Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Decisions and Games for BD Agents

Strategic games model the interaction between simultaneous decisions of a group of agents. The starting point of strategic games is a set of players (agents) having certain strategies (decisions) and preferences on the game’s outcomes. In this paper we do not assume the set of decisions and preferences of agents to be given, but derive them from their mental attitudes. In particular, we introduce a rule-based architecture for agents with beliefs and desires and explain how their decisions and preferences can be derived. We specify groups of such agents, define a mapping from their specification to the specification of the game they play, and use some familiar notions from game theory, such as Pareto efficiency and Nash equilibrium, to characterize the interaction between their decisions. We also discuss a reverse mapping from the specification of games that a group of agent play to the specifications of those agents. This mapping can be used to specify groups of agents that can play a ceratin game.
State of the Art in Edge and Trail Bundling Techniques

Bundling techniques provide a visual simplification of a graph drawing or trail set, by spatially grouping similar graph edges or trails. This way, the structure of the visualization becomes simpler and thereby easier to comprehend in terms of assessing relations that are encoded by such paths, such as finding groups of strongly interrelated nodes in a graph, finding connections between spatial regions on a map linked by a number of vehicle trails, or discerning the motion structure of a set of objects by analyzing their paths. In this state of the art report, we aim to improve the understanding of graph and trail bundling via the following main contributions. First, we propose a data‐based taxonomy that organizes bundling methods on the type of data they work on (graphs vs trails, which we refer to as paths). Based on a formal definition of path bundling, we propose a generic framework that describes the typical steps of all bundling algorithms in terms of high‐level operations and show how existing method classes implement these steps. Next, we propose a description of tasks that bundling aims to address. Finally, we provide a wide set of example applications of bundling techniques and relate these to the above‐mentioned taxonomies. Through these contributions, we aim to help both researchers and users to understand the bundling landscape as well as its technicalities.
Shape elongation of embedded metal nanoparticles induced by irradiation with swift heavy ions/cluster ions

Under swift heavy ion irradiation, metal nanoparticles (NPs) embedded in silica (amorphous SiO 2 ) show shape elongation toward the same direction parallel to the ion beam. Two candidate mechanisms, i.e., the deformation of transiently molten NPs by in-plane stress from the ion hammering and that guided by the underdense track cores, are compared and criticized. Finally, the first result of C60-ion irradiation to embedded Zn nanoparticles is briefly described.
Polarization and statistical analysis of scenes containing a semireflector.

We present an approach to recover scenes deteriorated by reflections off a semireflecting medium (e.g., a glass window). The method, based on imaging through a polarizer at two or more orientations, separates the reflected and transmitted scenes and determines which is which. We analyze the polarization effects, taking into account internal reflections within the medium. The scene reconstruction requires the estimation of the orientation (inclination and tilt angles) of the transparent (invisible) surface. The inclination angle is estimated by seeking the value that leads to the minimal mutual information of the estimated scenes. The limitations and the consequences of noise and angle error are discussed, including a fundamental ambiguity in the determination of the plane of incidence. Experimental results demonstrate the success of angle estimation and consequent scene separation and labeling.
From ideals to deals—The effect of impartiality experience on stakeholder behavior

In this paper, we study a two-party pie-sharing problem in the presence of asymmetries in the stakeholders' private endowments. Both the two stakeholders and third-party arbitrators may influence the outcome. We consider Nash-demand negotiations, where the two stakeholders place demands and share the pie accordingly if demands are compatible, and elicit dictatorial allocations from the stakeholders and the arbitrators. The Nash demands by stakeholders are strategic; the dictatorial allocations by stakeholders and arbitrators are non-strategic. We are interested in the influence of the past arbitrator experience on stakeholder allocations and demands and the past stakeholder experience on third-party arbitration allocations. We find that the ex-arbitrators' stakeholder allocations differ more from the impartial ideal than the stakeholder allocations by those without arbitration experience. In contrast with previous findings, the arbitration outcomes do not depend on the asymmetries in the previous stakeholder roles.
The architecture of the binding site in redox protein complexes: Implications for fast dissociation

