Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Proactive fault tolerance for HPC with Xen virtualization

Large-scale parallel computing is relying increasingly on clusters with thousands of processors. At such large counts of compute nodes, faults are becoming common place. Current techniques to tolerate faults focus on reactive schemes to recover from faults and generally rely on a checkpoint/restart mechanism. Yet, in today's systems, node failures can often be anticipated by detecting a deteriorating health status. Instead of a reactive scheme for fault tolerance (FT), we are promoting a proactive one where processes automatically migrate from "unhealthy" nodes to healthy ones. Our approach relies on operating system virtualization techniques exemplified by but not limited to Xen. This paper contributes an automatic and transparent mechanism for proactive FT for arbitrary MPI applications. It leverages virtualization techniques combined with health monitoring and load-based migration. We exploit Xen's live migration mechanism for a guest operating system (OS) to migrate an MPI task from a health-deteriorating node to a healthy one without stopping the MPI task during most of the migration. Our proactive FT daemon orchestrates the tasks of health monitoring, load determination and initiation of guest OS migration. Experimental results demonstrate that live migration hides migration costs and limits the overhead to only a few seconds making it an attractive approach to realize FT in HPC systems. Overall, our enhancements make proactive FT a valuable asset for long-running MPI application that is complementary to reactive FT using full checkpoint/restart schemes since checkpoint frequencies can be reduced as fewer unanticipated failures are encountered. In the context of OS virtualization, we believe that this is the first comprehensive study of proactive fault tolerance where live migration is actually triggered by health monitoring.
A Novel Image Signature based on Local Representative Pattern Mining

Copy Detection plays a critical and unique role in copyright infringement detection. This paper proposes a novel method that is able to find copies in large amount of images database efficiently and effectively. By mining the Representative Patterns (PR) about local keypoints, a robust binary image signature is built according to the spatial distribution of these selected patterns. The performance of this method is evaluated on benchmark datasets INRIA Holidays. It only needs 16 bytes that could handle serious image transformations such as 20% cropping. Results shows that only at one fourth (8.9 ms per image) of BRISK feature extracting time and 0.4% of GIST memory usage, our method has a comparable precision and robustness compared with the state-of-art methods of image signature for large-scale copy detection.
Estimating Clinically Important Change in Gait Speed in People With Stroke Undergoing Outpatient Rehabilitation

Background and Purpose: Gait speed is commonly used to assess walking ability in people with stroke. It is not clear how much change in gait speed reflects an important change in walking ability. The purpose of this study was to estimate clinically important changes in gait speed by using 2 different anchors for what is considered “important”: stroke survivors and physical therapists perceptions of change in walking ability. Methods: Participants underwent outpatient physical therapy (mean 56 days post-stroke) after a first-time stroke. Self-selected gait speed was measured at admission and discharge. At discharge, participants and their physical therapists rated their perceived change in walking ability on a 15-point ordinal Global Rating of Change (GROC) scale. Estimated important change values for gait speed were calculated by using receiver operating characteristics curves, with the participants and physical therapists GROC as the anchors. Results: The mean (SD) initial gait speed of all participants was 0.56 (0.22) m/s. The estimated important change in gait speed ranged from 0.175 m/s (participants perceived change in walking ability) to 0.190 m/s (physical therapists perceived change in walking ability), depending on the anchor. Discussion and Conclusions: During the subacute stage of recovery, individuals poststroke who experience improvements in gait speed of 0.175 m/s or greater are likely to exhibit a meaningful improvement in walking ability. The estimated clinically important change value of 0.175 m/s can be used by clinicians to set goals and interpret change in individual patients and by researchers to compare important change between groups.
Spectrum-averaged Harmonic Path (SHAPA) algorithm for non-contact vital sign monitoring with ultra-wideband (UWB) radar

We introduce the Spectrum-averaged Harmonic Path (SHAPA) algorithm for estimation of heart rate (HR) and respiration rate (RR) with Impulse Radio Ultrawideband (IR-UWB) radar. Periodic movement of human torso caused by respiration and heart beat induces fundamental frequencies and their harmonics at the respiration and heart rates. IR-UWB enables capture of these spectral components and frequency domain processing enables a low cost implementation. Most existing methods of identifying the fundamental component either in frequency or time domain to estimate the HR and/or RR lead to significant error if the fundamental is distorted or cancelled by interference. The SHAPA algorithm (1) takes advantage of the HR harmonics, where there is less interference, and (2) exploits the information in previous spectra to achieve more reliable and robust estimation of the fundamental frequency in the spectrum under consideration. Example experimental results for HR estimation demonstrate how our algorithm eliminates errors caused by interference and produces 16% to 60% more valid estimates.
Computer-Generated Papercutting

