Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Collaborative Mobile Agent-based Workflow System

Workflow technology is considered today as one of the key technologies for providing efficiency and consistency of organizations. The concepts of workflow embody the ideas of controlling and coordinating activities and interaction among individuals and software components. Today's workflow systems assume that each work item is executed by a single worker. From the viewpoint of the system, a worker with the proper qualifications selects a work item, executes the associated work, and reports the result. There is usually no support for teams, i.e., groups of people collaborating by jointly executing work items. In this paper, we propose the addition of a team concept to today's workflow management systems. In order to be effective support of work activities, we present a new collaborative approach for workflow systems by taking advantages of teams of mobile agents. Mobile agent is autonomous and dynamic entity that can migrate between various nodes in the network and act on behalf of a person or organization to accomplish tasks to be performed. With the help of mobile agents' collaboration, our system can manage to map closely to real world organization's processes such as collecting information, managing and collaborating work activities among workers, sharing of tasks and information, scheduling meetings which is one of the analyzed matters in an organization
The sources of erase voltage variability in split-gate flash memory cell arrays

We performed a comprehensive analysis of the voltage-to-erase (Verase) distribution in split-gate flash memory cell arrays. It was shown that Verase distribution is mostly determined by the tunneling voltage variations. Other factors, such as distributions of coupling ratio and FG channel parameters, have a minor effect on Verase variability.
Translational polymorphism as a potential source of plant proteins variety in Arabidopsis thaliana

MOTIVATION According to scanning model, 40S ribosomal subunits can either initiate translation at start AUG codon in suboptimal context or miss it and initiate translation at downstream AUG(s), thereby producing several proteins. Functional significance of such a protein translational polymorphism is still unknown. RESULTS We compared predicted subcellular localizations of annotated Arabidopsis thaliana proteins and their potential N-terminally truncated forms started from the nearest downstream in-frame AUG codons. It was found that localizations of full and N-truncated proteins differ in many cases: 12.2% of N-truncated proteins acquired sorting signals de novo and 5.7% changed their predicted subcellular locations (mitochodria, chloroplast or secretory pathway). It is likely that the in-frame downstream AUGs may be frequently utilized to synthesize proteins possessing new functional properties and such a translational polymorphism may serve as an important source of cellular and organelle proteomes.
A versatile platform for creating a comprehensive UAS-ORFeome library in Drosophila

Overexpression screens are used to explore gene functions in Drosophila, but this strategy suffers from the lack of comprehensive and systematic fly strain collections and efficient methods for generating such collections. Here, we present a strategy that could be used efficiently to generate large numbers of transgenic Drosophila strains, and a collection of 1149 UAS-ORF fly lines that were created with the site-specific ΦC31 integrase method. For this collection, we used a set of 655 genes that were cloned as two variants, either as an open reading frame (ORF) with a native stop codon or with a C-terminal 3xHA tag. To streamline the procedure for transgenic fly generation, we demonstrate the utility of injecting pools of plasmids into embryos, each plasmid containing a randomised sequence (barcode) that serves as a unique identifier for plasmids and, subsequently, fly strains. We also developed a swapping technique that facilitates the rapid exchange of promoters and epitope tags in vivo, expanding the versatility of the ORF collection. The work described here serves as the basis of a systematic library of Gal4/UAS-regulated transgenes.
Integrating active information delivery and reuse repository systems

Although software reuse can improve both the quality and productivity of software development, it will not do so until software developers stop believing that it is not worth their effort to find a component matching their current problem. In addition, if the developers do not anticipate the existence of a given component, they will not even make an effort to find it in the first place. Even the most sophisticated and powerful reuse repositories will not be effective if developers don't anticipate a certain component exists, or don't deem it worthwhile to seek for it. We argue that this crucial barrier to reuse is overcome by integrating active information delivery, which presents information without explicit queries from the user, and reuse repository systems. A prototype system, CodeBroker, illustrates this integration and raises several issues related to software reuse.
Increased Brain Lactate During Depressive Episodes and Reversal Effects by Lithium Monotherapy in Drug-Naive Bipolar Disorder: A 3-T 1H-MRS Study

