Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Main-Memory Hash Joins on Modern Processor Architectures

Existing main-memory hash join algorithms for multi-core can be classified into two camps. Hardware-oblivious hash join variants do not depend on hardware-specific parameters. Rather, they consider qualitative characteristics of modern hardware and are expected to achieve good performance on any technologically similar platform. The assumption behind these algorithms is that hardware is now good enough at hiding its own limitations-through automatic hardware prefetching, out-of-order execution, or simultaneous multi-threading (SMT)-to make hardware-oblivious algorithms competitive without the overhead of carefully tuning to the underlying hardware. Hardware-conscious implementations, such as (parallel) radix join, aim to maximally exploit a given architecture by tuning the algorithm parameters (e.g., hash table sizes) to the particular features of the architecture. The assumption here is that explicit parameter tuning yields enough performance advantages to warrant the effort required. This paper compares the two approaches under a wide range of workloads (relative table sizes, tuple sizes, effects of sorted data, etc.) and configuration parameters (VM page sizes, number of threads, number of cores, SMT, SIMD, prefetching, etc.). The results show that hardware-conscious algorithms generally outperform hardware-oblivious ones. However, on specific workloads and special architectures with aggressive simultaneous multi-threading, hardware-oblivious algorithms are competitive. The main conclusion of the paper is that, in existing multi-core architectures, it is still important to carefully tailor algorithms to the underlying hardware to get the necessary performance. But processor developments may require to revisit this conclusion in the future.
Transform coding of image feature descriptors

We investigate transform coding to efficiently store and transmit SIFT and SURF image descriptors. We show that image and feature matching algorithms are robust to significantly compressed features. We achieve near-perfect image matching and retrieval for both SIFT and SURF using ~2 bits/dimension. When applied to SIFT and SURF, this provides a 16× compression relative to conventional floating point representation. We establish a strong correlation between MSE and matching error for feature points and images. Feature compression enables many application that may not otherwise be possible, especially on mobile devices.
Testing-based assessment process for upgrading component systems

Updating component-based systems demand a careful treatment due to stability risks. Replacement components must be analysed on behaviour equivalence for the provided functionality. Our proposal complements the conventional compatibility analysis with black-box testing criteria as a support for substitutability. The aim is to analyse functions of data transformation encapsulated on components, i.e. their behaviour. This is reflected by the observability testing metric. For a piece under substitution, a component behaviour test suite is built for being later applied on candidate replacement components. The approach is supported through a tool, testooj, which is focused on testing Java components.
Flock House Virus RNA Polymerase Initiates RNA Synthesis De Novo and Possesses a Terminal Nucleotidyl Transferase Activity

Flock House virus (FHV) is a positive-stranded RNA virus with a bipartite genome of RNAs, RNA1 and RNA2, and belongs to the family Nodaviridae. As the most extensively studied nodavirus, FHV has become a well-recognized model for studying various aspects of RNA virology, particularly viral RNA replication and antiviral innate immunity. FHV RNA1 encodes protein A, which is an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRP) and functions as the sole viral replicase protein responsible for RNA replication. Although the RNA replication of FHV has been studied in considerable detail, the mechanism employed by FHV protein A to initiate RNA synthesis has not been determined. In this study, we characterized the RdRP activity of FHV protein A in detail and revealed that it can initiate RNA synthesis via a de novo (primer-independent) mechanism. Moreover, we found that FHV protein A also possesses a terminal nucleotidyl transferase (TNTase) activity, which was able to restore the nucleotide loss at the 3′-end initiation site of RNA template to rescue RNA synthesis initiation in vitro, and may function as a rescue and protection mechanism to protect the 3′ initiation site, and ensure the efficiency and accuracy of viral RNA synthesis. Altogether, our study establishes the de novo initiation mechanism of RdRP and the terminal rescue mechanism of TNTase for FHV protein A, and represents an important advance toward understanding FHV RNA replication.
Understanding the privacy-efficiency trade-off in location based queries

Mobile devices with global positioning capabilities (e.g., GPS) allow users to ask queries relative to their present location. Since certain queries may be privacy-sensitive, it is important to protect the identity of the users who send requests for Location-based Services (LBS). Instead of reporting the exact user location to the LBS provider, existing privacy-preserving techniques either perturb or encrypt the location data. Current LBS privacy solutions fall into several categories, based on the type of location transformation they employ, and the system architecture they rely on. This position paper introduces a taxonomy of LBS privacy solutions, and discusses the privacy-efficiency trade-offs achieved by various techniques. It also identifies several open problems, and proposes some interesting directions for future research.
Whither Social Networks for Web Search?

