Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
2 0 A ug 2 01 8 Stochastic Primal-Dual Algorithm for Distributed Gradient Temporal Difference Learning

The goal of this paper is to study a distributed version of the gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithm for a class of multi-agent Markov decision processes (MDPs). The temporal-difference (TD) learning is a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that learns an infinite horizon discounted cost function (or value function) for a given fixed policy without the model knowledge. In the multi-agent MDP each agent receives local reward through a local processing. The agents communicate over sparse and random networks to learn the global value function corresponding to the aggregate of local rewards. In this paper, the problem of estimating the global value function is converted into a constrained convex optimization problem with a consensus constraint. Then, we propose a stochastic primal-dual distributed GTD algorithm and prove that it almost surely converges to a set of stationary points of the optimization problem.
The Q gene of Rhodobacter sphaeroides: its role in puf operon expression and spectral complex assembly

The Q gene of the facultative photoheterotroph Rhodobacter sphaeroides, localized immediately upstream of the oxygen- and light-regulated puf operon, encodes a 77-amino-acid polypeptide. The 5' and 3' ends of the 561-bp Q transcript were determined. To gain insight into the role of the Q gene product, a number of Q mutations were constructed by oligonucleotide-directed mutagenesis and subsequent substitution of the mutated form of the gene in single copy for the chromosomal copy via homologous recombination. The resulting mutants can grow photosynthetically, with the exception of QSTART, in which the initiation codon for the Q protein was altered. Spectral analysis of the intracytoplasmic membranes showed that one of the missense mutants (QdA) was deficient in the formation of detectable B875 light-harvesting complex (LHC), whereas deletion of the stem-loop structure (Qloop) failed to form B800-850 LHC when grown anaerobically either in the dark or under light intensity of 100 W/m2. Other missense mutants (QuA and QuB) contained either more B800-850 LHC or more B875 LHC, respectively, than the wild type. Although the levels of puf and puc transcripts isolated from QSTART grown anaerobically on succinate-dimethyl sulfoxide in the dark were comparable to wild-type levels, no B875 spectral complex was detected and there was a greater than 90% reduction in the level of the B800-850 pigment-protein complex. It has also been confirmed that the ultimate cellular levels of either the B875 or B800-850 spectral complexes can vary over wide limits without any change in the level(s) of complex specific transcripts. When the wild-type Q gene was reintroduced in trans into the Q mutations, QSTART was able to grow photosynthetically and both B800-850 and B875 spectral complexes were formed in either QdA or Qloop. Finally, we demonstrated that the level of each puf-specific mRNA behaves independently of one another as well as independently of the level(s) of Q gene-specific mRNA. These results are compatible with the existence of regulatory sequences affecting the puf mRNA level(s) being localized within the Q structural gene. These results suggest that Q-specific expression is uncoupled from puf-specific transcription and that the Q protein is not involved in the regulation of transcription of the puf operon but is directly involved in the assembly of both the B875 and B800-850 pigment-protein complexes.
Reverse engineering of double JPEG compression in the presence of image resizing

In this paper, we propose a forensic technique for the reverse engineering of double JPEG compression in the presence of image resizing between the two compressions. Our approach is based on the fact that previously JPEG compressed images tend to have a near lattice distribution property (NLDP), and that this property is usually maintained after a simple image processing step and subsequent recompression. The proposed approach represents an improvement with respect to existing techniques analyzing double JPEG compression. Moreover, compared to forensic techniques aiming at the detection of resampling in JPEG images, the proposed approach moves a step further, since it also provides an estimation of both the resize factor and the quality factor of the previous JPEG compression. Such additional information can be used to reconstruct the history of an image and perform more detailed forensic analyses.
A New Lightweight Watchdog-Based Algorithm for Detecting Sybil Nodes in Mobile WSNs

