Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Software-defined infrastructure and the Future Central Office

This paper discusses the role of virtualization and software-defined infrastructure (SDI) in the design of future application platforms, and in particular the Future Central Office (CO). A multi-tier computing cloud is presented in which resources in the Smart Edge of the network play a crucial role in the delivery of low-latency and data-intensive applications. Resources in the Smart Edge are virtualized and managed using cloud computing principles, but these resources are more diverse than in conventional data centers, including programmable hardware, GPUs, etc. We propose an architecture for future application platforms, and we describe the SAVI Testbed (TB) design for the Smart Edge. The design features a novel Software-Defined Infrastructure manager that operates on top of OpenStack and OpenFlow. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the Smart Edge design on the Future CO.
Term Weighting Approaches for Text Categorization Improving

The objective of the text categorization problem examined in this paper corresponds to automatically distribute the legislative bills to the committees at the Federal District Legislative Assembly in Brasilia, Brazil. For this study the replacement of the idf part in TFIDF by a new term selection measure - absl logit- and by bi-normal separation produced the best general classification results, using support vector machines models (SVM), when compared with TFIDF and with the use of common term selection measures - chi-square, information gain, gain ratio and odds ratio - to replace the idf part in TFIDF.
Hardware trojan detection by symmetry breaking in path delays

This paper discusses the detection of hardware Trojans (HTs) by their breaking of symmetries within integrated circuits (ICs), as measured by path delays. Typically, path delay or side channel methods rely on comparisons to a golden, or trusted, sample. However, golden standards are affected by inter-and intra-die variations which limit the confidence in such comparisons. Symmetry is a way to detect modifications to an IC with increased confidence by confirming subcircuit consistencies within as it was originally designed. The difference in delays from a given path to a set of symmetric paths will be the same unless an inserted HT breaks symmetry. Symmetry can naturally exist in ICs or be artificially added. We describe methods to find and measure path delays against symmetric paths, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of this method. We discuss results of examples from benchmark circuits demonstrating the detection of hardware Trojans.
An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of An Olympism Education Programme to Resolve Conflicts Between Primary School Students in Sri Lanka

This paper reports and discusses the findings of an experimental method study that investigated how Olympism education could strengthen competencies on conflict resolution, through delivery of socio-cultural values educating young students in ethnically divided societies in Sri-Lanka.The research examined the initiatives first by investigating the impact of education in promoting peace in Sri Lanka. Secondly, the study provided an explanation for the potential nature of Olympism in conflict resolution and promoting peace in Sri Lanka. The study has introduced an integrated model of Olympism values and conflict resolution strategies and has been tested among primary students who represent the two main Sri Lankan ethnic groups; Singhalese and Tamils. Considering the effects of the intervention, the most notable finding of this study was that conflict resolution and Olympism Education integrated curriculum intervention significantly improved experimental group students’ conflict resolution competencies regardless of their gender or ethnicity. This research concluded that strategically designed and carefully managed Olympism lessons can help students to develop and enhance competencies of conflict resolution. In order to achieve significant outcomes in young children’s ability to learn to resolve their conflicts when they were exposed to physical education lessons, it is needed to employ experiential learning opportunities through a well balanced theoretical basement and sporting activities.
In situ Dynamics of O2, pH, Light, and Photosynthesis in Ikaite Tufa Columns (Ikka Fjord, Greenland)—A Unique Microbial Habitat

The Ikka Fjord (SW Greenland) harbors a unique microbial habitat in the form of several hundred submarine tufa columns composed of ikaite, a special hexahydrate form of calcium carbonate that precipitates when alkaline phosphate- and carbonate-enriched spring water seeping out of the sea floor meets cold seawater. While several unique heterotrophic microbes have been isolated from the tufa columns, the microbial activity, and the boundary conditions for microbial growth in ikaite have remained unexplored. We present the first detailed in situ characterization of the physico-chemical microenvironment and activity of oxygenic phototrophs thriving within the ikaite columns. In situ underwater microsensor measurements of pH, temperature, and irradiance in the porous ikaite crystal matrix, revealed an extreme microenvironment characterized by low temperatures, strong light attenuation, and gradients of pH changing from pH 9 at the outer column surface to above pH 10 over the first 1–2 cm of the ikaite. This outer layer of the freshly deposited ikaite matrix contained densely pigmented yellow and green zones harboring a diverse phototrophic community dominated by diatoms and cyanobacteria, respectively, as shown by amplicon sequencing. In situ O2 measurements, as well as underwater variable chlorophyll fluorescence measurements of photosynthetic activity, demonstrated high levels of oxygenic photosynthesis in this extreme gradient environment with strong irradiance-driven O2 dynamics ranging from anoxia to hyperoxic conditions in the ikaite matrix, albeit the local formation of gas bubbles buffered the day-night dynamics of O2 in the tufa columns. The microbial phototrophs in the ikaite matrix are embedded in exopolymers forming endolithic biofilms that may interact with mineral formation and cementing of ikaite crystals.
Semi-sparse flow-sensitive pointer analysis