Access to diverse perspectives nurtures an informed citizenry. Google and Bing have emerged as the duopoly that largely arbitrates which English language documents are seen by web searchers. A recent study shows that there is now a large overlap in the top organic search results produced by them. Thus, citizens may no longer be able to gain different perspectives by using different search engines. We present the results of our empirical study that indicates that by mining Twitter data one can obtain search results that are quite distinct from those produced by Google and Bing. Additionally, our user study found that these results were quite informative. The gauntlet is now on search engines to test whether our findings hold in their infrastructure for different social networks and whether enabling diversity has sufficient business imperative for them.
Data Cleaning for RFID and WSN Integration

Today's manufacturing environments are very dynamic and turbulent. Traditional enterprise information systems (EISs) have mostly been implemented upon hierarchical architectures, which are inflexible to adapt changes and uncertainties promptly. Next-generation EISs must be agile and adaptable to accommodate changes without significant time delays. It is essential for an EIS to obtain real-time data from the distributed and dynamic manufacturing environment for decision making. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems provide an excellent infrastructure for data acquisition, distribution, and processing. In this paper, some key challenges related to the integration of WSN and RFID technologies are discussed. A five-layer system architecture has been proposed to achieve synergistic performance. For the integration of WSN and RFID, one of the critical issues is the low efficiency of communication due to redundant data as redundant data increases energy consumption and causes time delay. To address it, an improved data cleaning algorithm has been proposed; its feasibility and effectiveness have been verified via simulation and a comparison with a published algorithm. To illustrate the capacity of the developed architecture and new data cleaning algorithm, their application in relief supplies storage management has been discussed.
State of the Practice: Component-based Software Engineering Course

Component-based development has many potential advantages such as shorter time to market and lower prices. These advantages are especially attractive for customers, who often do not recognize the risks of lower reliability, possible problems with maintenance, etc. Many software companies are forced to use imported components in their products, but are not able to keep the development process under control. Component-based development is still a process with lot of problems, not well defined either from theoretical or practical points of view. The lack of knowledge is probably the biggest problem and the need for component-based software engineering (CBSE) is urgent. This was the motivation to a company and a university to organize a Ph.D. course on CBSE. Both Ph.D. students and practitioners from the industry participated in the course. The aim of the course was to increase the knowledge and understanding of CBSE, and to analyze the needs for software components in different engineering areas. The course consisted of lectures, seminars and student reports on chosen CBSE topics. This paper describes the course, gives an overview of the reports, and discusses the course result.
Three-Step method to tightly integrate data mining tasks into a relational database system

In this paper, a result of the research project that aimed to define new algebraic operators and new SQL primitives for knowledge discovery in a tightly coupled architecture with a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is presented. In order to facilitate the tight coupling and to support the data mining tasks into the RDBMS engine, the three-step approach is proposed. In the first step, the relational algebra is extended with new algebraic operators to facilitate more expensive computationally processes of data mining tasks. In the next step and with the aim that the SQL language is relationally complete, these operators are defined as new primitives in the SELECT clause. In the last step, these primitives are unified into new SQL operator that runs a specific data mining task. Applying this method, new algebraic operators, new SQL primitives and new SQL operators for association and classification tasks were defined and were implemented into the PostgreSQL DBMS engine, giving it the capacity to discover association and classification rules efficiently.
Cost-Sensitive Debugging of Declarative Programs ⋆

Diagnosis methods in debugging aim at detecting bugs of a program, either by comparing it with a correct specification or by the help of an oracle (usually the user herself). Debugging techniques for declarative programs usually exploit the semantical properties of programs (and specifications) and generally try to detect one or more “buggy” rules. In this way, rules are split apart in an absolute way: either they are correct or not. However, in many situations, not every error has the same consequences, an issue that is ignored by classical debugging frameworks. In this paper, we generalise debugging by considering a cost function, i.e. a function that assigns different cost values to each kind of error and different benefit values to each kind of correct response. The problem is now redefined as assigning a real-valued probability and cost to each rule, by considering each rule more or less “guilty” of the overall error and cost of the program. This makes possible to rank rules rather than only separate them between right and wrong. Our debugging method is also different from classical approaches in that it is probabilistic, i.e. we use a set of ground examples to approximate these rankings.
sLRFU : A Data Streaming Based Least Recently Frequently Used Caching Policy

In this paper, we propose a novel caching policy called stream Least Recently/Frequently Used (sLRFU) that aims to maximize cache hit rate of CCN routers by incorporating content popularities in the caching decisions. In contrast to existing popularity-based caching policies, sLRFU copes with dynamics in content popularity while operating under the memory and high processing rate constraints of CCN network routers.
Adapting the Multi-Desktop Paradigm Towards a Multi-Context Interface

