Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Origin and Evolution of Retinoid Isomerization Machinery in Vertebrate Visual Cycle: Hint from Jawless Vertebrates

In order to maintain visual sensitivity at all light levels, the vertebrate eye possesses a mechanism to regenerate the visual pigment chromophore 11-cis retinal in the dark enzymatically, unlike in all other taxa, which rely on photoisomerization. This mechanism is termed the visual cycle and is localized to the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a support layer of the neural retina. Speculation has long revolved around whether more primitive chordates, such as tunicates and cephalochordates, anticipated this feature. The two key enzymes of the visual cycle are RPE65, the visual cycle all-trans retinyl ester isomerohydrolase, and lecithin:retinol acyltransferase (LRAT), which generates RPE65’s substrate. We hypothesized that the origin of the vertebrate visual cycle is directly connected to an ancestral carotenoid oxygenase acquiring a new retinyl ester isomerohydrolase function. Our phylogenetic analyses of the RPE65/BCMO and N1pC/P60 (LRAT) superfamilies show that neither RPE65 nor LRAT orthologs occur in tunicates (Ciona) or cephalochordates (Branchiostoma), but occur in Petromyzon marinus (Sea Lamprey), a jawless vertebrate. The closest homologs to RPE65 in Ciona and Branchiostoma lacked predicted functionally diverged residues found in all authentic RPE65s, but lamprey RPE65 contained all of them. We cloned RPE65 and LRATb cDNAs from lamprey RPE and demonstrated appropriate enzymatic activities. We show that Ciona ß-carotene monooxygenase a (BCMOa) (previously annotated as an RPE65) has carotenoid oxygenase cleavage activity but not RPE65 activity. We verified the presence of RPE65 in lamprey RPE by immunofluorescence microscopy, immunoblot and mass spectrometry. On the basis of these data we conclude that the crucial transition from the typical carotenoid double bond cleavage functionality (BCMO) to the isomerohydrolase functionality (RPE65), coupled with the origin of LRAT, occurred subsequent to divergence of the more primitive chordates (tunicates, etc.) in the last common ancestor of the jawless and jawed vertebrates.
Lithography-aware 1-dimensional cell generation

As the process technology advances to the sub-wavelength era, the 1-dimensional (1-D) design style is regarded as one of the most effective ways to continue scaling down the minimum feature size. This paper presents the lithography-aware cell generation algorithms which simultaneously minimize 1-D cell area and enhance the printability. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms can effectively and efficiently reduce the number of diffusion gaps, and minimize used routing tracks. Consequently, our approach results in smaller 1-D cell area and better printability.
A Linear Self-Calibration Method Based on Active Vision System

This paper presented an improved self-calibrate method based on active vision system. The camera was controlled to move directly in a plane and rotated around the X-axis in the camera coordinates in five times or more, then we calibrated the camera by the epipoles in the images. This method improved the accuracy and robust of the epipoles, compared with other method. The theory based on Kruppa equation of self-calibration of a moving camera was put forward by Maybank and Faugeras(1). Then, a lot of self-calibration methods were put forward. All these methods need to solve non-linear equations which are hard to work out. Ma gave a linear self-calibration method based on active vision system(2). The camera moved twice in the two plumb planes, and then the FOE (Focus of Expansion) was used to create linear equations and solve the internal camera parameters. The method carried out self- calibration by assuming that the skew factors are equal to zero. Those methods mentioned above don't work in the 5 factors model, and this paper introduced a method which can solve the internal camera parameters in 5 factors model without the plane information of the 3D space.
Optimal probabilistic allocation of customer types to servers

The model under consideration consists of n customer types attended by m parallel non-identical servers. Customers are allocated to the servers in a probabilistic manner; upon arrival customers are sent to one of the servers according to an m &times; n matrix of routing probabilities. We consider the problem of finding an allocation that minimizes a weighted sum of the mean waiting times. We expose the structure of an optimal allocation and describe for some special cases in detail how the structure may be exploited in actually determining an optimal allocation.
A 405MHz integer-N CMOS PLL for implantable biomedical application

This work is dedicated to a Phase Locked Loop design that works with a sub 1GHz frequency band. Medical Implant Communication Service operates at 402-405 MHz frequency of operation. The PLL design used in this paper uses a novel two stage ring VCO that can generate 179MHz to 438MHz by changing the control voltage from 0.3-V to 1-V. The worst case phase noise of -106dBc/Hz is obtained at an offset of 1MHz. The VCO is controlled by changing the resistance in the forward path by varying the gate voltage of the transmission gate. Thus the design challenge to achieve oscillation at two stages is achieved. For small frequency to have small size device is not possible in conventional design has been achieved in this design. The lock in time of the PLL is 8μS with a charge pump current of 100μA. The PLL architecture consumes 280μW of power from a supply voltage of 1-V. The loop filter and its stability analysis have been verified by MATLAB. The Simulink model has been developed in order to verify the theoretical operation of the PLL. The Transistor level analysis has been done using Cadence virtuoso 90nm CMOS technology.
Dimensionality reduction using MCE-optimized LDA transformation

