Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distributed-Memory Parallel Algorithms for Matching and Coloring

We discuss the design and implementation of new highly-scalable distributed-memory parallel algorithms for two prototypical graph problems, edge-weighted matching and distance-1 vertex coloring. Graph algorithms in general have low concurrency, poor data locality, and high ratio of data access to computation costs, making it challenging to achieve scalability on massively parallel machines. We overcome this challenge by employing a variety of techniques, including speculation and iteration, optimized communication, and randomization. We present preliminary results on weak and strong scalability studies conducted on an IBM Blue Gene/P machine employing up to tens of thousands of processors. The results show that the algorithms hold strong potential for computing at petascale.
A Spectral Approach to Analysing Belief Propagation for 3-Colouring

Belief propagation (BP) is a message-passing algorithm that computes the exact marginal distributions at every vertex of a graphical model without cycles. While BP is designed to work correctly on trees, it is routinely applied to general graphical models that may contain cycles, in which case neither convergence, nor correctness in the case of convergence is guaranteed. Nonetheless, BP has gained popularity as it seems to remain effective in many cases of interest, even when the underlying graph is ‘far’ from being a tree. However, the theoretical understanding of BP (and its new relative survey propagation) when applied to CSPs is poor. Contributing to the rigorous understanding of BP, in this paper we relate the convergence of BP to spectral properties of the graph. This encompasses a result for random graphs with a ‘planted’ solution; thus, we obtain the first rigorous result on BP for graph colouring in the case of a complex graphical structure (as opposed to trees). In particular, the analysis shows how belief propagation breaks the symmetry between the 3! possible permutations of the colour classes.
Error detection of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion in text-to-speech synthesis using speech signal and lexical context

In unit selection text-to-speech synthesis, voice creation involved a phonemic transcription of read speech. This is produced by an automatic grapheme-to-phoneme conversion of the text read, followed by a manual correction. Although grapheme-to-phoneme conversion makes few errors, the manual correction is time consuming as every generated phoneme should be checked. We propose a method to automatically detect grapheme-to-phoneme conversion errors by comparing contrastives phonemisation hypothesis. A lattice-based forced alignment system is implemented, allowing for signal-dependent phonemisation. We implement also a sequence-to-sequence neural network model to obtain a context-dependent grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. On a French dataset, we show that we can detect to 86.3% of the errors made by a commercial grapheme-to-phoneme system. Moreover, the amount of data annotated as erroneous is kept under 10% of the total evaluation data. The time spent for phoneme manual checking can thus been drastically reduced without decreasing significantly the phonemic transcription quality.
Control of Respiratory Motion by Hypnosis Intervention during Radiotherapy of Lung Cancer I

The uncertain position of lung tumor during radiotherapy compromises the treatment effect. To effectively control respiratory motion during radiotherapy of lung cancer without any side effects, a novel control scheme, hypnosis, has been introduced in lung cancer treatment. In order to verify the suggested method, six volunteers were selected with a wide range of distribution of age, weight, and chest circumference. A set of experiments have been conducted for each volunteer, under the guidance of the professional hypnotist. All the experiments were repeated in the same environmental condition. The amplitude of respiration has been recorded under the normal state and hypnosis, respectively. Experimental results show that the respiration motion of volunteers in hypnosis has smaller and more stable amplitudes than in normal state. That implies that the hypnosis intervention can be an alternative way for respiratory control, which can effectively reduce the respiratory amplitude and increase the stability of respiratory cycle. The proposed method will find useful application in image-guided radiotherapy.
A Divide-and-Conquer Strategy for Parsing

In this paper, we propose a novel strategy which is designed to enhance the accuracy of the parser by simplifying complex sentences before parsing. This approach involves the separate parsing of the constituent sub-sentences within a complex sentence. To achieve that, the divide-and-conquer strategy first disambiguates the roles of the link words in the sentence and segments the sentence based on these roles. The separate parse trees of the segmented sub-sentences and the noun phrases within them are then synthesized to form the final parse. To evaluate the effects of this strategy on parsing, we compare the original performance of a dependency parser with the performance when it is enhanced with the divide-and-conquer strategy. When tested on 600 sentences of the IPSM'95 data sets, the enhanced parser saw a considerable error reduction of 21.2% in its accuracy.
A Decomposition-based Constraint Optimization Approach for Statically Scheduling Task Graphs with Communication Delays to Multiprocessors

