Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic architecture of sensory exploitation: QTL mapping of female and male receiver traits in an acoustic moth

The evolution of extravagant sexual traits by sensory exploitation occurs if males incidentally evolve features that stimulate females owing to a pre‐existing environmental response that arose in the context of natural selection. The sensory exploitation process is thus expected to leave a specific genetic imprint, a pleiotropic control of the original environmental response and the novel sexual response in females. However, females may be subsequently selected to improve their discrimination of environmental and sexual stimuli. Accordingly, responses may have diverged and the original genetic architecture may have been modified. These possibilities may be considered by studying the genetic architecture of responses to male signals and to the environmental stimuli that were purportedly ‘exploited’ by those signals. However, no previous study has addressed the genetic control of sensory exploitation. We investigated this question in an acoustic pyralid moth, Achroia grisella, in which a male ultrasonic song attracts females and perception of ultrasound likely arose in the context of detecting predatory bats. We examined the genetic architecture of female response to bat echolocation signals and to male song via a cartographic study of quantitative trait loci (QTL) influencing these receiver traits. We found several QTL for both traits, but none of them were colocalized on the same chromosomes. These results indicate that – to the extent to which male A. grisella song originated by the process of sensory exploitation – some modification of the female responses occurred since the origin of the male signal.
MLPNN based handwritten character recognition using combined feature extraction

Statistical techniques for off-line character recognition are not flexible and adaptive enough for new handwriting constraints. Offline handwritten character recognition of English alphabets using a three layered feed forward neural network is presented in this paper. The proposed recognition system describes the evaluation of feed forward neural network by combining four different feature extraction approaches(box approach, diagonal distance approach, mean and gradient operations). The proposed recognition system performs well on the benchmark dataset CEDAR (Centre of Excellence for Document Analysis And Recognition).
Exploiting visa for higher concurrency in safe real-time systems

Worst-case execution times (WCET) of tasks are essential for safe scheduling in hard real-time systems. However, contemporary processors exceed the capabilities of static worst-case timing analysis tools. The Virtual Simple Architecture (VISA) framework shifts the burden of bounding the WCET of tasks, in part, to hardware. A VISA is the pipeline timing specification of a hypothetical simple processor. WCET is derived for a task assuming the VISA. Nonetheless, at run-time, the task is executed speculatively on an unsafe complex processor, and its progress is continuously gauged. If continued safe progress appears to be in jeopardy, the complex processor is reconfigured to a simple mode of operation that directly implements the VISA, thereby explicitly bounding the task's overall execution time by the WCET. In practice, the complex processor finishes tasks much faster than an explicitly-safe simple processor, creating significant slack in the task schedule. In previous work, this slack was exploited to safely lower frequency/voltage for power savings, in systems with only periodic hard-real-time tasks. In mixed systems with periodic and sporadic hard-real-time tasks, as well as soft-real-time tasks, the slack can be exploited for higher throughput and, hence, increased functionality/quality-of-service. This paper explores the throughput benefits enabled by the VISA framework, using both single-threaded and simultaneous multithreading processors. Using 10 tasksets composed from the C-lab benchmark suite (for periodic and sporadic hard-real-time tasks) and MPEG (for soft-real-time tasks), we show that 2.4-16 times more sporadic tasks are accepted using a VISA-protected complex processor versus an explicitlysafe simple processor. No MPEG frames are dropped by the complex processor whereas 67-93% of frames are dropped by the simple processor. Another contribution is demonstrating the feasibility of the
Alternating coding for universal variable length code

Variable length code (VLC) is used in a large variety of lossless compression applications. A specially designed VLC, called "universal variable length code" (UVLC), is utilized in the latest video coding standard H.26L under development. In this work we propose a new coding method under the name "alternating coding" (ALT coding) and apply it to the UVLC. The ALT coded UVLC yields the same high coding efficiency as the original UVLC, but ALT coding also enables immediate decoding, immediate error detection and location in a UVLC packet. It improves the error resiliency and error robustness of the UVLC packet by applying an "error speculation". Results show that the ALT coded UVLC packet always outperforms the original UVLC packet in terms of error resiliency and robustness. Moreover, the simple pattern of ALT coded UVLC can greatly simplify the UVLC decoder architecture and therefore enables small, fast, and low-power decoder design.
Differential Modulation of Photosynthesis, Signaling, and Transcriptional Regulation between Tolerant and Sensitive Tomato Genotypes under Cold Stress