Objective Mitochondrial dysfunction and energy metabolism impairment are key components in the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder (BD) and may involve a shift from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism. Measurement of brain lactate in vivo using proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) represents an important tool to evaluate mitochondrial and metabolic dysfunction during mood episodes, as well as to monitor treatment response. To date, very few studies have quantified brain lactate in BD. In addition, no study has longitudinally evaluated lactate using 1H-MRS during depressive episodes or its association with mood stabilizer therapy. This study aimed to evaluate cingulate cortex (CC) lactate using 3-T 1H-MRS during acute depressive episodes in BD and the possible effects induced by lithium monotherapy. Methods Twenty medication-free outpatients with short length of BD (80% drug-naive) in a current major depressive episode were matched with control subjects. Patients were treated for 6 weeks with lithium monotherapy at therapeutic doses in an open-label trial (blood level, 0.48 ± 0.19 mmol/L). Cingulate cortex lactate was measured before (week 0) and after lithium therapy (week 6) using 1H-MRS. Antidepressant efficacy was assessed with the 21-item Hamilton Depression Rating Scale as the primary outcome. Results Subjects with BD depression showed a significantly higher CC lactate in comparison to control subjects. Furthermore, a significant decrease in CC lactate was observed after 6 weeks of lithium treatment compared with baseline (P = 0.002). CC Lactate levels was associated with family history of mood disorders and plasma lithium levels. Conclusions This is the first report of increased CC lactate in patients with bipolar depression and lower levels after lithium monotherapy for 6 weeks. These findings indicate a shift to anaerobic metabolism and a role for lactate as a state marker during mood episodes. Energy and redox dysfunction may represent key targets for lithium’s therapeutic actions.
Design of Distributed and Autonomic Load Balancing for Self-Organization LTE

Future LTE RAN will benefit from a significant degree of self-organization. Autonomic Load Balancing (ALB) is considered as an important function of self-organization for LTE RAN. A novel distributed method to achieve ALB for LTE RAN, AFWBM (Autonomic Flowing Water Balancing Method), is presented, which works by AFWBM module. The eNBs with AFWBM modules can detect their load conditions depending on self-monitoring actions. When overload conditions are detected, eNBs can adjust their HOM (handover hysteresis margin) and trigger handover behaviors of users automatically to balance load. Simulation results have demonstrated that by AFWBM, load of eNBs can be balanced and system capacity can be improved significantly.
On mm-Wave Multipath Clustering and Channel Modeling

Efficient and realistic mm-wave channel models are of vital importance for the development of novel mm-wave wireless technologies. Though many of the current 60 GHz channel models are based on the useful concept of multipath clusters, only a limited number of 60 GHz channel measurements have been reported in the literature for this purpose. Therefore, there is still a need for further measurement based analyses of multipath clustering in the 60 GHz band. This paper presents clustering results for a double-directional 60 GHz MIMO channel model. Based on these results, we derive a model which is validated with measured data. Statistical cluster parameters are evaluated and compared with existing channel models. It is shown that the cluster angular characteristics are closely related to the room geometry and environment, making it infeasible to model the delay and angular domains independently. We also show that when using ray tracing to model the channel, it is insufficient to only consider walls, ceiling, floor and tables; finer structures such as ceiling lamps, chairs and bookshelves need to be taken into account as well.
Chebyshev expansion for impurity models using matrix product states

We improve a recently developed expansion technique for calculating real-frequency spectral functions of any one-dimensional model with short-range interactions, by postprocessing computed Chebyshev moments with linear prediction. This can be achieved at virtually no cost, and in sharp contrast to existing methods based on the dampening of the moments, improves the spectral resolution rather than lowering it. We validate the method for the exactly solvable resonating level model and the single impurity Anderson model. It is capable of resolving sharp Kondo resonances, as well as peaks within the Hubbard bands when employed as an impurity solver for dynamical mean-field theory. Our method works at zero temperature and allows for arbitrary discretization of the bath spectrum. It achieves similar precision as the dynamical density matrix renormalization group, at lower cost. We also propose an alternative expansion, of 1 - exp(-tau H) instead of the usual H, which opens the possibility of using established methods for the time evolution of matrix product states to calculate the spectral functions directly.
Characterizing Vulnerable Plaque Features With Intravascular Elastography

