Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Activity Recognition in Construction Sites Using 3 D Accelerometer and Gyrometer

Accelerometer and gyrometer data were collected from 3 construction workers during regular work days in order to distinguish between different activities. These activities hammering, sawing, sweeping and drilling were collected with a smart watch attached to the worker’s dominant hand, with a sampling rate of 25Hz. The dataset was divided into training and test set with two different partitions 50/50 and 80/20 (training/test). A preprocessing stage was first performed in order to minimize three main sources of problems noise, gravity influence, and outliers. Then, 46 features, including time and frequency domain, were extracted from a window of 40 samples (1.6 seconds). Five different algorithms were tested in order to verify their performances. The tests were conducted using the two different partitions of training and testing. A feature selection algorithm was performed in order to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space and evaluate the models performance. Finally, a last test was conducted by comparing the performance of each algorithm using both sensors’ data and using only accelerometr data. The best performance measured by the number of correctly classified activities was 91%.
Virus-1 Infection Protective Immunity to Herpes Simplex Immune-Dominant Peptide Confers Expressing a Single monocytogenes Listeria Cutting Edge: Recombinant

The vast majority of the world’s population is infected with HSV. Although antiviral therapy can reduce the in-cidence of reactivation and asymptomatic viral shedding, and limit morbidity and mortality from active disease, it cannot cure infection. Therefore, the development of an effective vaccine is an important global health priority. In this study, we demonstrate that recombinant Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) expressing the H-2K b glycoprotein B (gB) 498–505 peptide from HSV-1 triggers a robust CD8 T cell response to this Ag resulting in protective immunity to HSV infection. Following challenge with HSV-1, im-mune-competent mice primed with recombinant Lm-ex-pressing gB 498–505 Ag were protected from HSV-induced paralysis. Protection was associated with dramatic reductions in recoverable virus, and early expansion of HSV-1-specific CD8 T cells in the regional lymph nodes. Thus, recombinant Lm-expressing Ag from HSV represents a promising new class of vaccines against HSV infection. The Journal of Immunology, 2007, 178: 4731–4735.
Automatically Tuned Dynamic Programming with an Algorithm-by-Blocks

As the complexity of current computer architecture increases, domain-specific program generators are extensively used to implement performance portable libraries. Dynamic programming is a performance-critical kernel in many applications including engineering operations and bioinformatics. In this paper, we propose an Automatically Tuned Dynamic Programming (ATDP) to optimize performance of dynamic programming algorithm across various architectures. First, an algorithm-by-blocks for dynamic programming is designed to facilitate optimizing with well-known techniques including cache and register tiling. Further, the parameterized algorithm-by-blocks is cooperative with an auto-tuning framework and leverages a hill climbing algorithm to search the possible best program on a given platform. The experiments on two x86 processors demonstrate that (i) the generated scalar programs improve performance by over 10 times, (ii) the vector programs further speedup the scalar ones by a factor of 4 and 2 for single-precision and double-precision, respectively.
The ML4HMT Workshop on Optimising the Division of Labour in Hybrid Machine Translation

We describe the Shared Task on Applying Machine Learning Techniques to Optimise the Division of Labour in Hybrid Machine Translation (ML4HMT) which aims to foster research on improved system combination approaches for machine translation (MT). Participants of the challenge are requested to build hybrid translations by combining the output of several MT systems of different types. We first describe the ML4HMT corpus used in the shared task, then explain the XLIFF-based annotation format we have designed for it, and briefly summarize the participating systems. Using both automated metrics scores and extensive manual evaluation, we discuss the individual performance of the various systems. An interesting result from the shared task is the fact that we were able to observe different systems winning according to the automated metrics scores when compared to the results from the manual evaluation. We conclude by summarising the first edition of the challenge and by giving an outlook to future work.
Allometry and Interspecific Differences in the Facial Cranium of Two Closely Related Macaque Species

Interpreting evolutionary history of macaque monkeys from fossil evidence is difficult, because their evolutionary fluctuations in body size might have removed or formed important morphological features differently in each lineage. We employed geometric morphometrics to explore allometric trajectories of craniofacial shape in two closely related species, Macaca fascicularis and M. fuscata. These two species exhibit a single shared allometric trajectory in superoinferior deflection of the anterior face, indicating that the differences in this feature can be explained by size variation. In contrast, two parallel trajectories are demonstrated in craniofacial protrusion, indicating that even if they are comparable in size, M. fuscata has a higher and shorter face than M. fascicularis. The degree of facial protrusion is most likely a critical feature for phyletic evaluation in the fascicularis group. Such analyses in various macaques would help to resolve controversies regarding phyletic interpretations of fossil macaques.
Improving Recommendation Performance with User Interest Evolution Patterns

