Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tension Bounds for Information Complexity

The main contribution of this work is to relate information complexity to "tension" [Prabhakaran and Prabhakaran, 2014] - an information-theoretic quantity defined with no reference to protocols - and to illustrate that it allows deriving strong lower-bounds on information complexity. In particular, we use a very special case of this connection to give a quantitatively tighter connection between information complexity and discrepancy than the one in the work of Braverman and Weinstein (2012) (albeit, restricted to independent inputs). Further, as tension is in fact a multi-dimensional notion, it enables us to bound the 2-dimensional region that represents the trade-off between the amounts of communication in the two directions in a 2-party protocol. This work is also intended to highlight tension as a fundamental measure of correlation between a pair of random variables, with rich connections to a variety of questions in computer science and information theory.
COI barcodes and phylogeny of doves (Columbidae family)

Cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene has been recognized as an authentic tool for species identification. Besides its potential barcoding capacity, COI sequences have also been used for inferring the phylogeny. Phylogenetic relationships among genera of Columbidae (pigeons and doves family) have not been fully resolved because of scarce sampling of taxa and limited availability of sequence data. In this study, we have evaluated the efficiency of COI barcodes for species identification and phylogenetic analysis of various doves. We sequenced the 693 bp region of COI gene of three species of doves including Oena capensis, Streptopelia decaocto, and Streptopelia senegalensis. After retrieving the relevant sequences from the GenBank, the entire data-set of 85 sequences represented 25 dove species from 11 different genera of the family Columbidae. The COI sequences of four species including Chalcophaps indica (two specimens), Columbina inca (five specimens), Geopelia striata (three specimens), and Macropygia phasianella (three specimens) were identical. The mean intraspecific base differences ranged from 0 to 37 while the P-distances ranged between 0 and 0.058. For most of the species, the P-distances were ≤ 0.008. Phylogenetic analysis differentiated the taxa into three major clusters. One of the clusters grouped five genera including Claravis, Columbina, Gallicolumba, Geopelia, and Geotrygon. The remaining two clusters grouped three genera each including Chalcophaps, Oena, and Turtur in one cluster and Macropygia, Streptopelia, and Zenaida in another cluster. Further sub-clustering clearly separated all the genera into individual clusters except two discrepancies for the genera Streptopelia and Turtur. Species-level cladistics clearly separated all the species into distinctive clades. In conclusion, COI barcoding is a powerful tool for species identification with added information on phylogenetic inference. The finding of this study will help to understand the complex phylogeny of the family Columbidae.
Image restoration with Poisson–Gaussian mixed noise

This study focuses on the image denoising and deconvolution problem in case of mixed Gaussian–Poisson noise. By using a maximum a posteriori estimator, we derive a new variational formulation whose minimisation provides the desired restored image. The new functional is composed of the total variation (TV) regularisation term, the Kullback–Leibler divergence term for Poisson noise and the norm fidelity term for Gaussian noise. We consider a dual formulation for the TV term, thus changing the minimisation into a minimax problem. A fast iterative algorithm is derived by using the proximal point method to compute the saddle point of the minimax problem. We show the capability of our model both on synthetic examples and on real images of low-count fluorescence microscopy.
Interferon signalling network in innate defence

Interferons (IFNs) elicit multifaceted effects in host innate defence. Accumulating evidence revealed that not only the first identified Jak‐Stat pathway but also other newly found signalling pathways are required for the induction of versatile responses by IFNs. In particular, type I IFNs are inducible by viral infection through the recognition of pathogen‐associated molecules by pattern recognition receptors, and the induction of multiple IFN‐stimulated genes through the activation of type I IFN signalling confers antiviral and immunomodulatory activities. Any step in this process is often targeted by viruses for their immuno‐evasion. The regulatory function of constitutive IFN‐α/β signalling has been recognized in terms of its boosting effect on cellular responsiveness in host defence systems. Further comprehensive understanding of IFN signalling may offer a better direction to unravelling the complex signalling networks in the host defence system, and may contribute to their more effective therapeutic applications.
Android-based object recognition for the visually impaired

The large number of blind and visually impaired individuals in the society has motivated research groups to search for smart solutions that use vision-based technologies to improve their quality of life. This paper describes an Android-based application for object recognition developed to help the blind understand their environment better. This application is based on extracting local features of the object of interest, which are then matched to the corresponding features of objects saved in a knowledge base previously created. The local features are tested against more than one classification method and the results are analyzed. Deploying the application to a Samsung Galaxy Tab, the system is evaluated using a dataset especially developed for this purpose. The dataset contains more than 600 images of twelve objects under several distortions and viewing condition changes. Results of the analysis show that the system achieves real-time performance with high accuracy under most viewing conditions.
Exocytotic Release of ATP from Cultured Astrocytes*