Background—In vivo detection of vulnerable plaques is presently limited by a lack of diagnostic tools. Intravascular ultrasound elastography is a new technique based on intravascular ultrasound and has the potential to differentiate between different plaques phenotypes. However, the predictive value of intravascular elastography to detect vulnerable plaques had not been studied. Methods and Results—Postmortem coronary arteries were investigated with intravascular elastography and subsequently processed for histology. In histology, a vulnerable plaque was defined as a plaque consisting of a thin cap (<250 &mgr;m) with moderate to heavy macrophage infiltration and at least 40% of atheroma. In elastography, a vulnerable plaque was defined as a plaque with a high strain region at the surface with adjacent low strain regions. In 24 diseased coronary arteries, we studied 54 cross sections. In histology, 26 vulnerable plaques and 28 nonvulnerable plaques were found. Receiver operator characteristic analysis revealed a maximum predictive power for a strain value threshold of 1.26%. The area under the receiver operator characteristic curve was 0.85. The sensitivity was 88%, and the specificity was 89% to detect vulnerable plaques. Linear regression showed high correlation between the strain in caps and the amount of macrophages (P <0.006) and an inverse relation between the amount of smooth muscle cells and strain (P <0.0001). Plaques, which are declared vulnerable in elastography, have a thinner cap than nonvulnerable plaques (P <0.0001). Conclusions—Intravascular elastography has a high sensitivity and specificity to detect vulnerable plaques in vitro.
Analytic Models of SSD Write Performance

Solid-state drives (SSDs) update data by writing a new copy, rather than overwriting old data, causing prior copies of the same data to be invalidated. These writes are performed in units of pages, while space is reclaimed in units of multipage erase blocks, necessitating copying of any remaining valid pages in the block before reclamation. The efficiency of this cleaning process greatly affects performance under random workloads; in particular, in SSDs, the write bottleneck is typically internal media throughput, and write amplificationdue to additional internal copying directly reduces application throughput. We present the first nearly-exact closed-form solution for write amplification under greedy cleaning for uniformly-distributed random traffic, validate its accuracy via simulation, and show that its inaccuracies are negligible for reasonable block sizes and overprovisioning ratios. In addition, we also present the first models which predict performance degradation for both LRW (least-recently-written) cleaning and greedy cleaning under simple nonuniform traffic conditions; simulation results show the first model to be exact and the second to be accurate within 2%. We extend the LRW model to arbitrary combinations of random traffic and demonstrate its use in predicting cleaning performance for real-world workloads. Using these analytic models, we examine the strategy of separating “hot” and “cold” data, showing that for our traffic model, such separation eliminates any loss in performance due to nonuniform traffic. We then show how a system which segregates hot and cold data into different block pools may shift free space between these pools in order to achieve improved performance, and how numeric methods may be used with our model to find the optimum operating point, which approaches a write amplification of 1.0 for increasingly skewed traffic. We examine online methods for achieving this optimal operating point and show a control strategy based on our model which achieves high performance for a number of real-world block traces.
Decolonising Māori narratives: Pūrākau as a method

This paper is drawn from the methodological journey chartered in my doctoral thesis and was originally presented at the Mai Doctoral Conference, Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi. Pūrākau, a term usually used to refer to Māori myths and legends, was deliberately designated as a methodological tool to investigate the topic of my study - the "stories" of Māori teachers. However, to make methodological space for pūrākau as a narrative inquiry method was not a straightforward shift. This paper sets out the way pūrākau as methodology was developed and describes the engagement with decolonizing methodologies and kaupapa Māori as the work of the Indigenous bricoleur.
Critical Regionalism and the Policies of Place: Revisiting Localism for the Digital Age

Local broadcasting is at a crossroads in Western media systems. While regulators work to address emergent challenges, an enduring tension within the discourse of local media regulation remains how to define “the local. ” Stemming from the inability to meet this challenge, an artificial duality has emerged between communities of place and communities of interest within regulatory discussions. The larger epistemological question, therefore, remains undertheorized: How can we think through these issues in a productive fashion, rather than reducing them to an artificial dichotomy of spatial versus social? Through the use of illustrative instances from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, I argue that the neo-Marxian theory of critical regionalism is a useful framework to approach this question.
Silencing BRE Expression in Human Umbilical Cord Perivascular (HUCPV) Progenitor Cells Accelerates Osteogenic and Chondrogenic Differentiation

BRE is a multifunctional adapter protein involved in DNA repair, cell survival and stress response. To date, most studies of this protein have been focused in the tumor model. The role of BRE in stem cell biology has never been investigated. Therefore, we have used HUCPV progenitor cells to elucidate the function of BRE. HUCPV cells are multipotent fetal progenitor cells which possess the ability to differentiate into a multitude of mesenchymal cell lineages when chemically induced and can be more easily amplified in culture. In this study, we have established that BRE expression was normally expressed in HUCPV cells but become down-regulated when the cells were induced to differentiate. In addition, silencing BRE expression, using BRE-siRNAs, in HUCPV cells could accelerate induced chondrogenic and osteogenic differentiation. Hence, we postulated that BRE played an important role in maintaining the stemness of HUCPV cells. We used microarray analysis to examine the transcriptome of BRE-silenced cells. BRE-silencing negatively regulated OCT4, FGF5 and FOXO1A. BRE-silencing also altered the expression of epigenetic genes and components of the TGF-β/BMP and FGF signaling pathways which are crucially involved in maintaining stem cell self-renewal. Comparative proteomic profiling also revealed that BRE-silencing resulted in decreased expressions of actin-binding proteins. In sum, we propose that BRE acts like an adaptor protein that promotes stemness and at the same time inhibits the differentiation of HUCPV cells.
Culture and the Scottish Household Survey