Pointer analysis is a prerequisite for many program analyses, and the effectiveness of these analyses depends on the precision of the pointer information they receive. Two major axes of pointer analysis precision are flow-sensitivity and context-sensitivity, and while there has been significant recent progress regarding scalable context-sensitive pointer analysis, relatively little progress has been made in improving the scalability of flow-sensitive pointer analysis. This paper presents a new interprocedural, flow-sensitive pointer analysis algorithm that combines two ideas-semi-sparse analysis and a novel use of BDDs-that arise from a careful understanding of the unique challenges that face flow-sensitive pointer analysis. We evaluate our algorithm on 12 C benchmarks ranging from 11K to 474K lines of code. Our fastest algorithm is on average 197x faster and uses 4.6x less memory than the state of the art, and it can analyze programs that are an order of magnitude larger than the previous state of the art.
Quaternion-Valued Echo State Networks

Quaternion-valued echo state networks (QESNs) are introduced to cater for 3-D and 4-D processes, such as those observed in the context of renewable energy (3-D wind modeling) and human centered computing (3-D inertial body sensors). The introduction of QESNs is made possible by the recent emergence of quaternion nonlinear activation functions with local analytic properties, required by nonlinear gradient descent training algorithms. To make QENSs second-order optimal for the generality of quaternion signals (both circular and noncircular), we employ augmented quaternion statistics to introduce widely linear QESNs. To that end, the standard widely linear model is modified so as to suit the properties of dynamical reservoir, typically realized by recurrent neural networks. This allows for a full exploitation of second-order information in the data, contained both in the covariance and pseudocovariances, and a rigorous account of second-order noncircularity (improperness), and the corresponding power mismatch and coupling between the data components. Simulations in the prediction setting on both benchmark circular and noncircular signals and on noncircular real-world 3-D body motion data support the analysis.
Sexual Assault in Higher Education.

Sexual assault involves any behavior where one individual makes sexual contact with another without explicit consent (Department of Justice, 2017). More than 20% of females and 11% of males in undergraduate programs are victims of sexual assault annually. Sexual assault can significantly impact survivors’ academic performance and progress and may result in a survivor dropping out of school. Despite the many support services available on most campus, more than 90% of sexual assault incidents are left unreported. Sexual assault can have devastating and long-term effects on its victims. Even with proper policies and practices (e.g., Title IX), students within colleges and universities do not report or seek support services. This integrative literature review explores literature on how sexual assault impacts victims.
Review of the green lacewing genus Chrysacanthia Lacroix with a new species from Nigeria (Neuroptera, Chrysopidae)

Abstract The genus Chrysacanthia Lacroix (Chrysopidae: Belonopterygini) is reviewed and a new species is described from Nigeria. With the addition of the new species described herein, the genus contains four Old World species known from Madagascar, Nigeria, India, Thailand and China.
On Equalization for EDGE Mobile Communications

In this letter, an equalization concept for the novel radio access scheme EDGE is proposed, by which high performance can be obtained at moderate computational complexity. Because high{level modulation is employed in EDGE, optimum equalization as performed in most GSM receivers is too complex, and suboptimum schemes have to be considered. It is shown, that delayed decision{feedback sequence estimation (DDFSE) is a promising candidate. For various channel pro les, approximations for the bit error rate of DDFSE are given and compared with simulation results. It turns out, that a discrete{time allpass pre lter creating a minimum{ phase overall impulse response is indispensible for a favourable tradeo between performance and complexity. Additionally, the in uence of the receiver input lter is investigated.
COMPARISON OF TIME-BUDGETS FOR MAINLAND AND OUTER CHETWODE ISLAND POPULATIONS OF ADULT MALE SOUTH ISLAND ROBINS

SUMMARY: Mainland robins forage less and spend less time in interspecific interactions than do Outer Chetwode Island birds, but devote more time than the latter to vocalising, body maintenance and partner-interactions. Outer Chetwode Island males forage for a similar proportion of time throughout the day, but mainland birds forage less, and spend more time on vocalising and partner-interactions, in early and mid-morning than at other times. From the comparison it seems that the first priority of a robin is to find enough food to meet maintenance needs. When more time has to be spent finding food, that devoted to several other activities declines. Once sufficient food for metabolism is found, "spare" time is devoted to body-maintenance. The activities of least importance to robins in April, May and June are those related to reproduction, such as vocalising and partner-interactions. The birds' diurnal patterns of activities are such that most reproductive behaviour occurs in the early morning, a time of day when foraging efficiency is probably low, so that these activities take place when they have least effect on time required for foraging.
Persistent fibrosis, hypertrophy and sarcomere disorganisation after endoscopy-guided heart resection in adult Xenopus

