E. Horlait, 2004) are transmitted from an abnormal vehicle to others in its zone. This broadcast scheme is efficient since it delivers rapidly the EWPs, and it is adaptive since the rebroadcast probability of a vehicle node changes dynamically in term of the number of vehicle nodes in its zone. Consequently, this broadcast scheme alleviates the problem of the simple flooding broadcast which is referred to broadcast storm and represented by packets redundancy, contention, and collision in the network.
On the Generation of Full-Fledged Code from UML Profiles and ALF for Complex Systems

Modern software systems are becoming more and more complex thus demanding for new powerful development mechanisms. Model-driven engineering has been recognised as a promising paradigm for the development of complex systems especially for its capability of abstracting the problem through models and then manipulating them to reach the implementation. In this work we provide a solution for the problem of automatically generating target code from models expressed in CHESS-ML, a UML profile that leverages the Action Language for Foundational UML. The goal is to produce code that does not require any manual intervention after its automatic generation to be executed on the target platform. Focus is on the generation of complex systems targeting both single and multi process deployment configurations as well as different execution platforms.
Experiences of psychiatric nurses of violent behaviour by female patients with mental illness

As violent behaviour is more often associated with male patients with acute mental illness, little information is available on the experiences of nurses of violent behaviour of female patients. The objective of the study was thus to describe their experiences. A qualitative, descriptive and contextual study was conducted in a tertiary level psychiatric hospital. The target population was registered psychiatric nurses working in wards with patients presenting with acute illness. Purposive sampling was done and data collected through unstructured interviews with 10 nurses. Five themes were identified namely: nurses associate care of acutely ill patients with being exposed to violence, experience emotional turmoil, experience poor relationships with patients, distrusting patients and nursing management and appreciate the learning experiences. Support of nurses by nursing management is required before they are placed in acute wards, after experiencing or witnessing violence and continuously past their confrontation with violence. Keywords: Experiences, nurses, violent behaviour, patient with mental illness
The Playing Session: Enhanced Playability for Mobile Gamers in Massive Metaverses

Internet ubiquity and the success of mobile gaming devices are increasing the interest in wireless access to virtual environments. Mainly due to the mobility factor and wireless medium features, traditional gaming architectures are not enough to guarantee good levels of playability and fairness to mobile gamers. We suggest a new mechanism, called playing session, capable of controlling communications between mobile devices and the game infrastructure. In case of network failures, a mimicking mechanism is in charge of playing, until the communication channel is restored. The goal is to reproduce, with an adequate level of mimesis, the user behavior. According to this approach, it will be possible to enhance the overall playability of Internet games without requiring any modification to the existing communication infrastructure.
The Examination of Emotional Facial Expressions Within Parent–Child and Sibling Interactive Contexts: A Systematic Review

ABSTRACT This work constitutes a systematic review of the empirical literature about emotional facial expressions displayed in the context of family interaction. Searches of electronic databases from January 1990 until December 2016 generated close to 4400 articles, of which only 26 met the inclusion criteria. Evidence indicate that affective expressions were mostly examined through laboratory and naturalistic observations, within a wide range of interactive contexts in which mother–child dyads significantly outnumbered father–child dyads. Moreover, dyadic partners were found to match each others’ displays and positive and neutral facial expressions proving more frequent than negative facial expressions. Finally, researchers observed some developmental and gender differences regarding the frequency, intensity, and category of emotional displays and identified certain links among facial expression behavior, family relations, personal adjustment, and peer-related social competence.
A Joint Communication and Application Simulator for NoC-Based Custom SoCs: LDPC and Turbo Codes Parallel Decoding Case Study

NoCs have become a widespread paradigm in the system-on-chip design world, not only for multi-purpose SoCs, but also for application-specific ICs. The common approach in the NoC design world is to separate the design of the interconnection from the design of the processing elements: this is well suited for a large number of developments, but the need for joint application and NoC design is not uncommon, especially in the application-specific case. The correlation between processing and communication tasks can be strong, and separate or trace-based simulations fall often short of the desired precision. In this work, the OMNET++ based JANoCS simulator is presented: concurrent simulation of processing and communication allow cycle-accurate evaluation of the system. The potential of the proposed approach is illustrated through a simple application example. Furthermore, a detailed case study on LDPC and turbo codes parallel decoding is presented. Results analysis illustrates the need for joint simulations and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed JANoCS.
Domain-Independent Extensions to GSAT: Solving Large Structured Satisfiability Problems

GSAT is a randomized local search procedure for solving propositional satisfiability problems (Selman et al. 1992). GSAT can solve hard, randomly generated problems that are an order of magnitude larger than those that can be handled by more traditional approaches such as the Davis-Putnam procedure. GSAT also efficiently solves encodings of graph coloring problems, N-queens, and Boolean induction. However, GSAT does not perform as well on handcrafted encodings of blocks-world planning problems and formulas with a high degree of asymmetry. We present three strategies that dramatically improve GSAT's performance on such formulas. These strategies, in effect, manage to uncover hidden structure in the formula under considerations, thereby significantly extending the applicability of the GSAT algorithm.
Comparison of objective and subjective measures of speech intelligibility in elderly hearing-impaired listeners.

Three experiments were performed to evaluate the use of subjective intelligibility estimations as a method for measuring hearing aid benefit. Subjective and objective speech intelligibility scores were compared for young normal-hearing and elderly hearing-impaired listeners. Objective intelligibility scores were obtained using the Connected Speech Test (CST). This test consists of conversationally produced passages of speech that the listener repeats sentence by sentence. To provide subjective intelligibility scores, listeners estimated the percentage that they understood of each CST passage. Comparison of the two types of scores revealed that they were closely related in both groups of subjects (r = .82-.92). Although the two types of scores were essentially equal for normal-hearing subjects, the hearing-impaired listeners tended to produce subjective estimations of intelligibility that were significantly lower than their objective scores. Manipulation of visual cues and amplification, in an attempt to influence the hearing-impaired listeners' expectation of understanding speech, had no effect on the subjective-objective score differential. The difference between subjective and objective scores in the hearing-impaired group was not related to audiometric variables such as speech reception threshold, audiogram, or duration of hearing loss. It was concluded that comparative hearing aid evaluations using subjective intelligibility estimates would usually produce the same relative outcome as evaluations using the objective intelligibility measurement procedure. However, scores obtained with the objective procedure had smaller critical differences. Thus, when both types of scores are based on the same number of passages, the objective measurement procedure would be the more sensitive to differences among hearing aids.