Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multiple kernel learning with ICA: Local discriminative image descriptors for recognition

Local image features have been proven to be a powerful way to describe pattern of interest, both from single objects and complex scenes. While learning from images represented by local features is challenging, recent publications and developments in object recognition has shown that significant performance achievements can be achieved by carefully combining multi-level, coarse-to-fine, sparsely distributed feature encodings [10], and kernel based learning methods, which defines a generalized similarity measure among data using multiple kernel functions instead of a single one, also known as multiple kernel learning (MKL). In this paper we show that the Kernel ICA descriptors based MKL supervised learning approach perform better than other descriptors for object recognition, since the ICA-based representation is localized. In low-level feature extraction, ICA produces independent image bases that emphasize edge information in the image data. In high-level classification, MKL classifies the ICA features as discriminative components. We demonstrate our algorithm on different databases for recognition tasks, showing that the proposed method is accurate and more efficient than current approaches.
Automatic unit test data generation using mixed-integer linear programming and execution trees

This paper presents an approach to automatic unit test data generation for branch coverage using mixed-integer linear programming, execution trees, and symbolic execution. This approach can be useful to both general testing and regression testing after software maintenance and reengineering activities. Several strategies, including original algorithms, to move towards practical test data generation have been investigated in this paper. Methods include: the analysis of minimum path-length partial execution trees for unconstrained arcs, thus increasing the generation performance and reducing the difficulties originated by infeasible paths the reduction of the difficulties originated by nonlinear path conditions by considering alternative linear paths the reduction of the number of test cases, which are needed to achieve the desired coverage, based on the concept of unconstrained arcs in a control flow graph the extension of symbolic execution to deal with dynamic memory allocation and deallocation, pointers and pointers to functions system. Preliminary results are encouraging and show that a high percentage of the program branches can be covered by the test data automatically produced. The approach is flexible to branch selection criteria coming from general testing as well as regression testing.
Drought tolerance of four vegetable crops during germination and initial seedling growth

Seeds of arugula (Eruca sativa Miller, cv. Cultivada), carrot (Daucus carota L., cv. Nantes), eggplant (Solanum melongena L., cv. Embú) and watermelon [Citrullus lanatus (Thunb.) Matsum. & Nakai cv. Crimson Sweet] were submitted to different osmotic potentials induced by polyethylene glycol (PEG) with the objective of evaluate the effects of drought stress on seed germination and initial seedling growth. Seeds were distributed in plastic boxes containing blotter paper, soaked with PEG solutions prepared with osmotic potentials 0.0 (control), –0.2, –0.4, and –0.8 MPa and kept into a seed germinator, at 25 °C for 14 days. A completely randomized design in a 4 × 4 factorial scheme with four replicates of 50 seeds each was used. The results showed that by increasing of the osmotic potential level, germinated seeds number, germination rate index, root and shoot length, shoot and root dry matter, and seedling vigor indices decreased, while mean germination time and root: shoot ratio increased in all four vegetable crops. Additionally, the carrot and watermelon are more susceptible than arugula and eggplant to drought stress, with germination response declining more rapidly with the rise of osmotic potential level. Arugula and eggplant crops tolerate water stress of up to –0.2 MPa, without reducing germination of the seeds; however, the growth of shoots and roots are inhibited. The germination process of eggplant and watermelon seeds are completely inhibited at –0.8 MPa osmotic potential, whereas germination of carrot seeds is completely inhibited at –0.4 MPa osmotic potential. Severe drought stress limits the process of seed germination and initial seedling growth of vegetable crops.
Job stress, daily stress, and depressive symptoms among low-wage workers in Korea: the role of resilience

ABSTRACT This study examined the effects of job stress and daily stress on depressive symptoms and the role of resilience as a moderator among low-wage workers in South Korea. Using purposive sampling, we analysed 254 low-wage workers of private-sector organisations in Seoul and Gyeong-gi province. Results indicated that age, self-rated health, job stress, and daily stress were significant predictors of depressive symptoms, and the moderating effect of resilience was significant only for the relationship between daily stress and depressive symptoms. Findings suggest the significance of using different approaches to manage job stress and daily stress, which in turn will affect low-wage workers’ mental health.
A field study on spontaneous gaze-based interaction with a public display using pursuits

