Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Applying Constraint Satisfaction Technique in University Timetable Scheduling

Planning and scheduling are often NP-complete problems. There have been different approaches to tackle these problems. With the emergence of constraint logic programming, the constraint satisfaction approach has started to attract attention due to its effectness in solving these real-life problems. In this paper, we report our experience of applying constraint logic programming to fully automate the time table scheduling process in our faculty, which has been a tedious task for the administration. The system consists of a core for scheduling as well as an X-window user interface. Implemented in CHIP, the system consists of 1500 lines of codes, 80% of which are an X-window user interface. The system is able to produce a time table for the whole faculty in just a few seconds. Our experience shows that applying constraint logic programming is a practical viable means for time table scheduling in a university.
A method to integrate additional knowledge sources into HMM based on junction tree decomposition

Most current automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems use statistical data-driven methods based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). Although such approaches have proved to be efficient choices, ASR systems often still perform much worse than human listeners, especially in the presence of unexpected acoustic variability. Only a limited level of success can be achieved, by relying only on statistical models and mostly ignoring the additional knowledge available. We propose a new method of integrating various kinds of additional knowledge sources into an HMM-based statistical acoustic model in this paper. We utilized the junction tree algorithm to achieve efficient integration due to increased model complexity. This is since it facilitates the decomposition of the joint probability density function (PDF) into a linked set of local conditional PDFs. This way, a simplified form of the model could be constructed and reliably estimated using limited training data. We evaluated how efficient the proposed method was on an LVCSR task using two different types of accented English speech data. The experimental results revealed that our method improved word accuracy with respect to the standard HMM.
Small-Group Behavior in a Virtual and Real Environment: A Comparative Study

This paper describes an experiment that compares behavior in small groups when its members carry out a task in a virtual environment (VE) and then continue the same task in a similar, real-world environment. The purpose of the experiment was not to examine task performance, but to compare various aspects of the social relations among the group members in the two environments. Ten groups of three people each, who had never met before, met first in a shared VE and carried out a task that required the identification and solution of puzzles that were presented on pieces of paper displayed around the walls of a room. The puzzle involved identifying that the same-numbered words across all the pieces of paper formed a riddle or saying. The group continued this task for fifteen minutes, and then stopped to answer a questionnaire. The group then reconvened in the real world and continued the same task. The experiment also required one of the group members to continually monitor a particular one of the others in order to examine whether social discomfort could be generated within a VE. In each group, there was one immersed person with a head-mounted display and head-tracking and two non-immersed people who experienced the environment on a workstation display. The results suggest that the immersed person tended to emerge as the leader in the virtual group, but not in the real meeting. Group accord tended to be higher in the real meeting than in the virtual meeting. Socially conditioned responses such as embarrassment could be generated in the virtual meeting, even though the individuals were presented to one another by very simple avatars. The study also found a positive relationship between presence of being in a place and copresencethe sense of being with the other people. Accord in the group increased with presence, the performance of the group, and the presence of women in the group. The study is seen as part of a much larger planned study, for which this experiment was used to begin to understand the issues involved in comparing real and virtual meetings.
Exploring Data Integrity Protection in SAgent

In this paper we show how agent data integrity protections can be provided in SAgent, which is a security framework designed for comprehensive protection of mobile agents in JADE. While SAgent was designed for comprehensive security protocols with different design and interaction criteria, we show how efficient integrity-only protections can be seamlessly integrated into SAgent. In situations where the more challenging problem of working with secret data on remote hosts is not needed, these integrity protection techniques provide significantly better performance than the comprehensive protections, as we demonstrate through a series of experiments.
Random sampling based SVM for relevance feedback image retrieval