Astrocytes appear to communicate with each other as well as with neurons via ATP. However, the mechanisms of ATP release are controversial. To explore whether stimuli that increase [Ca2+]i also trigger vesicular ATP release from astrocytes, we labeled ATP-containing vesicles with the fluorescent dye quinacrine, which exhibited a significant co-localization with atrial natriuretic peptide. The confocal microscopy study revealed that quinacrine-loaded vesicles displayed mainly non-directional spontaneous mobility with relatively short track lengths and small maximal displacements, whereas 4% of vesicles exhibited directional mobility. After ionomycin stimulation only non-directional vesicle mobility could be observed, indicating that an increase in [Ca2+]i attenuated vesicle mobility. Total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) imaging in combination with epifluorescence showed that a high percentage of fluorescently labeled vesicles underwent fusion with the plasma membrane after stimulation with glutamate or ionomycin and that this event was Ca2+-dependent. This was confirmed by patch-clamp studies on HEK-293T cells transfected with P2X3 receptor, used as sniffers for ATP release from astrocytes. Glutamate stimulation of astrocytes was followed by an increase in the incidence of small transient inward currents in sniffers, reminiscent of postsynaptic quantal events observed at synapses. Their incidence was highly dependent on extracellular Ca2+. Collectively, these findings indicate that glutamate-stimulated ATP release from astrocytes was most likely exocytotic and that after stimulation the fraction of quinacrine-loaded vesicles, spontaneously exhibiting directional mobility, disappeared.
Adaptive coded CPM

In this paper we consider multiuser communication systems in which coded continuous-phase modulation (CPM) is used. Users share the same spectrum through a frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) scheme in which a tight intercarrier frequency spacing is used in order to achieve a high spectral efficiency. As a consequence, each user link experiences intercarrier interference (ICI). We propose a new iterative method for inter-carrier interference (ICI) cancellation and exploit it to design adaptive multiuser frequency-multiplexed CPM systems that achieve a high spectral efficiency.
Multicoordinated Paxos

Classic Paxos is a round-based distributed consensus algorithm. Normally, proposals are sent to the round leader and decided in two communication steps more. Fast Paxos extends Classic Paxos by allowing also fast rounds, in which a decision can be learned in two communication steps without relying on a leader but requiring bigger quorums. We extend Fast Paxos and allow yet another sort of round with multiple quorums of coordinators. Such new rounds have the same expected latency and quorum size requirements as classic rounds but do not rely on a single leader, providing better availability and allowing load balance. Fast rounds and ours have a different liveness requirement: the absence of collisions—which may happen if different values are proposed concurrently. However, collisions are inherently more expensive in fast rounds. We apply our algorithm to Generalized Consensus, a generalization of agreement problems that can use the application semantics to avoid
Using nanofluids to enhance the operation of solar energy systems

Nanofluids have garnered a lot of attention for their potential to modify thermal properties, particularly the thermal conductivity. While these modifications have been heavily investigated within the heat transfer and materials community, nanofluids additionally offer the potential for major modification to the radiative properties of the host fluid. Of particular interest here is how the modification of the radiative properties of fluids through nanoparticle dispersions can lead to enhanced energy conversion in systems dependent on radiative transport. By adjusting the size, shape, material, volume fraction and particle structure drastic modification can be achieved leading to enhanced efficiency within systems such as solar collectors, and night sky radiators. A summary review of the mechanisms that lead to enhanced efficiency are presented as well as new topics such as dynamic radiative property control with coreshell multifunctional nanoparticles.
Bridge the Gap of Codification and Personalization Strategies: Gain and Lost of Knowledge Management of Postgraduate Student Project Meetings

It is acknowledged that knowledge management (KM) brings several benefits for an organization, and two types of knowledge management strategies exist: Codification and personalization, and a gap exisits between both strategies. In this paper, the context of KM is placed on the campus of higher education. A knowledge capturing tool, in the form of a tablet based APP, is introduced to capture problem solving knowledge during a student project meeting. This tool intends to propose a new way of technology support to codify knowledge during socialization. A series of comparative experiments were undertaken to investigate the APP's influence on users' meeting experiences. This paper will present results based on interviews with the participants, which showed both positive and negative effects of the APP usage on their meeting experience.
Reflective Practice Within Elite Consultancy: Diary Extracts and Further Discussion on a Personal and Elusive Process

This paper examines reflective practice by illustrating and commenting upon aspects of an elite sport psychology practitioner’s reflective processes. Extracts from a practitioner’s reflective diary, maintained during attendance at a major sporting event, focused upon issues that relate to on-going relationships and com-munication with fellow practitioners and athletes. Authors one and three offered subsequent comment on these accounts to facilitate movement toward critical reflection via an intrapersonal process creating considerations for the practitioners with regard to skills and personal development. These issues are discussed in rela-tion to pragmatic topics such as “staged” and “layered” reflection encouraged by author collaboration and shared writing within the present paper. We argue these outcomes against more philosophical/opaque considerations such as the progres-sion of critical reflection and critical social science.
A temperature dependent measurement of the carrier velocity vs. electric field characteristic for as-grown and H-intercalated epitaxial graphene on SiC

