Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the time and space complexity of randomized test-and-set

We study the time and space complexity of randomized Test-And-Set (TAS) implementations from atomic read/write registers in asynchronous shared memory models with n processes. We present an adaptive TAS algorithm with an expected (individual) step complexity of O(log* k), for contention k, against the oblivious adversary, improving a previous (non-adaptive) upper bound of O(log log n) (Alistarh and Aspnes, 2011). We also present a modified version of the adaptive RatRace TAS algorithm (Alistarh et al., 2010), which improves the space complexity from O(n3) to O(n), while maintaining logarithmic expected step complexity against the adaptive adversary. We complement this upper bound with an Ω(log n) lower bound on the space complexity of any TAS algorithm that has the nondeterministic solo-termination property (which is a weaker progress condition than wait-freedom). No non-trivial lower bounds on the space requirements of TAS were known prior to this work.
Inter-document reference detection as an alternative to full text semantic analysis in document clustering

We discuss here the search for inter-document references as an alternative to the grouping of document inventories based on a full text semantic analysis. The used document inventory, which is not publicly available, was provided to us by the European Union (EU) in the framework of an EU project, the aim of which was to analyse, classify, and visualise EU funded research in social sciences and humanities in EU framework programmes FP5 and FP6. This project, called the SSH project for short, was aimed at the evaluation of the contributions of research to the development of EU policies. For the semantic based grouping, we start from a Multi-Dimensional Scaling analysis of the document vectors, which is the result of a prior semantic analysis. As an alternative to a semantic analysis, we searched for inter-document references or direct references. Direct references are defined as terms that explicitly refer to other documents present in the inventory. We show that the grouping based on references is largely similar to the one based on semantics, but with considerably less computational efforts. In addition, the non-expert can make better use of the results, since the references are displayed as graphical webpages with hyperlinks pointing to both the referenced and the referencing document(s), and the reason of linkage. Finally, we show that the combination of a database, to store the data and the (intermediate) results, and a webserver, to visualise the results, offers a powerful platform to analyse the document inventory and to share the results with all participants/collaborators involved in a data- and computation intensive EU-project, thereby guaranteeing both data- and result-consistency.
Cooperative Control using the Max-Sum Algorithm

This paper presents research on enabling cooperative decision strategies in a distributed sensor network. The paper begins with an introduction to distributed sensor networks and outlines two levels of cooperation: implicit and explicit cooperation. Implicit cooperation is the process of building and maintaining a common distributed picture where explicit cooperation is the process of negotiating to agree a common distributed plan. This paper focuses on how explicit cooperation can be achieved across a distributed sensor network by exploiting factorisation in the utility function to form a factor graph. The paper describes an efficient approach to both building and solving this factor graph using the max-sum algorithm. Experimental results are presented in a simulated sensor-to-target assignment problem.
WS Integration and Management as Crosscutting Concerns

Web service technologi es accelerate application development by allowing the selection and integration of third-party web services, achieving high modularity, flexibility and configurability. However, current approaches to integrate web services in client applications do not provide any management support, which is fundamental for achieving robustness. In this paper we show how Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) can be used to modularize service management issues in service oriented applications. To deal with the dynamic nature of the service environment we suggest the use of a dynamic aspectoriented programming language called JAsCo. We encapsulate the management code in aspects placed in an intermediate layer in between the application and the world of web services, called Web Services Management Layer (WSML).
TOB: Timely Ontologies for Business Relations

In this paper we present a suite of methods for extracting temporal relations from semi-structured and textual Web sources. We particularly address the needs for building and maintaining business ontologies, where the time aspects of relations between companies, between companies and products, and between companies and customers are important. For example, the date on which a company acquired another company or when a new CEO took over is crucial information for business-intelligence applications. Our methods are geared for extracting business relations and their time information from three kinds of sources: Wikipedia infoboxes, Reuter’s news feeds, and news pages provided by Google. All techniques are integrated into the TOB framework for timely business ontologies. Our experiments show that we can achieve fairly high precision for the extracted information.
Software-security patterns: degree of maturity

Since Gamma et al. published their design patterns, patterns are very popular in the area of software engineering. They provide best practice to handle recurring problems during the software development phase. Three years later, security patterns appeared and provided solutions for security problems. Besides the name analogy, design and security patterns should be very similar except for the security factor. In research and industry software engineering with design patterns is widespread. However, some researchers suspect that security-pattern engineering is made difficult by some issues such as terminology or description form. Detecting adoption problems can help to improve security patterns in future. Thus, they can promote the awareness of security especially in the software maintenance phase where many programmers first give attention to security problems. Therefore, we will compare design and security patterns to find indicators for negative impact on security pattern engineering in software development. We address this issue on inspecting the aspects classification, description form, provided code examples, and usage in the software life-cycle. We determine the degree of maturity of software-security patterns by comparing them to the well-explored design patterns. To achieve the objective, we inspect the pattern terminology and conducted a study on the used description forms including provided UML diagrams and code examples. Moreover, a literature review is conducted to compare their state of research w.r. t. the software life-cycle. The maturity degree of security patterns compared to common design patterns differs and we depict further research opportunities on security patterns.
African transnational families: Cross‐country and gendered comparisons

