Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pyramid broadcasting for video-on-demand service

The proposed scheme of pyramid broadcasting is a new way of rendering Video On Demand service. In pyramid broadcasting, the most frequently requested movies are multiplexed on the broadcast network, resulting in radical improvement of access time and efficient bandwidth utilization. This is achieved by using storage at the receiving end. As the available bandwidth increases, the improvement in access time is exponential as opposed to just linear improvement as in the case of conventional broadcasting. The larger the bandwidth of the network, the better the access time gain due to pyramid broadcasting. As the access time requirement decreases, the bandwidth requirement in the case of conventional broadcasting increases linearly while the bandwidth requirement in the case of pyramid broadcasting increases only logarithmically. We provide analytical and experimental evaluations of pyramid broadcasting based on its implementation on ethernet LAN, illustrating its advantages.
The Effects of Th17 Cytokines on the Inflammatory Mediator Production and Barrier Function of ARPE-19 Cells

Th17 cells have emerged as a key factor in the pathogenesis of uveitis as well as other autoimmune disorders. They secrete a number of cytokines including IL-17A, IL-17F and IL-22 and until now the effects of these cytokines on resident cells of the eye were not yet clear. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of Interleukin (IL)-17A, IL-17F and IL-22 on the production of inflammatory mediators and barrier function of retinal pigment epithelium cells. We showed that ARPE-19 cells, a spontaneously arisen cell line of retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), constitutively expressed IL-17RC and IL-22R, but not IL-17RA. IL-17A significantly enhanced the production of CXCL8, CCL2, CCL20 and IL-6 by these cells. IL-17F had a similar effect on the production of CXCL8, CCL2 and IL-6 by ARPE-19 cells, but did not influence the expression of CCL20. Both IL-17A and IL-17F significantly decreased the transepithelial electrical resistance (TER) of the ARPE-19 monolayer and increased the diffusion rate of fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC)-dextran. They also disrupted the distribution of the junction proteins zonula occludens (ZO)-1 and occludin at the interface of adjacent cells. IL-22 did not have a detectable effect on the production of the tested inflammatory mediators by ARPE-19 cells, TER of the ARPE-19 monolayer, the diffusion rate of FITC-dextran or the distribution of ZO-1 and occludin. This study demonstrates that IL-17A and IL-17F, but not IL-22, significantly promoted ARPE-19 cells to secrete inflammatory mediators and compromised the ARPE-19 monolayer barrier function in association with a disrupted distribution of ZO-1 and occludin. These results suggest that both IL-17A and IL-17F may play a role in posterior segment inflammation of the eye.
NWU-CS-04-48 November 8 th , 2004 Can we trust ICMP-based measurements ?

ICMP-based measurements (e.g. ping) are often criticized as un-representative of the applications’ experienced performance, as applications are based on TCP/UDP protocols and there is a well-accepted conjecture that routers are often configured to treat ICMP differently from TCP and UDP. However, to the best of our knowledge, this assumption has not been validated. With this in mind, we conducted extensive Internet end-to-end path measurements of these three protocols, spanning over 90 sites (from both commercial and academic networks), over 6, 000 paths and more than 28 million probes in PlanetLab during two weeks. Our results show that ICMP performance is a good estimator for TCP/UDP performance for the majority of the paths. However for nearly 0.5% of the paths, we found persistent RTT differences between UDP and ICMP greater than 50%, while for TCP the difference exceeds 10% for 0.27% of the paths. Thus, although ICMP-based measurements can be trusted as predictors of TCP/UDP performance, distributed systems and network researchers should be aware of some scenarios where these measurements will be heavily misleading; this paper also provides some hints that can help in identifying those situations.
Azithromycin and Chloramphenicol Diminish Neutrophil Extracellular Traps (NETs) Release