The paper presents a decomposition strategy to speed up constraint optimization for a representative multiprocessor scheduling problem. In the manner of Benders decomposition, our technique solves relaxed versions of the problem and iteratively learns constraints to prune the solution space. Typical formulations suffer prohibitive run times even on medium-sized problems with less than 30 tasks. Our decomposition strategy enhances constraint optimization to robustly handle instances with over 100 tasks. Moreover, the extensibility of constraint formulations permits realistic application and resource constraints, which is a limitation of common heuristic methods for scheduling. The inherent extensibility, coupled with improved run times from a decomposition strategy, posit constraint optimization as a powerful tool for resource constrained scheduling and multiprocessor design space exploration
Comparison of Characteristics between Patients with H7N9 Living in Rural and Urban Areas of Zhejiang Province, China: A Preliminary Report

A total of 134 cases of H7N9 influenza infection were identified in 12 provinces of China between March 25 and September 31, 2013. Of these, 46 cases occurred in Zhejiang Province. We carried out a preliminary comparison of characteristics between rural and urban H7N9 cases from Zhejiang Province, China. Field investigations were conducted for each confirmed H7N9 case. A standardized questionnaire was used to collect information about demographics, exposure history, clinical signs and symptoms, timelines of medical visits and care after onset of illness. Of the 46 H7N9 cases in Zhejiang Province identified between March 25 and September 31, 2013, there were 16 rural cases and 30 urban cases. Compared to urban cases, there was a higher proportion of females among the rural cases [11/16 (69%) vs. 6/30 (20%), P = 0.001]. Among the rural cases, 14/15 (93%) with available data had a history of recent poultry exposure, which was significantly higher than that among urban cases (64%, P = 0.038). More patients from the rural group had a history of breeding poultry compared with those from the urban group [38% (6/16) vs. 10% (3/30), respectively; P = 0.025]. Interestingly, the median number of medical visits of patients from rural areas was higher than that of patients from urban areas (P = 0.046). There was no difference between the two groups in terms of age distribution, fatality rate, incubation period, symptoms, and underlying medical conditions. In conclusion, compared to patients from urban areas, more patients from rural areas were female, had an exposure history, had a history of breeding poultry, and had a higher number of medical visits. These findings indicate that there are different exposure patterns between patients living in rural and urban areas and that more rural cases were infected through backyard poultry breeding.
Foundations of traversal based query execution over linked data

Query execution over the Web of Linked Data has attracted much attention recently. A particularly interesting approach is link traversal based query execution which proposes to integrate the traversal of data links into the creation of query results. Hence -in contrast to traditional query execution paradigms- this does not assume a fixed set of relevant data sources beforehand; instead, the traversal process discovers data and data sources on the fly and, thus, enables applications to tap the full potential of the Web. While several authors have studied possibilities to implement the idea of link traversal based query execution and to optimize query execution in this context, no work exists that discusses theoretical foundations of the approach in general. Our paper fills this gap. We introduce a well-defined semantics for queries that may be executed using a link traversal based approach. Based on this semantics we formally analyze properties of such queries. In particular, we study the computability of queries as well as the implications of querying a potentially infinite Web of Linked Data. Our results show that query computation in general is not guaranteed to terminate and that for any given query it is undecidable whether the execution terminates. Furthermore, we define an abstract execution model that captures the integration of link traversal into the query execution process. Based on this model we prove the soundness and completeness of link traversal based query execution and analyze an existing implementation approach.
Visualization and Analysis of Diffusion Tensor Fields

The power of medical imaging modalities to measure and characterize biological tissue is amplified by visualization and analysis methods that help researchers to see and understand the structures within their data. Diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging can measure microstructural properties of biological tissue, such as the coherent linear organization of white matter of the central nervous system, or the fibrous texture of muscle tissue. This dissertation describes new methods for visualizing and analyzing the salient structure of diffusion tensor datasets. Glyphs from superquadric surfaces and textures from reaction-diffusion systems facilitate inspection of data properties and trends. Fiber tractography based on vector-tensor multiplication allows major white matter pathways to be visualized. The generalization of direct volume rendering to tensor data allows large-scale structures to be shaded and rendered. Finally, a mathematical framework for analyzing the derivatives of tensor values, in terms of shape and orientation change, enables analytical shading in volume renderings, and a method of feature detection important for feature-preserving filtering of tensor fields. Together, the combination of methods enhances the ability of diffusion tensor imaging to provide insight into the local and global structure of biological tissue.
Fast Grasp Synthesis for Various Shaped Objects

Human‐like grasp planning is difficult because a human hand has a high number of degrees of freedom, and there are many grasping styles depending on the shape of an object and purpose. We propose a fast grasp synthesis system which enables a user to choose the desired grasping styles from a set of grasp types in a human grasp taxonomy. Given a 3D model of an object, our system detects graspable positions and generates grasping hand postures in every applicable grasp types in the grasp taxonomy for each grasping position. Hand postures are generated separately for each digit, and hand alignment is then refined iteratively. A user can also specify the grasping position by moving the cursor onto object surface, as well as grasp type. The generated hand postures are shown as a table of thumbnail images, and the user can select the grasping hand posture by clicking on one of those postures. Our system enables interactive generation of various grasping hand postures in real time.
University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs A platform for semantic web studies Conference or Workshop Item

