Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of GC design on power and performance for Android

Small mobile devices have evolved to versatile computing systems. Android devices run a complete software stack, including a full Linux kernel, user land with several software daemons and a virtual machine to run applications. On these mobile systems energy is a scarce resource and needs to be handled carefully. Current systems rely on governors that adjust the frequency of individual cores depending on the system load. We measure energy consumption of different components of this complex software stack, including garbage collection (GC) of the Android virtual machine. Here we propose several extensions to the default GC configuration of Android, including a generational collector, across established dimensions of heap memory size and concurrency. Our evaluation shows that Android's asynchronous GC thread consumes a significant amount of energy. Therefore, varying the GC strategy can reduce total on-chip energy (by 20--30%) whilst slightly impacting application throughput (by 10--40%) and increasing worst-case pause times (by 20--30%). Our work quantifies the direct impact of GC on mobile system, enumerates the main factors and layers of this relationship, and offers a guide for analysis of memory behavior in understanding and tuning system performance.
Alanine scanning mutagenesis of SP70 epitope in characterizing species-specific antibodies induced by enterovirus 71-based antigens

The enterovirus 71 (EV71) SP70 epitope, derived from amino acids 208–222 of VP1, is a neutralizing epitope. The present study aimed to assess the inter-species differences of the antibodies induced by EV71-based antigens in responses to SP70 mutant peptides. BALB/c mice and Lou/C rats were immunized with EV71 SP70. Monoclonal antibodies (Mabs) were produced by hybridoma clones. Serum polyclonal antibodies (Pabs) were produced from BALB/c mice and New Zealand white rabbits immunized with recombinant EV71 VP1 (rEV71-VP1) protein or inactivated EV71. Micro-neutralization and immunofluorescence assays were used to evaluate the capacity of the antibodies to bind to EV71. Reactivity of Mabs and Pabs to mutated SP70 were determined by alanine scanning mutagenesis. Furthermore, serums from EV71-infected patients were collected to examine the affinity of SP70 antibody in the serum to mutated SP70, using competitive ELISA. The binding affinity of mouse Mabs to the SP70 epitope was increased by alanine substitution at sites of 210, 212, 213, 214, and 221. The binding affinity of rat Mabs to the SP70 epitope was increased by alanine substitution at sites 210, 217, 219, and 221. Mouse serum Pabs elicited by inactivated EV71 bound wild-type SP70, but lost affinity for mutated peptides. Conversely, rabbit serum Pabs elicited by inactivated EV71 robustly recognized SP70 mutants. Mouse serum Pabs elicited by rEV71-VP1 presented the same trend as mouse Mabs. Mutations at sites 214, 215, and 217 led to loss of recognition by rabbit Pabs elicited by rEV71-VP1, while most mutations did not influence antibody binding. Compared with the wild-type, mutations at the sites 209, 219 and 221 of SP70 lead to increased affinity with the serum antibodies produced by the EV71-infected patients. Antibody responses triggered by inactivated EV71, rEV71-VP1 and EV71 SP70 differed among species in neutralizing capacity and affinity for SP70 mutant peptides.
Recovering the toolchain provenance of binary code

Program binaries are an artifact of a production process that begins with source code and ends with a string of bytes representing executable code. There are many reasons to want to know the specifics of this process for a given binary---for forensic investigation of malware, to diagnose the role of the compiler in crashes or performance problems, or for reverse engineering and decompilation---but binaries are not generally annotated with such provenance details. Intuitively, the binary code should exhibit properties specific to the process that produced it, but it is not at all clear how to find such properties and map them to specific elements of that process. In this paper, we present an automatic technique to recover toolchain provenance: those details, such as the source language and the compiler and compilation options, that define the transformation process through which the binary was produced. We approach provenance recovery as a classification problem, discovering characteristics of binary code that are strongly associated with particular toolchain components and developing models that can infer the likely provenance of program binaries. Our experiments show that toolchain provenance can be recovered with high accuracy, approaching 100% accuracy for some components and yielding good results (90%) even when the binaries emitted by different components appear to be very similar.
Development of a Query Language for GML based on XPath