Wide-spread deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) necessitates special attention to security issues, amongst which Sybil attacks are the most important ones. As a core to Sybil attacks, malicious nodes try to disrupt network operations by creating several fabricated IDs. Due to energy consumption concerns in WSNs, devising detection algorithms which release the sensor nodes from high computational and communicational loads are of great importance. In this paper, a new computationally lightweight watchdog-based algorithm is proposed for detecting Sybil IDs in mobile WSNs. The proposed algorithm employs watchdog nodes for collecting detection information and a designated watchdog node for detection information processing and the final Sybil list generation. Benefiting from a newly devised co-presence state diagram and adequate detection rules, the new algorithm features low extra communication overhead, as well as a satisfactory compromise between two otherwise contradictory detection measures of performance, True Detection Rate (TDR) and False Detection Rate (FDR). Extensive simulation results illustrate the merits of the new algorithm compared to a couple of recent watchdog-based Sybil detection algorithms.
Development of a telerobotic system for exploration of hazardous environments

This work addresses the manipulation and control problems of a teleoperated redundant manipulator. The choice of a benchmark of extremely high requirements is technical aid in catastrophic situations like road accidents, fires and natural disasters. Such scenarios demand intuitive though powerful operation minimizing user fatigue and tension. For this reason, replicating the human motion abilities by the telemanipulator is the main challenge in the presented design. A recently developed 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) haptic input device is used as master arm and an anthropomorphic, human sized 7 DoF manipulator as the slave arm. One of the problems studied here is the connection of two kinematically dissimilar devices working in master-slave configuration with 6 degrees of freedom kinesthetic feedback, issues regarding kinematic control, compliant motion, transparency, and intuitiveness of teleoperation are discussed.
Efficient implementation of linear programming decoding

This paper explores ideas for fast linear programming (LP) decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. We first propose a modification of adaptive LP decoding, and prove that it performs LP decoding by solving a number of linear programs that contain at most one linear constraint derived from each of the parity-check constraints. Then, as a step toward designing an efficient LP solver that exploits the structure of LDPC codes, we study a sparse interior-point implementation for solving this sequence of linear programs. Since the most complex part of each iteration of the interior-point algorithms is to solve a (usually ill-conditioned) system of linear equations for finding the step direction, we propose a framework for designing preconditioners to be used with the iterative methods for solving these systems. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated via both analytical and simulation results.
Airborne Technology for Distributed Air Traffic Management

Worldwide air traffic levels are growing at a rate expected to double the current traffic level by 2020. The current technology Air Traffic Control systems are stretched to their limit and are prone to large delays during the peak summer travel season. There is doubt that the current systems can be scaled up to meet the expected demand levels. Many Air Traffic Management automation systems have been proposed to increase controller capability, and some are in operation. While ATM automation systems will help handle more traffic, it is still doubtful that they can grow to meet the doubling in traffic levels foreseen. This paper presents an introduction to Distributed ATM – using the capability of airborne electronic systems to further relieve the controller workload. An overview of avionics capabilities is presented, followed by a detailed description of five specific examples of airborne capability that can be used to increase airspace capacity, as listed below. 1. An onboard method to control an aircraft to cross a terminal area waypoint at a Required Time of Arrival. 2. A trajectory negotiation process whereby the groundbased ATM system uses the 4D predicted trajectory computed by the aircraft, gives the aircraft RTA constraints to solve traffic conflicts, and contracts the aircraft to stay within a specified tolerance of the predicted 4D trajectory. 3. A formation flight system whereby multiple aircraft can be flown close together and controlled as a single aircraft. 4.
Three studies of the psychologic changes in chronic headache patients associated with biofeedback and relaxation therapies.