The wild species Solanum habrochaites is more cold tolerant than the cultivated tomato (S. lycopersicum). To explore the mechanisms underlying cold tolerance of S. habrochaites, seedlings of S. habrochaites LA1777 introgression lines (ILs), as well as the two parents, were evaluated under low temperature (4°C). The IL LA3969 and its donor parent LA1777 were found to be more cold tolerant than the recurrent parent S. lycopersicum LA4024. The differences in physiology and global gene expression between cold-tolerant (LA1777 and LA3969) and -sensitive (LA4024) genotypes under cold stress were further investigated. Comparative transcriptome analysis identified 1613, 1456, and 1523 cold-responsive genes in LA1777, LA3969, and LA4024, respectively. Gene ontology (GO) term enrichment analysis revealed that more GO biological process terms were significantly enriched among the up-regulated genes in the two tolerant genotypes, whereas more biological processes were significantly repressed by cold stress in the sensitive one. A total of 92 genes with significant differential expression between tolerant and sensitive genotypes under cold stress were identified. Among these, many stress-related GO terms were significantly enriched, such as ‘response to stimulus’ and ‘response to stress’. Moreover, GO terms ‘response to hormone stimulus’, ‘response to reactive oxygen species (ROS)’, and ‘calcium-mediated signaling’ were also overrepresented. Several transcripts involved in hormone or ROS homeostasis were also differentially expressed. ROS, hormones, and calcium as signaling molecules may play important roles in regulating gene expression in response to cold stress. Moreover, the expression of various transcription factors, post-translational proteins, metabolic enzymes, and photosynthesis-related genes was also specifically modulated. These specific modifications may play pivotal roles in conferring cold tolerance in tomato. These results not only provide new insights into the molecular mechanisms of cold tolerance in tomato, but also provide potential candidate genes for genetic improvement.
Atherosclerotic Plaque Inflammation Varies Between Vascular Sites and Correlates With Response to Inhibition of Lipoprotein‐Associated Phospholipase A2

Background Despite systemic exposure to risk factors, the circulatory system develops varying patterns of atherosclerosis for unclear reasons. In a porcine model, we investigated the relationship between site‐specific lesion development and inflammatory pathways involved in the coronary arteries (CORs) and distal abdominal aortas (AAs). Methods and Results Diabetes mellitus (DM) and hypercholesterolemia (HC) were induced in 37 pigs with 3 healthy controls. Site‐specific plaque development was studied by comparing plaque severity, macrophage infiltration, and inflammatory gene expression between CORs and AAs of 17 DM/HC pigs. To assess the role of lipoprotein‐associated phospholipase A2 (Lp‐PLA2) in plaque development, 20 DM/HC pigs were treated with the Lp‐PLA2 inhibitor darapladib and compared with the 17 DM/HC untreated pigs. DM/HC caused site‐specific differences in plaque severity. In the AAs, normalized plaque area was 4.4‐fold higher (P<0.001) and there were more fibroatheromas (9 of the 17 animals had a fibroatheroma in the AA and not the COR, P=0.004), while normalized macrophage staining area was 1.5‐fold higher (P=0.011) compared with CORs. DM/HC caused differential expression of 8 of 87 atherosclerotic genes studied, including 3 important in inflammation with higher expression in the CORs. Darapladib‐induced attenuation of normalized plaque area was site‐specific, as CORs responded 2.9‐fold more than AAs (P=0.045). Conclusions While plaque severity was worse in the AAs, inflammatory genes and inflammatory pathways that use Lp‐PLA2 were more important in the CORs. Our results suggest fundamental differences in inflammation between vascular sites, an important finding for the development of novel anti‐inflammatory therapeutics.
A Framework for Spelling Correction in Persian Language Using Noisy Channel Model

There are several methods offered for spelling correction in Farsi (Persian) Language. Unfortunately no powerful framework has been implemented because of lack of a large training set in Farsi as an accurate model. A training set consisting of erroneous and related correction string pairs have been obtained from a large number of instances of the books each of which were typed two times in Computer Research Center of Islamic Sciences. We trained our error model using this huge set. In testing part after finding erroneous words in sample text, our program proposes some candidates for related correction. The paper focuses on describing the method of ranking related corrections. This method is customized version of Noisy Channel Spelling Correction for Farsi. This ranking method attempts to find intended correction c from a typo t, that maximizes P(c) P(t | c). In this paper different methods are described and analyzed to obtain a wide overview of the field. Our evaluation results show that Noisy Channel Model using our corpus and training set in this framework works more accurately and improves efficiently in comparison with other methods.
Portable packet processing modules for OS kernels

During the last 15 years we have been involved in the design and development of some extremely popular pieces of open source software. Two of them, the dummynet network emulator and the netmap framework, are available as kernel components for popular operating systems, and are widely used in several research and commercial projects. In this article we briefly describe the internals of the two systems, discuss the challenges in building kernel components that run on multiple operating systems, and analyze the difficulties in developing and maintaining open source software as part of one's academic activity.
A review of Quality of Service (QoS) driven dynamic Web service selection techniques

