Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Elucidation of New Pathways in Normal and Perturbed Lignification

It seems incomprehensible that new structures in lignins and new pathways in lignification remain to be discovered after all this time. With new technologies and the improved understanding of the process that comes from new ways to perturb lignification, such discoveries continue to be made, however. Some may be of rather academic interest only, while others underlie important new approaches to improved utilization of cell walls. An assault on the existing theory of the process of lignification has lead not to its demise but its strengthening as it continues to account for old and new observations. That said, aspects of lignin structure still hold many biosynthetic mysteries. Although it is time to summarily discard the proposed new hypothesis/theory for the absolute control of lignin primary structure, lignification is complex and an all-encompassing theory remains elusive. Nevertheless, lignins and lignification are becoming increasingly well understood. New details on the coupling processes are being revealed. The β-1-pathway produces novel spirodienone structures that are, now that we know how to look for them, surprisingly easy to detect in lignins. What used to be the well-accepted β-β-coupling pathway to produce resinols is now being shown to proceed by alternate pathways that give other structures in lignins. β-β-Coupling when the γ-alcohol is acylated in natural lignins is revealing a range of fascinating structures and, more importantly, that acylated lignins derive from acylated monolignols, which therefore must be recognized as authentic lignin monomers. To date, the benefit of such acylation to the plant is unknown, and the components and pathways remain unexploited. A small range of monomers are now known to substitute for the conventional monolignols in various natural and transgenic plants. Substitution appears to be most successful when the replacement monomer behaves, in its chemical radical coupling and cross-coupling reactions, like a normal monolignol. The post-coupling reactions that may be altered by the different functionality on the monomer seem to have less impact. Thus massive changes in the lignin structure occur in COMT-deficient plants when 5-hydroxyconiferyl alcohol substitutes for sinapyl alcohol, for example - the coupling reactions are analogous, but post-coupling steps produce novel benzodioxane structures that drastically change the lignin structure. Such biosynthetic malleability functions well for the plant, but also provides significant opportunities for engineering the polymer. Already it has been demonstrated that natural and industrial processes ranging from ruminant digestibility to chemical pulping can be both positively and negatively impacted by alterations to lignin, and we are beginning to get a mechanistic handle to explain these effects. Future work should reveal opportunities beyond the interesting deviations achieved by up- and down-regulating genes on the monolignol pathway to date.
A Precise High-Level Power Consumption Model for Embedded Systems Software

The increasing demand for portable computing has elevated power consumption to be one of the most critical embedded systems design parameters. In this paper, we present a precise high-level power estimation methodology for the software loaded on a VLIW processor that is based on a functional level power model. The targeted processor of our approach is the TMS320C6416T DSP from Texas Instrument. We consider several important issues in our model such as the pipeline stall, inter-instructions effect and cache misses. The contributions are the following. First, a precise model to estimate the power consumption of the targeted DSP, while running a software algorithm is proposed. Second, we prove the validation and precision of our model on many typical algorithms applied in signal and image processing. Third, we further validate the precision of our model on a real application applied in the video processing field. The power consumption estimated by our model is compared to the physically measured power consumption, achieving a very low average absolute estimation error of 1.65% and a maximum absolute estimation error of only 3.3%.
Ab Initio DFT+U Analysis of Oxygen Vacancy Formation and Migration in La 1‑x Sr x FeO 3‑δ (x = 0, 0.25, 0.50)

Incorporating mixed oxygen-ion-electron conducting (MIEC) cathode materials is a promising strategy to make intermediate-temperature solid oxide fuel cells (IT-SOFCs) viable; however, a lack of fundamental understanding of oxygen transport in these materials limits their development. Density functional theory plus U (DFT+U) calculations are used to investigate how the Sr concentration affects the processes that govern oxygen ion transport in La1‑xSrxFeO3‑δ (LSF, x = 0, 0.25, and 0.50). Specifically, we show that oxygen vacancies compensate holes introduced by Sr and that this compensation facilitates oxygen vacancy formation in LSF. We also find that oxygen migration in LaFeO3 is accompanied by electron transfer in the opposite direction. Our results explicitly identify and clarify the role of electron-deficient substitutions in promoting oxygen diffusion in LSF. This atomic level insight is important for enabling rational design of iron-based SOFC cathode materials.
IPv 6 Autoconfiguration in Large Scale Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks are infrastructure-free, highly dynamic wireless networks, where central administration or configuration by the user is impractical. The Internet Protocol IPv6 defines mechanisms to autoconfigure interfaces of nodes in wired networks in a distributed manner. In this paper, the applicability of IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration and IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol to large scale mobile ad-hoc networks is investigated. A hierarchical approach based on so-called leader nodes is proposed together with a leader election algorithm. Address autoconfiguration with IPv6 in very dynamic ad-hoc networks requires special support as, for example, outlined within this paper. Extensions to the IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol are proposed to enable an efficient and scalable usage in ad-hoc networks.
Querying Trajectories through Model Checking based on Timed Automata

