Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extending Access Point Connectivity through Opportunistic Routing in Vehicular Networks

Abstract-Nowadays, the navigation systems available on cars are becoming more and more sophisticated. They greatly improve the experience of drivers and passengers by enabling them to receive map and traffic updates, news feeds, advertisements, media files, etc. Unfortunately, the bandwidth available to each vehicle with the current technology is severely limited. There have been many reports on the inability of 3G networks to cope with large size file downloads, especially in dense and mobile settings. A possible alternative is provided by WiFi access points (APs) that are being installed in several countries along the main routes and in popular areas. Although this approach significantly increases the available bandwidth, it still does not provide a fully satisfactory solution due to the limited transmission range (usually a few hundred meters). In this paper we present a novel routing protocol, based on opportunistic vehicle to vehicle communication, to enable efficient multi-hop routing capabilities between mobile vehicles and APs. Unlike prior work, this protocol fully supports two- way communication, i.e., the traditional vehicle-to-AP as well as the more challenging AP-to-vehicle. We leverage the information offered by the navigation system in terms of final destination and path, to i) route packets to the closest AP and ii) to route replies back to the moving vehicle efficiently.
Choice-Based Recommender Systems

Choice-based models are proposed to overcome some of the limitations found in traditional rating-based strategies. The new approach is grounded on decision-making paradigms, such as choice and utility theories. Speciﬁcally, random utility models were applied in a recommendation problem. Prediction accuracy was compared with state-of-art rating-based algorithms in a gastronomy dataset. The results show the superior performance of choice-based models, which may suggest that real choices could bring more predictive power than ratings.
Intelligent image management in a distributed PACS and telemedicine environment

Advances in information technology in the past decade have resulted in a proliferation of clinical information systems dedicated to individual user groups and clinical functional areas. This, in turn, has led to the need for hospital-wide management and integration of information, and has triggered major efforts towards the development of integrated hospital information systems. A framework for developing an integrated regional health telematics system is presented, based on the functional and data integration of federated autonomous information systems. The concept of the patient meta-record is introduced as a central element in achieving integration in terms of content, structure, and access to information resources. Intelligent image management at the level of either a single health care provider (hospital) or a regional health telematics network is addressed and is achieved through event and model-driven strategies enabled by a distributed hierarchical storage management system. Intelligence, in this context, refers to methods of efficient and effective real-time resource management in the timely delivery of health care.
Phonological priming and the role of phonology in nonnative word recognition

Research on nonnative auditory word recognition makes use of a lexical decision task with phonological priming to explore the role of phonological form in nonnative lexical access. In a medium-lag lexical decision task with phonological priming, nonnative speakers treat minimal pairs of words differentiated by a difficult phonological contrast as a repetition of the same word. While native speakers show facilitation in medium-lag priming only for identical word pairs, nonnative speakers also show facilitation for minimal pairs. In short-lag phonological priming, when the prime and the target have phonologically overlapping onsets, nonnative speakers show facilitation, while native speakers show inhibition. This review discusses two possible reasons for facilitation in nonnative phonological priming: reduced sensitivity to nonnative phonological contrasts, and reduced lexical competition of nonnative words with underdifferentiated, or fuzzy phonolexical representations. Nonnative words may be processed sublexically, which leads to sublexical facilitation instead of the inhibition resulting from lexical competition.
Why Are Daphnia in Some Lakes Sicker? Disease Ecology, Habitat Structure, and the Plankton

Some aspects of habitat seem to enhance the spread of disease whereas others inhibit it. Here, we illustrate and identify mechanisms that connect habitat to epidemiology using a case study of disease in plankton. We see a pronounced relationship between the basin shapes of lakes and fungal (Metschnikowia bicuspidata) disease in the Zooplankton grazer Daphnia dentifera. As we work through seven mechanisms that could explain why Daphnia in some lakes are sicker, we can eliminate some hypotheses (i.e., those relating an index of lake productivity to disease through host density, links between resource quality and transmission rate, and variation in host susceptibility) and find support for others involving food-web actors (e.g., selective predation on infected hosts by fishes, “sloppy predation” by an invertebrate, a possible dilution effect in V-shaped lakes). Furthermore, we identify physical mechanisms (gravity currents, turbulence) that could lead to greater transport of fungal spores to habitat occupied by Daphnia hosts in U-shaped lakes. These results highlight how habitat structure, through its effects on food-web structure and physical processes, can shape wildlife disease.
Power allocation for regenerative cognitive relay networks with QoS-guaranteed primary user

In this paper, we investigate the problem of optimal power allocation for a two-hop cognitive radio relay network over independent Rayleigh fading channels. We take into consideration of the transmit power limit at the secondary transmitter and relay where the powers are limited to guarantee the quality of service of the primary user. To minimize the secondary outage probability, we re-formulate the power allocation problem with a new set of constraints and achieved the closed form optimal solution. Simulation results confirm the performance improvement of the proposed power allocation scheme.
Testing for congenital disorders of glycosylation by HPLC measurement of serum transferrin glycoforms.