The craft of papercutting is part of the folk art traditions of cultures all over the world. From the point of view of computer graphics, papercutting can be seen as a method of composing bi-level images under a set of geometric connectivity constraints. In this paper, we present a technique for composing digital paper-cut designs. The elements of a design may be images, which are processed via a multilayer thresholding operation, or they may be procedurallygenerated arrangements of shapes. Elements are composed using a set of boolean operators that preserve connectivity. The resulting designs are well suited to being cut by a new generation of inexpensive computer peripherals.
The Statistical Mechanics of Complex Product Development: Empirical and Analytical Results

In recent years, understanding the structure and function of complex networks has become the foundation for explaining many different real- world complex biological, technological and informal social phenomena. Techniques from statistical physics have been successfully applied to the analysis of these networks, and have uncovered surprising statistical structural properties that have also been shown to have a major effect on their functionality, dynamics, robustness, and fragility. This paper examines, for the first time, the statistical properties of strategically important organizational networks -- networks of people engaged in distributed product development (PD) -- and discusses the significance of these properties in providing insight into ways of improving the strategic and operational decision-making of the organization. We show that the structure of information flow networks that are at the heart of large-scale product development efforts have properties that are similar to those displayed by other social, biological and technological networks. In this context, we identify novel properties that may be characteristic of other information-carrying networks. We further present a detailed model and analysis of PD dynamics on complex networks, and show how the underlying network topologies provide direct information about the characteristics of this dynamics. We believe that our new analysis methodology and empirical results are also relevant to other organizational information- carrying networks.
Regulation of Kv 4 . 3 currents by Ca 2 / calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II

Sergeant, Gerard P., Susumu Ohya, James A. Reihill, Brian A. Perrino, Gregory C. Amberg, Yuji Imaizumi, Burton Horowitz, Kenton M. Sanders, and Sang Don Koh. Regulation of Kv4.3 currents by Ca /calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II. Am J Physiol Cell Physiol 288: C304–C313, 2005. First published September 29, 2004; doi:10.1152/ajpcell.00293. 2004. —The voltage-dependent K channel 4.3 (Kv4.3) is one of the major molecular correlates encoding a class of rapidly inactivating K currents, including the transient outward current in the heart (Ito) and A currents (IA) in neuronal and smooth muscle preparations. Recent studies have shown that Ito in human atrial myocytes and IA in murine colonic myocytes are modulated by Ca /calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII); however, the molecular target of CaMKII in these studies has not been elucidated. We performed experiments to investigate whether CaMKII could regulate Kv4.3 currents directly. Inclusion of the autothiophosphorylated form of CaMKII in the patch pipette (10 nM) prolonged Kv4.3 currents such that the time required to reach 50% inactivation from peak more than doubled, with positive shifts in voltage dependence of both activation and inactivation. In contrast, the rate of recovery from inactivation was accelerated under these conditions. CaMKII-inhibitory peptide or KN-93 produced effects opposite to that above; thus the rate of inactivation was increased, and recovery from inactivation decreased. A number of mutagenesis experiments were conducted on the three candidate CaMKII consensus sequence sites on the channel. Mutations at S550A, located at the COOH-terminal region of the channel, resulted in currents that inactivated more rapidly but recovered from inactivation at a slower rate than that of wild-type controls. In addition, these currents were unaffected by dialysis with either autothiophosphorylated CaMKII or the specific inhibitory peptide of CaMKII, suggesting that CaMKII slows the inactivation and accelerates the rate of recovery from inactivation of Kv4.3 currents by a direct effect at S550A, located at the COOH-terminal region of the channel.
Joint offloading and computing optimization in wireless powered mobile-edge computing systems

Integrating mobile-edge computing (MEC) and wireless power transfer (WPT) is a promising technique in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. It can provide massive low-power mobile devices with enhanced computation capability and sustainable energy supply. In this paper, we consider a wireless powered multiuser MEC system, where a multi-antenna access point (AP) (integrated with an MEC server) broadcasts wireless power to charge multiple users and each user node relies on the harvested energy to execute latency-sensitive computation tasks. With MEC, these users can execute their respective tasks locally by themselves or offload all or part of the tasks to the AP based on a time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol. Under this setup, we pursue an energy-efficient MEC-WPT system design by jointly optimizing the transmit energy beamformer at the AP, the central processing unit (CPU) frequencies and the offloaded bits at each user, as well as the time allocation among different users. In particular, we minimize the energy consumption at the AP over a particular time block subject to the computation latency and energy harvesting constraints per user. By formulating this problem into a convex framework and employing the Lagrange duality method, we obtain its optimal solution in a semi-closed form. Numerical results demonstrate the merits of the proposed joint design over alternative benchmark schemes.
ESTIMATION OF CRYSTALLITE SIZE OF HYDROXYAPATITE BY RAMAN SPECTROSCOPY