&NA; Three separate, but similar, studies are described in which the psychologic effects (depression, anxiety, and overall degree of psychosomatic distress) of nonpharmacologic treatment (relaxation and/or biofeedback training) for three kinds of chronic headache (tension, migraine, and mixed migraine and tension) were evaluated. Results showed consistently (across all three studies) significant reductions in depression and trait‐anxiety associated with receiving treatment, regardless of headache type or treatment outcome. The significant reduction for overall degree of psychosomatic distress was not differentially related to receiving treatment and thus could have been due to prolonged monitoring of headaches or test‐retest regression effects.
Power Delivery Design for 3-D ICs Using Different Through-Silicon Via (TSV) Technologies

3-D integrated circuits promise high bandwidth, low latency, low device power, and a small form factor. Increased device density and asymmetrical packaging, however, renders the design of 3-D power delivery a challenge. We investigate in this paper various methods to improve 3-D power delivery. We analyze the impact of through-silicon via (TSV) size and spacing, of controlled collapse chip connection (C4) spacing, and of dedicated power delivery TSVs. In addition to considering typical cylindrical or square metal-filled TSVs (core TSVs), we also investigate using coaxial TSVs for power delivery resulting in reduced routing blockages and added coupling capacitance. Our 3-D evaluation system is composed of a quad-core chip multiprocessor, a memory die, and an accelerator engine, and it is evaluated using representative SPEC benchmark traces. This is the first detailed architectural-level analysis for 3-D power delivery. Our findings provide clear guidelines for 3-D power delivery design. More importantly, we show that it is possible to achieve 2-D-like, or even better, power quality by increasing C4 granularity and by selecting suitable TSV size and spacing.
Domain Adaptation for Medical Text Translation using Web Resources

This paper describes adapting statistical machine translation (SMT) systems to medical domain using in-domain and general-domain data as well as webcrawled in-domain resources. In order to complement the limited in-domain corpora, we apply domain focused webcrawling approaches to acquire indomain monolingual data and bilingual lexicon from the Internet. The collected data is used for adapting the language model and translation model to boost the overall translation quality. Besides, we propose an alternative filtering approach to clean the crawled data and to further optimize the domain-specific SMT system. We attend the medical summary sentence unconstrained translation task of the Ninth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT2014). Our systems achieve the second best BLEU scores for Czech-English, fourth for French-English, English-French language pairs and the third best results for reminding pairs.
Antecedents of entrepreneurial orientation: A contingency approach

This research was created in order to offer a better understanding of the entrepreneurial orientation construct. Based on the literature review several antecedents of the entrepreneurial orientation construct were identified: risk, achievement, innovation, locus of control, self-esteem, opportunity, autonomy, proactiveness, and competitive aggressiveness. Relying on the contingency theory developed by Burns and Stalker (1961), it was decided to use the Carland's trichotomy of entrepreneurs as a moderator variable between the antecedents and the entrepreneurial orientation construct. As a result, three main areas of research were identified. The first area deals with determining which dimensions are underpinning the entrepreneurial orientation construct, while the second is centered on the number of dimensions composing that construct. The third axis of research was to determine if there is a relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and performance. All things considered, 13 sets of hypothesis were created and tested for the research. The survey was sent through e-mail to entrepreneurs based in Louisiana, it was received by 1003 entrepreneurs. 103 surveys were returned for analysis, resulting in a 10.2% response rate. After analyzing the results, it became clear that several different types of entrepreneurs exist and that these types are heterogeneous. The three types of entrepreneurs tested did not have the same number of antecedents or even the same kind
Increased mitochondrial DNA diversity in ancient Columbia River basin Chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha

The Columbia River and its tributaries provide essential spawning and rearing habitat for many salmonid species, including Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha). Chinook salmon were historically abundant throughout the basin and Native Americans in the region relied heavily on these fish for thousands of years. Following the arrival of Europeans in the 1800s, salmon in the basin experienced broad declines linked to overfishing, water diversion projects, habitat destruction, connectivity reduction, introgression with hatchery-origin fish, and hydropower development. Despite historical abundance, many native salmonids are now at risk of extinction. Research and management related to Chinook salmon is usually explored under what are termed “the four H’s”: habitat, harvest, hatcheries, and hydropower; here we explore a fifth H, history. Patterns of prehistoric and contemporary mitochondrial DNA variation from Chinook salmon were analyzed to characterize and compare population genetic diversity prior to recent alterations and, thus, elucidate a deeper history for this species. A total of 346 ancient and 366 contemporary samples were processed during this study. Species was determined for 130 of the ancient samples and control region haplotypes of 84 of these were sequenced. Diversity estimates from these 84 ancient Chinook salmon were compared to 379 contemporary samples. Our analysis provides the first direct measure of reduced genetic diversity for Chinook salmon from the ancient to the contemporary period, as measured both in direct loss of mitochondrial haplotypes and reductions in haplotype and nucleotide diversity. However, these losses do not appear equal across the basin, with higher losses of diversity in the mid-Columbia than in the Snake subbasin. The results are unexpected, as the two groups were predicted to share a common history as parts of the larger Columbia River Basin, and instead indicate that Chinook salmon in these subbasins may have divergent demographic histories.
Pharmacodynamics of the G-Quadruplex-Stabilizing Telomerase Inhibitor 3,11-Difluoro-6,8,13-trimethyl-8H-quino[4,3,2-kl]acridinium methosulfate (RHPS4) in Vitro: Activity in Human Tumor Cells Correlates with Telomere Length and Can Be Enhanced, or Antagonized, with Cytotoxic Agents

Telomeric integrity is required to maintain the replicative ability of cancer cells and is a target for the G-quadruplex–stabilizing drug 3,11-difluoro-6,8,13-trimethyl-8H-quino[4,3,2-kl]acridinium methosulfate (RHPS4). We report a senescent-like growth arrest in MCF-7 breast cancer cells, within 14 to 17 days, and a reduction in telomere length (from 5.2 kilobases (kb) to 4.7 and 4.3 kb after 17 days of treatment at 0.5 and 1 μM, respectively). These effects occurred at noncytotoxic drug concentrations (doses < 1 μM over a 14-day exposure) compatible with long-term drug dosing. The telomere length of cancer cells influences their sensitivity to growth inhibition by RHPS4: mutant (mt) human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT)-expressing MCF-7 cells [short telomere restriction fragment (TRF) length, 1.9 kb; IC50, 0.2 μM] were 10 times more sensitive to RHPS4 compared with wild-type (wt) hTERT-expressing, vector-transfected control cells (longer TRF-length 5.2 kb; IC50 2 μM) in the 5 day SRB assay. This relationship was corroborated in a panel of 36 human tumor xenografts grown in vitro showing a positive correlation between telomere length and growth inhibitory potency of RHPS4 (15-day clonogenic assay, r = 0.75). These observations are consistent with loss of the protective capping status of telomeres mediated by RHPS4 G-quadruplex-stabilization, thus leading to greater susceptibility of cells with shorter telomeres. In combination studies, paclitaxel (Taxol), doxorubicin (Adriamycin), and the experimental therapeutic agent 17-(allylamino)-17-demethoxygeldanamycin, which inhibits the 90-kDa heat shock protein, conferred enhanced sensitivity in RHPS4 treated MCF-7 cells, whereas the DNA-interactive temozolomide and cisplatin antagonized the action of RHPS4. Our results support the combined use of certain classes of cytotoxic anticancer agents with RHPS4 to enhance potential clinical benefit.
Reliability-Based Topology Optimization Based on Evolutionary Structural Optimization

This paper presents a Reliability-Based Topology Optimization (RBTO) based on Evolutionary Structural Optimization (ESO). An actual design involves uncertain conditions such as material property, operational load and dimensional variation. Deterministic Topology Optimization (DTO) is obtained without considering of the uncertainties related to the uncertainty parameters. However, RBTO involves evaluation of probabilistic constraints, which can be done in two different ways, the reliability index approach (RIA) and the performance measure approach (PMA). Limit state function is approximated using Monte Carlo Simulation and Central Composite Design for reliability analysis. ESO, one of the topology optimization techniques, is adopted for topology optimization. Numerical examples are presented to compare the DTO with RBTO. Keywords—Evolutionary Structural Optimization, Performance Measure Approach, Reliability-Based Topology Optimization, Reliability Index Approach.
Predicting the Dutch Weather Using Recurrent Neural Networks