Smooth pursuit eye movements were recently introduced as a promising technique for calibration-free and thus spontaneous and natural gaze interaction. While pursuits have been evaluated in controlled laboratory studies, the technique has not yet been evaluated with respect to usability in the wild. We report on a field study in which we deployed a game on a public display where participants used pursuits to select fish moving in linear and circular trajectories at different speeds. The study ran for two days in a busy computer lab resulting in a total of 56 interactions. Results from our study show that linear trajectories are statistically faster to select via pursuits than circular trajectories. We also found that pursuits is well perceived by users who find it fast and responsive.
Primary Hyperparathyroidism Influences the Expression of Inflammatory and Metabolic Genes in Adipose Tissue

Background Primary hyperparathyroidism (PHPT) is characterised by increased production of parathyroid hormone (PTH) resulting in elevated serum calcium levels. The influence on bone metabolism with altered bone resorption is the most studied clinical condition in PHPT. In addition to this, patients with PHPT are at increased risk of non-skeletal diseases, such as impaired insulin sensitivity, arterial hypertension and increased risk of death by cardiovascular diseases (CVD), possibly mediated by a chronic low-grade inflammation. The aim of this study was to investigate whether adipose tissue reflects the low-grade inflammation observed in PHPT patients. Methodology/Principal Findings Subcutaneous fat tissue from the neck was sampled from 16 non-obese patients with PHPT and from 16 patients operated for benign thyroid diseases, serving as weight-matched controls. RNA was extracted and global gene expression was analysed with Illumina BeadArray Technology. We found 608 differentially expressed genes (q-value<0.05), of which 347 were up-regulated and 261 were down-regulated. Gene ontology analysis showed that PHPT patients expressed increased levels of genes involved in immunity and defense (e.g. matrix metallopeptidase 9, S100 calcium binding protein A8 and A9, CD14, folate receptor 2), and reduced levels of genes involved in metabolic processes. Analysis of transcription factor binding sites present in the differentially expressed genes corroborated the up-regulation of inflammatory processes. Conclusions/Significance Our findings demonstrate that PHPT strongly influences gene regulation in fat tissue, which may result in altered adipose tissue function and release of pathogenic factors that increase the risk of CVD.
Juvenile Delinquency and Serious Injury Victimization

This Bulletin is part of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) Youth Development Series, which presents findings from the Program of Research on the Causes and Correlates of Delinquency. Teams at the University at Albany, State University of New York; the University of Colorado; and the University of Pittsburgh collaborated extensively in designing the studies. At study sites in Rochester, New York; Denver, Colorado; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the three research teams have interviewed 4,000 participants at regular intervals for a decade, recording their lives in detail. Findings to date indicate that preventing delinquency requires accurate identification of the risk factors that increase the likelihood of delinquent behavior and the protective factors that enhance positive adolescent development.
Environmental health sciences center task force review on halogenated organics in drinking water

The disinfection of drinking water by chlorination has in recent years come under closer scrutiny because of the potential hazards associated with the production of stable chlorinated organic chemicals. Organic chemical contaminants are common to all water supplies and it is now well-established that chlorinated by-products are obtained under conditions of disinfection, or during tertiary treatment of sewage whose products can ultimately find their way into drinking water supplies. Naturally occurring humic substances which are invariably present in drinking waters are probably the source of chloroform and other halogenated methanes, and chloroform has shown up in every water supply investigated thus far. The Environmental Protection Agency is charged with the responsibility of assessing the public health effects resulting from the consumption of contaminated drinking water. It has specifically undertaken the task of determining whether organic contaminants or their chlorinated derivatives have a special impact, and if so, what alternatives there are to protect the consumer against bacterial and viral diseases that are transmitted through infected drinking waters. The impetus to look at these chemicals is not entirely without some prima facie evidence of potential trouble. Epidemiological studies suggested a higher incidence of cancer along the lower Mississippi River where the contamination from organic chemicals is particularly high. The conclusions from these studies have, to be sure, not gone unchallenged. The task of assessing the effects of chemicals in the drinking water is a difficult one. It includes many variables, including differences in water supplies and the temporal relationship between contamination and consumption of the finished product. It must also take into account the relative importance of the effects from these chemicals in comparison to those from occupational exposure, ingestion of contaminated foods, inhalation of polluted air, and many others. The susceptibility of different age, genetic, and ethnic groups within the population must also be carefully considered. The present review discusses: the reasons for disinfection; the general occurrence of chlorinated organics in drinking water; the chemistry in the synthesis of chlorinated organics under aqueous conditions; and alternatives to chlorine for disinfection.
TARGET BASED REVIEW CLASSIFICATION FOR FINE-GRAINED SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