In this paper, the minimum classification error (MCE) method is extended to optimize both linear discriminant analysis (LDA) transformation and the classification parameters for dimensionality reduction. Firstly, under the HMM-based continuous speech recognition (CSR) framework, we use the MCE criterion to optimize the conventional dimensionality reduction method, which uses LDA to transform the standard MFCC. Then, a new dimensionality reduction method is proposed. In the new method, the combination of discrete cosine transform (DCT) and LDA, as used in the conventional method, is replaced by a single LDA transformation, which is optimized according to MCE criterion along with the classification parameters. Experimental results on TiDigits show that even when the feature dimension is reduced to 14, the performance of this new method is as good as that of the MCE-trained system using 39 dimension MFCC. It also outperforms our MCE-optimized conventional dimensionality reduction method.
Integrating Shared Cyber Security Information into Information Security Risk Management

In the last couples of years, the complexity and interconnectedness of Information Systems (IS), and security related incidents increased significantly. In order to guarantee confidentiality, integrity, and availability of these IS an appropriate information security risk management (ISRM) must be in place. Reliable ISRM represents a challenge for organizations, since they take security related decisions based on outdated data, overlook vulnerabilities, threats or common incidents. To overcome these issues the acquisition of shared cyber security information at the right time supports ISRM to reduce risks, identify attacks, and enhance resilience of an IS. However, the exchange and acquisition of shared cyber security information represents a major challenge in ISRM. In the proposed PhD thesis we focus on this challenge by developing a framework that automatically combines and integrates shared cyber security information into ISRM processes. In doing so, we develop quality criteria, measures, and metrics to evaluate and filter shared cyber security information.
OpenRouter An OpenCOM-based Component Framework for Structuring Software Routers

2 I certify that the material contained in this dissertation is my own work and does not contain significant portions of unreferenced or unacknowledged material. I also warrant that the above statement applies to the implementation of the project and all associated documentation. In the case of electronically submitted work, I also consent to this work being stored electronically and copied for assessment purposes, including the department's use of p lagiarism detection systems in order to check the integrity of assessed work. Abstract This project is concerned with evaluating the viability of using component frameworks and reflective techniques to build software routers. This dissertation reviews related research, outlines a generic framework for designing software routers in general then focuses on IP routing. The project involves the design and implementation of a system which uses the low level packet filtering facilities of the Windows NT (5) Networking Stack together with a Component Framework to struc ture a number of components into a software router. The report evaluates the developed system to see if it achieves the ideal of allowing a high performance modular router to be reconfigured at run-time. This report shows that the system has increased functionality, ease of programmability and modularity over existing monolithic software routers and it performs on par with existing systems. 4 Acknowledgements I would like to take this opportunity to thank a number of people who helped during the duration of the dissertation and in the preparation of this report. I would like to thank Geoff Coulson for the guidance given in supervising me for the duration of the project. I would also like to thank Geoff and Gordon Blair for there excellent module during the MSc Course, which led me into this field. I would like to thank Stefan Schmid and Tim Chart for supplying the Lara++ code and allo wing me to use it and Paul Grace for helping when I got stuck with OpenCOM. I would finally like to thank Danny Hughes, Phil Greenwood and Matthew Pierce for there general comments during the dissertation and during the final stages of the write-up.
IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES OF REAL-TIME TRAJECTORY GENERATION ON SMALL UAVS

IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES OF REAL-TIME TRAJECTORY GENERATION ON SMALL UAVS Derek Bastian Kingston Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Master of Science The transition from a mathematical algorithm to a physical hardware implementation is non-trivial. This thesis discusses the issues involved in the transition from the theory of real-time trajectory generation all the way through a hardware experiment. Documentation of the validation process as well as modifications to the existing theory as a result of hardware testing are treated at length. The results of hardware experimentation show that trajectory generation can be done in real-time in a manner facilitating coordination of multiple small UAVs. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express sincere appreciation to Professor Randy Beard for his guidance throughout the implementation and writing of this thesis. In addition, many others in the MAGICC lab have helped make this work possible including Reed Christiansen, Joshua Hintze, Wei Ren, Matt Blake, Walt Johnson, and David Hubbard. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my wife, Sarah, for her support and patience.
Improving the informativeness of verbose queries using summarization techniques for spoken document retrieval

