Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Level-Set Method for the Evolution of Faceted Crystals

A level-set formulation for the motion of faceted interfaces is presented. The evolving surface of a crystal is represented as the zero-level of a phase function. The crystal is identified by its orientation and facet speeds. Accuracy is tested on a single crystal by comparison with the exact evolution. The method is extended to study the evolution of a polycrystal. Numerical examples in two and three dimensions are presented.
Wireless network secrecy with public feedback

In this paper we consider secret communication between two special nodes (ldquosourcerdquo and ldquodestinationrdquo) in a wireless network with authenticated relays: the message communicated to the destination is to be kept information-theoretically (unconditionally) secret from any eavesdropper within a class. A public feedback channel from the destination to all nodes may or may not be available. We focus on a one-relay network with a bottleneck link between the source and the relay to illustrate the ideas. For this particular network, we derive the rate-equivocation capacity region when the public feedback channel is absent, and an achievable secret key rate when public feedback is present.
Analysis of appearance features for human matching between different fields of view

Human matching between different fields of view is a difficult problem in intelligent video surveillance; whereas fusing multiple features has become a strong tool to solve it. In order to guide the fusion scheme, it is necessary to evaluate the matching performance of these features. In this paper, four typical features are chosen for the evaluation. They are the Color Histogram, UV Chromaticity, Major Color Spectrum Histogram, and Scale-Invariant Features (SIFT). Quantities of video data are collected to test their general accuracy, robustness, and real-time applicability. The robustness is measured under the conditions of illumination changes, Gaussian and salt noises, foreground errors, resolution changes, and camera angle differences. The experimental results show that the four features bear distinctive performances under the different conditions, which will provide important references for the feature fusion methods.
Functional Analysis of NopM, a Novel E3 Ubiquitin Ligase (NEL) Domain Effector of Rhizobium sp. Strain NGR234

Type 3 effector proteins secreted via the bacterial type 3 secretion system (T3SS) are not only virulence factors of pathogenic bacteria, but also influence symbiotic interactions between nitrogen-fixing nodule bacteria (rhizobia) and leguminous host plants. In this study, we characterized NopM (nodulation outer protein M) of Rhizobium sp. strain NGR234, which shows sequence similarities with novel E3 ubiquitin ligase (NEL) domain effectors from the human pathogens Shigella flexneri and Salomonella enterica. NopM expressed in Escherichia coli, but not the non-functional mutant protein NopM-C338A, showed E3 ubiquitin ligase activity in vitro. In vivo, NopM, but not inactive NopM-C338A, promoted nodulation of the host plant Lablab purpureus by NGR234. When NopM was expressed in yeast, it inhibited mating pheromone signaling, a mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase pathway. When expressed in the plant Nicotiana benthamiana, NopM inhibited one part of the plant's defense response, as shown by a reduced production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in response to the flagellin peptide flg22, whereas it stimulated another part, namely the induction of defense genes. In summary, our data indicate the potential for NopM as a functional NEL domain E3 ubiquitin ligase. Our findings that NopM dampened the flg22-induced ROS burst in N. benthamiana but promoted defense gene induction are consistent with the concept that pattern-triggered immunity is split in two separate signaling branches, one leading to ROS production and the other to defense gene induction.
Viewing maintenance as reuse-oriented software development

The author presents a high-level organizational paradigm for development and maintenance in which an organization can learn from development and maintenance tasks and then apply that paradigm to several maintenance process models. Associated with the paradigm is a mechanism for setting measurable goals, making it possible to evaluate the process and the product and learn from experience. He discusses three maintenance models: the quick-fix, the iterative-enhancement, and the full-reuse model. He establishes a framework for classifying reusable objects and selecting a model. He offers a scheme that categorizes three aspects of reuse: the reusable object, the reusable object's context, and the process of transforming that object. The author then discusses what he terms reuse enablers: an improvement paradigm that helps organizations evaluate, learn, and enhance their software processes and products; a reuse-oriented evolution environment that encourages and supports reuse; and automated support for the paradigm and environment as well as for measurement and evaluation. <<ETX>>
Spatial Event Language across Geographic Domains

We present first results of an analysis of a corpus of linguistic descriptions that were collected in controlled experiments. This corpus and its analysis add to the body of knowledge on formal models for spatial language, language interpretation and generation. The experiments are grounded in qualitative formalisms (RCC and Intersection Models, IM) that have a long standing tradition as means to bridge formal and linguistic descriptions of space and spatial relations. Our experiments address dynamically changing spatial relations (movement patterns/geographic events). By keeping the formal spatial characterizations identical across experiments but changing the semantics (that is, we used movement patterns across seven different geographic domains such as a hurricane in relation to a peninsula, plus two geometric figure domains) we contribute to disentangling spatial and domain specific aspects of spatial (event) language. We briefly discuss here two aspects: First, we hand examine the corpus by selecting participants that show the same conceptual behavior as identified through RCC/IM; second, we analyze the domain specific sub-corpora to address similarities and dissimilarities between individual domains.
A remote telepresence system for high school classrooms