Interprotein electron transfer is characterized by protein interactions on the millisecond time scale. Such transient encounters are ensured by extremely high rates of complex dissociation. Computational analysis of the available crystal structures of redox protein complexes reveals features of the binding site that favor fast dissociation. In particular, the complex interface is shown to have low geometric complementarity and poor packing. These features are consistent with the necessity for fast dissociation since the absence of close packing facilitates solvation of the interface and disruption of the complex. Proteins 2004;55:000–000. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Electrons, Ions and Cathodoluminescence in the Environmental SEM

“Secondary” or ‘low energy’ electron emission in the environmental SEM is a complex summation of surface and near surface interactions of electron and ions, fields developed within the sample and conventional electron-sample interactions. Little is understood about the first two aspects and recent data has illustrated limitations on our understanding of cathodoluminescence. The recently described Charge Contrast Imaging (CCI) has drawn attention to the fact that the role of ions in the environmental SEM have been largely ignored. Generally the positive ions have been regarded to provide charge cancellation at the specimen surface but otherwise to have little effect. This view has persisted in the face of evidence that even without gas amplification effects, charge neutral conditions are obtained at the sample surface with a chamber gas pressure of 0.1 torr2, a pressure far lower than normal operating conditions for the ESEM (1 -2 0 torr).
A Method for Estimating Pan Evaporation for Inland and Coastal Regions of the Southeastern U.S.

Regression models that estimate daily pan evaporation for inland and coastal regions of Southeastern U.S. were developed using observations of wind speed, solar radiation, minimum relative humidity, and maximum temperature. These weather elements are collected in numerous locations where measured pan evaporation records are not available, allowing an estimation of pan evaporation across large regions with higher point pattern density than is available using pan evaporation sites only. Sixteen models were developed and tested. An innovative model selection metric was developed, employing R square, Pearson's correlation coefficient, average difference between estimated and measured evaporation, root mean-squared error, and mean absolute error. Models selected included two validated for use in inland environments and one validated for use in coastal environments.
Development of engineered antibodies specific for the Müllerian inhibiting substance type II receptor: a promising candidate for targeted therapy of ovarian cancer

The Müllerian inhibiting substance type II receptor (MISIIR) is involved in Müllerian duct regression as part of the development of the male reproductive system. In adult females, MISIIR is present on ovarian surface epithelium and is frequently expressed on human epithelial ovarian cancer cells. Müllerian inhibiting substance has been found to be capable of inhibiting the growth of primary human ovarian cancer cells derived from ascites and ovarian cancer cell lines. This suggested to us that MISIIR could be an attractive target for antibody-based tumor targeting and growth inhibition strategies. Here, we describe the production of recombinant human MISIIR extracellular domain-human immunoglobulin Fc domain fusion proteins and their use as targets for the selection of MISIIR-specific human single-chain variable fragments (scFv) molecules from a human nonimmune scFv phage display library. The binding kinetics of the resulting anti-MISIIR scFv clones were characterized and two were employed as the basis for the construction of bivalent scFv:Fc antibody-based molecules. Both bound specifically to human ovarian carcinoma cells in flow cytometry assays and cross-reacted with mouse MISIIR. These results indicate that antibody-based constructs may provide a highly specific means of targeting MISIIR on human ovarian carcinoma cells for the purpose of diagnosing and treating this disease. [Mol Cancer Ther 2006;5(8):2096–105]
Farmland Quality Evaluation Based on GIS and Fuzzy Matter-Element Proximity Cluster Model