Query-by-example information retrieval aims at helping users to find relevant documents accurately when users provide specific query exemplars describing what they are interested in. The query exemplars are usually long and in the form of either a partial or even a full document. However, they may contain extraneous terms (or off-topic information) that would have a negative impact on the retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose to integrate extractive summarization techniques into the retrieval process so as to improve the informativeness of a verbose query exemplar. The original query exemplar is first divided into several sub-queries or sentences. To construct a new concise query exemplar, summarization techniques are then employed to select a salient subset of sub-queries. Experiments on the TDT Chinese collection show that the proposed approach is indeed effective and promising.
Developing a computational grammar for Bengali using the HPSG formalism

This paper describes the first phase of developing a computational grammar for Bengali using the HeadDriven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) formalism. The HPSG formalism is a highly developed framework that combines computational and psycholinguistic research to provide a tool with which the features particular to a language can be captured and simultaneously provide information about language universals i.e. linguistic phenomena common to diverse languages. The grammar is implemented on a Linguistic Knowledge Building (LKB) system that has both a syntactic and a semantic level. The system is a powerful tool that allows the user to build a parser along with a generator by using the formalism to code in linguistic rules through feature structures and feature unification. This paper provides a set of instructions for using the formulation of HPSG to parse as well as generate grammatical sentences of Bengali. This paper will enable linguists to interpret and formulate features and types with which Bengali or a structurally similar language can be coded in HPSG. It provides a stepping-stone towards the development of a full computational grammar for Bengali which will also provide useful information as a computational description for its sister languages.
Constructing shallow-transfer rule for Indonesian-English machine translation

Shallow-transfer rule is the main component of shallow-transfer machine translation that matches the pattern of source language and then performs required action to translate them into the target language. However, high development cost is required to build it because it needs much of linguistic knowledge. This paper focuses on the process to automatically generate the shallow-transfer rule for Indonesian-to-English that is followed with manual post-editing to improve the quality of automatic rule. The result shows that the automatic transfer rule can improve the performance of the word-for-word translation. Furthermore, manual post-editing process was also shown to increase the quality of automatic transfer rule. According to this result, using automatic approach is an effective way to build shallow-transfer rule at starting point that can be further enhanced by performing rule post-editing.
Studies of drugs given before anaesthesia XXVI: lorazepam.

Lorazepam has been studied as preanaesthetic medication given by mouth, i.m. and i.v. Sediation and side-effects and the incidence of anterograde amnesia in patients having a standard operation under methohexitone-nitrous oxide-oxygen anaesthesia were assessed. In a preliminary study of three i.m. (2-, 4- and 8-mg) and six oral (1-,2-,2.5-,4-,5- and 8-mg) doses, the optimum dose was found to be 4 mg for patients with an average weight of 60 kg. This dose was studied in detail when given by all three routes and compared with the commercially available 2.5- and 5-mg tablets. Even when given i.v. , there was a delay of 30-40 min in the onset of maximum sedative effect and drowsiness persisted for at least 4 h. Although the onset of action by i.m. injection was slightly faster than when the drug was given by mouth this advantage was more than offset by the high frequencies of pain at the site of injection and restlessness which persisted for 20-40 min. Oral lorazepam in doses of 2.5-5.0 mg was a reliable, effective sedative which could be recommended for routine preanaesthetic medication, provided rapid recovery was not essential. Its soporific effect was accompanied by an appreciable incidence of anterograde amnesia.
Generic base standards

Generic base standards, that is, ones defining these fundamental concepts of information technology, offer a way of improving standardization in IT by enabling greater commonality. The paper looks briefly at the fundamental base standards of terminology and character sets. It then considers in more depth two other generic base concepts: syntactic metalanguages (for example, Backus Naur form) and numeric floating-point constants. Case studies illustrate typical unnecessary variations in existing standards and demonstrate that even the simplest ideas are treated in widely different ways. <<ETX>>
Aggregate Flow Fairness in MANs

MANs and backbone networks are shared by "users" that can be individuals, organizations as well as communication service providers. Such users produce concurrently a variety of traffic patterns from multiple network locations. Traditional fairness definitions allocate bandwidth to individual source to destination flows. These individual flow fairness definitions generally allocate more bandwidth to users with a larger number of flows, thus creating unfairness at the user level. This paper explores alternative user level fairness criteria. We examine several extensions of the max-min fairness that allocate bandwidth fairly to users. We require the new criteria to be based on a max-min definition, to be backward compatible with the traditional max-min fairness (when each user has a single flow) and not to allocate zero bandwidth to any individual flow. We describe three different criteria for fair bandwidth allocation to users. The first is a weighted max-min criteria, achieving user fairness by the weights assigned to each flow; The second attempts to balance the user allocation separately over each link; Finally, we introduce a novel scheme termed the redefined vector-space fairness that is based on a lexicographical maximization of both user and individual flows. This paper evaluates the three fairness definitions both behaviorally and numerically. The simulation results show a clear advantage for the redefined vector-space fairness both in terms of user fairness and overall throughput.
Notes on Stochastic Finance