Geography Markup Language (GML) has been established as the standard language for the transport, storage and modelling of geographic information. In this paper we study how to adapt the XPath query language to GML documents. With this aim, we have defined a semantic based XPath language which is not based on the (tree-based) syntactic structure of GML documents, instead it is based on the “semantic structure” of GML documents. In other words, the proposed XPath language is based on the GML schema. We have developed a system called UALGIS, in order to implement the approach. Such system stores GML documents by means of the PostGIS RDBMS. In order to execute semantic-based XPath queries we have defined a translation of the queries into SQL. Such translation takes into account the GML schema. Finally, the system allows to visualize the result. With this aim, the result of a query is exported to the Keyhole Markup Language (KML) format.
Growth and characterization of (Bi, Pb)_2Sr_2Ca_2Cu_3O_xsingle crystals

(Bi, Pb)_2Sr_2Ca_2Cu_3O_ x (2223) single crystals have been grown using a fused-salt reaction of Bi_2O_3, PbO, SrCl_2, CaCl_2, CuCl, and KNO_3 in a KCl flux. The pristine crystals show regular plate-like morphology with typical dimension of 0.1 × 0.1 × 0.001–0.01 mm^3. Crystal orientation, chemical composition, phase purity, and superconductivity of the pristine crystals were determined by SEM, TEM, EDX, x-ray diffraction techniques, and SQUID magnetometry. The relative fraction of the Bi-2223 phase ( T _ c = 110 K) in as-grown crystals is ~97%. The only impurity phase, Bi-2212, occurs in some selected crystals but is present in amounts less than the detection limit of x-ray diffraction and is unobserved in the diamagnetic signal determined by SQUID magnetometry.
Semantically-Enabled Project-Based Collaborative Learning of Software Patterns

Teaching and learning software design patterns (DPs) is not an easy task. Apart from learning individual DPs and the principle behind them, students should learn how to apply them in real-life situations. Therefore, to make the learning process of DPs effective, it is necessary to include a project component in which students, usually in small teams, develop a medium-sized software application. Following this paradigm, and using active learning techniques, project-based learning (PBL) and collaborative learning (CL), we have developed a learning environment for software DPs which leverages semantic technologies to integrate several existing learning systems and tools.
Personal Sense and Idiolect: Combining Authorship Attribution and Opinion Analysis

Subjectivity analysis and authorship attribution are very popular areas of research. However, work in these two areas has been done separately. We believe that by combining information about subjectivity in texts and authorship, the performance of both tasks can be improved. In the paper a personalized approach to opinion mining is presented, in which the notions of personal sense and idiolect are introduced; the approach is applied to the polarity classification task. It is assumed that different authors express their private states in text individually, and opinion mining results could be improved by analyzing texts by different authors separately. The hypothesis is tested on a corpus of movie reviews by ten authors. The results of applying the personalized approach to opinion mining are presented, confirming that the approach increases the performance of the opinion mining task. Automatic authorship attribution is further applied to model the personalized approach, classifying documents by their assumed authorship. Although the automatic authorship classification imposes a number of limitations on the dataset for further experiments, after overcoming these issues the authorship attribution technique modeling the personalized approach confirms the increase over the baseline with no authorship information used.
Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology – nutritional epidemiology (STROBE‐nut): An extension of the STROBE statement

Abstract Concerns have been raised about the quality of reporting in nutritional epidemiology. Research reporting guidelines such as the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) statement can improve quality of reporting in observational studies. Herein, we propose recommendations for reporting nutritional epidemiology and dietary assessment research by extending the STROBE statement into Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology – Nutritional Epidemiology (STROBE‐nut). Recommendations for the reporting of nutritional epidemiology and dietary assessment research were developed following a systematic and consultative process, co‐ordinated by a multidisciplinary group of 21 experts. Consensus on reporting guidelines was reached through a three‐round Delphi consultation process with 53 external experts. In total, 24 recommendations for nutritional epidemiology were added to the STROBE checklist. When used appropriately, reporting guidelines for nutritional epidemiology can contribute to improve reporting of observational studies with a focus on diet and health.
An ultra-fast user-steered image segmentation paradigm: live wire on the fly