The popularization of geographical position devices (e.g. GPS) creates new opportunities for analyzing behavior of moving objects. However, such analysis are hindered by a lack of semantic information associated to the basic information provided by GPS. Previous works propose semantic enrichment of trajectories. Through the semantic enrichment, we could check which trajectories have a given moving sequence in an application. Often, this sequence is expressed according to the semantic application, using the approach of semantic trajectories proposed in the literature. This trajectory can be represented as a sequence of predicates that holds in some time interval. However, the solutions for querying moving sequence proposed by previous works have a high computational cost. In this paper, we propose an expressive query language to semantic trajectories that allows temporal constraints. To evaluate a query we will use model checking based on timed automata, that can be performed in polynomial time. As this model checking algorithm is not implemented yet, we propose to use UPPAAL tool, that can be more expensive theoretically, but we expected that will be e cient for our approach. In addition, we will present a query example that demonstrates the expressive power of our language. Although in this paper we will focus on semantic trajectories data, our approach is general enough for being applied to other purposes.
Stability of linear dilaton black holes at the Hagedorn temperature

We study the thermodynamics and the small fluctuations of a linear dilaton black hole, in an S-dual version of the near-horizon limit of type IIB NS5 branes. The thermodynamical analysis shows that the black hole is in a Hagedorn phase, with marginal stability. The dynamical analysis confirms that the speed of sound of the dual theory vanishes and that there are no evident instabilities at the level of supergravity. We clarify the physical meaning of some singularities of the retarded correlator that were thought to lead to instabilities.
Optimized selection of benchmark test parameters for image watermark algorithms based on Taguchi methods and corresponding influence on design decisions for real-world applications

With the growing commercialization of watermarking techniques in various application scenarios it has become increasingly important to quantify the performance of watermarking products. The quantification of relative merits of various products is not only essential in enabling further adoption of the technology by society as a whole, but will also drive the industry to develop testing plans/methodologies to ensure quality and minimize cost (to both vendors & customers.) While the research community understands the theoretical need for a publicly available benchmarking system to quantify performance, there has been less discussion on the practical application of these systems. By providing a standard set of acceptance criteria, benchmarking systems can dramatically increase the quality of a particular watermarking solution, validating the product performances if they are used efficiently and frequently during the design process. In this paper we describe how to leverage specific design of experiments techniques to increase the quality of a watermarking scheme, to be used with the benchmark tools being developed by the Ad-Hoc Watermark Verification Group. A Taguchi Loss Function is proposed for an application and orthogonal arrays used to isolate optimal levels for a multi-factor experimental situation. Finally, the results are generalized to a population of cover works and validated through an exhaustive test.
Plenary session: Can a semantic web for life sciences improve drug discovery?

Dr. Neumann recently assumed the position of Global Head of Knowledge Management at Aventis Pharmaceuticals. the U.S. pharmaceuticals business of Aventis, a world leader in pharmaceuticals and human vaccines. Prior to that he was Vice President, Strategic Informatics and Head of Knowledge Research at Beyond Genomics, a privately owned life sciences research company founded in the fall of 2000 and committed to realizing the full potential of a Systems Biology approach to drug discovery.
Parallel Execution of AES-CTR Algorithm Using Extended Block Size

Data encryption and decryption are common operations in a network based application programs with security. In order to keep pace with the input data rate in such applications, real-time processing of data encryption/decryption is essential. For example, in an environment where a multimedia data is streamed, high speed data encryption/decryption is crucial. In this paper, we propose a new approach to parallelize AES-CTR algorithm by extending the size of the block which is encrypted at one time across the unit block boundaries. The proposed approach leads to significant performance improvements using a general-purpose multi-core processor and a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) which become popular these days. In particular, the performance improvement on GPU is dramatic, close to 9-times faster compared with the original coarse-grain parallelization approach, mainly thanks to the "multi-core" nature of the GPU architecture.
A robust optimization model for the risk averse reservoir management problem