A basic limitation of the two-step model considered in Chapter 1 is that it does not allow for trading until the end of the first time period is reached. In order to be able to re-allocate the portfolio over time we need to consider a discrete-time, multistep financial model with N + 1 time instants t = 0, 1, . ,N . The practical importance of this model lies also in its direct computer implementability.
2 1 8 O ct 2 00 5 Dynamically generated embeddings of spacetime

We discuss how embeddings in connection with the Campbell-Magaard (CM) theorem can have a physical interpretation. We show that any embedding whose local existence is guaranteed by the CM theorem can be viewed as a result of the dynamical evolution of initial data given in a four-dimensional spacelike hypersurface. By using the CM theorem, we establish that for any analytic spacetime, there exist appropriate initial data whose Cauchy development is a five-dimensional vacuum space into which the spacetime is locally embedded. We shall see also that the spacetime embedded is Cauchy stable with respect these the initial data. The development of the braneworld scenario [1, 2, 3, 4], in which our ordinary spacetime is viewed as a hypersurface of a higher-dimensional space, has greatly contributed to increase recent interest on embeddings theorems. The so-called non-compact Kaluza-Klein (NKK) models [5, 6, 7] have also motivated the study of embedding problems of the spacetime. are of special interest when the embedding spaces possess only one extra dimension as is the case of the Randall-Sundrum braneworld scenario [3, 4] and the NKK models [5, 6, 7]. The CM theorem ensures the existence of local and analytic isometric embedding 1 of any n-dimensional analytic manifold M into a Ricci-flat (n + 1)-1 Henceforth embedding for us will mean analytic and isometric embedding.
Adapting of Science Learning Self-Efficacy Belief Scale for Middle School Students: Validity and Reliability Study

The aim of this study is to develop a measurement tool with a high level validity and reliability to define the level of self-efficacy beliefs for science learning of middle school students. The research is a methodological validity and reliability study. For Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA); the data of the study has been collected in two different sampling groups which consist of 826 students from seven different schools. EFA method has showed measurement tool can be structured on three factors. For CFA, fit indices have then been reviewed and it has been seen that the χ2 value is not compatible with acceptable values and the other indices have acceptable values. This means that the model obtained with CFA has medium level conformity. As a result of the reliability studies for EFA, it has been determined that internal consistency coefficient is 0.85; and it is 0.83 according to CFA sampling. The results of the factor analysis indicate that the measurement tool can be built on three factors. These factors are defined as “self- efficacy for personal
Intelligent component for adaptive E-learning systems

Existing e-learning systems are based on the quantity of information. They fail to consider an important factor for the success of the system, namely the user. An intelligent adaptive system should adjust the content in order to ensure faster and better performances in the learning process. Moreover, it should help students to develop new, desirable learning abilities. This paper presents the intelligent component of an adaptive e-learning system based on Bayesian networks; such a module makes an initial user classification using a psychological test, and continuously adapts according to user's interaction with the system.
Game Theory for Signal Processing in Networks

In this tutorial, the basics of game theory are introduced along with an overview of its most recent and emerging applications in signal processing. One of the main features of this contribution is to gather in a single paper some fundamental game-theoretic notions and tools which, over the past few years, have become widely spread over a large number of papers. In particular, both strategic-form and coalition-form games are described in details while the key connections and differences between them are outlined. Moreover, a particular attention is also devoted to clarify the connections between strategic-form games and distributed optimization and learning algorithms. Beyond an introduction to the basic concepts and main solution approaches, several carefully designed examples are provided to allow a better understanding of how to apply the described tools.
Examining The Cultural, Age and Gender Differences In Attitudes Toward Employee Engagement Surveys.

In order to assess levels of engagement in a global organisation, employees often complete online anonymous surveys. However, is it possible to compare engagement results between countries? Starting with the null hypothesis that “attitudes to employee surveys do not vary by country or gender and age within those countries” an online survey was completed by employees from one organisation in six countries, assessing their attitudes towards factors such as belief in the anonymity of surveys, honesty of response, preferred method of raising concerns and whether they believe employee surveys to be the most effective method of communicating engagement issues. The results show that in countries with a high level of “Power Distance” such as Romania, India, China and Mexico, employee surveys were the preferred method of communicating issues, particularly with female employees. Sufficient differences in attitude towards using an online anonymous survey occurred to raise serious concerns for practitioners when asked to compare the results from employees around the world.