PEBBLES (providing education by bringing learning environments to students) is a telecommunications system which combines traditional videoconferencing with simple robotics. It allows elementary school aged children who are unable to attend school because of hospitalization or other reasons to establish a presence in their classroom with a remotely controlled videoconferencing robot. In addition to communicating with live video and audio, the child can turn the robot's head left and right, tilt the conferencing camera up and down, zoom in and out, and activate a hand for asking questions. Earlier studies have shown that PEBBLES can be successfully integrated into classrooms at the elementary level. However, no studies have been conducted with high school students because attending high school classes requires a high degree of mobility and additional functionality that is lacking in PEBBLES. We present our recently completed high school prototype of PEBBLES. Functionality for this system incorporates all of the controls of the existing version of PEBBLES as well as two displays, and collaboration tools. Other features include being lightweight for portability between classes, and esthetically pleasing to high school students
Study on the Effect of Firm's Dividends on Shareholders' Balance Mechanism

Based on the endogeneity of the ownership structure, this paper uses panel data to show the dynamic effect of Chinese Listed Companies' cash dividend distribution behavior on the shareholders’ balance mechanism. We find minority shareholders don't perceive cash dividends, at least normal level of dividends, as controlling shareholder's expropriation behavior, especially in companies that controlling shareholders dominant. Taking into account of the ownership structure’ exogenous feature, We use a Simultaneous Equations Model to show the interactions between cash dividends and shareholders’ balance mechanism. We find the higher level of Chinese Listed Companies' cash dividends, the lower degree of balance among shareholders; the lower degree of balance of shareholders, the higher level of companies’ cash dividends.
Improvement Recall of NTCIR-MedNLP Using Hierarchical Bayesian Language Models

The msiknowledge team participated in the de-identification, complaint and diagnosis subtasks of the NTCIR-10 MedNLP Pilot Task. The terms of complaint and diagnosis subtasks may have several representations and some terms may be not in sample data, and also locations and personal names in de-identification task are unique in each cases, so simple dictionary building from sample can’t solve the problem. In this research, to avoid using outer copora or dictionaries which are not general solution, we aimed at building a system that learns to recognize terminology from small tagged corpus by combining a tag level language model and a character level language model base on HPYLM.
Nymphodora gen. nov., a new genus of Nannoniscidae Hansen, 1916 (Isopoda, Asellota, Janiroidea) from the high Arctic

A new isopod genus is described from the Canada Basin, Nymphodora gen. nov. The type species of the genus, Nymphodora fletcheri (Paul & George, 1975) comb. nov., was first described as Desmosomatidae in the genus Mirabilicoxa and then later assigned to Chelibranchus by Kussakin (1999). However, the species bears characters with a greater affinity to Nannoniscidae, such as a bulbous terminal article of antenna 1 and fusions of the pereonites 6, 7 and pleotelson. Here, the species is redescribed and transferred to a new genus in Nannoniscidae.
Identification of the immunodominant peptides of the MART-1 human melanoma antigen recognized by the majority of HLA-A2-restricted tumor infiltrating lymphocytes

Four melanoma proteins, MART-1, gp100, tyrosinase, and tyrosinase- related protein-1 (gp75) were evaluated for recognition by HLA-A2- restricted melanoma-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) derived from the tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) of 10 different patients. 9 of 10 TIL recognized MART-1, 4 recognized gp100 (including 3 that also recognized MART-1), but none of the TIL recognized tyrosinase or gp75. Based on the known HLA-A2.1 peptide binding motifs, 23 peptides from MART-1 were synthesized in an attempt to identify the epitopes recognized by TIL. Three peptides were recognized by TIL when pulsed on T2 target cells. One of the 9-mer peptides, AAGIGILTV, was most effective in sensitizing the T2 cells for TIL lysis. This peptide was recognized by 9 of 10 HLA-A2-restricted melanoma-specific CTLs. Therefore, this peptide appears to be a very common immunogenic epitope for HLA-A2-restricted melanoma-specific TIL and may be useful for the development of immunotherapeutic strategies.
Observed decreases in the Canadian outdoor skating season due to recent winter warming