Neutrophils are one of the first cells to arrive at the site of infection, where they apply several strategies to kill pathogens: degranulation, respiratory burst, phagocytosis, and release of neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs). Antibiotics have an immunomodulating effect, and they can influence the properties of numerous immune cells, including neutrophils. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of azithromycin and chloramphenicol on degranulation, apoptosis, respiratory burst, and the release of NETs by neutrophils. Neutrophils were isolated from healthy donors by density-gradient centrifugation method and incubated for 1 h with the studied antibiotics at different concentrations (0.5, 10 and 50 μg/mL—azithromycin and 10 and 50 μg/mL—chloramphenicol). Next, NET release was induced by a 3 h incubation with 100 nM phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA). Amount of extracellular DNA was quantified by fluorometry, and NETs were visualized by immunofluorescent microscopy. Degranulation, apoptosis and respiratory burst were assessed by flow cytometry. We found that pretreatment of neutrophils with azithromycin and chloramphenicol decreases the release of NETs. Moreover, azithromycin showed a concentration-dependent effect on respiratory burst in neutrophils. Chloramphenicol did not affect degranulation, apoptosis nor respiratory burst. It can be concluded that antibiotics modulate the ability of neutrophils to release NETs influencing human innate immunity.
Stereoscopic video generation based on efficient layered structure and motion estimation from a monoscopic image sequence

This paper presents a novel object-based method for the generation of a stereoscopic image sequence from a monoscopic video, using bidirectional two-dimensional motion estimation for the recovery of rigid motion and structure and a Bayesian framework to handle occlusions. The latter is based on extended Kalman filters and an efficient method for reliably tracking object masks. Experimental results show that the layered object scene representation, combined with the proposed algorithm for reliably tracking object masks throughout the sequence, yields very accurate results.
SEMISMOOTH METHODS FOR LINEAR AND NONLINEAR SECOND-ORDER CONE PROGRAMS

The optimality conditions of a nonlinear second-order cone program can be reformulated as a nonsmooth system of equations using a projection mapping. This allows the application of nonsmooth Newton methods for the solution of the nonlinear second-order cone program. Conditions for the local quadratic convergence of these nonsmooth Newton methods are investigated. Related conditions are also given for the special case of a linear second-order cone program. An interesting and important feature of these conditions is that they do not require strict complementarity of the solution.
Most Reported Genetic Associations With General Intelligence Are Probably False Positives

General intelligence (g) and virtually all other behavioral traits are heritable. Associations between g and specific single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in several candidate genes involved in brain function have been reported. We sought to replicate published associations between g and 12 specific genetic variants (in the genes DTNBP1, CTSD, DRD2, ANKK1, CHRM2, SSADH, COMT, BDNF, CHRNA4, DISC1, APOE, and SNAP25) using data sets from three independent, well-characterized longitudinal studies with samples of 5,571, 1,759, and 2,441 individuals. Of 32 independent tests across all three data sets, only 1 was nominally significant. By contrast, power analyses showed that we should have expected 10 to 15 significant associations, given reasonable assumptions for genotype effect sizes. For positive controls, we confirmed accepted genetic associations for Alzheimer’s disease and body mass index, and we used SNP-based calculations of genetic relatedness to replicate previous estimates that about half of the variance in g is accounted for by common genetic variation among individuals. We conclude that the molecular genetics of psychology and social science requires approaches that go beyond the examination of candidate genes.
Group Linkage