Effective recommendation is indispensable to customized or personalized services. Collaborative filtering approach is a salient technique to support automated recommendations, which relies on the profiles of customers to make recommendations to a target customer based on the neighbors with similar preferences. However, traditional collaborative recommendation techniques only use static information of customers’ preferences and ignore the evolution of their purchasing behaviours which contain valuable information for making recommendations. Thus, this study proposes an approach to increase the effectiveness of personalized recommendations by mining the sequence patterns from the evolving preferences of a target customer over time. The experimental results have shown that the proposed technique has improved the recommendation precision in comparison with collaborative filtering method based on Top k recommendation.
Green and energy efficiency in access networks and cloud infrastructures. (Green et efficacité en énergie dans les réseaux d'accès et les infrastructures cloud)

Over the last decade, there has been an increasing use of personal wireless devices, such as laptops, smartphones and tablets. The widespread availability of wireless access created an environment in which anywhere at anytime users access data and services hosted in cloud infrastructures. However, such wireless cloud network consumes a non-negligible amount of energy and generates a considerable amount of carbon, which is becoming a major concern in IT industry. In this context, we address the problem of reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint, as well as building green infrastructures in the two different parts of the wireless cloud: (i) wireless access networks including wireless mesh and campus networks, and (ii) data centers in a cloud infrastructure. In the first part of the thesis, we present an energy-efficient framework for joint routing and link scheduling in multihop TDMA-based wireless networks. At a later stage, we extended this framework to cover campus networks using the emerging Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. In the second part of this thesis, we address the problem of reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint of cloud infrastructures. Specifically, we propose optimization approaches for reducing the energy costs and carbon emissions of a cloud provider owning distributed infrastructures of data centers with variable electricity prices and carbon emissions in two different setups: the case of a cloud provider trying to reduce its carbon emissions and operational costs as well as the case where green constraints are specified by the cloud consumers in the form of Green SLAs.
Why do simple algorithms for triangle enumeration work in the real world?

Triangle enumeration is a fundamental graph operation. Despite the lack of provably efficient (linear, or slightly super-linear) worst-case algorithms for this problem, practitioners run simple, efficient heuristics to find all triangles in graphs with millions of vertices. How are these heuristics exploiting the structure of these special graphs to provide major speedups in running time? We study one of the most prevalent algorithms used by practitioners. A trivial algorithm enumerates all paths of length 2, and checks if each such path is incident to a triangle. A good heuristic is to enumerate only those paths of length 2 where the middle vertex has the lowest degree. It is easily implemented and is empirically known to give remarkable speedups over the trivial algorithm. We study the behavior of this algorithm over graphs with heavy-tailed degree distributions, a defining feature of real-world graphs. The erased configuration model (ECM) efficiently generates a graph with asymptotically (almost) any desired degree sequence. We show that the expected running time of this algorithm over the distribution of graphs created by the ECM is controlled by the l4/3-norm of the degree sequence. As a corollary of our main theorem, we prove expected linear-time performance for degree sequences following a power law with exponent α ≥ 7/3, and non-trivial speedup whenever α ∈ (2,3).
A robust model for optimal time-of-day speed control at highway work zones

This paper proposes a new speed control strategy, named time-of-day speed limit (TOD SL) control, for highway work-zone operations. The main purposes of the TOD SL control are to overcome the difficulty in setting the optimal real-time speed limit due to the lack of detectors and to maximize the use of available data such as the historical volume data on the target work zone. Its core logic is to divide the entire day of operations into a number of control periods and to accommodate the time-varying traffic conditions within each control period. The measure of effectiveness (MOE) selected in the TOD SL model takes into account both the operational efficiency and traffic safety. To encompass all possible traffic conditions during each control period, the control model employs traffic flow relations calibrated from historical data to estimate the speed and density data with available volume under possible traffic scenarios. The performance of the proposed TOD SL control has been evaluated with the simulation experiments and compared with the other speed control strategies based on the selected measures of effectiveness
Erasure coding-based message forwarding to multiple destinations in intermittently connected networks