Global warming has the potential to negatively affect one of Canada’s primary sources of winter recreation: hockey and ice skating on outdoor rinks. Observed changes in winter temperatures in Canada suggest changes in the meteorological conditions required to support the creation and maintenance of outdoor skating rinks; while there have been observed increases in the ice-free period of several natural water bodies, there has been no study of potential trends in the duration of the season supporting the construction of outdoor skating rinks. Here we show that the outdoor skating season (OSS) in Canada has significantly shortened in many regions of the country as a result of changing climate conditions. We first established a meteorological criterion for the beginning, and a proxy for the length of the OSS. We extracted this information from daily maximum temperature observations from 1951 to 2005, and tested it for significant changes over time due to global warming as well as due to changes in patterns of large-scale natural climate variability. We found that many locations have seen a statistically significant decrease in the OSS length, particularly in Southwest and Central Canada. This suggests that future global warming has the potential to significantly compromise the viability of outdoor skating in Canada.
Implementation of an Internet-controlled system under variable delays

This work deals with the control and the observation of a remote system using Internet as a communication line. The process consists in a Slave part S, with poor computing capacity, connected to a Master M through the Internet. The internal times of both M and S are synchronized thanks to a common GPS clock. The global system must ensure some speed performance whatever the delay variations. The main technical restriction is that the delays are less than some known bound, even if the framework we consider takes into account the perturbations generated by the Internet communication delays, by the packet losses and by the sampling phenomenon as well. In what concerns the design of the observer and controller, most of the theorems to be used here refer to proofs given in (Seuret et al., 2006), and this will allow for focussing on the implementation aspects.
On Refining Real-Time Multilingual News Event Extraction through Deployment of Cross-Lingual Information Fusion Techniques

Nowadays, many influential security-related facts are reported multiple times by different sources and in different languages. Therefore, in the recent years, the research on advancing event extraction technology shifted from classical single-document extraction toward cross-document information aggregation and fact validation. However, relatively little work has been reported on cross-lingual information fusion in this area. This paper presents the results of some preliminary experiments on deploying cross-lingual information fusion techniques for refining the results of a large-scale multilingual news event extraction system. The first technique is based on fusing the responses of the mono-lingual event extraction systems, whereas the second one uses state-of-the-art machine translation to convert all news articles reporting on a given event into one common language and subsequently applies the corresponding mono-lingual event extraction system on the translated articles. An evaluation of the aforementioned techniques on a news article corpus, whose articles refer to 523 real-world crisis-related events (violent events, man-made and natural disasters), revealed that the descriptions of circa 10% of the events could be refined through fusing the event descriptions returned by the mono-lingual event extraction systems. The overall gain in recall and precision against the best mono-lingual system was 6,4% and 4,8% respectively. The second approach, based on machine translation, turned to perform significantly worse compared to the former technique and the best mono-lingual system (English).
Determination of burn depth by polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

Burn depth assessment is a key step guiding the treatment plan in patients who have sustained thermal injuries. We have developed a technique, polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT), to provide the physician with a quantitative estimate of actual burn depth. We generated burns of various depths by contacting rates with a brass rod preheated to 75 degrees for 5, 15, or 30 seconds. PS-OCT imags birefringence in biological tissue, through the depth resolved changes in the polarization state of light propagated and reflected from the sample. Preliminary result are presented that show a correlation between the loss of birefringence due to thermal injury and the actual burn depth determined by histological analysis. PS-OCT is a noninvasive technique which potentially can give physicians the accuracy to formulate the best treatment plan for burn patients.
The BubbleFish: Bringing Digital Document Management into the Physical World

Abstract This paper introduces the BubbleFish project, in terms of the main idea, related work, and a set of possible prototypical implementations. The BubbleFish is a digital document manager that uses Augmented Reality to let its users maintain digital documents in the physical environment, as an alternative to the currently dominating file/folder approach in desktop based computer systems. The user moves documents in and out of a virtual stage, currently the computer screen, and is able to freely position the documents spatially, e.g. on the desk, in a shelf or a drawer. The framework of interaction provided follows the principles of direct manipulation, but takes the issue of directness at the interface further by providing an inter-action space that blends the virtual and the physical world. Introduction This paper will introduce the BubbleFish project. In short, I will present the BubbleFish concept for how to allow the desktop computer user to manage his or her documents in the physical space surrounding the computer. Management of all digital documents—be it word-processing documents, pictures, or organizational budgets—is currently restricted to putting files (i.e. documents) into folders (i.e. hierarchical separators); a hierarchical tree-like system promoted and implemented in basically all available operating systems. Digital document management was chosen as it should be considered as one of the most frequent everyday concerns of computer use: how to store, retrieve and maintain digital documents. As mentioned, in today’s computer systems documents are stored as files within folder hierarchies. The problem is that we often find it intricate to organize digital documents using this approach. Rekimoto (1999) argues that it is difficult to correctly classify documents into specific folders as some documents may belong to two or more categories, or insufficiently match a user’s subjective folder system. For the same reasons, finding a document is also a difficult task, which is especially true for digitized data such as images, audio and video where there is currently no apparent mechanism available to perform searches on content (Rekimoto, 1999). The starting point for this project was hence to question the currently applied view of how digital documents should be managed, and specifically find a new way of allowing users to manage digital documents in desktop computing. The paper will also consider related work in
Antecedents and outcomes of ERP implementation success