Poor quality data is prevalent in databases due to a variety of reasons, including transcription errors, lack of standards for recording database fields, etc. To be able to query and integrate such data, considerable recent work has focused on the record linkage problem, i.e., determine if two entities represented as relational records are approximately the same. Often entities are represented as groups of relational records, rather than individual relational records, e.g., households in a census survey consist of a group of persons. We refer to the problem of determining if two entities represented as groups are approximately the same as group linkage. Intuitively, two groups can be linked to each other if (i) there is high enough similarity between "matching" pairs of individual records that constitute the two groups, and (ii) there is a large fraction of such matching record pairs. In this paper, we formalize this intuition and propose a group linkage measure based on bipartite graph matching. Given a data set consisting of a large number of groups, efficiently finding groups with a high group linkage similarity to an input query group requires quickly eliminating the many groups that are unlikely to be desired matches. To enable this task, we present simpler group similarity measures that can be used either during fast pre-processing steps or as approximations to our proposed group linkage measure. These measures can be easily instantiated using SQL, permitting our techniques to be implemented inside the database system itself. We experimentally validate the utility of our measures and techniques using a variety of real and synthetic data sets.
UrbanFlow: Large-scale Framework to Integrate Social Media and Authoritative Landuse Maps

Everyday massive amounts of geo-tagged information are generated around urban environment using micro-blogging services and content sharing platforms. These new Big Geospatial Data sources provide an opportunity to understand people activities and their interaction with the urban environment. In this regard, it is crucial to integrate geo-tagged micro-data with more authoritative sources such as official landuse maps. This integration would benefit the urban research community by combining real time information about people activities and their spatial interaction with the synoptic view of physical infrastructure as depicted in official landuse maps. However, the scientific effort for integrating heterogeneous data sources is hindered by the lack of scalable Geospatial synthesis capabilities to accommodate the massive volume and fast update of microdata. We developed UrbanFlow, a platform to integrate geolocated Twitter data with detailed landuse map (parcel level) to detect and analyze individual human mobility patterns. The platform provides scientists with a set of tools to extract key locations of each Twitter user, assess the extraction quality and uncertainty, and analyze city neighbors' connectivity based on detected users' frequent visitation patterns. These capabilities are built on a novel scalable solution for the point in/nearest polygon algorithm, implemented on Hadoop to harness the power of distributed systems to combine massive point data and large number of polygon in scale-out fashion. Our results showed that we are able to effectively process large data stream of Twitter data (2.42 billion tweets) and synthesize that with highly detailed landuse map (468,641 parcels for the city of Chicago).
Agreement Formation in International Public Goods Provision with Heterogeneous Agents

The provision of international public goods, such as financial stability, international security or environmental protection, has been salient in international negotiations over the past decades. International public goods have the property that all countries benefit from aggregate provisions, while the costs are only carried by those actually providing. For instance, a country’s provision of military forces to a peace keeping mission also benefits countries that do not participate in the mission. Or, if some countries invest in clean technology and enforce strict regulations with respect to greenhouse gas emissions, all countries benefit from reduced pollution on a global scale while only those countries investing in emission reduction pay the costs.
Automatic face detection system for street view images

As street view images have been widely used in digital maps, detecting and blurring faces in these images for privacy protection is highly needed. In this paper, an automatic face detection system for street view images is constructed. Firstly, image pre-processing is used to increase image's global contrast. Then, head-shoulder detection based on combined-HOG features is applied to locate faces roughly. After that, multi-angle face detection and Bayes face detection based on skin segmentation are used to get faces' locations precisely from the located head-shoulder regions. Experiments conducted show high precision and robustness of the system.
Single element excitation and detection of (micro-)mechanical resonators

The authors describe a single-element approach for the excitation and detection of the vibrational motion of (micro-)mechanical resonators. An equivalent electrical one-port network is derived for an electrostatically and a piezoelectrically driven resonator. In this way, the effect of the mechanical resonator is transformed into the electrical domain and can easily be accounted for in a circuit simulation. A detection circuit, based on an (on-chip) bridged design, is proposed as a way to compensate for the parasitic parallel load of the one-port. A criterion is given for the accepted level of unbalance of the bridge if a minimal phase shift of 90 degrees in the transfer characteristic around resonance is required. <<ETX>>
Analyzing Millions of Lines of Code with Sparse Flow-Sensitive Pointer Analysis

