Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What makes a useful maturity model? a framework of general design principles for maturity models and its demonstration in business process management

Since the Software Engineering Institute has launched the Capability Maturity Model almost twenty years ago, hundreds of maturity models have been proposed by researchers and practitioners across multiple application domains. With process orientation being a central paradigm of organizational design and continuous process improvement taking top positions on CIO agendas, maturity models are also prospering in business process management. Although the application of maturity models is increasing in quantity and breadth, the concept of maturity models is frequently subject to criticism. Indeed, numerous shortcomings have been disclosed referring to both maturity models as design products and the process of maturity model design. Whereas research has already substantiated the design process, there is no holistic understanding of the principles of form and function – that is, the design principles – maturity models should meet. We therefore propose a pragmatic, yet well-founded framework of general design principles justified by existing literature and grouped according to typical purposes of use. The framework is demonstrated using an exemplary set of maturity models related to business process management. We finally give a brief outlook on implications and topics for further research.
&agr;-E-Catenin Inactivation Disrupts the Cardiomyocyte Adherens Junction, Resulting in Cardiomyopathy and Susceptibility to Wall Rupture

Background— &agr;-E-catenin is a cell adhesion protein, located within the adherens junction, thought to be essential in directly linking the cadherin-based adhesion complex to the actin cytoskeleton. Although &agr;-E-catenin is expressed in the adherens junction of the cardiomyocyte intercalated disc, and perturbations in its expression are observed in models of dilated cardiomyopathy, its role in the myocardium remains unknown. Methods and Results— To determine the effects of &agr;-E-catenin on cardiomyocyte ultrastructure and disease, we generated cardiac-specific &agr;-E-catenin conditional knockout mice (&agr;-E-cat cKO). &agr;-E-cat cKO mice displayed progressive dilated cardiomyopathy and unique defects in the right ventricle. The effects on cardiac morphology/function in &agr;-E-cat cKO mice were preceded by ultrastructural defects in the intercalated disc and complete loss of vinculin at the intercalated disc. &agr;-E-cat cKO mice also revealed a striking susceptibility of the ventricular free wall to rupture after myocardial infarction. Conclusions— These results demonstrate a clear functional role for &agr;-E-catenin in the cadherin/catenin/vinculin complex in the myocardium in vivo. Ablation of &agr;-E-catenin within this complex leads to defects in cardiomyocyte structural integrity that result in unique forms of cardiomyopathy and predisposed susceptibility to death after myocardial stress. These studies further highlight the importance of studying the role of &agr;-E-catenin in human cardiac injury and cardiomyopathy in the future.
An efficient algorithm for adaptive total variation based image decomposition and restoration

Abstract With the aim to better preserve sharp edges and important structure features in the recovered image, this article researches an improved adaptive total variation regularization and H−1 norm ﬁdelity based strategy for image decomposition and restoration. Computationally, for minimizing the proposed energy functional, we investigate an efﬁcient numerical algorithm—the split Bregman method, and brieﬂy prove its convergence. In addition, comparisons are also made with the classical OSV (Osher–Sole–Vese) model (Osher et al., 2003) and the TV-Gabor model (Aujol et al., 2006), in terms of the edge-preserving capability and the recovered results. Numerical experiments markedly demonstrate that our novel scheme yields signiﬁcantly better outcomes in image decomposition and denoising than the existing models.
Education Modifies the Association of Wealth with Obesity in Women in Middle-Income but Not Low-Income Countries: An Interaction Study Using Seven National Datasets, 2005-2010

Background Education and wealth may have different associations with female obesity but this has not been investigated in detail outside high-income countries. This study examines the separate and inter-related associations of education and household wealth in relation to obesity in women in a representative sample of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Methods The seven largest national surveys were selected from a list of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) ordered by decreasing sample size and resulted in a range of country income levels. These were nationally representative data of women aged 15–49 years collected in the period 2005–2010. The separate and joint effects, unadjusted and adjusted for age group, parity, and urban/rural residence using a multivariate logistic regression model are presented Results In the four middle-income countries (Colombia, Peru, Jordan, and Egypt), an interaction was found between education and wealth on obesity (P-value for interaction <0.001). Among women with no/primary education the wealth effect was positive whereas in the group with higher education it was either absent or inverted (negative). In the poorer countries (India, Nigeria, Benin), there was no evidence of an interaction. Instead, the associations between each of education and wealth with obesity were independent and positive. There was a statistically significant difference between the average interaction estimates for the low-income and middle-income countries (P<0.001). Conclusions The findings suggest that education may protect against the obesogenic effects of increased household wealth as countries develop. Further research could examine the factors explaining the country differences in education effects.
Tracklet Association in Detect-Then-Track Paradigm for Long-Term Multi-person Tracking