The authors have been developing general user steered image segmentation strategies for routine use in applications involving a large number of data sets. In the past, they have presented three segmentation paradigms: live wire, live lane, and a three-dimensional (3-D) extension of the live-wire method. Here, they introduce an ultra-fast live-wire method, referred to as live wire on the fly for further reducing user's time compared to the basic live-wire method. In live wire, 3-D/four-dimensional (4-D) object boundaries are segmented in a slice-by-slice fashion. To segment a two-dimensional (2-D) boundary, the user initially picks a point on the boundary and all possible minimum-cost paths from this point to all other points in the image are computed via Dijkstra's algorithm. Subsequently, a live wire is displayed in real time from the initial point to any subsequent position taken by the cursor. If the cursor is close to the desired boundary, the live wire snaps on to the boundary. The cursor is then deposited and a new live-wire segment is found next. The entire 2-D boundary is specified via a set of live-wire segments in this fashion. A drawback of this method is that the speed of optimal path computation depends on image size. On modestly powered computers, for images of even modest size, some sluggishness appears in user interaction, which reduces the overall segmentation efficiency. In this work, the authors solve this problem by exploiting some known properties of graphs to avoid unnecessary minimum-cost path computation during segmentation. In live wire on the fly, when the user selects a point on the boundary the live-wire segment is computed and displayed in real time from the selected point to any subsequent position of the cursor in the image, even for large images and even on low-powered computers. Based on 492 tracing experiments from an actual medical application, the authors demonstrate that live wire on the fly is 1.331 times faster than live wire for actual segmentation for varying image sizes, although the pure computational part alone is found to be about 120 times faster.
Pharmacokinetics of posaconazole within epithelial cells and fungi: insights into potential mechanisms of action during treatment and prophylaxis.

BACKGROUND The antifungal posaconazole concentrates within host cells and protects against Aspergillus fumigatus. The specific subcellular location of posaconazole and the mechanism by which cell-associated posaconazole inhibits fungal growth remain uncharacterized. METHODS Posaconazole was conjugated with the fluorophore boron-dipyrromethene (BDP-PCZ). A549 pulmonary epithelial cells and A. fumigatus were exposed to BDP-PCZ individually and in coculture. BDP-PCZ subcellular localization and trafficking were observed using confocal microscopy and flow cytometry. RESULTS BDP-PCZ concentrated within A549 cell membranes, and in particular within the endoplasmic reticulum. Epithelial cell-associated BDP-PCZ rapidly transferred to and concentrated within A. fumigatus cell membranes on contact. BDP-PCZ transfer to conidia did not require phagocytosis and was markedly enhanced by the conidial hydrophobin RodA. Within AF, BDP-PCZ also concentrated in membranes including the endoplasmic reticulum and colocalized with the azole target enzyme CYP51a. Concentration of BDP-PCZ within host and fungal cell membranes persisted for >48 hours and could be competitively inhibited by posaconazole but not voriconazole. CONCLUSIONS Posaconazole concentrates within host cell membranes and rapidly transfers to A. fumigatus, where it accumulates to high concentrations and persists at the site of its target enzyme. These intracellular and intercellular pharmacokinetic properties probably contribute to the efficacy of PCZ.
Automatic peculiarities detection in PhenoScreen information system

1 Service de Développements pour la Bio-informatique, Section Sud-Est, Direction des Sciences du Vivant, CEA Grenoble, 17 rue des Martyrs, F-38054, Grenoble cedex 09 France samuel.wieczorek@cea.fr, sroy@cea.fr 2 Laboratoire Leibniz, IMAG Unité Mixte de Recherche n° 5522, 46 Avenue Félix Viallet, F-38031 Grenoble Cedex France gilles.bisson@imag.fr 3 Centre de Criblage de Molécules Bio-Actives, DRDC/CS CEA Grenoble, 17 rue des Martyrs, F-38054, Grenoble cedex 09 France laurence. lafanechère@cea.fr 4 Laboratoire Logiciels Systèmes Réseaux, IMAG, 681, rue de la Passerelle, BP.72, F-38402 Saint Martin d'Hères Cedex France laurent.trilling@imag.fr 5 UMR 5019 CNRS-CEA-INRA-Université Joseph Fourier, Laboratoire de Physiologie Cellulaire Végétale, Direction des Sciences du Vivant, CEA Grenoble, 17 rue des Martyrs, F-38054 Grenoble cedex 09 – France eric.marechal@cea.fr
Protective Effects of Baicalin on Decidua Cells of LPS-Induced Mice Abortion