Many program analyses perform better and produce more preci se results when they are given precise pointer information. On e dimension of precision is flow-sensitive pointer analysis (i. e., an analysis that respects a program’s control-flow), which has been shown to be useful for important applications such as program veri ficat on and understanding, among others. However, this type of poin ter analysis has historically been unable to scale to programs w ith hundreds of thousands of lines of code. We present a new interprocedural flow-sensitive pointer ana lysis that has significantly better performance than the curre nt stateof-the-art. There are two key ideas behind our algorithm: (1 ) We stagethe pointer analysis by first running a flow-insensitive auxiliary pointer analysis that produces conservative def-us information; the primary flow-sensitive analysis can then employ a s p r e analysis that efficiently propagates pointer information a cross these conservative def-use chains; and (2) we exploit a novel noti o of equivalence calledaccess equivalence , which allows the algorithm to efficiently apply the conservative def-use information f or the sparse analysis even when the conservative nature of the aux iliary analysis produces a huge amount of def-use information. Tog ether, these techniques produce the first flow-sensitive pointer an alysis that can analyze a C program with 1.9M lines of code, an order o f magnitude improvement over the previous state-of-the-art .
Modeling and Rendering a Nighttime Bear and River Scene

For our final project, we created a scene with a scene with a bear in a riverbed at night. We wanted to highlight the fur of the bear, so we implemented the Marschner model, which consists of the highlight lobes. We modeled our scene in Maya and 3ds Max, including an intricate fur geometry consisting of about 550,000 hair strands, where each strand consists of 7 cylinders. We also used a fluid simulation in Maya to generate our water geometry. Finally, we used volumetric scattering to create a “glowing” firefly. Various effects and artistic direction are used throughout to achieve the most visually appealing result.
Measuring and Mitigating Speckle Noise in Dual-Axis Confocal Microscopy Images

Speckle noise is a form of multiplicative noise that corrupts the quality of medical images. It is well described and studied in medical ultrasound imaging, but less attention has been paid to its presence in reflectance microscopy images. Presence of the speckle noise not only limits the application of further post-processing and computer vision techniques, like edge detection, but it also makes diagnostics more difficult and less reliable for physicians. Many speckle mitigation techniques have been studied by various researchers, but the vast majority of them limit themselves to a single image of the target tissue. In this study, we examined the possibility to mitigate speckle using the redundant data present in consecutive frames of the video recordings, as they provide uncorrelated data from different spatial positions. Different ways of processing the redundant data were examined and compared against conventional methodologies.
Dual Band Meander Line Antenna for Wireless LAN Communication

A printed meander line antenna is described with a shaped ground plane and a back coupled rectangular patch. The prototype is proposed for wireless local-area network (WLAN) applications in the 2.4-2.48GHz and 5.15-5.35 GHz frequency range. Dual-band operation, resonance impedance matching, and wide impedance bandwidth are the characteristics of the antenna. The antenna impedance matching for the first-resonance is provided by applying a shaped ground plane. The second even-mode resonance is generated by adding a rectangular patch at the back of the meander antenna. The impedance bandwidth for a return-loss less than -10 dB is 11% and 6% for the first- and the second-resonance, respectively. Furthermore, the second-resonance frequency can be tuned by the length of the rectangular patch and it meets the requirements for the IEEE 802.11a WLAN (5.15-5.35 GHz and 5.470-5.725 GHz or 5.725-5.825GHz). In fact, the second-resonance frequency can be continuously adjusted between 5.2 and 7 GHz with a little effect on the first-resonance
Development and investigation of the nanosensor-based apparatus to assess the psycho-emotional state of a person

