Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An exemplar test problem on parameter convergence analysis of temporal difference algorithms

Reinforcement learning techniques have been developed to solve difficult learning control problems having small amount of a priori knowledge about the system dynamics. In this paper, a simple unstable exemplar test problem is proposed to investigate issues in parametric convergence of the value function. A specific closed-form solution for the value function is determined which has a polynomial form. It is proved that the temporal difference error introduces a null space associated with the finite horizon basis function during the control trajectory. The learning problem can be only nonsingular if the termination is handled correctly, and a number of possible solutions are introduced. This result was only revealed because of the derived closed form solution for the value function.
A Survey on Using Data Mining Techniques for Online Social Network Analysis

In this paper we take into consideration the concepts of using algorithmic and data mining perspective of Online Social Networks (OSNs), with special emphasis on latest hot topics of research area. There are several factors which has made the study of OSNs gain enormous importance by researchers. Few such factors include the availability of huge amount of OSN data, the representation of OSN data as graphs, and so on. Analysis of data in OSNs also has a great prospective for researchers in a variety of disciplines. Hence this paper gives an idea about the key topics of using data mining in OSNs which will help the researchers to solve those challenges that still exist in mining OSNs.
FootSpring: A Compliance Model for the ATHLETE Family of Robots

This paper describes and evaluates one method of modeling compliance in a wheel-on-leg walking robot. This method assumes that all of the robot s compliance takes place at the ground contact points, specifically the tires and legs, and that the rest of the robot is rigid. Optimization is used to solve for the displacement of the feet and of the center of gravity. This method was tested on both robots of the ATHLETE family, which have different compliance. For both robots, the model predicts the sag of points on the robot chassis with an average error of about one percent of the height of the robot.
Indicator-based differential evolution using exclusive hypervolume approximation and parallelization for multi-core processors

A new Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA) based on Differential Evolution (DE), i.e., Indicator-Based DE (IBDE) is proposed. IBDE employs a strategy of DE for generating a series of offspring. In order to evaluate the quality of each individual in the population, IBDE uses the exclusive hypervolume as an indicator function. A fast algorithm called Incremental Hypervolume by Slicing Objectives (IHSO) has been reported for calculating the exclusive hypervolume. However, the computational time spent by IHSO increases exponentially with the number of objectives and considered individuals. Therefore, an exclusive hypervolume approximation, in which IHSO can be also used effectively, is proposed. Furthermore, it is proven that the proposed exclusive hypervolume approximation gives an upper bound of the accurate exclusive hypervolume. The procedure of IHSO is parallelized by using the multiple threads of the Java language. By using the parallelized IHSO, not only the exclusive hypervolume but also the exclusive hypervolume approximation can be calculated concurrently on a multi-core processor. By the results of numerical experiments and statistical tests conducted on test problems, the usefulness of the proposed approach is demonstrated.
Abnormal Spontaneous Neural Activity in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

Neuroimaging studies of obsessive-compulsive disorder have found abnormalities in orbitofronto-striato-thalamic circuitry, including the orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, caudate, and thalamus, but few studies have explored abnormal intrinsic or spontaneous brain activity in the resting state. We investigated both intra- and inter-regional synchronized activity in twenty patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and 20 healthy controls using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. Regional homogeneity (ReHo) and functional connectivity methods were used to analyze the intra- and inter-regional synchronized activity, respectively. Compared with healthy controls, patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder showed significantly increased ReHo in the orbitofrontal cortex, cerebellum, and insula, and decreased ReHo in the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, caudate, and inferior occipital cortex. Based on ReHo results, we determined functional connectivity differences between the orbitofrontal cortex and other brain regions in both patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and controls. We found abnormal functional connectivity between the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral anterior cingulate cortex in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder compared with healthy controls. Moreover, ReHo in the orbitofrontal cortex was correlated with the duration of obsessive-compulsive disorder. These findings suggest that increased intra- and inter-regional synchronized activity in the orbitofrontal cortex may have a key role in the pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorder. In addition to orbitofronto-striato-thalamic circuitry, brain regions such as the insula and cerebellum may also be involved in the pathophysiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Policy Generator (PG): A Heuristic-Based Fuzzer

Recently, grammar-based fuzzers have been proposed to automate the generation of testing data. Grammar-based fuzzers differ from traditional fuzzers because the fuzzer is provided a grammatical definition of the test objective for the system under test. A novel fuzzer, Policy Generator (PG), is introduced. PG utilizes a number of heuristic techniques to improve space coverage over existing fuzzers. A simple grammatical test-bed, firewall policy generation, is used to compare the performance of these two systems. The set of test cases produced for this scenario are examined and each algorithm is evaluated against a number of novel grammar-based coverage metrics. The empirical study demonstrates that PG generates superior coverage compared to current generation techniques.
Horse and Rider Revisited