Hydroxyapatite (HAP) is a naturally occurring mineral (Ca10(PO4)6(OH)2) that is similar in composition to the bone mineral. It has been used in orthopaedics as bone implant for the cure of bone injuries or diseases. Among the different properties that affect the mechanical properties of bone is the crystallite size of hydroxyapatite. The scope of the current research was to explore the possibility of developing a method for the estimation of crystallite size of bone mineral using Raman spectroscopy. Hydroxyapatite was prepared and different degrees of crystallinity and crystallite sizes were obtained by heating the material. The crystallite size of the material was estimated using the whole pattern of XRD analysis and applying the Williamson-Hall plot method. The same samples were then analyzed by Raman spectroscopy. The full width at the half maximum intensity (FWHM) of the v1-PO4 3- vibration at 959 cm -1 was measured and the derived values were correlated to the estimated by the XRD values of crystallite size. Thus, using XRD as the standard method it became feasible to construct a calibration between crystallite size of bone mineral and FWHM of 959 cm -1 vibration of the
Dynamic Web Services Personalization

In order to fulfil current customers requirements, companies and services providers need to supply a large panel of their products and services. This situation has led recently to the mass customizing paradigm, meaning that products and services should be designed in such a way that makes it possible to deliver and adapt different configurations. The increasing number of services available on the Web, together with the heterogeneity of Web audiences, are among the main reasons that motivate the adoption of this paradigm to Web services technology. In this paper we describe a solution that allows automatic customization of Web services: a supplier configuration, published in a services repository, is automatically translated into another configuration better suited for fulfilling customers' needs
Gaussian Specific Compensation for Channel Distortion in Speech Recognition

Channel distortion is one of the major factors degrading the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Most of the current compensation methods rely on the assumption that the channel distortion remains unchanged within an utterance or globally. However, we show in this letter that the distortion varies over speech frames even if the channel response is unchanged. To address this problem, we relax the above-mentioned assumption and propose a new method to compensate the channel distortion for each Gaussian of the acoustic models. Firstly, we derive the relationship between the clean and distorted models, and then estimate the channel magnitude response with the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Finally, we obtain the matched models with the estimated magnitude response and the clean models. Experiments were conducted on the TIMIT/NTIMIT databases and the results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Cs 2429 -foundations of Communication Complexity Cs 2429 -foundations of Communication Complexity

Here, a linear program on variables x1, . , xn, y1, . , ym expresses F if the feasible set of the program projects onto F as we ignore the variables y1, . , ym. Whenever one can express the polytope F as a polynomial sized LP (sometimes called an extended formulation for F ), one can solve linear optimization problems on F in polynomial time using any of the polynomial-time LP solvers. However, in [11] it was shown that many NP-hard optimisation problems do not admit such polynomial-size extended formulations. The connection to communication complexity is the following. First, define the non-negative rank, rk(A), of a non-negative real n×n matrix A as the minimum r such that A can be written as PQ, where P and Q are non-negative and of dimensions n×r and r×n, respectively. (Non-negative rank is a slippery concept: it is not obvious that rk(A) is even computable [2], and determining it exactly is NP-hard [10]. ) If A is a boolean matrix, we can bound rk(A) from below in terms of the non-deterministic communication complexity of A:
Rethinking Passwords to Adapt to Constrained Keyboards

We describe and analyze a variant of the traditional pass-word scheme. This is designed to take advantage of standard error-correcting methods of the types used to facilitate text entry on handsets. We call the new approach fast-words to emphasize their primary feature compared to regular passwords. Compared with passwords, fastwords are approximately twice as fast to enter on mobile keyboards, and approximately three times as fast on full-size keyboards. This is supported by user studies reported on herein. Furthermore, these user studies show that fastwords also have considerably greater entropy than passwords, and that their recall rates are dramatically higher than that of passwords and PINs. The new structure permits a memory jogging technique in which a portion of the fastword is revealed to a user who has forgotten it. We show that this results in boosted re-call rates, while maintaining a security above that of traditional passwords. We also introduce the notion of equivalence classes – whether based on semantics or pronunciation – and describe uses, including voice-based authentication. The new technology does not need any client-side modiﬁca-tion.
TEAM: efficient two-locus epistasis tests in human genome-wide association study