Relevance feedback (RF) schemes based on support vector machine (SVM) have been widely used in content-based image retrieval. However, the performance of SVM based RF is often poor when the number of labeled positive feedback samples is small. This is mainly due to three reasons: (1) SVM classifier is unstable on small size training set; (2) SVM's optimal hyper-plane may be biased when the positive feedback samples are much less than the negative feedback samples; (3) overfitting due to that the feature dimension is much higher than the size of the training set. In this paper, we try to use random sampling techniques to overcome these problems. To address the first two problems, we propose an asymmetric bagging based SVM. For the third problem, we combine the random subspace method (RSM) and SVM for RF. Finally, by integrating bagging and RSM we solve all the three problems and further improve the RF performance.
On the Design and Analysis of Competent Selecto-recombinative GAs

In this paper, we study two recent theoretical modelsa population-sizing model and a convergence modeland examine their assumptions to gain insights into the conditions under which selecto-recombinative GAs work well. We use these insights to formulate several design rules to develop competent GAs for practical problems. To test the usefulness of the design rules, we consider as a case study the map-labeling problem, an NP-hard problem from cartography. We compare the predictions of the theoretical models with the actual performance of the GA for the map-labeling problem. Experiments show that the predictions match the observed scale-up behavior of the GA, thereby strengthening our claim that the design rules can guide the design of competent selecto-recombinative GAs for realistic problems.
Overexpression of SMPX in Adult Skeletal Muscle Does not Change Skeletal Muscle Fiber Type or Size

Mechanical factors such as stretch are thought to be important in the regulation of muscle phenotype. Small muscle protein X-linked (SMPX) is upregulated by stretch in skeletal muscle and has been suggested to serve both as a transcription factor and a mechanosensor, possibly giving rise to changes in both fiber size and fiber type. We have used in vivo confocal imaging to study the subcellular localization of SMPX in skeletal muscle fibers of adult rats using a SMPX-EGFP fusion protein. The fusion protein was localized predominantly in repetitive double stripes flanking the Z-disc, and was excluded from all nuclei. This localization would be consistent with SMPX being a mechanoreceptor, but not with SMPX playing a role as a transcription factor. In vivo overexpression of ectopic SMPX in skeletal muscle of adult mice gave no significant changes in fiber type distribution or cross sectional area, thus a role of SMPX in regulating muscle phenotype remains unclear.
A Stated Preference Investigation into the Chinese Demand for Farmed vs. Wild Bear Bile

Farming of animals and plants has recently been considered not merely as a more efficient and plentiful supply of their products but also as a means of protecting wild populations from that trade. Amongst these nascent farming products might be listed bear bile. Bear bile has been exploited by traditional Chinese medicinalists for millennia. Since the 1980s consumers have had the options of: illegal wild gall bladders, bile extracted from caged live bears or the acid synthesised chemically. Despite these alternatives bears continue to be harvested from the wild. In this paper we use stated preference techniques using a random sample of the Chinese population to estimate demand functions for wild bear bile with and without competition from farmed bear bile. We find a willingness to pay considerably more for wild bear bile than farmed. Wild bear bile has low own price elasticity and cross price elasticity with farmed bear bile. The ability of farmed bear bile to reduce demand for wild bear bile is at best limited and, at prevailing prices, may be close to zero or have the opposite effect. The demand functions estimated suggest that the own price elasticity of wild bear bile is lower when competing with farmed bear bile than when it is the only option available. This means that the incumbent product may actually sell more items at a higher price when competing than when alone in the market. This finding may be of broader interest to behavioural economists as we argue that one explanation may be that as product choice increases price has less impact on decision making. For the wildlife farming debate this indicates that at some prices the introduction of farmed competition might increase the demand for the wild product.
Novel Classes of Minimal Delay and Low PAPR Rate ${1\over 2}$ Complex Orthogonal Designs