The Semantic Web can be seen as a large, heterogeneous network of ontologies and semantic documents. Characterizing these ontologies, the way they relate and the way they are organized can help in better understanding how knowledge is produced and published online. It also provides new ways to explore and exploit this large collection of ontologies. In this paper, we present the foundation of a research platform for characterizing the Semantic Web, relying on the collection of ontologies and the functionalities provided by the Watson Semantic Web search engine. We more specifically focus on formalizing and monitoring relationships between ontologies online, considering a variety of different relations (similarity, versioning, agreement, modularity) and how they can help us obtaining meaningful overviews of the current state of
Biodegradable Porous Nano-Hydroxyapatite/Alginate Scaffold

Porous scaffold containing biodegradable Ca-crosslinked alginate(ALG) and nano-hydroxyapatite(n-HA) is synthesized by the freeze-extraction and freeze-gelation methods. The prepared scaffolds were tested by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), infrared absorption spectra (IR), raman spectra, X-ray diffraction (XRD) and burning test. Chemical binding between inorganic n-HA and Ca-crosslinked alginate was investigated. It indicated that n-HA was interacted with Ca-crosslinked alginate. The results of SEM showed that the scaffolds exhibited open-cellular pore structures. The content of n-HA affected the porosity and pore size of the composite. The composite can be a promising scaffold material for tissue engineering.
A Methodology for integration of formal methods in a healthcare case study

When developing safety-critical systems, it is necessary to satisfy not only functional requirements defining the set of tasks to be performed by the system, but also safety requirements describing the characteristics the system should possess in order to ensure proper safety. Reliability is, as well, an acute issue in the development of safety-critical systems. Enhancement of safety and reliability can be achieved by applying formal methods, while complexity of large systems can be mastered using a graphical language for modelling, e.g., UML. Here we introduce a UML-based development process that incorporates safety analysis and provides a logical interface to a formal refinement based development in B-action systems. The tools associated with the B Method provide a good mechanised support for proving the correctness of the development within B-action systems. We show the feasibility of our development process within a healthcare case study where we develop a safety-critical drug discovery system. The work has been done within the EU-project MATISSE Methodologies and Technologies for Industrial Strength Systems Engineering (IST-1999-11435, http://www.matisse.qinetiq.com/ ).
Critical Periods for the Development of Obesity

The mother's nutritional and metabolic environment is critical in determining not only the success of reproduction but also for the future health of the newborn. Maternal genetics, maternal diet during pregnancy, lactation and infant feeding in the early stages of life can have long-term effects on children's health and may predispose to diseases such as obesity. The term "programming“ has been used to describe the process by which stimuli or manipulations applied during critical or sensitive periods of development and organogenesis can cause changes in the long term in structures and functions of the body, compromising the future health of the individual (Barker, 1994; Lucas, 1994; Symonds et al., 2007). The concept “programming” defines the genetic, diet, nutrition and habits in the early stages of life for the pregnant mother and child, which are main factors influencing the optimal neurological and psychological development of children (Dunstan et al., 2008; Helland et al., 2003; Hibbeln et al., 2005; Wells, 2007) and the development of diseases in adulthood (Lucas, 2005; Wells, 2007) such as diabetes (Fernandez-Twinn & Ozanne, 2006), obesity (Budge et al., 2005; Koletzko, 2006), cardiovascular disease (Feldt et al., 2007), some types of cancer (Key et al., 2004) and bone diseases (Sayer & Cooper, 2005) (Figure 1).
Emotion measurement platform for daily life situations

The growing interest in affective computing is expected to have its beneficial impact on consumer lifestyle products. Especially emphatic applications — applications that make you feel they really understand you — will serve the current consumer interest in enhanced and meaningful experiences. To do so, the applications will have to measure the user's emotional experience. Well-established psychophysiological techniques bear promise, but so far have mainly been validated in laboratory situations. To also apply them in real-life situations, we built an emotion measurement platform. This platform shows that emotional experiences can be measured in a relatively unobtrusive way, while at the same time it enables us to gather knowledge on emotional experiences in everyday-life and it offers the opportunity to prototype emphatic application concepts and test them in relevant situations.
Feature Extraction for Illustrating 3D Stone Tools from Unorganized Point Clouds

This paper presents a method for extracting features for illustrating stone tools. Features are detected from unorganized point clouds obtained by a 3D laser scanner. The curvature of each point in the point clouds is estimated by local surface (cid:12)tting algorithm and used for detecting potential feature points. Feature lines are extracted by directionally growing algorithm. The main idea of our method is to extract feature lines using principal curvatures and principal directions of the potential feature points along the axis directions and to merge all extracted lines. The detected features are modi(cid:12)ed by speci(cid:12)c knowledge on illustrating stone tools.
Exceptional structure of the dilute A(3) model: E(8) and E(7) Rogers-Ramanujan identities