As a promising tool for identifying genetic markers underlying phenotypic differences, genome-wide association study (GWAS) has been extensively investigated in recent years. In GWAS, detecting epistasis (or gene–gene interaction) is preferable over single locus study since many diseases are known to be complex traits. A brute force search is infeasible for epistasis detection in the genome-wide scale because of the intensive computational burden. Existing epistasis detection algorithms are designed for dataset consisting of homozygous markers and small sample size. In human study, however, the genotype may be heterozygous, and number of individuals can be up to thousands. Thus, existing methods are not readily applicable to human datasets. In this article, we propose an efficient algorithm, TEAM, which significantly speeds up epistasis detection for human GWAS. Our algorithm is exhaustive, i.e. it does not ignore any epistatic interaction. Utilizing the minimum spanning tree structure, the algorithm incrementally updates the contingency tables for epistatic tests without scanning all individuals. Our algorithm has broader applicability and is more efficient than existing methods for large sample study. It supports any statistical test that is based on contingency tables, and enables both family-wise error rate and false discovery rate controlling. Extensive experiments show that our algorithm only needs to examine a small portion of the individuals to update the contingency tables, and it achieves at least an order of magnitude speed up over the brute force approach. Contact: xiang@cs.unc. edu
The Integr8 project - a resource for genomic and proteomic data

Integr8 (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/integr8/) is providing an integration layer for the exploitation of genomic and proteomic data by drawing on databases maintained at major bioinformatics centres in Europe. Main aims are to store the relationships of biological entities to each other and to entries in other databases, to provide a framework that allows for new kinds of data to be integrated, and to offer an entity-centric view of complete genomes and proteomes. Basic tools for data integration comprise the Proteome Analysis database, the International Protein Index (IPI), the Universal Protein sequence archive (UniParc) and the Genome Reviews. Entry points for the Integr8 portal depend on the users entity of interest: from browsing the taxonomy or with a predetermined species of interest, the species page can be used, and a simple search page leads to different applications when looking for certain protein sequences or genes. Customisable statistics data are available from the BioMart application, and pre-prepared data can be downloaded from the FTP site.
Mutations in Synaptojanin Disrupt Synaptic Vesicle Recycling

Synaptojanin is a polyphosphoinositide phosphatase that is found at synapses and binds to proteins implicated in endocytosis. For these reasons, it has been proposed that synaptojanin is involved in the recycling of synaptic vesicles. Here, we demonstrate that the unc-26 gene encodes the Caenorhabditis elegans ortholog of synaptojanin. unc-26 mutants exhibit defects in vesicle trafficking in several tissues, but most defects are found at synaptic termini. Specifically, we observed defects in the budding of synaptic vesicles from the plasma membrane, in the uncoating of vesicles after fission, in the recovery of vesicles from endosomes, and in the tethering of vesicles to the cytoskeleton. Thus, these results confirm studies of the mouse synaptojanin 1 mutants, which exhibit defects in the uncoating of synaptic vesicles (Cremona, O., G. Di Paolo, M.R. Wenk, A. Luthi, W.T. Kim, K. Takei, L. Daniell, Y. Nemoto, S.B. Shears, R.A. Flavell, D.A. McCormick, and P. De Camilli. 1999. Cell. 99:179–188), and further demonstrate that synaptojanin facilitates multiple steps of synaptic vesicle recycling.
Demonstration of an ultra-low-threshold phonon laser with coupled microtoroid resonators in vacuum

We demonstrate an ultra-low-threshold phonon laser using a coupled-microtoroid-cavity system by introducing a novel coupling approach. The scheme exhibits both high optical quality factors and high mechanical quality factors. We have experimentally obtained the mechanical quality factor up to 18,000 in vacuum for a radial-breathing mode of 59.2 MHz. The measured phonon lasing threshold is as low as 1.2 μW, which is ∼5 times lower than the previous result.
Foaming morphology control of microcellular injection molded parts with gas counter pressure and dynamic mold temperature control

Microcellular injection molding process is a promising solution for products with special requirements such as weight reduction, extra thin wall, high dimensional stability, clamping force reduction, etc. Despite microcellular foaming application used in reciprocating screw injection molding machine was built more than a decade, some limitations, such as poor surface quality or poor foaming control, confine the usage of this technology. Earlier CAE simulation tool for microcellular injection molding was not successful due to insufficient physical and computational considerations, limited by complicated bubble growth mechanism; so that, an economic and efficient tool for examining foaming quality of injection foaming product was lack. In this study, a recent developed three-dimensional simulation tool is used to predict injection foaming process. Predictions are carried out with commodity polypropylene and polystyrene with nitrogen and carbon dioxide supercritical fluids (SCFs). Comparisons of simulations .