This paper presents a novel introduction of online target-specific metric learning in track fragment (tracklet) association by network flow optimization for long-term multi-person tracking. Different from other network flow formulation, each node in our network represents a tracklet, and each edge represents the likelihood of neighboring tracklets belonging to the same trajectory as measured by our proposed affinity score. In our method, target-specific similarity metrics are learned, which give rise to the appearance-based models used in the tracklet affinity estimation. Trajectory-based tracklets are refined by using the learned metrics to account for appearance consistency and to identify reliable tracklets. The metrics are then re-learned using reliable tracklets for computing tracklet affinity scores. Long-term trajectories are then obtained through network flow optimization. Occlusions and missed detections are handled by a trajectory completion step. Our method is effective for long-term tracking even when the targets are spatially close or completely occluded by others. We validate our proposed framework on several public datasets and show that it outperforms several state of art methods.
Characterization of anti-tubular basement membrane antibodies in rats.

Autoimmune tubulointerstitial nephritis was induced in Brown-Norway (BN) rats by immunization with bovine (Bov) tubular basement membrane (TBM) in complete Freund's adjuvant. Serum antibodies thus produced reacted to a greater extent with Bov than BN TBM antigens by indirect immunofluorescence and by radioimmunoassay with particulate (P) and collagenase-solubilized (CS) TBM. The quantities of antibodies reactive with CS TBM correlated with the intensity of tubulointerstitial pathologic changes. Antibodies eluted from kidneys reactive with BN TBM by indirect immunofluorescence were 508 times more concentrated in the kidney than in the serum, compared with 15 times for Bov TBM-reactive antibodies. The reactivity of eluted antibodies to P BN TBM was inhibited by 70% after absorption with BN CS TBM. A major CS TBM antigen of 42,000 m.w. was identified by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. This antigen was present in both Bov and BN TBM, and may be important in triggering autoantibody formation in this model. Lewis rats immunized under the same conditions produced antibodies reactive with BN TBM by immunofluorescence but failed to develop immune deposits in TBM of their own kidneys. Analysis of serum anti-TBM antibodies in Lewis rats revealed a selective lack of reactivity with either homologous or autologous CS TBM. These results suggest that the ability to make an immune response to one or more elements of CS TBM plays a major role in the development of autoimmune tubulointerstitial nephritis in rats.
Aggregating pixel-level prediction and cluster-level texton occurrence within superpixel voting for roadside vegetation classification

Roadside vegetation classification has recently attracted increasing attention, due to its significance in applications such as vegetation growth management and fire hazard identification. Existing studies primarily focus on learning visible feature based classifiers or invisible feature based thresholds, which often suffer from a generalization problem to new data. This paper proposes an approach that aggregates pixel-level supervised classification and cluster-level texton occurrence within a voting strategy over superpixels for vegetation classification, which takes into account both generic features in the training data and local characteristics in the testing data. Class-specific artificial neural networks are trained to predict class probabilities for all pixels, while a texton based adaptive K-means clustering process is introduced to group pixels into clusters and obtain texton occurrence. The pixel-level class probabilities and cluster-level texton occurrence are further integrated in superpixel-level voting to assign each superpixel to a class category. The proposed approach outperforms previous approaches on a roadside image dataset collected by the Department of Transport and Main Roads, Queensland, Australia, and achieves state-of-the-art performance using low-resolution images from the Croatia roadside grass dataset.
Multimedia Delivery Service using Multicast Technique on the Head- End-Network

Summary In this paper, we propose Multimedia Delivery Service (MDS) for providing fluent multimedia services using multicast technique on the Head-end-Network. The implemented system is not conventional server-based multicast system but provides client-based on-demand one that has been lacked in conventional multicast delivery. The scheduler generates a multicast group address and port number when a client requests a service, then it sends them to multimedia server and client who request service. And then multimedia server transmits requested streams with a multicast group address and the client joins the group automatically. The scheduler assigns the same multicast group address when other clients request an identical multimedia within the same scheduling duration. Otherwise, it assigns another multicast group address to them.
The Optimality of Two Prices: Maximizing Revenue in a Stochastic Communication System

This paper considers the problem of pricing and transmission scheduling for an access point (AP) in a wireless network, where the AP provides service to a set of mobile users. The goal of the AP is to maximize its own time-average profit. We first obtain the optimum time-average profit of the AP and prove the ¿Optimality of Two Prices¿ theorem. We then develop an online scheme that jointly solves the pricing and transmission scheduling problem in a dynamic environment. The scheme uses an admission price and a business decision as tools to regulate the incoming traffic and to maximize revenue. We show the scheme can achieve any average profit that is arbitrarily close to the optimum, with a tradeoff in average delay. This holds for general Markovian dynamics for channel and user state variation, and does not require a priori knowledge of the Markov model. The model and methodology developed in this paper are general and apply to other stochastic settings where a single party tries to maximize its time-average profit.
Multi-agent pre-trade analysis acceleration in FPGA