Congenital disorders of glycosylation (CDG), formerly named carbohydrate-deficient glycoprotein syndrome, are rare hereditary disorders caused by mutations in the genes coding for enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of glycoproteins and other glycoconjugates (1). The clinical characteristics are variable, but often include psychomotor, growth, and mental retardation from early childhood. CDG are the result of defects in the assembly and transfer (type I) or processing (type II) of the glycan moieties, and as a result, the carbohydrate chains are either completely missing (type I) or structurally abnormal (type II). CDG-Ia is the most frequent subtype, with ∼500 patients reported, whereas <100 patients have been diagnosed with types Ib–Ik and only ∼10 with type II (IIa–IId) (1)(2)(3)(4)(5). However, it is assumed that the limited awareness of CDG, together with their variable and unspecific clinical symptoms, contribute to underdiagnosis of these disorders (6)(7)(8). Another reason for underdiagnosis could be that methods for CDG testing are not generally available in clinical laboratories. Testing for CDG focuses mainly on the abnormal pattern of N-linked glycans of serum transferrin. The type I pattern is characterized by an increase of transferrin glycoforms missing one or both of the entire biantennary N-glycans (9)(10) (traditionally named disialo- and asialotransferrin, respectively, based on the number of terminal sialic acid residues), whereas type II is characterized by increased trisialo- and monosialotransferrin, indicating the presence of truncated glycans (11)(12)(13). A variety of laboratory techniques have been evaluated for this purpose, with isoelectric focusing being the most common and serving as the reference procedure to date. A sensitive HPLC method is widely used for detection of alcohol-induced changes in serum transferrin glycoforms \[i.e., carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT)\] (14). This study …
Structure and Psychometric Properties of the Father Involvement Scale Used in a Retrospective Pretest–Posttest Design

Abstract Several programs that address responsible fatherhood exist; however, these programs need strategic evaluation and appropriate tools to measure success of the programs. The goal of this research was to understand the structure and psychometric properties of a father involvement measure used to assess the change in parenting and co-parenting behaviors of fathers in a child welfare program. Analyses used secondary data from a father parenting program, with a retrospective pretest–posttest design. Participants were fathers (N = 361) who attended a parenting program in three large counties in the North Texas region. Missing data diagnosis and exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed on 13 items to investigate scale structure and psychometric properties. The following three factors with adequate to good internal consistency emerged: self-efficacy, parenting (emotional and physical support), and co-parenting skills. Fit indices showed good model fit for pretest items and a moderate fit for posttest items. The survey instrument demonstrates potential to be adapted to diverse populations, other languages and cultures to further expand program components. Based on the findings, future research should utilize more items to enhance the alpha reliability of the scales. Furthermore, revised scales can be validated across diverse populations based on socioeconomic, ethnicity, and cultural backgrounds.
A robust oblivious watermarking technique

Digital watermarking is an effective and popular technique to disapprove illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted digital content. One of the important issues of watermarking is the robustness subject to resist the lossy compression of the watermarked image. In addition, in JPEG quantification, there is a question which is that the two similar DCT coefficients will be quantified to the same rank. It will cause the mistake of the extracting watermark from the lossy compression of the watermarked image. In this paper, a robust oblivious watermarking technique is proposed. This presented scheme performed in the middle frequency region of the original host image. The modification of the mid-frequency coefficients is corresponding to the quantization table in JPEG standard. And, the permutation operation is adopted in the block of the host image in order to discourage the effect of the JPEG quantification as discuss above. With this technique, the watermark can survive when the watermarked image is compressed using JPEG. Moreover, the proposed scheme doesn't require the information of the watermark and the original host image in the extracting process.
Optimal Approximation Algorithms for Multi-agent Combinatorial Problems with Discounted Price Functions