The dilute A3 lattice model in regime 2 is in the universality class of the Ising model in a magnetic field. Here we directly establish the existence of an E8 structure in the dilute A3 model in this regime by expressing the one-dimensional configuration sums in terms of fermionic sums which involve the E8 root system explicitly. In the thermodynamic limit, these polynomial identities yield a proof of the E8 Rogers-Ramanujan identity recently conjectured by Kedem et al. (1993). The polynomial identities also apply to regime 3, which is obtained by transforming the modular parameter by q to 1/q. In this case we find an A1xE7 structure and prove a Rogers-Ramanujan identity of A1xE7-type. Finally, in the critical q to 1 limit, we give some intriguing expressions for the number of L-step paths on the A3 Dynkin diagram with tadpoles in terms of the E8 Cartan matrix. All our findings confirm the E8 and E7 structure of the dilute A3 model found recently by means of the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz.
Modeling heterogeneous network interference

Cellular systems are becoming more heterogeneous with the introduction of low power nodes including femtocells, relays, and distributed antennas. Unfortunately, the resulting interference environment is also becoming more complex, making evaluation of different communication strategies for cellular systems more challenging in both analysis and simulation. This paper suggests a simplified interference model for heterogeneous network. Leveraging recent applications of stochastic geometry to analyze cellular systems, this paper propose to analyze performance in a fixed-size typical cell surrounded by an interference field consisted of superposition of marked Poisson point processes outside a guard region. The proposed model simplifies the simulation of cellular systems and may provide analytical insights for certain signaling strategies.
Time-Consistent Public Policy

In this paper we study how a benevolent government that cannot commit to future policy should trade off the costs and benefits of public expenditure. We characterize and solve for Markov-perfect equilibria of the dynamic game between successive governments. The characterization consists of an inter-temporal first-order condition (a "generalized Euler equation") for the government, and we use it both to gain insight into the nature of the equilibrium and as a basis for computations. For a calibrated economy, we find that when the only tax base available to the government is capital income—an inelastic source of funds at any point in time—the government still refrains from taxing at confiscatory rates. We also find that when the only tax base is labour income the Markov equilibrium features less public expenditure and lower tax rates than the Ramsey equilibrium. Copyright 2008, Wiley-Blackwell.
The geriatric cancer experience at the end of life: testing an adapted model

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To test an adapted end-of-life conceptual model of the geriatric cancer experience and provide evidence for the validity and reliability of the model for use in practice and research. DESIGN Nonexperimental and cross-sectional using baseline data collected within 24-72 hours of admission to hospice. SETTING Two hospices in the southeastern United States. SAMPLE 403 hospice homecare patients; 56% were men and 97% were Caucasian with a mean age of 77.7 years. METHODS Confirmatory factor analyses using structural equation modeling with AMOS statistical software. MAIN RESEARCH VARIABLES Clinical status; physiologic, psychological, and spiritual variables; and quality of life (QOL). FINDINGS A three-factor model with QOL as an outcome variable showed that 67% of the variability in QOL is explained by the patient's symptom and spiritual experiences. CONCLUSIONS As symptoms and associated severity and distress increase, the patient's QOL decreases. As the spiritual experience increases (the expressed need for inspiration, spiritual activities, and religion), QOL also increases. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING The model supports caring for the physical and metaphysical dimensions of the patient's life. It also highlights a need for holistic care inclusive of physical, emotional, and spiritual domains.
Three-dimensional finite element analysis of effect of prosthetic materials and short implant biomechanics on D4 bone under immediate loading

Aim: The aim of the study is to evaluate the influence of maxillary cortical bone thickness (CBT) and crown prosthesis on stress distribution at bone bone–implant interface in single immediately loaded short and wide wide-diameter implants. Materials and Methods: A three dimensional finite element model of a maxillary posterior section of bone (Type 4) with CBT of 0.5 mm was used in this study. Dental implant of length 7 mm length and diameter 5 mm diameter was modeled and inserted into maxillary models. Porcelain fused to metal (PFM) and acrylics were used for crown prosthesis. A total average occlusal force of 100 N was applied at the central pit of the crown in oblique (15° to the vertical) direction buccolingually. Results: The micro micro–movements and Von Mises stresses were found to be lower for PFM crown than for acrylic crown on the short implant. Conclusion: The peri–implant stresses on the cortical bone were reduced for PFM crown. Short and wide implant can be placed in D4 bone quality with thin CBT under immediately loading protocol using PFM crowns.