A technique for the measurement of the electron velocity versus electric field is demonstrated on as-grown and H-intercalated graphene. Van der Pauw, coplanar microbridge, and coplanar TLM structures are fabricated in order to assess the carrier mobility, carrier concentration, sheet resistance, and contact resistance of both epi-materials. These measurements are then combined with dynamic IV measurements to extract a velocity-field characteristic. The saturated electron velocity measurements indicate a value of 2.33 x 10(7)cm/s for the as-grown material and 1: 36 x 10(7)cm/s for the H-intercalated material at 300 K. Measurements are taken as a function of temperature from 100K to 325K in order to estimate the optical phonon energy E-so of 4H-SiC by assuming an impurity scattering model. The extracted values of E-so are 97 meV for the as-grown sample and 115 meV for the H-intercalated sample. The H-intercalated result correlates to the anticipated value of 116 meV for 4H-SiC, while the as-grown value is significantly below the expected value. Therefore, we hypothesize that the transport properties of epitaxial graphene on SiC are influenced both by intercalation and by remote phonon scattering with the SiC substrate.
The Mechanism of Ciliary Stimulation by Acetylcholine

Stimulation of ciliary cells through muscarinic receptors leads to a strong biphasic enhancement of ciliary beat frequency (CBF). The main goal of this work is to delineate the chain of molecular events that lead to the enhancement of CBF induced by acetylcholine (ACh). Here we show that the Ca2+, cGMP, and cAMP signaling pathways are intimately interconnected in the process of cholinergic ciliary stimulation. ACh induces profound time-dependent increase in cGMP and cAMP concentrations mediated by the calcium–calmodulin complex. The initial strong CBF enhancement in response to ACh is mainly governed by PKG and elevated calcium. The second phase of CBF enhancement induced by ACh, a stable moderately elevated CBF, is mainly regulated by PKA in a Ca2+-independent manner. Inhibition of either guanylate cyclase or of PKG partially attenuates the response to ACh of [Ca2+]i, but completely abolishes the response of CBF. Inhibition of PKA moderately attenuates and significantly shortens the responses to ACh of both [Ca2+]i and CBF. In addition, PKA facilitates the elevation in [Ca2+]i and cGMP levels induced by ACh, whereas an unimpeded PKG activity is essential for CBF enhancement mediated by either Ca2+ or PKA.
Positioning range extension gateways in mobile ad hoc wireless networks to improve connectivity and throughput

The dynamic nature of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) may result in a cluster of nodes being isolated from the remaining network, especially when deployed in a terrain with blockages. In order to facilitate scalability and to provide connectivity between partitions that might occur in wireless networks as a consequence of mobility, we can envision a 'range extension' network that consists of airborne communication platforms, or geostationary/low-Earth-orbit satellites. These airborne/satellite nodes maintain communication links with specific 'gateway' nodes among the mobile ground nodes. To communicate with a node that is geographically distant or belongs to a different network partition, an ad hoc node can relay its data packets through an appropriate mobile gateway and via the range extension network. If we envision that the MANET is divided into different groups and a mobile gateway is deployed for each such group, an objective then is to determine the trajectory of the mobile gateway to best serve the ad hoc group to which it belongs, in terms of network performance metrics such as throughput and latency. In this paper, this problem of computing the optimal position for a gateway is reduced to a linear optimization problem by means of some simplifying but realistic assumptions. We suggest methods that may be deployed to enable the gateway to follow this optimal trajectory as closely as possible (within the practical constraints imposed by its velocity and maneuverability). Simulation results for various scenarios show a 10-15% improvement in the throughput and latency, per gateway domain, if a gateway has a dynamic trajectory whose locus follows the computed optimal position, as compared to a gateway that is statically placed at a regular position, or to a gateway that has a random trajectory.
CREDO: a web-based tool for computational detection of conserved sequence motifs in noncoding sequences

SUMMARY CREDO is a user-friendly, web-based tool that integrates the analysis and results of different algorithms widely used for the computational detection of conserved sequence motifs in noncoding sequences. It enables easy comparison of the individual results. CREDO offers intuitive interfaces for easy and rapid configuration of the applied algorithms and convenient views on the results in graphical and tabular formats. AVAILABILITY http://mips.gsf. de/proj/regulomips/credo.htm.
Organisational knowledge management capability: a multi case study