Submodular functions are an important class of functions in combinatorial optimization which satisfy the natural properties of decreasing marginal costs. The study of these functions has led to strong structural properties with applications in many areas. Recently, there has been significant interest in extending the theory of algorithms for optimizing combinatorial problems (such as network design problem of spanning tree) over submodular functions. Unfortunately, the lower bounds under the general class of submodular functions are known to be very high for many of the classical problems. In this paper, we introduce and study an important subclass of submodular functions, which we call discounted price functions. These functions are succinctly representable and generalize linear cost functions. In this paper we study the following fundamental combinatorial optimization problems: Edge Cover, Spanning Tree, Perfect Matching and Shortest Path, and obtain tight upper and lower bounds for these problems. The main technical contribution of this paper is designing novel adaptive greedy algorithms for the above problems. These algorithms greedily build the solution whist rectifying mistakes made in the previous steps.
iVector-based discriminative adaptation for automatic speech recognition

We presented a novel technique for discriminative feature-level adaptation of automatic speech recognition system. The concept of iVectors popular in Speaker Recognition is used to extract information about speaker or acoustic environment from speech segment. iVector is a low-dimensional fixed-length representing such information. To utilized iVectors for adaptation, Region Dependent Linear Transforms (RDLT) are discriminatively trained using MPE criterion on large amount of annotated data to extract the relevant information from iVectors and to compensate speech feature. The approach was tested on standard CTS data. We found it to be complementary to common adaptation techniques. On a well tuned RDLT system with standard CMLLR adaptation we reached 0.8% additive absolute WER improvement.
Costs, prices and mark-up indicators in the italian national accounts system

This paper discusses the Italian method of estimating quarterly costs, input-output prices and mark-up indicators by industry. The methodology refers to the ESA95 National Accounts System, furnishing a consistent framework for the various flows underlying the indicators. ISTAT has particular experience in the gross computation of such measures where intra-sector transactions are taken into account. A net computation has never been considered to date because a system for the annual revision of the input-output tables has only recently been developed. Such revision has been made possible by considering the information available on external and commercial trade statistics for flows with the rest of the world, and the output estimates for the intermediate uses table. These tables are computed at both current and constant prices, at the same time allowing evaluation of deflators and intermediate unit costs for both domestic and foreign components. Finally, the quarterly measures are obtained by distributing the annual flows through application of the Chow-Lin methodology using price and current indicators derived by the quarterly system of accounts.
Proven risk youth and life-coach dyads make sense of their discipleship

Proven risk youth are a vulnerable population of at-risk youth. Unless significant intervention occurs, the proven risk youth are proven to re-offend or be re-incarcerated. Discipleship is an intense and intentional form of intervention in which a life-coach and a proven risk youth engage in relational learning. This research aims to understand how proven risk and life-coach dyads make sense of their discipleship by utilizing the qualitative methodology of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to emphasize the voice and lived-experiences of the participants. As relational learning is in view, the Zone of Proximal Development is used to examine the way in which learning occurs between a more knowledgeable life-coach and a less knowledgeable proven risk youth.
Observation System for Assessment of Learning Engagement in Various Pedagogies

This study is focused on the development of an instrument for the measurement of learning engagement. It evaluates engagement as a function of students' attitudes displayed in form of concentration on or distraction from learning based on the pedagogy being employed by the teacher. The instrument, Code for Students' Performance Measures (COSPERM) is designed to provide a measure of student engagements within different pedagogies and especially in learning settings that employ technology-based modes. The COSPERM validation process involves different pedagogies as well as live and recorded observations. COSPERM is content-validated and inter-observer agreement and intra-observer reliability measures established through Cohen's kappa are consistently high for item-by-item as well as whole observer matches showing very good agreement and a minimum of 0.418 (moderate reliability). This shows the COSPERM is a reliable instrument employable in either live or recorded observations. It can also be reliably employed by single or multiple observers.
Extraction of vocal tract area function from three‐dimensional magnetic resonance images using digital waveguide mesh

A method is proposed in this paper to extract the vocal tract area function from the three‐dimensional magnetic resonance images. The proposed method uses the digital waveguide mesh, an implementation of the finite‐difference time‐domain (FDTD) method, to simulate wave propagation in the vocal tract from the glottis to the lips. The dimensions of the vocal tract areas are then calculated along the traveling wavefront that emerges from the simulation. Formant analysis has been conducted for Japanese vowels to show the validity of the proposed method. The calculated formant frequencies of the area functions obtained by the proposed method and other existing methods have been compared to those measured from the acoustic utterance of the imaged person.
Musical Key Extraction from Audio Using Profile Training