This paper presents a new formulation for the risk averse stochastic reservoir management problem. Using recent advances in robust optimization and stochastic programming, we propose a dynamic, multi-objective model based on minimization of a multidimensional risk measure associated with floods and droughts for a hydro-electrical complex. We present our model and then identify approximate solutions using standard affine decision rules commonly found in the literature as well as lifted decision rules. Finally, we conduct thorough numerical experiments based on a real river system in Western Quebec and conclude on the relative performance of families of decision rules.
Perspectives in component-based software engineering

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) has become a commonly used development technique. Using it, applications are composed of reusable components with well defined interfaces and behavior. Currently, in the scope of CBSE, research has been driven in huge number of directions and by many research teams. Naturally, such conditions are ideal for mutual cooperation and collaboration. In this paper, we describe our experience with research cooperation, especially in the scope of Europe. We present experience gained during recent joint projects, in which we have participated. Also, we present our research areas and topics and ongoing work on them.
A web platform and a methodology to promote a collaborative development of context-aware systems

The development of services that use context data to personalize their behaviour is complex. Data coming from distributed and heterogeneous sources have to be acquired, processed and managed. One of the main tasks in the development process is the definition of user situations, which are best defined by people with expertise in the application domain that usually do not have technical skills. The existing context-aware development toolkits are for programmers, so nontechnical domain experts cannot participate in the development process. In order to solve this gap, this article presents a web-based platform to ease the development of context-aware services. The web front-end provides several dialogs in order to manage context data, involving the creation of the context model, the access to the defined context data sources and the definition of situations based on rules. A situation-driven methodology is also proposed in order to guide the development process based in the collaboration among programmers and domain experts. The paper describes the main functionalities of the platform, the development methodology and presents the results of the user evaluation tests that have been carried out.
Parameterization of Invariant Manifolds for Periodic Orbits I: Efficient Numerics via the Floquet Normal Form

We present an efficient numerical method for computing Fourier--Taylor expansions of (un)stable manifolds associated with hyperbolic periodic orbits. Three features of the method are that (1) we obtain accurate representation of the invariant manifold as well as the dynamics on the manifold, (2) it admits natural a posteriori error analysis, and (3) it does not require numerically integrating the vector field. Our approach is based on the parameterization method for invariant manifolds, and studies a certain partial differential equation which characterizes a chart map of the manifold. The method requires only that some mild nonresonance conditions hold. The novelty of the present work is that we exploit the Floquet normal form in order to efficiently compute the Fourier--Taylor expansion. A number of example computations are given including manifolds in phase space dimension as high as ten and manifolds which are two and three dimensional. We also discuss computations of cycle-to-cycle connecting orbits .
Factors affecting music retrieval in query-by-melody

This paper assesses the impact of three factors on the music retrieval accuracy of a query-by-melody (QBM) system. The investigated factors are the accuracy of the query provider (the singer), the query transcription accuracy of the acoustic front-end and the length of the query. The music retrieval accuracy is described in terms of a new concept, called the remaining information fraction (RIF). With this new concept it is possible to get more insight in the way the individual factors affect the music retrieval accuracy. The experimental results reported in this paper support the following conclusions: i) the music retrieval accuracy of a QBM system, as assessed on a large set of queries, is strongly correlated with the query transcription accuracy of its front-end, as assessed on a small set of manually transcribed queries, ii) there is still a significant gap between the accuracies obtained with manual and automatically generated query transcriptions, and iii) the music retrieval accuracy starts to drop quickly as soon as the query consists of less than 20 notes
Attitudes towards student support: How positive feedback-effects prevent change in the Four Worlds of Student Finance