With the original data as basis, evaluation of cultivated land quality was carried out in Yidu County with the aid of GIS and the fuzzy matter-element proximity cluster model. The procedure of the evaluation goes:(1)Use the principal component analysis method to determine factors which affecting cultivated land quality;(2) extract correlatographs through vectorization with the aid of ArcGIS, put them under spatial analysis, and overlay multi-maps to define evaluation units and extract attribute data; (3) based on membership functions of evaluation factors and fuzzy matter-element proximity cluster analysis model, calculate weight of evaluation factors and proximity of evaluation units, then sort the cultivated lands into various quality levels. At the same time, 120 samples were collected randomly to verify veracity of the results. The results indicate that the quality of cultivated land in this area is medium in Hubei Province and can be sorted into 6 levels, accounting for 12.96%, 30.37%, 31.71%, 16.16%, 7.14% and 1.66%, respectively, which is in accord with the actual situation.
The InfoVis Toolkit

This article presents the InfoVis toolkit, designed to support the creation, extension and integration of advanced 2D information visualization components into interactive Java swing applications. The InfoVis toolkit provides specific data structures to achieve a fast action/feedback loop required by dynamic queries. It comes with a large set of components such as range sliders and tailored control panels required to control and configure the visualizations. These components are integrated into a coherent framework that simplifies the management of rich data structures and the design and extension of visualizations. Supported data structures currently include tables, trees and graphs. Supported visualizations include scatter plots, time series, parallel coordinates, treemaps, icicle trees, node-link diagrams for trees and graphs and adjacency matrices for graphs. All visualizations can use fisheye lenses and dynamic labeling. The InfoVis toolkit supports hardware acceleration when available through Agile2D, an implementation of the Java graphics API based on OpenGL, achieving speedups of 10 to 200 times. The article also shows how new visualizations can be added and extended to become components, enriching visualizations as well as general applications
Azorhizobium caulinodans respires with at least four terminal oxidases

In culture, Azorhizobium caulinodans used at least four terminal oxidases, cytochrome aa3 (cytaa3), cytd, cyto, and a second a-type cytochrome, which together mediated general, respiratory electron (e-) transport to O2. To genetically dissect physiological roles for these various terminal oxidases, corresponding Azorhizobium apocytochrome genes were cloned, and three cytaa3 mutants, a cytd mutant, and a cytaa3, cytd double mutant were constructed by reverse genetics. These cytochrome oxidase mutants were tested for growth, oxidase activities, and N2 fixation properties both in culture and in symbiosis with the host plant Sesbania rostrata. The cytaa3 mutants grew normally, fixed N2 normally, and remained fully able to oxidize general respiratory e- donors (NADH, succinate) which utilize a cytc-dependent oxidase. By difference spectroscopy, a second, a-type cytochrome was detected in the cytaa3 mutants. This alternative a-type cytochrome (Amax = 610 nm) was also present in the wild type but was masked by bona fide cytaa3 (Amax = 605 nm). In late exponential-phase cultures, the cytaa3 mutants induced a new, membrane-bound, CO-binding cytc550, which also might serve as a cytc oxidase (a fifth terminal oxidase). The cloned Azorhizobium cytaa3 genes were strongly expressed during exponential growth but were deactivated prior to onset of stationary phase. Azorhizobium cytd mutants showed 40% lower N2 fixation rates in culture and in planta, but aerobic growth rates were wild type. The cytaa3, cytd double mutant showed 70% lower N2 fixation rates in planta. Pleiotropic cytc mutants were isolated by screening for strains unable to use N,N,N',N'-tetramethyl-p-phenylenediamine as a respiratory e- donor. These mutants synthesized no detectable cytc, excreted coproporphyrin, grew normally in aerobic minimal medium, grew poorly in rich medium, and fixed N2 poorly both in culture and in planta. Therefore, while aerobic growth was sustained by quinol oxidases alone, N2 fixation required cytc oxidase activities. Assuming that the terminal oxidases function as do their homologs in other bacteria, Azorhizobium respiration simultaneously employs both quinol and cytc oxidases. Because Azorhizobium terminal oxidase mutants were able to reformulate their terminal oxidase mix and grow more or less normally in aerobic culture, these terminal oxidases are somewhat degenerate. Its extensive terminal oxidase repertoire might allow Azorhizobium spp. to flourish in wide-ranging O2 environments.
An Annotated Corpus of Typical Durations of Events