Electronic trading in global markets and exchanges requires sophisticated communication and data management systems. Novel computational infrastructures and trading strategies are required to support the massive amount of incoming streaming data, where the main problem is in latency management. Multi-agent Systems have been recognized as a promising solution to address complex problems in many areas such as biology, social sciences and financial markets and may provide powerful and flexible solutions for implementing trading engines. In addition, reconfigurable hardware based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offers many important performance benefits over software implementations, such as reducing decision making latency and high-throughput data processing. Robust and scalable trading engines can be developed by leveraging the benefits of reconfigurable FPGA platforms. This paper presents a multi-agent architecture in reconfigurable hardware for financial applications and the implementation of a trading engine for pre-trade analysis as a validation scenario. Performance results show that calculation of technical indicators and trading strategy evaluation to generate trading signals with a latency of 550 ns is achievable.
Fax: An Alternative to SGML

We have argued elsewhere (Church and Mercer, 1993) that text is more available than ever before, and that the availability of massive quantities of data has been responsible for much of the recent interest in text analysis. Ideally, we wotdd hope that this data would be distributed in a convenient format such as SGML (Goldfarb, 1990), but in practice, we usually have to work with the data in whatever format it happens to be in, since we usually aren't in much of a position to tell tim data providers how to do their business. Recently, we have been working with a collection of 15,000 AT&T internal documents (500,000 pages or 100 million words). Unfortunately, this data is stored in a particularly inconvenient format: fax.
Characterization of three distinct extradiol dioxygenases involved in mineralization of dibenzofuran by Terrabacter sp. strain DPO360

The dibenzofuran-degrading bacterial strain DPO360 represents a new species of the genus Terrabacter together with the previously described dibenzofuran-mineralizing bacterial strain DPO1361 (K.-H. Engesser, V. Strubel, K. Christoglou, P. Fischer, and H. G. Rast, FEMS Microbiol. Lett. 65:205-210, 1989; V. Strubel, Ph.D. thesis, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany, 1991; V. Strubel, H. G. Rast, W. Fietz, H.-J. Knackmuss, and K.-H. Engesser, FEMS Microbiol. Lett. 58:233-238, 1989). Two 2,3-dihydroxybiphenyl-1,2-dioxygenases (BphC1 and BphC2) and one catechol-2,3-dioxygenase (C23O) were shown to be expressed in Terrabacter sp. strain DPO360 growing with dibenzofuran as a sole source of carbon and energy. These enzymes exhibited strong sensitivity to oxygen. They were purified to apparent homogeneity as homodimers (BphC and BphC2) and as a homotetrameric catechol-2,3-dioxygenase (C23O). According to their specificity constants kcat/Km, both BphC1 and BphC2 were shown to be responsible for the cleavage of 2,2',3-trihydroxybiphenyl, the first metabolite in dibenzofuran mineralization along the angular dioxygenation pathway. With this substrate, BphC2 exhibited a considerably higher kcat/Km, value (183 microM/min) than BphC1 (29 microM/min). Catechol-2,3-dioxygenase was recognized to be not involved in the ring cleavage of 2,2',3-trihydroxybiphenyl (kcat/Km, 1 microM/min). Analysis of deduced amino acid sequence data of bphC1 revealed 36% sequence identity to nahC from Pseudomonas putida PpG7 (S. Harayama and M. Rekik, J. Biol. Chem. 264:15328-15333, 1989) and about 40% sequence identity to various bphC genes from different Pseudomonas and Rhodococcus strains. In addition, another 2,3-dihydroxybiphenyl-1,2-dioxygenase gene (bphC3) was cloned from the genome of Terrabacter sp. strain DPO360. Expression of this gene, however, could not be detected in Terrabacter sp. strain DPO360 after growth with dibenzofuran.
Information Navigation System with Discovering User Interests

We demonstrate an information navigation system for sightseeing domains that has a dialogue interface for discovering user interests for tourist activities. The system discovers interests of a user with focus detection on user utterances, and proactively presents related information to the discovered user interest. A partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP)-based dialogue manager, which is extended with user focus states, controls the behavior of the system to provide information with several dialogue acts for providing information. We transferred the belief-update function and the policy of the manager from other system trained on a different domain to show the generality of defined dialogue acts for our information navigation system.
Comparison of Two Transducers for Color Doppler Imaging of the Retrobulbar Vessels