A new method is presented for extracting the musical key from raw audio data. The method is based on the extraction of chromagrams using a new approach for tonal component selection taking into account auditory masking. The extracted chromagrams were used to train three key profiles for major and three key profiles for minor keys. The three trained key profiles differ in their temporal weighting of information across the duration of the song. One profile is based on uniform weighting while the other two apply emphasis on the beginning and ending of the song, respectively. The actual key extraction is based on comparing the key profiles with three average chromagrams that were extracted from a particular piece of music using the same temporal weighting functions as used for the key profile training. A correct key classification of 98% was achieved using nonoverlapping test and training sets drawn from a larger set of 237 CD recordings of classical piano sonatas.
Information Retrieval Framework for Technology Survey in Biomedical and Chemistry Literature

The Technology survey task deals with the retrieval of information that can best answer a scientific question. This task is more challenging in biomedical and chemistry domains due to diverse conventions applied for naming the entities. In order to address this challenge, the work reported here presents an ad-hoc retrieval task that has been evaluated during the TRECCHEM-2011 for its ability to support retrieval from the biomedical and chemistry literature. The core of the framework contains nearly 1.3 million patents and full-text articles that were indexed with pre-selected biomedical concepts. Altogether, four runs were submitted based on different query formulation strategies and they exhibited competitive results.
Optimization of the Gaussian Mixture Model Evaluation on GPU

In this paper we present a highly optimized implementation of Gaussian mixture acoustic model evaluation algorithm. Evaluation of these likelihoods is one of the most computationally intensive parts of automatics speech recognizers but it can be well-parallelized and offloaded to GPU devices. Our approach offers significant speed-up compared to the recently published approaches, since it exploits the GPU architecture better. All the recent implementations were programmed either in CUDA or OpenCL GPU programming frameworks. We present results for both; CUDA as well as OpenCL. Results suggest that even very large acoustic models can be utilized in real-time speech recognition engines on computers and laptops equipped with a low-end GPU. Optimization of acoustic likelihoods computation on GPU enables to use the remaining GPU resources for offloading of other computeintensive parts of LVCSR decoder. Other possible use of the freed GPU resources is to evaluate several acoustic models at the same time and use fusion techniques or model selection techniques to improve the quality of resulting conditional likelihoods under diverse conditions.
Nutraceutical Effects of Curcuma, Ginger, Celery, Yeast and Honey on Side Effects of Gentamicin Induced Nephrotoxicity in Rats

The study was carried out on 35 adult albino male rats Sprague-Dawley strain. 5 rats served as normal control group and 30 rats were injected with gentamicin (100 mg/kg/day for 7 days i.p) to induce renal damage. Then, rats reclassified into control positive group and 5 treated rat groups which administered curcuma, ginger, celery, yeast and honey. The treatment period was designed for eight weeks. The results revealed that, there was a significant increase in final weight, weight gain, weight gain percent, food intake, food efficiency ratio, protein efficiency ratio, hemoglobin, packed cell volume, serum total protein, globulin, calcium, erythropoietin hormone and vitamin D and serum and kidney superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase and catalase antioxidant enzymes. There was a significant decrease in serum alanine and aspartate amino transferase and alkaline phosphatase enzymes activity, creatinine, urea, phosphor, sodium and potassium, pH and albumin to globulin ratio in all treated rat groups compared with control positive group. Rat groups which administered gentamicin with curcuma or celery or yeast showed a significant increase in protein intake and a significant decrease in rennin hormone while rat groups which administered gentamicin with curcuma or celery showed a significant increase in red blood cells but rat groups which administered gentamicin with celery and honey showed a significant decrease in white blood cells compared with control positive group. All treated rat groups revealed no histopathological changes. In conclusion, feeding rats with curcuma, ginger, celery, yeast and honey may significantly reduce nephrotoxicity.
Multi-Layered Defense against Web Application Attacks

Abstract-Web application security is the hottest issue in the present scenario of e-business environment. Web application attacks can play havoc with the system within no time. More than 80% attacks are at application layer and almost 90% applications are vulnerable to these attacks. Traditional solutions in the form of web scanners, firewall, intrusion detection system (IDS) or web proxies are ineffective to mitigate application level attacks. We have introduced a novel approach of multiple layered defenses to the application level attacks which possess higher detection ability with low false positive rate. The System is capable to detect application level known and unknown attacks especially XSS and SQL injection, in efficient way. Our system is also helpful for the developers to find the application vulnerabilities well in time by visually observing the proper validation through validation flow graph. Over all our system approach is efficient to locate and detect the vulnerability with the help of control flow graph which avoid time consuming sequential search.