Studies indicated differences between transnational family life for migrant mothers and fathers and that the effects on their “left‐behind” children differ according to who migrates. Yet little is known about why these differences exist. This paper aims to fill this gap by comparing transnational and nontransnational African families with parents living in Europe to understand their different family structures. We analyse three datasets with information on migrants from five African origin countries in eight European countries. Our analyses reveal important differences between transnational and nontransnational families and between transnational mothers and fathers. Transnational mothers are more often single, have children from multiple relationships, and start family life earlier than transnational fathers and nontransnational parents. This corresponds closely to what family sociologists have found make “fragile families” among nonmigrants. Our work thus indicates that policies aiming to improve migrants' lives need to consider the disadvantages that particularly migrant women experience in maintaining their family life.
Comparison of Envelope-Related Genes in Unicellular and Filamentous Cyanobacteria

To elucidate the evolution of cyanobacterial envelopes and the relation between gene content and environmental adaptation, cell envelope structures and components of unicellular and filamentous cyanobacteria were analyzed in comparative genomics. Hundreds of envelope biogenesis genes were divided into 5 major groups and annotated according to their conserved domains and phylogenetic profiles. Compared to unicellular species, the gene numbers of filamentous cyanobacteria expanded due to genome enlargement effect, but only few gene families amplified disproportionately, such as those encoding waaG and glycosyl transferase 2. Comparison of envelope genes among various species suggested that the significant variance of certain cyanobacterial envelope biogenesis genes should be the response to their environmental adaptation, which might be also related to the emergence of filamentous shapes with some new functions.
Multistability of Recurrent Neural Networks With Time-varying Delays and the Piecewise Linear Activation Function

In this brief, stability of multiple equilibria of recurrent neural networks with time-varying delays and the piecewise linear activation function is studied. A sufficient condition is obtained to ensure that n-neuron recurrent neural networks can have (4k-1)n equilibrium points and (2k)n of them are locally exponentially stable. This condition improves and extends the existing stability results in the literature. Simulation results are also discussed in one illustrative example.
Criteria-Based Evaluation Framework for Service-Oriented Methodologies

Service-Oriented Software Engineering is based on concepts ‎and principles for constructing complex enterprise systems in ‎which services as building block of the system, are distributed ‎in large networks. The main goal of the service-oriented ‎methodologies is to define a process for development and ‎maintenance of service-based systems. Most of the Service-‎Oriented methodologies are not mature enough compared with ‎traditional software development methodologies such as ‎Object-Oriented or Component-Based. Hence, defining an ‎evaluation framework will be useful for comparing ‎methodologies for identifying their strengths and weaknesses, ‎defining new methodologies or extending existing Service-‎Oriented methodologies. At the time being, there is no ‎complete evaluation framework for evaluating Service-‎Oriented methodologies. The principal objective of this paper ‎is to introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework for ‎evaluating Service-Oriented methodologies. This evaluation ‎tool is appropriate for methodology engineers to develop new ‎methodologies, as well as project managers to select an ‎appropriate methodology at a specific project‎.
In Silico Identification and in Vitro Activity of Novel Natural Inhibitors of Trypanosoma brucei Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate-dehydrogenase †

As part of our ongoing efforts to identify natural products with activity against pathogens causing neglected tropical diseases, we are currently performing an extensive screening of natural product (NP) databases against a multitude of protozoan parasite proteins. Within this project, we screened a database of NPs from a commercial supplier, AnalytiCon Discovery (Potsdam, Germany), against Trypanosoma brucei glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (TbGAPDH), a glycolytic enzyme whose inhibition deprives the parasite of energy supply. NPs acting as potential inhibitors of the mentioned enzyme were identified using a pharmacophore-based virtual screening and subsequent docking of the identified hits into the active site of interest. In a set of 700 structures chosen for the screening, 13 (1.9%) were predicted to possess significant affinity towards the enzyme and were therefore tested in an in vitro enzyme assay using recombinant TbGAPDH. Nine of these in silico hits (69%) showed significant inhibitory activity at 50 µM, of which two geranylated benzophenone derivatives proved to be particularly active with IC50 values below 10 µM. These compounds also showed moderate in vitro activity against T. brucei rhodesiense and may thus represent interesting starting points for further optimization.
Students' Personal and Social Meaning Making in a Chinese Idiom Mobile Learning Environment