This article provides a detailed analysis of individual preferences towards public financial aid to students from low-income families. Who favours/opposes such aid? What are the determinants of the respective preferences? I argue that three sets of factors jointly shape these preferences: materialistic self-interests, political attitudes, and the status quo of the higher education subsidy systems by generating positive feedback-effects. Results of multilevel ordered logit models utilizing the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data for up to 22 countries over two decades indicate that self-interest matters: students strongly favour subsidies as do their parents, while those paying for the spending and those not expecting to benefit oppose such aid. Moreover, political attitudes are important: Supporters of redistribution and of increased public education spending in general, as well as leftwing voters, are much more likely to support students. On the macro-level, the findings suggest that positive feedback-effects exist: in countries with generous subsidy systems, public support for subsidies is higher. This article is the first to systematically analyse preferences towards higher education subsidies across countries and time and demonstrates how positive feedback-effects increasingly lock-in countries’ tuition-subsidy paths, making the systems resistant to (radical) change. As such, it speaks to the literature on the political economy of skill formation, the welfare state, public opinion and the public opinion–policy link.
Minimal Interaction Search in Recommender Systems

While numerous works study algorithms for predicting item ratings in recommender systems, the area of the user-recommender interaction remains largely under-explored. In this work, we look into user interaction with the recommendation list, aiming to devise a method that allows users to discover items of interest in a minimal number of interactions. We propose generalized linear search (GLS), a combination of linear and generalized searches that brings together the benefits of both approaches. We prove that GLS performs at least as well as generalized search and compare our method to several baselines and heuristics. Our evaluation shows that GLS is liked by the users and achieves the shortest interactions.
Tight Conservative Occlusion Culling for Urban Visualization

Tamper-evident closure apparatus for internally pressurized containers includes a closure provided with a mechanism for venting the internal pressurized gas upon initial unsealing of the container and a tamper-indicating device adapted to be acted upon by the vented gas to indicate that an initial unsealing of the container has occurred. The tamper-indicating device may be, for example, chemically activated to change colors when acted upon by the vented gas or may be mechanically activated so that venting of the pressurized gas causes a visibly apparent disruption, distortion or the like to indicate initial unsealing of the container.
WMT 2016 Multimodal Translation System Description based on Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks with Double-Embeddings

Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks (BiRNNs) have shown outstanding results on sequence-to-sequence learning tasks. This architecture becomes specially interesting for multimodal machine translation task, since BiRNNs can deal with images and text. On most translation systems the same word embedding is fed to both BiRNN units. In this paper, we present several experiments to enhance a baseline sequence-to-sequence system (Elliott et al., 2015), for example, by using double embeddings. These embeddings are trained on the forward and backward direction of the input sequence. Our system is trained, validated and tested on the Multi30K dataset (Elliott et al., 2016) in the context of the WMT 2016 Multimodal Translation Task. The obtained results show that the double-embedding approach performs significantly better than the traditional single-embedding one.
Case-based recommender systems

We describe recommender systems and especially case-based recommender systems. We define a framework in which these systems can be understood. The framework contrasts collaborative with case-based, reactive with proactive, single-shot with conversational, and asking with proposing. Within this framework, we review a selection of papers from the case-based recommender systems literature, covering the development of these systems over the last ten years.
The Academic Progress of Male and Female First Year University Students Compared

Research findings on the relative progress of male and female university students are few; even Miller's (I970) valuable review of research on student progress says little about the sex variable. The findings also tend to lack precision; the overall success rate or 'score' of men is often compared with that of women, and this is meaningless unless considered in relation to other variables. Women, for example, are most strongly represented in the arts faculty, where the percentage of first class degrees awarded is low, less well in pure science, where this percentage is high, and almost absent from engineering, where the percentage tends to be highest of all. Until recently there was also a strong tendency for a smaller proportion of women than of men to take honours courses in the faculties of arts and pure science (Nisbet, 1970), though recent changes in the nomenclature and provision of courses now make generalisation difficult. We do know, however, that of those women who enter the honours schools in arts and pure science a smaller proportion gain good honours degrees than in the case of the men (Forster, I959; Mountford, 1956; McCracken, 1969). Looking at the failures, we find constant hints in the research literature that, overall, a slightly greater percentage of women than of men graduate without delays and a slightly smaller percentage withdraw for academic reasons (Nisbet, 1970; Mountford, 1956; Forster, 1959; Robbins, 1963; UGC, 1968; Cox, 1971). The UGC report especially demonstrates that this occurs in most fields of study. Few of these differences at the bottom end were statistically significant, and any overall advantage to the women may in part be due to the heavy weighting of women in arts (with low failure rates) and low weighting in engineering (with a high failure rate). It should also be noted that the proportion of women withdrawing for other than academic reasons is greater than for men. In this article, however, we are concerned with comparing the academic progress of men and women students between the Advanced