The increasing number of Web service providers throughout the globe, have produced numerous Web services providing the same or similar functionality. This necessitates the use of tools and techniques to search the suitable services available over the Web. The effective dynamic Web service selection mechanism is a challenging problem as the requester is involved in the selection having wide variety of requirements. Quality of Service (QoS) is one of the decisive factor in selecting the desired Web service for the requester. This paper reviews various QoS based Web service selection mechanisms and architectures which facilitate qualitatively optimal selection. The authors classify various selection mechanisms based on the nature of QoS requirements used for the selection. The paper also compares the performance of QoS based selection mechanisms with respect to a set of evaluation criterion.
Tontines for the Invincibles: Enticing Low Risks Into the Health Insurance Pool With an Idea From Insurance History and Behavioral Economics

Over one third of the uninsured adults in the U.S. below retirement age are between 19 and 29 years old. Young adults, especially men, often go without insurance, even when buying it is mandatory and sometimes even when it is a low cost employment benefit. This paper proposes a new form of health insurance targeted at this group—the “Young Invincibles”—those who (wrongly) believe that they don’t need health insurance because they won’t get sick. Our proposal offers a cash bonus to those who turn out to be right in their belief that they did not really need health insurance. The concept comes from the tontine life insurance that fueled the rise of the U.S. insurance industry in the late 19th Century. A largely forgotten casualty of the 1906 pacification of the life insurance industry, the tontine idea holds great promise for making health insurance attractive to the invincibles today. The tontine feature frames the health insurance purchase as a smart investment, rather than a way to spend money for something the customer does not think he needs. Tontines make insurance more attractive to the uninsured, without wasting funds by subsidizing those who are already covered. We identify a particular class of individuals (the invincibles), show how a specific cognitive bias accounts for their irrational behavior, and design an insurance mechanism (tontines or deferred dividends) to overcome the effects of this bias. The final sections of the paper offer an empirically calibrated pricing demonstration for a tontine health policy and an analysis of the legality of tontines in this context.
Charitable Giving: the Effects of Exogenous and Endogenous Status

Social status can affect charitable giving both exogenously and endogenously. Exogenously, individuals may change their giving behavior as a result of being endowed with status. Endogenously, status‐seeking individuals may give to charity to gain status. We conduct a charitable donation experiment that disentangles the two by varying (a) the social visibility of pre‐donation performance and (b) the social visibility of the donation. Performance‐visibility exogenously increases status of high‐performers while decreasing it for low‐performers, whereas donation‐visibility enables individuals to endogenously gain status through their contributions. We find that exogenous status significantly increases donations among high performers. By contrast, our evidence of endogenous status‐seeking behavior is at best weak.
Multiplex Detection of Homo- and Heterodimerization of G Protein-Coupled Receptors by Proximity Biotinylation

Dimerization of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) represents a potential mechanism by which GPCR functions are regulated. Several resonance energy transfer (RET)-based methods have revealed GPCR homo- and heterodimerization. However, interpretation of an increase in FRET efficiency could be attributed to either dimerization/oligomerization events or conformational changes within an already dimerized/oligomerized receptor complex. Furthermore, RET-based methods can only measure pairwise dimerization, and cannot easily achieve multiplex detection. In this study, we applied proximity-based biotinylation for detecting receptor dimerization by utilizing a specific enzyme-substrate pair that are fused to GPCRs. The biotin ligase BirA is fused to CXCR4 and site-specifically biotinylates an acceptor peptide (AP) in the presence of biotin. As a test case for our newly developed assay, we have characterized the homo-dimerization of chemokine receptor CXCR4 and heterodimerization of CXCR4 with CCR2 or CCR5. The degree of biotinylation varies with the amount of GPCR-AP as well as biotinylation time. Using enzyme/substrate receptor pairs and measuring receptor biotinylation, we demonstrate that CXCR4 can homo-dimerize and hetero-dimerize with CCR2 and CCR5. The effect of CXCL12, agonist for CXCR4, was found to decrease surface biotinylation of CXCR4-AP. This effect is due to a combination of CXCR4 endocytosis and stabilization of CXCR4 homodimers. Finally, when CXCR4-AP, CCR2-AP, and CCR5-AP were expressed together, we observed CXCR4-CXCR4 homodimers and CXCR4-CCR2 and CXCR4-CCR5 heterodimers. The newly developed assay opens new opportunity for multiplex detection for GPCR homo- and heterodimerization within the same cellular context.
Task adaptation of acoustic and language models based on large quantities of data

We investigate use of large amounts, over 1500 hours, of untran-scribed data recorded from a deployed conversational system to improve the acoustic and language models. The system that we considered allows users to perform transactions on their retirement accounts. Using all the untranscribed data we get over 19% relative improvement in word error rate over a baseline system. In contrast, a system built using 70 hours of transcribed data results in over 31% relative improvement.
Respondent-driven Sampling in the Real World