Knowledge workers are typically processing multiple tasks in parallel. As humans can concentrate and work on but one task at a time, users have to switch between them. The required task switching causes a high cognitive load and decreases efficiency. To reduce the costs of these task switches, we have to find ways to cope with a multitude of dormant tasks the user might switch to again. The challenges here are supporting the user to resume work on a (former) task. In this work, we employ the known multi-desktop paradigm and extend it to a task-switching interface. Each of the multiple desktops is identified with one individual context of the user. Each virtual desktop consists of a different set of applications with open documents and their positioning on screen. This helps the user to separate individual tasks and allows easy recovering when switching back. As we explicitly want to allow switching back to finished tasks in order to reuse the knowledge captured there, the multi-desktop paradigm has to be extended to cope with a multitude of desktops (hundreds rather than four or six). This also requires a better user interface for discovering the right desktop when switching back to a recently paused task.
Eyewitness credibility as a function of grammatical usage and presentation medium

The present study investigated the perceived credibility of an eyewitness as a function of the grammar he uses on the stand, as well as the way in which his testimony is presented (written or videotaped format) to mock jurors. Fifty students, 19 males and 31 females, from Kutztown University participated in the study. Ages of the subjects ranged from 18 to 42 with a mean age of 21.94. Subjects were asked to read an exchange of dialogue between two lawyers, a defendant, and a plaintiff. Dialogue was taken, in part, from Levy (1950). Subjects either read or watched a videotape of an eyewitness who used either correct or incorrect grammar on the stand, according to condition. Significant main effects were found for grammar (p<.05) with higher credibility ratings being awarded to an eyewitness who used correct grammar on
A-Site mRNA Cleavage Is Not Required for tmRNA-Mediated ssrA-Peptide Tagging

In Escherichia coli, prolonged translational arrest allows mRNA degradation into the A site of stalled ribosomes. The enzyme that cleaves the A-site codon is not known, but its activity requires RNase II to degrade mRNA downstream of the ribosome. This A-site mRNA cleavage process is thought to function in translation quality control because stalled ribosomes are recycled from A-site truncated transcripts by the tmRNA-SmpB “ribosome rescue” system. During rescue, the tmRNA-encoded ssrA peptide is added to the nascent chain, thereby targeting the tagged protein for degradation after release from the ribosome. Here, we examine the influence of A-site mRNA cleavage upon tmRNA-SmpB activity. Using a model transcript that undergoes stop-codon cleavage in response to inefficient translation termination, we quantify ssrA-peptide tagging of the encoded protein in cells that contain (rnb+) or lack (Δrnb) RNase II. A-site mRNA cleavage is reduced approximately three-fold in Δrnb backgrounds, but the efficiency of ssrA-tagging is identical to that of rnb + cells. Additionally, pulse-chase analysis demonstrates that paused ribosomes recycle from the test transcripts at similar rates in rnb + and Δrnb cells. Together, these results indicate that A-site truncated transcripts are not required for tmRNA-SmpB-mediated ribosome rescue and suggest that A-site mRNA cleavage process may play a role in other recycling pathways.
An Efficient Multiple Lags Selection Method for Cyclostationary Feature Based Spectrum-Sensing

The principle of cognitive radio (CR) systems is to utilize the licensed spectrum when their interference to primary users (PUs) can be maintained below a certain threshold. Thus, to successfully coexist, cognitive users must have awareness of PUs presence in the vicinity. As most communication signals exhibit statistical periodicities, cyclostationary feature detection (CFD) can be used to perform the task of sensing the spectrum for PUs presence. A second-order statistical approach is most widely used to perform CFD in which a set of lags should be chosen for statistical testing. The optimal method for choosing multiple lags requires knowledge of the 4th-order cyclic cumulant of PUs' signals, which can be a burden in practice. In this letter, we present a new idea for lag set selection with which avoids the mentioned 4th-order cumulant burden. The results, verified via analysis and simulation, show that the performance of the proposed method is comparable to the optimal one in the low signal to-noise ratio region where it is most critical for CR applications.
A Flexible Memory Controller Supporting Deep Belief Networks with Fixed-Point Arithmetic

Deep Belief Networks (DBNs) are state-of-art Machine Learning techniques and one of the most important unsupervised learning algorithms. Training DBNs is computationally intensive which naturally leads to investigate FPGA acceleration. Fixed-point arithmetic can have an important influence on the execution time and prediction accuracy of a DBN. Previous studies have focused only on customized DBN accelerators with a fixed data-width. Our results experiments demonstrate that supporting various data-widths in different DBN configurations and application environments does make sense for achieving acceptable performance. From this we conclude that a DBN accelerator should support various data-widths rather than the fixed one as done in previous work. The processing performance of DBN accelerators in FPGA is almost always constrained not by the capacity of the processing units, but by their on-chip RAM capacity and speed. We propose an efficient memory controller for DBN accelerators, which shows that supporting various data-widths is not as difficult as it may sound. The cost is only little in hardware terms and does not affect the critical path. We have designed a tool to help users reconfiguring the memory controller with arbitrary data-width flexibly.
Family Social Capital As a Predictor of Parental and Adolescent Subjective Well-Being in Russia