The study was carried out to investigate the protective effects of Baicalin on decidual cells of LPS-induced abortion mice. In the in vitro experiment, the decidual cells were cultured by uterus tissue mass cultivation sampled at day 6 of pregnancy, and gradient concentrations of LPS were used to determine the optimal LPS concentration of the injured decidual cells model. The injured decidual cells were treated with Baicalin (4 μg/mL) to determine the protective role of Baicalin. In the in vivo experiment, lipopolysaccharide (LPS) was injected intravenously via the tail vein to induce abortion at day 6 of pregnancy, and the mice were given different concentrations of Baicalin by oral gavage consecutively at days 7 to 8 of pregnancy. On day 9 of gestation, the mice were sacrificed. The TNF and progesterone contents in the serum were assayed by ELISA. The results clearly revealed that Baicalin can prevent the injury to decidual cells from LPS dose dependently, TNF was decreased significantly (P < 0.01) compared to LPS group, and there was no effect on the progesterone. These findings suggest that Baicalin has protective effects on the injured decidual cells in the pregnant mice.
Wormhole: Reliable Pub-Sub to Support Geo-replicated Internet Services

Wormhole is a publish-subscribe (pub-sub) system developed for use within Facebook's geographically replicated datacenters. It is used to reliably replicate changes among several Facebook services including TAO, Graph Search and Memcache. This paper describes the design and implementation of Wormhole as well as the operational challenges of scaling the system to support the multiple data storage systems deployed at Facebook. Our production deployment of Wormhole transfers over 35 GBytes/sec in steady state (50 millions messages/sec or 5 trillion messages/day) across all deployments with bursts up to 200 GBytes/sec during failure recovery. We demonstrate that Wormhole publishes updates with low latency to subscribers that can fail or consume updates at varying rates, without compromising efficiency.
A multiple emulsion method for loading 5‐fluorouracil into a magnetite‐loaded nanocapsule: a physicochemical investigation

The preparation of 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) loaded poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) biodegradable nanocapsules containing magnetite nanoparticles was studied through the modified multiple emulsion solvent evaporation method for magnetically controlled delivery of anticancer drugs. The morphology and size distribution of the prepared magnetite/PLGA nanocapsules were investigated by transmission and scanning electron microscopy. The micrographs showed that the magnetic nanocapsules were almost spherical in shape and their mean diameter was in the nanometer range with a narrow size distribution. Fourier transform infrared and ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy confirmed incorporation of 5-FU molecules into the PLGA matrix. The magnetite content was assessed by thermogravimetric and magnetometry analysis and the results showed a magnetite content of 35 wt% with high magnetic responsivity. Magnetometry measurements showed superparamagnetic properties of the magnetic nanocapsules with a saturation magnetization of 13.7 emu g−1. Such biodegradable magnetic nanocapsules could be considered as an appropriate choice for drug targeting. Furthermore, the influence of some important processing parameters such as PLGA concentration, initial loading of 5-FU and poly(vinyl alcohol) concentration on drug content, encapsulation efficiency and in vitro drug release kinetics was investigated and optimized. The drug content and encapsulation efficiency of the magnetic nanocapsules were 4–7 wt% and 60%–80%, respectively, and the nanocapsules demonstrated controlled release of 5-FU at 37 °C in a buffer solution. All samples exhibited a burst release at the initial stage and this burst release showed its close dependence on the formulation parameters. Copyright © 2012 Society of Chemical Industry
Micro-assembly and modeling of the liquid microworld : the PRONOMIA project