In many countries, HIV/AIDS infections are concentrated in 3 high-risk groups: injection drug users, sex workers, and men who have sex with men. Accurate information about disease prevalence and risk behaviors in these groups is therefore critical for designing and evaluating HIV prevention programs. Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a relatively new method that allows researchers to collect such information about “hidden” or “hard-to-reach” groups, and the work of McCreesh and colleagues provides an important contribution to our understanding of RDS. An RDS sample is collected through a peer-to-peer recruitment process, akin to “snowball sampling” and “link-tracing sampling. ” Once these data are collected, they might not be directly representative of the target population, and thus RDS also provides researchers a set of statistical procedures to adjust the observed data, with the hope that these adjustments will result in estimates that are more reflective of the target population. Given the importance of the public health problem and the limitations of available alternatives, respondent-driven sampling has been rapidly adopted by the international public health community. Despite its widespread use, however, little is currently known about the actual (as opposed to the theoretical) performance of RDS, and some recent research suggests cause for concern. Given this, many researchers may be left to wonder: How well does RDS actually work in the real world? Our limited ability to address this question is not for lack of effort; in the past, researchers have taken several approaches to the problem, and the paper of McCreesh et al is a new and important contribution to this stream of research. RDS as a method of data collection—what I will call “RDS sampling”—and RDS as a method of data analysis—what I will call “RDS inference”—were both introduced by Heckathorn in 1997. Although RDS sampling has remained largely unchanged, RDS inference has been an area of active research resulting in the RDS-I estimator, the RDS-II estimator, the RDS-MR estimator, the RDS-SS estimator, estimators currently in development, and several approaches to variance estimation. Previous efforts to assess the performance of RDS generally fall into 3 categories: (1) analytic results, (2) simulation studies, and (3) studies using data from hidden populations. Each of these approaches has strengths and weaknesses, but it can be helpful to consider them in terms of the trade-off between precision and relevance. Some approaches—analytic results and simulation studies—allow for precise, definitive conclusions (eg, under these 5 conditions, this estimator has these 3 properties), but these conclusions may be irrelevant to actual RDS studies because they could depend on assumptions that bear little relationship to what actually happens in practice. On the other hand, studies involving data from hidden populations, while certainly relevant, rarely yield precise, unequivocal results because the underlying truth is not known. The work of McCreesh et al, building on innovative work by Wejnert and Heckathorn, attempts
LACI: Lazy Associative Classification Using Information Gain

Associative classification method applies association rule mining technique in classification and achieves higher classification accuracy. However, it is a known fact that associative classification typically yields a large number of rules, from which a set of high quality rules are chosen to construct an efficient classifier. Hence, generating, ranking and selecting a small subset of high-quality rules without jeopardizing the classification accuracy is of prime importance but indeed a challenging task. Lazy learning associative classification method eliminates the need of constructing the classifier but suffers with high computation cost. This paper proposes lazy associative classification using Information gain where, the system first chooses the Information gained attribute from the training sample and computes highest subset probability and then it directly predicts the class label. This proposed method not only reduces the computation cost but also improves the classification accuracy. Experimental result shows that the proposed system outperforms the traditional associative classification methods and the existing lazy associative classification method.
Real-time non-photorealistic rendering

This paper summarizes techniques used for real-time non-photorealistic rendering (NPR). Currently most NPR images and animations are computed prior playback. This limits the possible uses of NPR imagery. It is however possible to overcome the computational barrier represented by NPR by clever usage of modern computer graphics hardware. For a sketched look the Appel silhouette edge tracing was optimized for minimal computation but good enough accuracy for real-time rendering. For painterly looking virtual environments an image based rendering technique was created that filters the image based rendering textures with NPR to create special mipmaps called art-maps.
Genomic Approach to Study Floral Development Genes in Rosa sp.

Cultivated for centuries, the varieties of rose have been selected based on a number of flower traits. Understanding the genetic and molecular basis that contributes to these traits will impact on future improvements for this economically important ornamental plant. In this study, we used scanning electron microscopy and sections of meristems and flowers to establish a precise morphological calendar from early rose flower development stages to senescing flowers. Global gene expression was investigated from floral meristem initiation up to flower senescence in three rose genotypes exhibiting contrasted floral traits including continuous versus once flowering and simple versus double flower architecture, using a newly developed Affymetrix microarray (Rosa1_Affyarray) tool containing sequences representing 4765 unigenes expressed during flower development. Data analyses permitted the identification of genes associated with floral transition, floral organs initiation up to flower senescence. Quantitative real time PCR analyses validated the mRNA accumulation changes observed in microarray hybridizations for a selection of 24 genes expressed at either high or low levels. Our data describe the early flower development stages in Rosa sp, the production of a rose microarray and demonstrate its usefulness and reliability to study gene expression during extensive development phases, from the vegetative meristem to the senescent flower.