Abstract The contributions of neurobiology and infant research have greatly extended our understanding of unconscious processes. We are still driven by unconscious forces that we cannot control, but those forces represent unconscious perceptual and interpretive processes and cannot be viewed simply as instincts under repression as Freud believed. This paper reexamines the Freudian dynamic unconscious and the problem of agency in the light of these newer findings of neuroscience.
Fabrication and characterization of radome structure

This paper presents the design issues, modeling, fabrication and characterization of a radome structure, a metamaterial cover over the slotted patch antenna for triband operation with center frequency 2.45 GHz. The dimensions of the slots patterned over the patch antenna are designed to control the lower resonant frequency and the bandwidth. The paper presents the selection of the best optimized dimensions of the slotted patch antenna and metamaterial cover to control the resonant frequencies and bandwidth of the antenna. The experimental results are presented thoroughly and compared with the analytical calculations. An analytical method, Newton's divided difference method is utilized to predict the features of the simulation results, implying that within a certain frequency range, the spatial height of the metamaterial cover can be adjusted for maximum directivity attainment. Negative value of permittivity and permeability are obtained due to the use of metametarial cover over the patch antenna. S-parameters, directivity and radiation patterns as performance matrices are obtained using the software tool High Frequency Structure Simulator version 11. These parameters are used to retrieve the effective permittivity and permeability. Numerous simulations have been carried out for different heights of the cover from the patch antenna in the microwave regime. The optimally simulated structure is proposed for the application of metamaterials as antenna cover to primarily enhance directivity by minimizing its refractive index in negative regime. Further design includes review and critical discussions on the effect of using different substrate materials for the patch antenna.
Influence of Body Position on Cortical Pain-Related Somatosensory Processing: An ERP Study

Background Despite the consistent information available on the physiological changes induced by head down bed rest, a condition which simulates space microgravity, our knowledge on the possible perceptual-cortical alterations is still poor. The present study investigated the effects of 2-h head-down bed rest on subjective and cortical responses elicited by electrical, pain-related somatosensory stimulation. Methodology/Principal Findings Twenty male subjects were randomly assigned to two groups, head-down bed rest (BR) or sitting control condition. Starting from individual electrical thresholds, Somatosensory Evoked Potentials were elicited by electrical stimuli administered randomly to the left wrist and divided into four conditions: control painless condition, electrical pain threshold, 30% above pain threshold, 30% below pain threshold. Subjective pain ratings collected during the EEG session showed significantly reduced pain perception in BR compared to Control group. Statistical analysis on four electrode clusters and sLORETA source analysis revealed, in sitting controls, a P1 component (40–50 ms) in the right somatosensory cortex, whereas it was bilateral and differently located in BR group. Controls' N1 (80–90 ms) had widespread right hemisphere activation, involving also anterior cingulate, whereas BR group showed primary somatosensory cortex activation. The P2 (190–220 ms) was larger in left-central locations of Controls compared with BR group. Conclusions/Significance Head-down bed rest was associated to an overall decrease of pain sensitivity and an altered pain network also outside the primary somatosensory cortex. Results have implications not only for astronauts' health and spaceflight risks, but also for the clinical aspects of pain detection in bedridden patients at risk of fatal undetected complications.
The Topology of the External Activity Complex of a Matroid

International audience We prove that the external activity complex Act<(M) of a matroid is shellable. In fact, we show that every linear extension of Las Vergnas's external/internal order <ext/int on M provides a shelling of Act<(M). We also show that every linear extension of Las Vergnas's internal order <int on M provides a shelling of the independence complex IN(M). As a corollary, Act<(M) and M have the same h-vector. We prove that, after removing its cone points, the external activity complex is contractible if M contains U3,1 as a minor, and a sphere otherwise.
Constraints in Feature Algebra

Feature Algebra captures the commonalities of feature oriented software development (FOSD), such as introductions, refinements and quantification. So far constraints have not been integrated into this algebraic framework. They arise in feature elicitation, feature dependence, feature exclusion, feature interaction etc. This paper presents a possibility for integrating such constraints into Feature Algebra.
Cytokine Requirements for Acute and Basal Homeostatic Proliferation of Naive and Memory CD8+ T Cells