In this paper, we present a design research study in Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) that emphasizes learner created content and contextualized meaning making. In learning Chinese idioms, students proactively used smartphones on a 1:1 basis to capture photos of the real-life contexts pertaining to the idioms, and to construct sentences with them. Subsequently, in-class or online sharing and discussions on the contexts took place, which would enhance the students' understanding of the proper usage of the idioms. The learning design is grounded in seamless learning that encompasses in-class formal learning and out-of-class informal settings, and personal and social learning spaces. Our analysis of the student artifacts in both product- and process-oriented aspects reveal the students’ cognitive process and learning strategies during the course of content creation. The students' ongoing, open-ended, personal-to-social meaning making process and artifacts have shown some indicators of seamless language learning that has the potential of transforming language learning into an authentic learning experience.
Drivers of the Sex Disparity in Statin Therapy in Patients with Coronary Artery Disease: A Cohort Study

Background Women are less likely to be prescribed statins than men. Existing reports explain only a fraction of this difference. We conducted a study to identify factors that account for sex differences in statin therapy among patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). Methods and Results We retrospectively studied 24,338 patients with CAD who were followed for at least a year between 2000 and 2011 at two academic medical centers. Women (9,006 / 37% of study patients) were less likely to either have initiated statin therapy (81.9% women vs. 87.7% men) or to have persistent statin therapy at the end of follow-up (67.0% women vs. 71.4% men). Women were older (72.9 vs. 68.4 years), less likely to have ever smoked (49.8% vs. 65.6%), less likely to have been evaluated by a cardiologist (57.5% vs. 64.5%) and more likely to have reported an adverse reaction to a statin (27.1% vs. 21.7%) (p < 0.0001 for all). In multivariable analysis, patients with history of smoking (OR 1.094; p 0.017), younger age (OR 1.013 / year), cardiologist evaluation (OR 1.337) and no reported adverse reactions to statins (OR 1.410) were more likely (p < 0.0001 for all) to have persistent statin therapy. Together, these four factors accounted for 90.4% of the sex disparity in persistent statin therapy. Conclusions Several specific factors appear to underlie divergent statin therapy in women vs. men. Identifying such drivers may facilitate programmatic interventions and stimulate further research to overcome sex differences in applying proven interventions for cardiovascular risk reduction.
Inferring User Interest Using Familiarity and Topic Similarity with Social Neighbors in Facebook

Uncovering user interest plays an important role to develop personalized systems in various fields including the Web and pervasive computing. In particular, online social networks (OSNs) are being spotlighted as the means to understand users' social behavior out of abundant online social information. In this paper, we explore a computational method of inferring user interest in Facebook by combining the degree of familiarity and topic similarity with social neighbors based on social correlation phenomenon. By conducting a question-naire survey, we demonstrate that our proposed method increases the accuracy of inference by 12.4% compared to existing methods which do not consider the latent topic structure implied in social contents.
Application of Stereo Imaging to Atomic Force Microscopy

Abstrac t| M etrologicald ata from sample surfacescanb e ob tained byusinga varietyofpro ̄lometrymethod s.Atomic Forc e M ic roscopy (AFM ), w hich relies oncontac t interatomic forcesto extrac t topographicalimagesofa sample, isone such method that c anb e used ona w id e range ofsurface types,w ith possible nanometer range resolution.How ever,AFM imagesare commonly d istorted by c onvolution, w hich red ucesmetrologicalac curacy. T histype ofd istortionismore signī cant w henthe sample surface contains high aspec t ratio featuressuch aslines,stepsor sharp ed ges struc turescommonlyfound insemicond uc tor d evic esand applications.Aimingat mitigatingthese d istortionsand rec overingmetrologysound ness,w e introd uce a novelimage d econvolutionscheme b ased onthe principle ofstereo imaging.M ultiple imagesofa sample,takenat d i®erent angles, allow for separationofconvolutionartifac tsfrom true topographic d ata.Asa result,perfec t sample reconstruc tion and prob e shape estimationcanb e achieved incertaincases. Ad d itionally,shad ow zones,w hich are areasofthe sample that c annot b e prob ed by the AFM , are greatly red uced . M ost importantly,thistechnique d oesnot require a priori prob e charac terization.It also red ucesthe need for slend er or sharper prob es, w hich, onone hand , ind uc e lessconvolutiond istortionbut,onthe other hand ,are more prone to w ear and d amage,thusd ec reasingoverallsystem reliab ility.
Effect of imperfect channel estimate on the performance of MMSE receivers in multibeam satellite systems: First order analysis