Erasure coding-based paradigm is a typical sort of message forwarding paradigms to improve robustness of message forwarding against dynamics and unreliability in intermittently connected networks. Since previous erasure coding-based schemes were mainly dedicated to delivering messages to any single destination, this paper considers the other situation of delivering messages to multiple destinations in intermittently connected networks. This paper obtains a straightforward expression for the delay distribution of multiple destinations if the delay distribution of a single destination is given. Afterwards, this paper analyses the delay distribution for message forwarding to not only a single destination but also multiple destinations. Upon delivery ratio and delay time, the examination of performance sensitivity results in many new inherent observations, properties and insights into the virtue of the erasure coding-based forwarding scheme, providing significant information for the design of erasure coding-based forwarding mechanisms in support of multiple destinations in intermittently connected networks.
Antioxidant, Analgesic, Anti-Inflammatory, and Hepatoprotective Effects of the Ethanol Extract of Mahonia oiwakensis Stem

The aim of this study was to evaluate pharmacological properties of ethanol extracted from Mahonia oiwakensis Hayata stems (MOSEtOH). The pharmacological properties included antioxidant, analgesic, anti-inflammatory and hepatoprotective effects. The protoberberine alkaloid content of the MOSEtOH was analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The results revealed that three alkaloids, berberine, palmatine and jatrorrhizine, could be identified. Moreover, the MOSEtOH exhibited antioxidative activity using the DPPH assay (IC50, 0.743 mg/mL). The DPPH radical scavenging activity of MOSEtOH was five times higher that that of vitamin C. MOSEtOH was also found to inhibit pain induced by acetic acid, formalin, and carrageenan inflammation. Treatment with MOSEtOH (100 and 500 mg/kg) or silymarin (200 mg/kg) decreased the serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST) levels compared with the CCl4-treated group. Histological evaluation showed that MOSEtOH reduced the degree of liver injury, including vacuolization, inflammation and necrosis of hepatocytes. The anti-inflammatory and hepatoprotective effect of MOSEtOH were found to be related to the modulation of antioxidant enzyme activity in the liver and decreases in malondialdehyde (MDA) level and nitric oxide (NO) contents. Our findings suggest that MOSEtOH has analgesic, anti-inflammatory and hepatoprotective effects. These effects support the use of MOSEtOH for relieving pain and inflammation in folk medicine.
Development of a Miniature Shear Sensor for Direct Comparison of Skin-Friction Drags

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of a silicon-micromachined mechanical sensor that directly compares the wall shears of two different surfaces in a liquid flow. The 27 mm × 27 mm sensor contains two 10 mm × 20 mm × 0.2 mm plates suspended to displace in proportion to the shear force on each surface. The monolithic sensor designed to compare skin-friction drag on two different surfaces consists of two floating plates, each suspended from a frame by identical flexure beams etched out of a 0.2-mm-thick silicon wafer. Design of the sensor is assisted by finite-element analysis to ensure adequate structural characteristics in the intended flows and validated by experimental characterization. The fabrication process is presented in detail, including how to form millimeter-long beams with a uniform cross section in micrometers and release the centimeter-scale plates suspended by the delicate beams. This paper provides a guidance to develop a miniature shear comparator using silicon microfabrication technologies.
Climate, soil or both? Which variables are better predictors of the distributions of Australian shrub species?

Background Shrubs play a key role in biogeochemical cycles, prevent soil and water erosion, provide forage for livestock, and are a source of food, wood and non-wood products. However, despite their ecological and societal importance, the influence of different environmental variables on shrub distributions remains unclear. We evaluated the influence of climate and soil characteristics, and whether including soil variables improved the performance of a species distribution model (SDM), Maxent. Methods This study assessed variation in predictions of environmental suitability for 29 Australian shrub species (representing dominant members of six shrubland classes) due to the use of alternative sets of predictor variables. Models were calibrated with (1) climate variables only, (2) climate and soil variables, and (3) soil variables only. Results The predictive power of SDMs differed substantially across species, but generally models calibrated with both climate and soil data performed better than those calibrated only with climate variables. Models calibrated solely with soil variables were the least accurate. We found regional differences in potential shrub species richness across Australia due to the use of different sets of variables. Conclusions Our study provides evidence that predicted patterns of species richness may be sensitive to the choice of predictor set when multiple, plausible alternatives exist, and demonstrates the importance of considering soil properties when modeling availability of habitat for plants.
Marking the Allophones Boundaries Based on the DTW Algorithm