In 2007 the Scottish Government introduced an outcomes based approach to culture set within a National Performance Framework. One of the main data sources to measure “culture” in Scotland is the Scottish Household Survey (SHS). In this article, the SHS and its “Culture and Sport” Module are explored to show how useful the data is within the Scottish Government's economic agenda. This way, the paper reflects on the usefulness of the main data source used to understand cultural activity within Scotland. There are general difficulties measuring “culture”, but overall the SHS provides adequate national data for Scotland on cultural participation and attendance. However, the SHS cannot provide in-depth local level information and provides limited data on non-participants. Other surveys in Scotland and England give some example practices that could be incorporated to improve survey outcomes. Overall, the SHS is a useful policy tool but more could be done to utilise the data it can provide on the Scottish cultural sector.
Fast Updates on Read-Optimized Databases Using Multi-Core CPUs

Read-optimized columnar databases use differential updates to handle writes by maintaining a separate write-optimized delta partition which is periodically merged with the read-optimized and compressed main partition. This merge process introduces significant overheads and unacceptable downtimes in update intensive systems, aspiring to combine transactional and analytical workloads into one system. In the first part of the paper, we report data analyses of 12 SAP Business Suite customer systems. In the second half, we present an optimized merge process reducing the merge overhead of current systems by a factor of 30. Our linear-time merge algorithm exploits the underlying high compute and bandwidth resources of modern multi-core CPUs with architecture-aware optimizations and efficient parallelization. This enables compressed in-memory column stores to handle the transactional update rate required by enterprise applications, while keeping properties of read-optimized databases for analytic-style queries.
Prominence variation beyond given/new

Prominence variation is known to be determined in part by discourse factors, such as the givenness or newness of the discourse entity being realized to the discourse. However, few empirical studies have been carried out to explain a wider range of phenomena occurring in natural speech corpora. In this study, corpus linguistics methods are applied to a task-oriented monologue corpus to show that the given/new dichotomy does not explain the data at hand. Rather, there are marked linguistic con gurations in which discourse focusing status combines with other linguistic cues to meaning { such as grammatical function and form of referring expression { to convey subtle shades of given/new that can be captured by using a computational discourse model to de ne attentional focusing status.
3D statistical shape models incorporating 3D random forest regression voting for robust CT liver segmentation

During image segmentation, 3D Statistical Shape Models (SSM) usually conduct a limited search for target landmarks within one-dimensional search profiles perpendicular to the model surface. In addition, landmark appearance is modeled only locally based on linear profiles and weak learners, altogether leading to segmentation errors from landmark ambiguities and limited search coverage. We present a new method for 3D SSM segmentation based on 3D Random Forest Regression Voting. For each surface landmark, a Random Regression Forest is trained that learns a 3D spatial displacement function between the according reference landmark and a set of surrounding sample points, based on an infinite set of non-local randomized 3D Haar-like features. Landmark search is then conducted omni-directionally within 3D search spaces, where voxelwise forest predictions on landmark position contribute to a common voting map which reflects the overall position estimate. Segmentation experiments were conducted on a set of 45 CT volumes of the human liver, of which 40 images were randomly chosen for training and 5 for testing. Without parameter optimization, using a simple candidate selection and a single resolution approach, excellent results were achieved, while faster convergence and better concavity segmentation were observed, altogether underlining the potential of our approach in terms of increased robustness from distinct landmark detection and from better search coverage.
Muslim and Non-Muslim Collaboration: Catalyst to the Scientific and Technological Excellence of the Abbasid Era

This article analyses the collaboration between Muslim and non-Muslim scholars in the Islamic civilization, specifically during the Abbasid era. Its purpose is to give due acknowledgement to non-Muslim scholars who worked closely with Muslim scholars to spur science and technology excellence in the Islamic civilization during the Abbasid era. In addition, it also aims to discover the reasons conducive to Muslim and non-Muslim collaboration in developing science and technology in the Islamic civilization. This study finds that Muslim and non-Muslim scholars could work closely together to develop scientific and technological progress during the Abbasid era.