This paper presents an overview of the French research program PRONOMIA which deals with new methods for robotic micromanipulation and especially on submerged micromanipulation. During microscale object manipulation, contact (pull-off) forces and non-contact (capillary, van der Waals, and electrostatic) forces determine the behavior of the micro-objects rather than the inertial forces. This article introduces a review of the major differences between dry and submerged micromanipulations and gives an experimental analysis of the physical phenomena at a microscopic scale in dry and liquid media. New submerged microhandling strategies is necessary to perform micromanipulation in a liquid. Two solutions are proposed in this article which use a freeze gripper and a dielectrophoretic gripper. Finally, microassembly and biological applications are presented.
Self-regulating smoking and snacking through physical activity.

OBJECTIVE Emotional snacking contributes to weight gain after smoking cessation. Exercise acutely reduces cravings for cigarettes and snack food. This study examined if different exercise intensities acutely reduces snack and cigarette cravings and attentional bias (AB) to video clips of snacks and cigarettes among abstinent smokers. METHODS Abstinent smokers (and snackers; N = 23) randomly did 15 mins of moderate and vigorous cycling and a passive control in a cross-over design. Visual initial AB (IAB) and maintained AB (MAB) were assessed pre- and after treatment while watching paired snacking/neutral or smoking/neutral video clips. Desire to snack and smoke were assessed throughout. RESULTS ANOVAs revealed significant condition × time interactions for initial and maintained AB for smoking [IAB: F(1.58, 34.75) = 3.58, MAB: F(2, 44) = 4.52, p < . 05] and snacking [IAB: F(2, 44) = 8.13, MAB: F(2, 44) = 5.08, p < . 01]. IAB for both smoking and snacking were lower after moderate and vigorous exercise than the control. MAB was lower only after vigorous exercise. Fully repeated ANOVAs revealed a condition × time interaction for desire to smoke, F(3.31, 72.75) = 12.62, and snack F(4.34, 95.52) = 9.51, p < . 001. Cravings were lower after moderate and vigorous exercise, compared with control. CONCLUSIONS Exercise acutely reduces both AB and cravings for cigarettes and snacks and may help self-regulation of smoking and snacking. Vigorous exercise was only more advantageous for reducing MAB.
Mechanics of Viscoelastic Thin-Walled Structures

Thin-walled structures made of polymers and reinforced polymer composites are prominent candidates for constructing large lightweight structures. A major challenge in designing polymer-based thin-walled structures is their time and temperature dependent behavior originating from material viscoelasticity and its interaction with the highly geometrically nonlinear response due to thinness of the walls. Although polymer viscoelasticity and geometric nonlinearity have been extensively studied, the mechanics of structures exhibiting both phenomena are not well understood. This thesis presents a combination of experimental, numerical, and analytical investigations of the behavior of viscoelastic thin-walled structures. The first goal of this research is to establish general methods of analysis for two types of structural components, namely composite shells and polymer membranes, that will serve as the basis for full-scale structural analysis. The second goal is to demonstrate the capability of the developed methods by analyzing time and temperature dependent behavior of deployable structures and balloon structures. In the study of deployable structures, the deployment and shape recovery processes after stowage are investigated. Fundamental features of viscoelastic deployable structures are studied first with homogeneous polymer beams and shells. A simple closed-form solution describing the shape evolution of a beam after stowage is proposed. The effects of rate and temperature on the bending instability of shells are revealed. Building on the understanding gained from the analysis of homogeneous structures, modeling techniques are developed for polymer composite structures. A micromechanical viscoelastic model for carbon fiber reinforced polymer thin shells is established through finite element homogenization and applied to evaluate the effects of long-term stowage in a representative composite deployable structure. In the study of balloon structures, a membrane model is developed to study polymer balloon films with stress concentrations due to thickness variation. A nonlinear viscoelastic constitutive model is first formulated for the film material. The wrinkling instability behavior is incorporated into the model through correction of stress and strain states in the presence of wrinkling. Stress concentration factors in balloon films are predicted and measured with the membrane model and full-field displacement measurement techniques, respectively.