Both naive and memory T cells undergo antigen-independent proliferation after transfer into a T cell–depleted environment (acute homeostatic proliferation), whereas only memory T cells slowly divide in a full T cell compartment (basal proliferation). We show, first, that naive and memory CD8+ T cells have different cytokine requirements for acute homeostatic proliferation. Interleukin (IL)-7 receptor(R)α–mediated signals were obligatory for proliferation of naive T cells in lymphopenic hosts, whereas IL-15 did not influence their division. Memory T cells, on the other hand, could use either IL-7Rα– or IL-15–mediated signals for acute homeostatic proliferation: their proliferation was delayed when either IL-7Rα was blocked or IL-15 removed, but only when both signals were absent was proliferation ablated. Second, the cytokine requirements for basal and acute homeostatic proliferation of CD8+ memory T cells differ, as basal division of memory T cells was blocked completely in IL-15–deficient hosts. These data suggest a possible mechanism for the dearth of memory CD8+ T cells in IL-15– and IL-15Rα–deficient mice is their impaired basal proliferation. Our results show that naive and memory T lymphocytes differ in their cytokine dependence for acute homeostatic proliferation and that memory T lymphocytes have distinct requirements for proliferation in full versus empty compartments.
Regulation of RraA, a Protein Inhibitor of RNase E-Mediated RNA Decay

ABSTRACT The recently discovered RraA protein acts as an inhibitor of the essential endoribonuclease RNase E, and we demonstrated that ectopic expression of RraA affects the abundance of more than 700 transcripts in Escherichia coli (K. Lee, X. Zhan, J. Gao, J. Qiu, Y. Feng, R. Meganathan, S. N. Cohen, and G. Georgiou, Cell 114:623-634, 2003). We show that rraA is expressed from its own promoter, P rraA , located in the menA-rraA intergenic region. Primer extension and lacZ fusion analysis revealed that transcription from P rraA is elevated upon entry into stationary phase in a σs-dependent manner. In addition, the stability of the rraA transcript is dependent on RNase E activity, suggesting the involvement of a feedback circuit in the regulation of the RraA level in E. coli.
Genotypic and PFGE/MLVA Analyses of Vibrio cholerae O1: Geographical Spread and Temporal Changes during the 2007–2010 Cholera Outbreaks in Thailand

Background Vibrio cholerae O1 El Tor dominated the seventh cholera pandemic which occurred in the 1960s. For two decades, variants of V. cholerae O1 El Tor that produce classical cholera toxin have emerged and spread globally, replacing the prototypic El Tor biotype. This study aims to characterize V. cholerae O1 isolates from outbreaks in Thailand with special reference to genotypic variations over time. Methods/Findings A total of 343 isolates of V. cholerae O1 from cholera outbreaks from 2007 to 2010 were investigated, and 99.4% were found to carry the classical cholera toxin B subunit (ctxB) and El Tor rstR genes. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) differentiated the isolates into 10 distinct pulsotypes, clustered into two major groups, A and B, with an overall similarity of 88%. Ribotyping, multiple-locus variable-number tandem-repeat analysis (MLVA), and PCR to detect Vibrio seventh pandemic island II (VSP-II) related genes of randomly selected isolates from each pulsotype corresponded to the results obtained by PFGE. Epidemiological investigations revealed that MLVA type 2 was strongly associated with a cholera outbreak in northeastern Thailand in 2007, while MLVA type 7 dominated the outbreaks of the southern Gulf areas in 2009 and MLVA type 4 dominated the outbreaks of the central Gulf areas during 2009–2010. Only MLVA type 16 isolates were found in a Thai-Myanmar border area in 2010, whereas those of MLVA types 26, 39, and 41 predominated this border area in 2008. Type 39 then disappeared 1–2 years later as MLVA type 41 became prevalent. Type 41 was also found to infect an outbreak area. Conclusions MLVA provided a high-throughput genetic typing tool for understanding the in-depth epidemiology of cholera outbreaks. Our epidemiological surveys suggest that some clones of V. cholerae O1 with similar but distinctive genetic traits circulate in outbreak sites, while others disappear over time.
An approach for cloud resource scheduling based on Parallel Genetic Algorithm

Resource scheduling is a key process for clouds such as Infrastructure as a Service cloud. To make the most efficient use of the resources, we propose an optimized scheduling algorithm to achieve the optimization or sub-optimization for cloud scheduling problems. We investigate the possibility to place the Virtual Machines in a flexible way to improve the speed of finding the best allocation on the premise of permitting the maximum utilization of resources. Mathematically, we consider the scheduling problem come down to an Unbalance Assignment Problem. Our scheduling policy achieved by Parallel Genetic Algorithm which is much faster than traditional Genetic Algorithm. The experiments show that our method improved both the speed of resources allocation and the utilization of system resource.
Estimation of individual admixture: Analytical and study design considerations