Aggressive frequency reuse in a multibeam satellite system offers wider bandwidths per beam at the cost of increased co-channel interference. Focussing on the return link of interactive mobile satellite systems, emphasis has been laid on Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) receivers at the gateway to reduce the co-channel interference arising out of aggressive reuse. Performance of such receivers have been evaluated in presence of perfect channel information and synchronization showing impressive gains in throughput. Towards bringing such receivers closer to system implementation, this work aims at understanding the effect of imperfect channel estimates on the resulting performance. In particular, utilizing first order approximations, closed-form expressions for the MMSE receiver and the resulting Mean Squared Error (MSE) have been derived. These expressions provide insight into the effect of channel, noise levels and the estimation error on performance while indicating the robustness of MMSE receiver.
Trajectory Sampling Value Iteration: Improved Dyna Search for MDPs

Traditional online learning algorithms often suffer from the lack of convergence rate and accuracy. The Dyna-2 framework, combining learning with searching methods, provides a way of alleviating the problem. The main idea behind it is to execute a simulation-based search that helps the learning process to select better actions. The search process relies on a simulated model of the environment that is built during learning. However, the model is not fully used in Dyna-2. To provide better solution quality, our paper improves the algorithm by applying value iteration, a model-based dynamic programming algorithm, to the search process with a trajectory sampling approach (DynaTSVI). Trajectory sampling is used to reduce high time complexity caused by dynamic programming. Experimentally, we use the Dyna Maze and the Windy Grid World tasks to analyze the proposed method in several aspects. Our results show that DynaTSVI outperforms Dyna-2 in both deterministic and stochastic environments in terms of convergence rate and accuracy.
Inverse Modeling of One-Dimensional Setup and Alongshore Current in the Nearshore

Inverse models are developed that use data and dynamics to estimate optimally the breaking-wave-driven setup and alongshore current, as well as the cross-shore forcing, alongshore forcing, and drag coefficient. The inverse models accurately reproduce these quantities in a synthetic barred-beach example. The method is applied to one case example each from the Duck94 and SandyDuck field experiments. Both inverse solutions pass consistency tests developed for the inverse method and have forcing corrections similar to a roller model and significant cross-shore variation of the drag coefficient. The inverse drag coefficient is related to the wave dissipation, a bulk measure of the turbulence source, but not to the bed roughness, consistent with the hypothesis that breaking-wave-generated turbulence increases the drag coefficient. Inverse solutions from a wider range of conditions are required to establish the generality of these results.
A. R. Luria and the Twin Method in Modern Medical Genetics

The twin method is one of the classical methods of medical genetics which aids in defining the role of factors of heredity and environment in traits of norm and pathology, to study development of multifactorial diseases and development of genetics of intellectual activity. From the genetic point of view twins may be either monozygotic or dizygotic. The field of intellectual activity, in particular learning ability, attention and memory is most difficult and inaccessible for the genetic analyses of twins. The very beginning of research of twins’ intellectual activity was laid by A.R. Luria in years 1920-1930 and the features of development of twins of various age wererevealed. Using tasks that required mental capacities of different levels: immediate memory vs cultural forms of mediated memory, Luria’s group compared results of monozygotic and dizygotic twins of different ages (5-7 and 11-13). It has been shown that monozygotic twins are much more similar between themselves concerningmental capacities, natural forms of memory than dizygotic twins. In the older group it was the same difference in natural forma, but much less difference between monozygotic and dizygotic tweens in culturally determined forms of memory. Much more similarity was observed between monozygotic twins who grew separately, thanbetween dizygotic, being raised in the identical social environment. During these researches a number of assumptions have been stated about « the influence of heredity on intellectual activity which will be revealed in the solution of tasks which don’t demand special knowledge». Prospects of modern researches are in comparison of concordance mono-and dizygotic twins, confirming A. R. Luria’s assumption of interrelation of natural memory and intellectual endowments of twins with their genotype. Medical genetics confirmsthat the extent of development of various intellectual traits of monozygotic and dizygotic twins is caused first of all by influence of the environment – training and experience which is revealed is increased in increased variability of most intellectual characteristics at the age of 14–16 years. Keywords: A.R. Luria, twin method, medical genetics, epigenetic changes.
Lookback BiST for RF front-ends in digital transceivers

This paper addresses a built-in self-test (BiST) for ICs digital transceivers. The focus is on testing the RF front-end while taking advantage of the on-chip DSP resources and DA-, and AD converters. The loopback architecture is used to preserve the sensitive RF blocks from extra noise and external disturbances. The test aims at spot defects typical of RF CMOS ICs, where those faults are deemed the main yield limiter in mass production. The fault model is discussed at three levels of design abstraction: layout, circuit and functional block. The BiST model is verified at the circuit and functional level. As a demonstrator a GSM transceiver model with loopback BiST is presented that provides a promising result.