Models of cardiac repair are needed to understand mechanisms underlying failure to regenerate in human cardiac tissue. Such studies are currently dominated by the use of zebrafish and mice. Remarkably, it is between these two evolutionary separated species that the adult cardiac regenerative capacity is thought to be lost, but causes of this difference remain largely unknown. Amphibians, evolutionary positioned between these two models, are of particular interest to help fill this lack of knowledge. We thus developed an endoscopy-based resection method to explore the consequences of cardiac injury in adult Xenopus laevis. This method allowed in situ live heart observation, standardised tissue amputation size and reproducibility. During the first week following amputation, gene expression of cell proliferation markers remained unchanged, whereas those relating to sarcomere organisation decreased and markers of inflammation, fibrosis and hypertrophy increased. One-month post-amputation, fibrosis and hypertrophy were evident at the injury site, persisting through 11 months. Moreover, cardiomyocyte sarcomere organisation deteriorated early following amputation, and was not completely recovered as far as 11 months later. We conclude that the adult Xenopus heart is unable to regenerate, displaying cellular and molecular marks of scarring. Our work suggests that, contrary to urodeles and teleosts, with the exception of medaka, adult anurans share a cardiac injury outcome similar to adult mammals. This observation is at odds with current hypotheses that link loss of cardiac regenerative capacity with acquisition of homeothermy.
Lexicon-free and context-free drug names identification methods using hidden markov models and pointwise mutual information

The paper concerns the issue of extraction of medicine names from free text documents written in Polish. Using lexicon-based approaches, it is impossible to identify unknown or misspelled medicine names. In this paper, we present the results of experimentation on two methods: Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI)-based approach. The experiment was to identify the medicine names without the use of lexicon or contextual information. The experimentation results show, that HMM may be used as one of several steps in drug names' identification (with F-score slightly below 70% for the test set), while the PMI can help in increasing the precision of results achieved using HMM, but with significant loss in recall.
Using Iterative MapReduce for Parallel Virtual Screening

Virtual Screening is a technique in chemo informatics used for Drug discovery by searching large libraries of molecule structures. Virtual Screening often uses SVM, a supervised machine learning technique used for regression and classification analysis. Virtual screening using SVM not only involves huge datasets, but it is also compute expensive with a complexity that can grow at least up to O(n2). SVM based applications most commonly use MPI, which becomes complex and impractical with large datasets. As an alternative to MPI, MapReduce, and its different implementations, have been successfully used on commodity clusters for analysis of data for problems with very large datasets. Due to the large libraries of molecule structures in virtual screening, it becomes a good candidate for MapReduce. In this paper we present a MapReduce implementation of SVM based virtual screening, using Spark, an iterative MapReduce programming model. We show that our implementation has a good scaling behaviour and opens up the possibility of using huge public cloud infrastructures efficiently for virtual screening.
Primordial globular clusters, X-ray binaries and cosmological reionization

Globular clusters are dense stellar systems that have typical ages of ∼ 13 billion years, implying that they formed during the early epochs of galaxy formation at redshifts of z≥6. Massive stars in newly formed or primordial globular clusters could have played an important role during the epoch of cosmological reionization (z ≥ 6) as sources of energetic, neutral hydrogen ionizing UV photons. We investigate whether or not these stars could have been as important in death as sources of energetic X-ray photons as they were during their main sequence (MS) lives. Most massive stars are expected to form in binaries, and an appreciable fraction of these (as much as ∼30 per cent) will evolve into X-ray luminous (L X ∼ 10 38 erg s -1 ) high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs). These sources would have made a contribution to the X-ray background at z ≥ 6. Using Monte Carlo models of a globular cluster, we estimate the total X-ray luminosity of a population of HMXBs. We compare and contrast this with the total UV luminosity of the massive stars during their MS lives. For reasonable estimates, we find that the bolometric luminosity of the cluster peaks at ∼10 42 erg s -1 during the first few million years, but declines to ∼10 41 erg s -1 after ∼5 Myr as the most massive stars evolve off the MS. From this time onwards, the total bolometric luminosity is dominated by HMXBs and falls gradually to ∼10 40 erg s -1 after ∼50 Myr. Assuming a power-law spectral energy distribution for the HMXBs, we calculate the effective number of neutral hydrogen ionizations per HMXB and show that HMXBs can be as important as sources of ionizing radiation as massive stars. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for modelling galaxy formation at high redshift and the prospects of using globular clusters as probes of reionization.
On the Convergence of the Iterative Shrinkage/Thresholding Algorithm With a Weakly Convex Penalty