Literature concerning knowledge management KM and its effectiveness or capability does various attempts and discussion on concepts namely, explicit and tacit knowledge, knowledge work, knowledge worker, knowledge assets and knowledge infrastructure, etc., but none of the extant studies could elaborate the applicability of these components in an organisation to achieve a knowledge management capability from a real time perspective. So this research gap asks some important research question viz.: 1 What are the components of a KM capability in an organisation? 2 What are the characteristics of these components? 3 Which is the most important component of an organisational KM capability? These issues necessitate a multi-case study to explore the components and characteristics that influence the achievement of KM capability in a knowledge intensive firm. The results confirm the proposed model and suggest that KM capability is mandated in knowledge intensive firm, and its consequences can be classified in to two major types of outcome, such as 'immediate benefits' and 'final outcome'. Study implications, limitations and suggestions for future research are also discussed.
Design of variable loop gains of dual-loop DPLL

An approach to the derivation of variable loop gain sequences of dual-loop digital phase-locked loop (DPLL) is developed based on some modifications of the Kalman filtering formulation. It is shown that optimal loop gain sequences which are independent of measurement noise statistics can be obtained under a deterministic source model. Computer simulation results demonstrate that the adaptive dual-loop DPLL designed by using the proposed method is more robust to noise variations than the adaptive DPLL of Driessen (see ibid., vol.47, p.673-75, 1994).
A physical model for efficient ranking in networks

A simple physical model enables rapid detection and extraction of linear hierarchies in large networks. We present a physically inspired model and an efficient algorithm to infer hierarchical rankings of nodes in directed networks. It assigns real-valued ranks to nodes rather than simply ordinal ranks, and it formalizes the assumption that interactions are more likely to occur between individuals with similar ranks. It provides a natural statistical significance test for the inferred hierarchy, and it can be used to perform inference tasks such as predicting the existence or direction of edges. The ranking is obtained by solving a linear system of equations, which is sparse if the network is; thus, the resulting algorithm is extremely efficient and scalable. We illustrate these findings by analyzing real and synthetic data, including data sets from animal behavior, faculty hiring, social support networks, and sports tournaments. We show that our method often outperforms a variety of others, in both speed and accuracy, in recovering the underlying ranks and predicting edge directions.
Approximate intrinsic fourier analysis of speech

Popular parametric models of speech sounds such as the source-ﬁlter model provide a ﬁxed means of describing the variability inherent in speech waveform data. However, nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques such as the intrinsic Fourier analysis method of Jansen and Niyogi provide a more ﬂexible means of adaptively estimating such structure directly from data. Here we employ this approach to learn a low-dimensional manifold whose geometry is meant to reﬂect the structure implied by the human speech production system. We derive a novel algorithm to efﬁciently learn this manifold for the case of many training examples—the setting of both greatest practical interest and computational difﬁculty. We then demonstrate the utility of our method by way of a proof-of-concept phoneme identiﬁcation system that operates effectively in the intrinsic Fourier domain.
Maximum Data Rate Power Allocation for MIMO Spatial Multiplexing Systems with Imperfect CSI

In MIMO systems, spatial multiplexing is a powerful technique for increasing channel capacity by transmitting multiple data streams in the same channel simultaneously. Moreover, additional performance can be extracted in the presence of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. However, channel estimation error usually exists in practical systems and leads to imperfect CSI. As a result, the system performance is degraded. Fortunately power allocation can mitigate the problem effectively. In this paper, the power allocation problem is investigated in the case of imperfect CSI with accurate system model. A greedy power allocation (GPA) algorithm with adaptive modulation scheme is proposed to maximize the system data rate while satisfying each data stream's bit error rate requirement. Simulation results show that GPA can reduce the effects of imperfect CSI and obtain better performance than other traditional algorithms, e.g. waterfilling and equal power allocation algorithms.
A Cross-Layer MAC Mechanism to Solve Performance Anomaly in MANET

Since the IEEE 802.11 standard supports multiple data rates at the physical layer, many rate adaptation mechanisms have been proposed to utilize this multi-rate capability by dynamically switching rates in response to different channel conditions. In IEEE 802.11b networks, the guarantee of an equal transmission opportunity for all participating nodes results in performance anomaly. Traditional solutions have some limitations when solving performance anomaly, especially when dealing with multi-hop networks. Competition in ad hoc networks usually occurs between multi-hop paths. However, competitive nodes’ data rates could not reflect the whole competitive paths’ rate information. In this paper, we propose a new cross-layer MAC mechanism, which allows nodes acquire the whole path’s rate information by exchanging information between MAC and Routing layer. We estimate each path’s competitive level, which represents the whole path’s data transmission capability, and use it as the criteria for allocating the channel. When collision happens, nodes on the path with higher competitive level have a more time share of channel. We evaluate the performance of our mechanism on the network simulator NS-2. Compared with RBAR, by solving performance anomaly in multi-hop networks, the proposed protocol can increase the aggregate throughput by 5%-15% while decreasing the average end-to-end delay by 30%.