Target based sentiment classification is able to provide more fine grained sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose a similarity based approach for this problem. Firstly, a new measure of PMI-TFIDF by combining PMI (Pointwise mutual information) and TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) is proposed to measure the association of words for extending related features for a given target. Then Polynomial Kernel (PK) method is applied to get the similarities between a review and the related features of different targets. The sentiment orientation of a review is determined by comparing their similarities with the target based opinion words. The comparisons between PMI and PMI-TFIDF showed that the extracted features that measured by PMI-TFIDF have closer association with the targets than the extracted features measured by PMI. And the association values measured by PMI-TFIDF showed better distinction between different features. The experiments also demonstrated the effectiveness and validation of the proposed approach on target based review classification, opinion words extraction, and target based sentiment classification.
Hereditary Hemochromatosis Predisposes Mice to Yersinia pseudotuberculosis Infection Even in the Absence of the Type III Secretion System

The iron overload disorder hereditary hemochromatosis (HH) predisposes humans to serious disseminated infection with pathogenic Yersinia as well as several other pathogens. Recently, we showed that the iron-sulfur cluster coordinating transcription factor IscR is required for type III secretion in Y. pseudotuberculosis by direct control of the T3SS master regulator LcrF. In E. coli and Yersinia, IscR levels are predicted to be regulated by iron bioavailability, oxygen tension, and oxidative stress, such that iron depletion should lead to increased IscR levels. To investigate how host iron overload influences Y. pseudotuberculosis virulence and the requirement for the Ysc type III secretion system (T3SS), we utilized two distinct murine models of HH: hemojuvelin knockout mice that mimic severe, early-onset HH as well as mice with the HfeC282Y∕C282Y mutation carried by 10% of people of Northern European descent, associated with adult-onset HH. Hjv−∕− and HfeC282Y∕C282Y transgenic mice displayed enhanced colonization of deep tissues by Y. pseudotuberculosis following oral inoculation, recapitulating enhanced susceptibility of humans with HH to disseminated infection with enteropathogenic Yersinia. Importantly, HH mice orally infected with Y. pseudotuberculosis lacking the T3SS-encoding virulence plasmid, pYV, displayed increased deep tissue colonization relative to wildtype mice. Consistent with previous reports using monocytes from HH vs. healthy donors, macrophages isolated from HfeC282Y∕C282Y mice were defective in Yersinia uptake compared to wildtype macrophages, indicating that the anti-phagocytic property of the Yersinia T3SS plays a less important role in HH animals. These data suggest that Yersinia may rely on distinct virulence factors to cause disease in healthy vs. HH hosts.
Extensible software transactional memory

XSTM is a software transactional memory that can be extended by pluggable components. Extensions can access transactions read and write sets through an API, and process them e.g., for logging, change notification, state persistence or replication. This project explores ways to make memory transactions useful beyond thread synchronization. We describe in particular an application architecture enabled by extensions which aims to combine some of the strengths of shared state and of the Actor model. Shared state offers developers the modeling power of object orientation, and avoids the overhead of copying memory between components. The Actor model offers safety and composability when writing parallel and distributed applications. Our second design goal is to make memory transactions easy to reason about and safe to use. Opacity is achieved using a Multi Version Concurrency Control design where transactions are view-isolated, i.e., run in stable and consistent snapshots of the full memory. Transactions never encounter inconsistent data, do not abort while partially executed, and global progress is guaranteed. The programming model is further simplified by enforcing strong atomicity at the type system level, as transactional objects accessors require an ambient transaction. Finally, our design offers interesting performance characteristics by avoiding mutable shared state. Data is either mutable but private to a thread, or shared but immutable. This allows transactions to run without synchronization (no memory fence) between start and commit, which are themselves implemented in a lock-free way using O(1) memory fences and compare-and-swaps. We describe working implementations on the JVM and CLR for the STM and some extensions.
An Analysis of Network Scanning Traffic as it relates to Scan-Detection in Network Intrusion Detection Systems

Network Intrusion Detection is, in a modern network, a useful tool to detect a wide variety of malicious traffic. The ever present prevalence of scanning activity on the Internet is fair justification to warrant scan detection as a component of network intrusion detection. Whilst current systems are able to perform scan-detection, the methods they use are often flawed and exhibit an inability to detect scans in an efficient and scalable manner. Existing research by van Riel and Irwin has illustrated a number of flaws present in the open source systems Snort and Bro. This paper builds on this by describing current research at Rhodes University in which these flaws are being addressed. In particular, this research will address the flaws in the scan-detection engines in Snort and Bro by developing new plug-ins for these systems which take into consideration the improvements which are identified over the course of the research.
Impact of channel length and thickness on the short channel effects of GeOI MOSFETs