The genome of an admixed individual represents a mixture of alleles from different ancestries. In the United States, the two largest minority groups, African‐Americans and Hispanics, are both admixed. An understanding of the admixture proportion at an individual level (individual admixture, or IA) is valuable for both population geneticists and epidemiologists who conduct case‐control association studies in these groups. Here we present an extension of a previously described frequentist (maximum likelihood or ML) approach to estimate individual admixture that allows for uncertainty in ancestral allele frequencies. We compare this approach both to prior partial likelihood based methods as well as more recently described Bayesian MCMC methods. Our full ML method demonstrates increased robustness when compared to an existing partial ML approach. Simulations also suggest that this frequentist estimator achieves similar efficiency, measured by the mean squared error criterion, as Bayesian methods but requires just a fraction of the computational time to produce point estimates, allowing for extensive analysis (e.g., simulations) not possible by Bayesian methods. Our simulation results demonstrate that inclusion of ancestral populations or their surrogates in the analysis is required by any method of IA estimation to obtain reasonable results. Genet. Epidemiol. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Haplotyping as Perfect Phylogeny: a Direct Approach Haplotyping as Perfect Phylogeny: a Direct Approach

A full Haplotype Map of the human genome will prove extremely valuable as it will be used in large scale screens of populations to associate speci c haplotypes with speci c complex genetic in uenced diseases A prototype Haplotype Mapping strategy is presently being nalized by an NIH working group The biological key to that strategy is the surprising fact that genomic DNA can be partitioned into long blocks where genetic recombination has been rare leading to strikingly fewer distinct haplotypes in the population than previously expected In this paper we explore the algorithmic implications of the no recombination in long blocks observation for the problem of inferring haplotypes in populations This assumption together with the standard population genetic assumption of in nite sites justi es a model of haplotype evolution where the haplotypes in a population are assumed to evolve along a coalescent which as a rooted tree is a perfect phylogeny We consider the following algorithmic problem called Perfect Phylogeny Haplotyping problem PPH which was introduced by Gus eld given n genotypes does there exist a set of at most n haplotypes such that each genotype is generated by a pair of haplotypes from this set and such that this set can be derived on a perfect phylogeny The approach taken in to solve this problem reduces it to established very deep results and algorithms from matroid and graph theory Although that reduction is quite simple and the resulting algorithm nearly optimal in speed a linear time lower bound is necessary taken as a whole that approach is quite involved and in particular challenging to program Moreover anyone wishing to fully establish by reading existing literature the correctness of the entire algorithm would need to read several deep and di cult papers in graph and matroid theory A stated open goal in was to nd a simpler more direct yet still e cient algorithm via a self contained approach not needing deep matroid or graph theorems This paper accomplishes that goal for both the rooted and unrooted PPH problems It establishes a very simple easy to program O nm time algorithm that determines whether there is a PPH solution for input genotypes and produces a linear space data structure to represent all of the solutions The approach allows complete although not trivial self contained proofs In addition to algorithmic simplicity the approach here makes the representation of all solutions more intuitive than in and solves another open goal from that paper namely to prove a non trivial upper bound on the number of PPH solutions showing that that number is vastly smaller than the number of haplotype solutions each solution being a set of n pairs of haplotypes that can generate the genotypes when the perfect phylogeny requirement is not imposed
Comparing Topic Models for a Movie Recommendation System

Recommendation systems have become successful at suggesting content that are likely to be of interest to the user, however their performance greatly suffers when little information about the users preferences are given. In this paper we propose an automated movie recommendation system based on the similarity of movie: given a target movie selected by the user, the goal of the system is to provide a list of those movies that are most similar to the target one, without knowing any user preferences. The Topic Models of Latent Semantic Allocation (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) have been applied and extensively compared on a movie database of two hundred thousand plots. Experiments are an important part of the paper; we examined the topic models behaviour based on standard metrics and on user evaluations, we have conducted performance assessments with 30 users to compare our approach with a commercial system. The outcome was that the performance of LSA was superior to that of LDA in supporting the selection of similar plots. Even if our system does not outperform commercial systems, it does not rely on human effort, thus it can be ported to any domain where natural language descriptions exist. Since it is independent from the number of user ratings, it is able to suggest famous movies as well as old or unheard movies that are still strongly related to the content of the video the user has watched.
Modelling the virtual campus

The challenge facing TeleLearning and Distance Education is to support the essentially autonomous knowledge building process by the learner, while at the same time, emphasizing the very important collaborative dimension of learning. This challenge cannot be met without information technology and without the integration of all the useful synchronous and asynchronous technologies in a coherent architecture. We call such an architecture the Virtual Campus. A review of five LICEF's projects related to this architecture will be presented. Then, applying an object oriented modeling technique, we outline the modeling process, defining the actors of the Virtual Campus, their roles, the processes they are involved in and the computer tools they need to perform their roles. Upgrading tools and methods to support the Virtual Campus will open up and extend the traditional classroom in a very "real" way. It will hopefully contribute to learners persistence in distance education, thus extending the social and economic usefulness of TeleLearning. Keyword Codes: K.3. 1, I.2. 4, D.1. 5