In this paper, we present our work on generating an annotated corpus for extracting information about the typical durations of events from texts. We include the annotation guidelines, the event classes we categorized, the way we use normal distributions to model vague and implicit temporal information, and how we evaluate inter-annotator agreement. The experimental results show that our guidelines are effective in improving the inter-annotator agreement.
Partitionable Services Framework: Seamless Access to Distributed Applications

A key problem in contemporary distributed systems is how to satisfy user quality of service (QoS) requirements for distributed applications deployed in heterogeneous, dynamically changing environments spanning multiple administrative domains. An attractive solution is to create an infrastructure which satisfies user QoS requirements by automatically and transparently adapting distributed applications to any environment changes with minimum user input. However, successful use of this approach requires overcoming three challenges: (1) Capturing the application behavior and its relationship with the environment as a set of compact local specifications, using general, quantitative and qualitative properties. (2) Finding the “best” application deployment that satisfies both application and user requirements, and the various domain policies. (3) Ensuring that the found deployments are practical and efficient, i.e., that the efficiency of automatic deployments is comparable with the efficiency of hand-tuned solutions. This dissertation describes three techniques that address these challenges in the context of component-based applications. The first technique extends the basic component-based application model with conditions and effects of component deployments and linkages, together with interactions between components and the network. The second technique uses AI planning to build an efficient and scalable algorithm which exploits the expressivity of the application model to find an application deployment that satisfies user QoS and application requirements. The last technique ensures that application deployments are both practical and efficient by leveraging language and run-time system support to automatically customize components, as appropriate for the desired security and data consistency guarantees. These techniques are implemented as integral parts of the Partitionable Services Framework (PSF), a Java-based framework which flexibly assembles component-based applications to suit the properties of their environment. The benefits of PSF are evaluated by deploying representative component-based applications in an environment simulating fast and secure domains connected by slow and insecure links. Analysis of the programming and the deployment processes shows that: (1) the code modifications required by PSF are minimal, (2) PSF appropriately adapts the deployments based on the network state and user QoS requirements, (3) the run-time deployment overheads incurred by PSF are negligible compared to the application life-time, and (4) the efficiency of PSF-deployed applications matches that of hand-crafted solutions.
3 Hours ahead of time flood water level prediction using NNARX structure: Case study pahang

Flood is defined as an overflow of large amount of water beyond its normal limits. Therefore, it has become threat to people's life and can cause damages to properties. However, in Malaysia, the only existing flood warning system are the alarming system which only notify residents nearby flood location to evacuate only when flood occur. Thus, flood water level prediction is very much needed in order to prevent flood disaster to happen. One of the effective techniques which frequently used to solve nonlinear cases such as flood is Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Therefore, this paper proposed 3 hours flood water level prediction using Neural Network Autoregressive model with Exogenous Input (NNARX) technique. The area involved in this study was along Pahang river basin where the flood location is situated at Mentakab. Four input parameters were fed in to the NNARX model to predict flood 3 hours ahead of time. The inputs were carefully selected during flood events. The samples used for training, validation and testing stage are 1553, 1997 and 4000 samples respectively. The NNARX flood prediction model developed using Matlab Neural Network Toolbox. Result shows satisfactory performance with low error measures.
Convergence of RNA cis Elements and Cellular Polyadenylation Factors in the Regulation of Human Cytomegalovirus UL37 Exon 1 Unspliced RNA Production