Germanium on insulator (GeOI) MOSFETs have shown great promise for future nanoelectronics due to outstanding carrier transport properties in Ge and better electrostatic control. In this paper, we develop an accurate 2D surface potential based model for GeOI device to calculate threshold voltage VTH, drain induced barrier lowering DIBL and sub-threshold swing SS for channel thickness ranging 25-5 nm and channel length L in the range a few hundred down to 20 nm. Our formulation takes into account both the front and back interface-trapped charge density, oxide charge density, and the effect of back gate coupling. Our studies reveal that short channel effects as estimated in terms of VTH roll-up, DIBL and SS become pronounced for sub-40 nm while improve as the channel thickness shrinks below 15 nm.
SpotME If You Can: Randomized Responses for Location Obfuscation on Mobile Phones

Nowadays companies increasingly aggregate location data from different sources on the Internet to offer location-based services such as estimating current road traffic conditions, and finding the best nightlife locations in a city. However, these services have also caused outcries over privacy issues. As the volume of location data being aggregated expands, the comfort of sharing one's whereabouts with the public at large will unavoidably decrease. Existing ways of aggregating location data in the privacy literature are largely centralized in that they rely on a trusted location-based service. Instead, we propose a piece of software (Spot Me) that can run on a mobile phone and is able to estimate the number of people in geographic locations in a privacy-preserving way: accurate estimations are made possible in the presence of privacy-conscious users who report, in addition to their actual locations, a very large number of erroneous locations. The erroneous locations are selected by a randomized response algorithm. We evaluate the accuracy of Spot Me in estimating the number of people upon two very different realistic mobility traces: the mobility of vehicles in urban, suburban and rural areas, and the mobility of subway train passengers in Greater London. We find that erroneous locations have little effect on the estimations (in both traces, the error is below 18% for a situation in which more than 99% of the locations are erroneous), yet they guarantee that users cannot be localized with high probability. Also, the computational and storage overheads for a mobile phone running Spot Me are negligible, and the communication overhead is limited.
Design & Implementation of Cost Effective Wireless Power Transmission Model : GOOD BYE Wires

Power is very important to modern systems. From the smallest sensors, bionic implants, laptops, consumer products to satellites and oil platforms, it is important to be able to deliver power means other than classical wires or transmission lines. Wireless transmission is useful in cases where instantaneous or continuous energy transfer is needed, but interconnecting wires are inconvenient, hazardous, or impossible. An efficient method for wireless power transfer would also enable advances in such diverse areas as embedded computing, mobile computing, sensor networks, and micro robotics. The need to minimize energy consumption is often the main design driver in applications where devices need to operate without tethered. Energy consumption often restricts functionality in such applications. The work depicted in this paper is inspired by potential application of magnetic resonant coupling as a means for WPT from a source coil to a single load. It is observed that without the intermediate coil a LED is lit up to a maximum distance of 70 centimeter and with intermediate coil that lead is lit up to a maximum distance of 91 centimeter with voltage measured 2.2volts. Several experiments regarding this technique need to carry out for a better output and the day is not far when the need for wires will get obsolete.
Electromagnetic Wave Propagation in the Finite Periodically Layered Chiral Medium

The transmission and reflection coefficients of electromagnetic waves propagating through the finite periodically layered chiral structure are defined both theoretically (using the propagation matrix method) and experimentally. The coefficients of the propagation matrix of the periodically layered chiral medium are obtained. The boundaries of the forbidden bands for a periodic medium, whose unit cell consists of two different chiral layers were determined. It is shown that the boundaries of the forbidden bands do not depend on the chirality parameter of the layers. It is found that for certain values of the layers thicknesses, the forbidden band widths tend to zero and that the proposed method for calculation of the reflection and transmission coefficients can be used to determine the effective constitutive parameters of artificial chiral metamaterials. The transmission and reflection coefficients of plane electromagnetic waves propagated through the finite periodically layered chiral structure were determined experimentally for 20-40 GHz range. A good agreement between the experimental results and theoretical studies of the forbidden band spectrum for the structure under research has been shown.
Evaluating non-deterministic retrieval systems

The use of sampling, randomized algorithms, or training based on the unpredictable inputs of users in Information Retrieval often leads to non-deterministic outputs. Evaluating the effectiveness of systems incorporating these methods can be challenging since each run may produce different effectiveness scores. Current IR evaluation techniques do not address this problem. Using the context of distributed information retrieval as a case study for our investigation, we propose a solution based on multivariate linear modeling. We show that the approach provides a consistent and reliable method to compare the effectiveness of non-deterministic IR algorithms, and explain how statistics can safely be used to show that two IR algorithms have equivalent effectiveness.