PurposeTo compare blood flow velocity measurements obtained with two different linear probes (7.5 MHz and 12 MHz). Materials and MethodsCDI measurements were performed in 31 eyes of 19 individuals with a 12 MHz and a 7.5 MHz probe. Measurements were taken in the ophthalmic artery (OA), central retinal artery (CRA), temporal short posterior ciliary arteries (TSPCA), and nasal short posterior ciliary arteries (NSPCA). With each probe, three measurements of each vessel were obtained, and end-diastolic velocity (EDV), peak systolic velocity (PSV), and resistance index (RI) were calculated. ResultsFor EDV, the variation among replicates with the 7.5 MHz probe was between 13.99% and 19.51% and with the 12 MHz probe between 15.40% and 23.17%. For PSV, the variation among replicates was between 5.16% and 9.98% and between 6.58% and 10.71%, respectively with each probe. For RI, the variation among the replicates was between 3.10% and 8.97% and between 3.93% and 10.16%, respectively with each probe. The variation between probes was between 15.02% and 23.07% for EDV, between 10.72% and 13.24% for PSV, and between 4.27% and 6.05% for RI. The difference between estimated means was only significant for EDV in the TSPCA (P = 0.019), PSV in the TSPCA (P = 0.0002), as well as NSPCA (P = 0.003) and RI in the CRA (P < 0.001) and NSPCA (P < 0.044). ConclusionThe observed variation among three measurements is similar with both the 7.5 MHz and the 12 MHz probes. However, the 7.5 MHz probe tends to measure slightly higher values for some parameters.
Pedobarography - a novel screening tool for diabetic peripheral neuropathy?

AIM To investigate the diagnostic significance of foot plantar pressure distribution abnormalities in patients with diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN). PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 107 patients were divided into normal control (28 participants, 56 feet), non-DPN (56 patients, 112 feet), and DPN groups (23 patients, 46 feet). Foot plantar pressure was measured while patients walked at a constant speed over a flat floor using F-Scan pressure insoles. Recordings of six middle strides were averaged to evaluate the characteristics of foot plantar pressure distribution. RESULTS Compared with the normal group, the time of contact (TOC) was longer in non-DPN (p < 0.05) and DPN groups (p < 0.01). The foot to floor force-time integral (FTI) was increased in DPN group (p < 0.01). The forefoot plantar force ratio increased in non-DPN and DPN patients (p < 0.05). Moreover, in DPN patients, the ratio of lateral foot plantar force increased (p < 0.05). The examination of the correlations between biomechanical parameters of the foot plantar and electrophysiological parameters of the lower limbs showed foot plantar biomechanical abnormalities correlated with abnormal sensory conduction of the sural nerve and motor conduction of the common peroneal nerve. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis showed the area under FTI curve was 0.714 (p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS The plantar pressure was shifted towards the side of the forefoot in DPN patients. The foot plantar biomechanical changes were closely correlated with lower limb paresthesia and contraction abnormalities of lower-limb extensor muscles. Foot plantar pressure measurement might be used as a screening tool for early diagnosis of DPN.
Contrast adaptation in human retina and cortex.

PURPOSE Although cortical contrast adaptation has been extensively studied with both psychophysical and electrophysiological techniques, little is known about retinal contrast adaptation in humans. METHODS Retinal and cortical long-term contrast adaptation was assessed with simultaneous measurement of pattern electroretinogram (PERG) and cortical visual evoked potentials (VEPs). This study involved three approaches: sampling of the contrast transfer function from 2.7% to 98% with adaptation to high (98%) and low (7.3%) contrasts, linearity of adaptation effects, and transfer of contrast adaptation between parallel and orthogonal grating orientations. RESULTS Contrast adaptation affected retinal and cortical recordings quite differently. The VEP showed a sigmoid contrast transfer function, which was shifted toward higher contrasts (by a factor of 1.9), whereas amplitudes at higher test contrasts were enhanced to 127%. The PERG decreased in amplitude to approximately 90%, and the latency was significantly reduced by 4 to 6 msec (P < 0.05). All measured effects were linear with adaptation contrast. Orientation played no role in the PERG results, whereas the VEP was enhanced to 125% when tested parallel and to 150% when tested orthogonal to adaptation. CONCLUSIONS VEP results confirm and extend previous findings and fit well with single-cell recordings. The PERG findings suggest that retinal contrast adaptation occurs and mainly operates in the temporal domain, comparable to rapid gain-control findings in cats and primates.
WirArb: A New MAC Protocol for Time Critical Industrial Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Wireless sensor networks are typically designed for condition monitoring applications and to conserve energy but not for time-critical applications with strict real-time constraints that can be found in the industrial automation and avionics domain. In this paper, we propose a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol defined as wireless arbitration (WirArb) which grants each user channel access based on their different priority levels. The proposed MAC protocol supports multiple users and each user is pre-assigned a specific arbitration frequency which decides the order of channel access. With this mechanism, we can ensure that the user with the highest priority will immediately gain channel access and we can guarantee a deterministic behavior. To evaluate the proposed MAC, we use a discrete-time Markov chain model to mathematically formulate the WirArb protocol. Our results show that the proposed protocol provides high performance to ensure deterministic real-time communication and bandwidth efficiency.