Psycho-emotional state is one of the factors effecting human health. Its evaluation allows revealing hidden psychological trauma which can be reason of chronic stress, depression or psychosomatic disorders. Modern techniques of objective psycho-emotional state assessment involve a device which detects electrophysiological parameters of human body connected with emotional reaction and psychological condition. The present study covers development and testing of psycho-emotional state assessment device. The developed implement uses three methods of electrophysiological activity evaluation: electrocardiography, electroencephalography and galvanic skin response detection. The device represents hardware-software complex consisting of nanosensors, measuring unit, lead wires and laptop. Filters are excluded from the measuring circuit due to metrological parameters and noise immunity of implemented nanosensors. This solution minimizes signal distortion and allows measuring signals of 0.3 μV and higher in a wide frequency range (0-10000 Hz) with minimal data loss. In addition, results of preliminary medical studies aimed to find correspondence between different psycho-emotional states and electrophysiological parameters are described. Impact of filters on electrophysiological studies was studied. According to the results conventional filters significantly distort EEG channel information. Further research will be directed to the creation of complete base of electrophysiological parameters related to a particular emotion.
The DNA Polymerase Activity of Saccharomyces cerevisiae Rev1 is Biologically Significant

A cell's ability to tolerate DNA damage is directly connected to the human development of diseases and cancer. To better understand the processes underlying mutagenesis, we studied the cell's reliance on the potentially error-prone translesion synthesis (TLS), and an error-free, template-switching pathway in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The primary proteins mediating S. cerevisiae TLS are three DNA polymerases (Pols): Rev1, Pol ζ (Rev3/7), and Pol η (Rad30), all with human homologs. Rev1's noncatalytic role in recruiting other DNA polymerases is known to be important for TLS. However, the biological significance of Rev1's unusual conserved DNA polymerase activity, which inserts dC, is much less well understood. Here, we demonstrate that inactivating Rev1's DNA polymerase function sensitizes cells to both chronic and acute exposure to 4-nitroquinoline-1-oxide (4-NQO) but not to UV or cisplatin. Full Rev1-dependent resistance to 4-NQO, however, also requires the additional Rev1 functions. When error-free tolerance is disrupted through deletion of MMS2, Rev1's catalytic activity is more vital for 4-NQO resistance, possibly explaining why the biological significance of Rev1's catalytic activity has been elusive. In the presence or absence of Mms2-dependent error-free tolerance, the catalytic dead strain of Rev1 exhibits a lower 4-NQO–induced mutation frequency than wild type. Furthermore, Pol ζ, but not Pol η, also contributes to 4-NQO resistance. These results show that Rev1's catalytic activity is important in vivo when the cell has to cope with specific DNA lesions, such as N2-dG.
OUTPUT FEEDBACK STOCHASTIC STABILIZATION OF ACTIVE FAULT TOLERANT CONTROL SYSTEMS: LMI FORMULATION

Abstract In this paper, we address the dynamic output feedback control problem of continuous time active fault tolerant control system with Markovian parameters (AFTCSMP). We will first derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the exponential stability in the mean square of the AFTCSMP under a dynamic output feedback control, in terms of coupled matrix inequalities, and then we will give an LMI (Linear Matrix Inequalities) characterization of dynamical compensators that stabilize the closed-loop system in the mean square sense.
Efficient Algorithms and Error Analysis for the Modified Nystrom Method

Many kernel methods suffer from high time and space complexities and are thus prohibitive in big-data applications. To tackle the computational challenge, the Nystr\"om method has been extensively used to reduce time and space complexities by sacrificing some accuracy. The Nystr\"om method speedups computation by constructing an approximation of the kernel matrix using only a few columns of the matrix. Recently, a variant of the Nystr\"om method called the modified Nystr\"om method has demonstrated significant improvement over the standard Nystr\"om method in approximation accuracy, both theoretically and empirically. In this paper, we propose two algorithms that make the modified Nystr\"om method practical. First, we devise a simple column selection algorithm with a provable error bound. Our algorithm is more efficient and easier to implement than and nearly as accurate as the state-of-the-art algorithm. Second, with the selected columns at hand, we propose an algorithm that computes the approximation in lower time complexity than the approach in the previous work. Furthermore, we prove that the modified Nystr\"om method is exact under certain conditions, and we establish a lower error bound for the modified Nystr\"om method.