This research examines the role of family social capital (FSC) in parental and adolescent subjective well-being. As the construct FSC is relatively new, the article presents data of validated methods for measuring it. 397 Russians were interviewed to identify whether FSC is a significant predictor of subjective well-being. The results indicate that it is a predictor of adolescent subjective well-being. For parents, this construct can be a predictor of their subjective well-being depending on their level of income
Fuzzy Subjective Sentiment Phrases: A Context Sensitive and Self-Maintaining Sentiment Lexicon

In this paper, we present a novel self-maintaining, domain-independent, and context-sensitive Sentiment Lexicon (SL) which finds and maps opinion words and phrases to a fuzzy sentiment score ranging from strong negative to strong positive. We show that our automatically built SL has advantage over other already existing lexicons in various aspects, namely, reducing the number of word false-matches by using context information. Furthermore, through iterative learning, our lexicon not only learns the sentiment score of a target word but also the sentiment scores of phrases and top word collocations with which the target word frequently co-occurs. Our experimental results suggest that our proposed method is highly effective and can produce lexicons which outperform a standard manually built SL, such as the AFINN lexicon, which was used in our experiments.
Antenna-in-Package in LTCC for 60-GHz Radio

An IEEE standards group, 802.15. 3c, is defining specifications for 60-GHz radio to use the 7 GHz of unlicensed spectrum to enable very high-data-rate applications such as high-speed Internet access, streaming content downloads, and wireless data bus for cable replacement. An antenna plays a key role in a radio as it has independent properties that affect the radio as a whole. Antenna designs for radio operating at 60 GHz or above are turning to antenna-on-chip (AoC) and antenna-in-package (AiP) solutions. In this paper we present the design, fabrication, and characterization of two novel AiPs in ceramic ball grid array packages using low temperature cofired ceramic (LTCC) technology for 60-GHz radio. LTCC process can embed high-quality passives in low loss ceramic substrates, while allowing active devices to be mounted on/in them. The LTCC process produces mechanically strong, hermetically sealed, thermally conductive, chemically inert, and dimensionally stable structures with high yield. Therefore, the LTCC process has recently been added to the narrow list of technologies capable of realizing millimeter-wave wireless systems
Parents’ Negative Relational Disclosures and Young Adult Children’s Perceptions of Appropriateness and Feelings of Being Caught

This study tested the degree to which the perceived appropriateness of parents’ negative relational disclosures moderated the association between such disclosures and young adult children’s feelings of being caught between their parents. Participants included 241 young adult children who completed online surveys. Whereas negative relational disclosures received from both mother and father positively predicted children feeling caught, the perceived appropriateness of those disclosures inversely predicted their feelings of being caught. After controlling for divorce status, the positive association between negative relational disclosures and feelings of being caught depended upon the perceived appropriateness of the disclosures for fathers but not for mothers.
Source attribution of climatically important aerosol properties measured at Paposo (Chile) during VOCALS

Abstract. Measurements of submicron aerosol composition, light scattering, and size distribution were made from 17 October to 15 November 2008 at the elevated Paposo site (25° 0.4' S, 70° 27.01' W, 690 m a.s.l.) on the Chilean coast as part of the VOCALS* Regional Experiment (REx). Based on the chemical composition measurements, a receptor modeling analysis using Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) was carried out, yielding four broad source categories of the aerosol mass, light scattering coefficient, and a proxy for cloud condensation nucleus (CCN) concentration at 0.4% supersaturation derived from the size distribution measurements assuming an observed soluble mass fraction of 0.53. The sources resolved were biomass burning, marine, an urban-biofuels mix and a somewhat ambiguous mix of smelter emissions and mineral dust. The urban-biofuels mix is the most dominant aerosol mass component (52%) followed by biomass burning (25%), smelter/soil dust (12%) and marine (9%) sources. The average (mean±std) submicron aerosol mass concentration, aerosol light scattering coefficient and proxy CCN concentration were, 8.77±5.40 μg m−3, 21.9±11.0 Mm−1 and 548±210 cm−3, respectively. Sulfate is the dominant identified submicron species constituting roughly 40% of the dry mass (3.64±2.30 μg m−3), although the indentified soluble species constitute only 53% of the mass. Much of the unidentified mass is likely organic in nature. The relative importance of each aerosol source category is different depending upon whether mass, light scattering, or CCN concentration is being considered, indicating that the mean size of aerosols associated with each source are different. Marine aerosols do not appear to contribute to more than 10% to either mass, light scattering, or CCN concentration at this site. Back trajectory cluster analysis proved consistent with the PMF source attribution. *VOCALS: VAMOS** Ocean-Cloud-Atmosphere-Land Study (VOCALS) **VAMOS: Variability of American Monsoon System