Accurately predicting the weather has been an ongoing challenge for the scientific community. The recent advancements on neural networks raise the question: can neural networks be used to predict the weather? In this paper, a neural network approach to predict the temperature for the Netherlands is evaluated. Furthermore, different hyperparameter configurations are compared to each other on this complex problem. The results provide a useful overview of different hyperparameters and their optimal settings and show that the created solution is not competitive with conventional methods.
Adenine and adenosine salvage pathways in erythrocytes and the role of S‐adenosylhomocysteine hydrolase

This article is devoted to the study of redundancy and yield of salvage pathways in human erythrocytes. These cells are not able to synthesize ATP de novo. However, the salvage (recycling) of certain nucleosides or bases to give nucleotide triphosphates is operative. As the salvage pathways use enzymes consuming ATP as well as enzymes producing ATP, it is not easy to see whether a net synthesis of ATP is possible. As for pathways using adenosine, a straightforward assumption is that these pathways start with adenosine kinase. However, a pathway bypassing this enzyme and using S‐adenosylhomocysteine hydrolase instead was reported. So far, this route has not been analysed in detail. Using the concept of elementary flux modes, we investigate theoretically which salvage pathways exist in erythrocytes, which enzymes belong to each of these and what relative fluxes these enzymes carry. Here, we compute the net overall stoichiometry of ATP build‐up from the recycled substrates and show that the network has considerable redundancy. For example, four different pathways of adenine salvage and 12 different pathways of adenosine salvage are obtained. They give different ATP/glucose yields, the highest being 3 : 10 for adenine salvage and 2 : 3 for adenosine salvage provided that adenosine is not used as an energy source. Implications for enzyme deficiencies are discussed.
Polarimetric Observations of the Emissivity of Whitecaps Experiment (POEWEX' 04) to Characterize the Azimuthal Variation of the Microwave Emission from Foam Generated by Breaking Waves

WindSat, the first polarimetric microwave radiometer on orbit, and the NPOESS Conical Microwave Imager/Sounder, scheduled for launch in 2010, are both designed to retrieve the ocean surface wind vector from radiometric brightness temperatures. Available observations and models show that the wind direction signal is only 1-3 K peak-to-peak at 19 and 37 GHz, much smaller than the wind speed signal. Therefore, quantitative knowledge of the dependence of the ocean surface emissivity on properties such as surface roughness and wave breaking is critical for wind vector retrieval. The dependence of surface emission on roughness has been addressed by many studies, but the azimuthal dependence of the microwave emission from breaking waves and foam has not been adequately addressed. Recently, a number of experiments have been conducted to quantify the increase in sea surface microwave emission due to foam. The Polarimetric Observations of the Emissivity of Whitecaps EXperiment (POEWEX’04) was conducted during November 2004 to measure the azimuthal dependence of reproducible breaking waves in order to improve wind vector retrieval from spaceborne radiometric measurements, especially at wind speeds of 7 m/s and higher. The emissivity of breaking waves was shown to vary as a function of azimuth angle at four different WindSat frequencies.
A Model of Maintainability - Suggestion for Future Research

Lack of a commonly defined maintainability model hinders us from evaluating and certifying products with respect to maintainability. We cannot compare different products within and across organisations. We have difficulties to evolve and maintain software. We cannot try new development paradigms and evaluate their effects on product maintainability. We have no commonly defined maintainability model to base our software engineering research. In this paper, we outline a suggestion for a model of maintainability. We advocate to the software community to gather its resources in order to develop the model. Such a model would have a substantial long-term impact within research, industry, standardisation authorities and education. This paper lists ideas for a maintainability model with the aim to provide an initial milestone for ample discussion within the software engineering community.