ABSTRACT The human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) UL36-38 immediate early (IE) locus encodes proteins required for its growth. The UL37 promoter drives production of an unspliced and several alternatively spliced RNAs. The UL37 exon 1 (UL37x1) unspliced RNA is abundant from IE to late times of HCMV infection, whereas the UL37 spliced RNAs are markedly less abundant. Production of the UL37x1 unspliced RNA requires polyadenylation (PA) at nucleotide 50998, which lies within intron 1, upstream of the UL37 exon 2 (UL37x2) acceptor. The physical proximity of its cis elements suggests steric hindrance between PA and splicing machineries for UL37 pre-mRNA. To test this possibility, we generated site-specific mutants in Target 1 PA and RNA splicing cis elements and compared the PA and splicing efficiencies of mutant RNAs with those of wild-type RNA. The mutually exclusive processing events of UL37x1 PA and UL37x1-UL37x2 splicing have been accurately recapitulated in transfected permissive human fibroblasts (HFFs) expressing a Target 1 minigene RNA, which contains the required splicing and PA cis elements. Two mutants in the invariant PA signal dramatically decreased UL37x1 PA as expected and, concomitantly, increased the efficiency of UL37x1-UL37x2 RNA splicing. Consistent with these results, changes to consensus UL37x1 donor and UL37x2 acceptor sites increased the efficiency of UL37x1-UL37x2 RNA splicing but decreased the efficiency of UL37x1 PA. Moreover, HCMV infection of HFFs increased the abundance of the PA cleavage stimulatory factor CstF-64, the potent splicing suppressor PTB, and the hypophosphorylated form of the splicing factor SF2 at 4 h postinfection. Induction of these factors further favors production of the UL37x1 unspliced RNA over that of the spliced RNAs. Taken together, these results suggest that there is a convergence in UL37 RNA regulation by cis elements and cellular proteins which favors production of the UL37x1 unspliced RNA during HCMV infection at the posttranscriptional level.
Experimental evaluation of LDPC-coded OAM based FSO communication in the presence of atmospheric turbulence

A low-density parity check (LDPC)-coded orbital angular momentum (OAM)-based free-space optical (FSO) transmission system is experimentally studied in both the absence and presence of emulator-induced atmospheric turbulence. In the presence of turbulence, the coding gains larger than 6.8 dB are obtained at BER of 10-4 for single OAM mode and dramatic improvement is found in case of LDPC-coded OAM multiplexing of states ±2, ±5 as uncoded case enters into an early error floor phenomenon.
The Receptive Fields of Inferior Temporal Cortex Neurons in Natural Scenes

Inferior temporal cortex neurons have generally been found to have large visual receptive fields that typically include the fovea and extend throughout much of the visual field. However, a problem of such a large receptive field is that it does not easily support object selection by subsequent processing areas, in that all objects within such a large receptive field might activate inferior temporal cortex cells. To clarify this, we recorded from inferior temporal cortex neurons while macaques searched for objects in complex natural scenes or in plain backgrounds, as normally used. Inferior temporal cortex neuron receptive fields were much smaller in natural scenes (mean radius, 11°) than in plain backgrounds (39°). With two objects in a scene, one of which was a target for action (a touch), the firing rates were equally high during foveation of the effective stimulus when it was the target and when it was the distractor in both the plain and the complex scenes. With a plain background and two objects present, the receptive fields were much larger (24°) for the stimulus when it was the target than when it was the distractor (9°). This effect of object-based attention was much less evident in the complex scene, when the receptive fields were small both when the stimulus was a distractor and when it was a target. The results show that the temporal visual cortex provides an unambiguous representation in natural scenes by responding to the object shown at or close to the fixation point.
The LDA - an integrated diagnostics tool

In this paper we describe the Logic Designer's Apprentice (LDA). The LDA is a knowledge-based computer program (an "expert system") that designs digital electronic circuits. The LDA extends existing CAD/CAE capabilities by providing a computer aid to the design process, supplementing those that assist the drafting, layout, and simulation processes. It seeks to ensure that appropriate testability (and in the future, other "ility") features are incorporated during the earliest stages of design in accord with the guidelines defined for Integrated Diagnostics. We discuss issues relevant to the engineering development of other knowledge-based tools needed for Integrated Diagnostics including tool selection and choice of knowledge representation.