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have established a reputation in the world of business as indispensables tools that integrate all departments and functions across a company into a single computer system. However, implementing an ERP system does not always result in enhanced organizational performance. In order to ensure successful implementation, companies should study the critical factors having an impact on the whole procedure. In this context, the present study proceeds in developing and testing an original conceptual framework (research model), which explores the factors having an impact on ERP implementation success (internal environment, technology-related issues, implementation team, end-users), as well as the impact of the implementation itself on organisational performance. The proposed conceptual framework was tested, using a newly-developed structured questionnaire, in a sample of 204 Greek companies that have already implemented an ERP system. The Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) technique was used in order to test the research hypotheses.
Unsupervised and Supervised Clustering: The Mutual Information between Parameters and Observations

Recent works in parameter estimation and neural coding have demonstrated that optimal performance are related to the mutual information between parameters and data. We consider the mutual information in the case where the dependency in the parameter (a vector θ) of the conditional p.d. f. of each observation (a vector ξ, is through the scalar product θξ only. We derive bounds and asymptotic behaviour for the mutual information and compare with results obtained on the same model with the "replica technique".
The Stratifying Value of Hangzhou Criteria in Liver Transplantation for Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Background/Aims The selection criteria for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) as candidates for deceased donor liver transplantation (DDLT) are well studied. In this era of limited deceased donor organs, the value of living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) for HCC remains controversial. The aim of the present study was to verify the stratification value of the Hangzhou criteria for LDLT. Methods The data of 47 LDLT recipients and 94 matched DDLT recipients at our center were evaluated. Overall survival and tumor-free survival were calculated. Prognostic factors influencing post-liver transplantation (LT) survival were identified. The stratification values of the Hangzhou criteria and Milan criteria were compared. Results LDLT recipients spent much less time on the waiting list. The post-LT survival of recipients fulfilling the Milan criteria and recipients fulfilling the Hangzhou criteria were comparable (P>0.05). The overall and tumor-free survival did not differ statistically between the two groups. In both groups, more recipients not meeting the Milan criteria but with a satisfactory outcome were identified by the Hangzhou criteria. Among recipients who did not meet the Hangzhou criteria, tumor-free survival was better for the LDLT recipients than the DDLT recipients (P = 0.024). Conclusions The Hangzhou criteria are reliable for stratifying HCC patients in terms of prognosis. HCC patients fulfilling the Hangzhou criteria gain satisfactory survival from LT. Outcomes after LDLT are better than those after DDLT for HCC patients who do not meet the Hangzhou criteria.
Layout-aware optimization of stt mrams

We present a layout-aware optimization methodology for spin-transfer torque (STT) MRAMs, considering the dependence of cell area on the access transistor width (WFET), number of fingers in the access transistor and the metal pitch of bit- and source-lines. It is shown that for WFET less than a critical value (~7 times the minimum feature length), one-finger transistor yields minimum cell area. For large WFET, minimum cell area is achieved with a two-finger transistor. We also show that for a range of WFET, the cell area is limited by the metal pitch of bit- and source-lines. As a result, in the metal pitch limited (MPL) region, WFET can be increased with no change in the cell area. We analyze the impact of increase in WFET in the MPL region on the write margin and cell tunneling magneto-resistance (CTMR) of different genres of STT MRAMs. We consider conventional STT MRAM cells in the standard and reverse-connected configurations and STT MRAMs with tilted magnetic anisotropy for the analysis. By increasing WFET from the minimum to the maximum value in the MPL region (at iso-cell area) and reducing read voltage to achieve iso-read disturb margin, 2X improvement in write margin and 27% improvement in CTMR is achieved for the reverse-connected STT MRAM. Similar trends are observed for other STT MRAM cells.
A 190mW 40Gbps SerDes transmitter and receiver chipset in 65nm CMOS technology

This paper presents a 40Gbps SerDes transceiver consuming only 190mW power. The transmitter employs serializing time window search technique and 2-tap pre-emphasis. The receiver implements power-efficient front-end circuits including current-integrating FFE and cascaded dynamic comparators. The CDR employs a bang-bang phase detector, and the integral path and proportional path are separated. Fabricated in 65nm technology, the receiver BER is below 1e-12 under 15dB channel loss. The total jitter of transmitter 40Gbps eye diagram is 6.7ps for 1e-12 BER. The phase noise of recovered clock is -122dBc/Hz at 1MHz and recovered data peak-peak jitter is 26ps.