The paper presents an approach to marking the boundaries of allophones in the speech signal based on the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm. Setting and marking of allophones boundaries in continuous speech is a difficult issue due to the mutual influence of adjacent phonemes on each other. It is this neighbourhood on the one hand that creates variants of phonemes that is allophones, and on the other hand it affects that the border between allophones is in some cases very difficult to determine. Nowadays, this task is carried out manually in cooperation with specialists in the field of phonetics. The presented approach allows to build a system that is able to automate this process. The aim of the work currently carried out by the author is a method that facilitates the training material processing for the needs of the development of multimodal speech recognition systems. For this purpose, the difficult problem of marking boundaries of allophones is solved in this report based on the Polish dictionary in the context of the creation of allophone bases for speech synthesis. This is done in this way due to the simplified possibility of organizing critical listening and subjective evaluation of received allophones by a large group of Polish native speakers (73 people). Strengthening the method will allow it to be used for the extraction of allophones for the needs of developed system of automatic transcription of English speech and for its notation according to the IPA standard. The analysed continuous speech is combined in the DTW algorithm with a synthesized speech signal. The comparison of both signals is performed not in the time domain as in the classical DTW, but in the frequency domain. This allows for a statement that the phonetic content of both signals is compared. The paper describes the process of marking the boundaries of allophones for the Polish language, however after appropriate modifications, this approach can be used to determine the allophones boundaries in other languages, especially for English.
SureMail: Notification Overlay for Email Reliability

We consider the problem of silent email loss in the Internet. Some recent studies have reported loss rates of 0.5-1%, which indicates that the problem is significant, especially since email loss can impose a high cost. We present SureMail, a system designed to address the silent email loss problem. SureMail augments the existing SMTP-based email system with a notification overlay to make intended recipients aware of email they might be missing. Our design addresses several challenges including avoiding dependence on support from the email infrastructure, placing minimal demands on users, preventing spammers from subverting the system, and maintaining the privacy of users.
Abstract Machines for Game Semantics, Revisited

We define new abstract machines for game semantics which correspond to networks of conventional computers, and can be used as an intermediate representation for compilation targeting distributed systems. This is achieved in two steps. First we introduce the HRAM, a Heap and Register Abstract Machine, an abstraction of a conventional computer, which can be structured into HRAM nets, an abstract point-to-point network model. HRAMs are multi-threaded and subsume communication by tokens (cf. IAM) or jumps. Game Abstract Machines (GAM), are HRAMs with additional structure at the interface level, but no special operational capabilities. We show that GAMs cannot be naively composed, but composition must be mediated using appropriate HRAM combinators. HRAMs are flexible enough to allow the representation of game models for languages with state (non-innocent games) or concurrency (non-alternating games). We illustrate the potential of this technique by implementing a toy distributed compiler for ICA, a higher-order programming language with shared state concurrency, thus significantly extending our previous distributed PCF compiler. We show that compilation is sound and memory-safe, i.e. no (distributed or local) garbage collection is necessary.
Mechanical Properties of 2D Materials Studied by In Situ Microscopy Techniques

Two‐dimensional (2D) materials have been demonstrated as promising building blocks in future electronic and their mechanical properties are quite important for various applications. Due to their atomic thickness and planar nature, the investigation of the mechanical properties and related atomic mechanism are quite challenging. This review focuses on the recently developed in situ techniques based on scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and atomic force microscopy (AFM) in characterization of the mechanical properties of 2D materials. In situ methods used for studying their elastic properties, fracture behavior, and surface/interface energy are introduced in detail. Specifically, the AFM indentation test and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) device are generally used to investigate the elastic properties; the manipulator based methods show their flexibility in studying the fracture, adhesion, cleavage, and friction properties; atomic level fracture mechanism can be revealed with in situ high resolution TEM (HRTEM); the pressurized blister test and the buckle/wrinkle based methods are widely used to measure the surface/interface properties. Moreover, the influence of sample preparation process, defects and layer numbers to their mechanical properties are also discussed. Finally, the extensions of above methods to investigate the strain‐modulated physical properties of 2D materials are introduced.
3-connected Planar Graph Isomorphism is in Log-space

We consider theisomorphism and canonization problem for3-connected planar graphs. The problem was known to be L -hard and in UL ∩ coUL (TW08). In this paper, we give a determin- istic log-space algorithm for 3-connected planar graph isomorphism and canonization. This gives an L -completeness result, thereby settling its complexity. The algorithm uses the notion of universal exploration sequences from (Kou02) and (Rei05). To our knowledge, this is a completely new approach to graph canonization.