We consider the iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithm (ISTA) applied to a cost function composed of a data fidelity term and a penalty term. The penalty is nonconvex but the concavity of the penalty is accounted for by the data fidelity term so that the overall cost function is convex. We provide a generalization of the convergence result for ISTA viewed as a forward-backward splitting algorithm. We also demonstrate experimentally that for the current setup, using large stepsizes in ISTA can accelerate convergence more than existing schemes proposed for the convex case, like TwIST or FISTA.
High homocysteine levels prevent via H2S the CoCl2‐induced alteration of lymphocyte viability

High homocysteine (HCy) levels are associated with lymphocyte‐mediated inflammatory responses that are sometimes in turn related to hypoxia. Because adenosine is a potent lymphocyte suppressor produced in hypoxic conditions and shares metabolic pathways with HCy, we addressed the influence of high HCy levels on the hypoxia‐induced, adenosine‐mediated, alteration of lymphocyte viability. We treated mitogen‐stimulated human lymphocytes isolated from healthy individuals and the human lymphoma T‐cell line CEM with cobalt chloride (CoCl2)to reproduce hypoxia. We found that CoCl2‐altered cell viability was dose‐dependently reversed using HCy. In turn, the HCy effect was inhibited using DL‐propargylglycine, a specific inhibitor of the hydrogen sulphide (H2S)‐synthesizing enzyme cystathionine‐γ‐lyase involved in HCy catabolism. We then addressed the intracellular metabolic pathway of adenosine and HCy, and the role of the adenosine A2A receptor (A2AR). We observed that: (i) hypoxic conditions lowered the intracellular concentration of HCy by increasing adenosine production, which resulted in high A2AR expression and 3′, 5′‐cyclic adenosine monophosphate production; (ii) increasing intracellular HCy concentration reversed the hypoxia‐induced adenosinergic signalling despite high adenosine concentration by promoting both S‐adenosylhomocysteine and H2S production; (iii) DL‐propargylglycine that inhibits H2S production abolished the HCy effect. Together, these data suggest that high HCy levels prevent, via H2S production and the resulting down‐regulation of A2AR expression, the hypoxia‐induced adenosinergic alteration of lymphocyte viability. We point out the relevance of these mechanisms in the pathophysiology of cardiovascular diseases.
Creating VRML extensions to support scientific visualization

The design of new, specialized VRML nodes is discussed with its repercussions to users and developers. Two sample nodes are presented: one for data storage, the other, a shape node for visualization of vector fields. The nodes are then compared to the alternative implementations and shown to have superior performance. The possibility of future trends towards discipline-based VRML node libraries is projected in the light of providing increased performance, smaller file size and simpler programming specifications.
Observed macro- and micro-level parenting behaviors during preadolescent family interactions as predictors of adjustment in emerging adults with and without spina bifida.

OBJECTIVE To examine observed autonomy-promoting and -inhibiting parenting behaviors during preadolescence as predictors of adjustment outcomes in emerging adults with and without spina bifida (SB). METHODS Demographic and videotaped interaction data were collected from families with 8/9-year-old children with SB (n = 68) and a matched group of typically developing youth (n = 68). Observed interaction data were coded with macro- and micro-coding schemes. Measures of emerging adulthood adjustment were collected 10 years later (ages 18/19 years; n = 50 and n = 60 for SB and comparison groups, respectively). RESULTS Autonomy-promoting (behavioral control, autonomy-relatedness) and -inhibiting (psychological control) observed preadolescent parenting behaviors prospectively predicted emerging adulthood adjustment, particularly within educational, social, and emotional domains. Interestingly, high parent undermining of relatedness predicted better educational and social adjustment in the SB sample CONCLUSIONS Parenting behaviors related to autonomy have long-term consequences for adjustment in emerging adults with and without SB.
Losing functions without gaining data: another look at defunctionalisation

We describe a transformation which takes a higher-order program, and produces an equivalent first-order program. Unlike Reynolds-style defunctionalisation, it does not introduce any new data types, and the results are more amenable to subsequent analysis operations. We can use our method to improve the results of existing analysis operations, including strictness analysis, pattern-match safety and termination checking. Our transformation is implemented, and works on a Core language to which Haskell programs can be reduced. Our method cannot always succeed in removing all functional values, but in practice is remarkably successful.
Researches on ingeniously behaving agents

We have been studying the techniques for evolutionary robotics and experimenting with various robots applied evolutionary methods. We have paid special attentions to real robots and multi-agent problems related to them. In this research domain, we name them as "ingeniously behaving agents" (IBA). This paper shows several techniques developed in our IBA laboratory and their experimental results applied to simulations and real robots.