Complex orthogonal designs (CODs) of rate 1/2 have been considered recently for use in analog transmissions and as an alternative to maximum rate CODs due to the savings in decoding delay as the number of antennas increases. While algorithms have been developed to show that an upper bound on the minimum decoding delay for rate 1/2 CODs with n=2m-1 or n=2m columns is ν(n) = 2m-1 or ν(n) = 2m, depending on the parity of n modulo 8, it remains open to determine the exact minimum delay. This paper shows that this bound ν(n) is also a lower bound on minimum decoding delay for a major class of rate 1/2 CODs, named balanced complex orthogonal designs (BCODs), and that this is the exact minimum decoding delay for most BCODs. These rate 1/2 codes are conjugation-separated and thus permit a linearized description of the transceiver signal. BCODs also display other combinatorial properties that are expected to be useful in implementation, such as having no linear processing. An elegant construction is provided for a class of rate 1/2 CODs that have no zero entries, effectively no irrational coefficients, no linear processing, and have each variable appearing exactly twice per column. The resulting codes meet the aforementioned bound on decoding delay in most cases. This class of CODs will be useful in practice due to their low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and other desirable properties.
Invasin gimB found in a bovine intestinal Escherichia coli with an adherent and invasive profile

The invasin gimB (genetic island associated with human newborn meningitis) is usually found in ExPEC (Extraintestinal Pathogenic Escherichia coli) such as UPEC (uropathogenic E. coli), NMEC (neonatal meningitis E. coli) and APEC (avian pathogenic E. coli). In NMEC, gimB is associated with the invasion process of the host cells. Due to the importance of E. coli as a zoonotic agent and the scarce information about the frequency of gimB-carrying strains in different animal species, the aim of this study was to investigate the presence of gimB in isolates from bovine, swine, canine and feline clinical samples. PCR was conducted on 196 isolates and the identity of the amplicons was confirmed by sequencing. Of the samples tested, only E. coli SB278/94 from a bovine specimen was positive (1/47) for gimB, which represents 2.1% of the bovine isolates. The ability of SB278/94 to adhere to and invade eukaryotic cells was confirmed by adherence and gentamicin-protection assays using HeLa cells. This is the first study that investigates for gimB in bovine, canine and feline E. coli isolates and shows E. coli from the intestinal-bovine samples harboring gimB.
Productivity and Stock Returns: 1951 - 2002

There is considerable concern whether the decline in stock market returns will eventually exert negative changes in the productivity data. This paper examines the long run, or the equilibrium, relationship between productivity and stock returns for the 1951-2002 period. It introduces the notion of equilibrium as represented by the co-movements of economic variables in the long run. This notion is viewed to be broader than the economic theory definition of equilibrium that usually means market clearance. Acknowledging that structural changes in economic time series are hard to detect, an alternative approach employing pair-wise and multifactor cointegration along with VAR modeling is employed. Within this framework, the relationships among productivity, stock prices (returns), investment, and corporate cash flows are pair-wise and jointly investigated. The results indicate that productivity and stock prices share a common trend; so do the stock prices and corporate net cash flows. The long-run common trend between investment and stock prices on the other hand is not so clear. The implications of these results for investors and policy-makers are discussed.
Haptic realization for user recognition using vibration pattern

In this paper, the haptic implementation using user-aware vibration pattern studied to recognize a surroundings of a teleoperated mobile robot in an environment where the user cannot see. The user teleoperates the mobile robots using the joystick in an environment where the user cannot see, haptic that enables the user perceive the perceived location information of obstacle during driving was implemented by using user-aware vibration pattern occurring in the haptic device. The haptic device was consist of equip with one vibration motor on the bottom of the joystick. The mobile robot implements the location information of the obstacle precisely by increasing the resolution using the superposition of ultrasonic sensors, and using this information, proper vibration pattern was implemented in haptic devices.
Distributed Algorithms for Dynamic Bandwidth Provisioning in Communication Networks

Efficient dynamic resource provisioning algorithms are necessary to the development and automation of Quality of Service (QoS) networks. The main goal of these algorithms is to offer services that satisfy the QoS requirements of individual users while guaranteeing at the same time an efficient utilization of network resources. In this paper we introduce a new service model that provides quantitative per-flow bandwidth guarantees, where users subscribe for a guaranteed rate; moreover, the network periodically individuates unused bandwidth and proposes short-term contracts where extra-bandwidth is allocated and guaranteed exclusively to users who can exploit it to transmit at a rate higher than their subscribed rate. To implement this service model we propose a dynamic provisioning architecture for intra-domain Quality of Service networks. We develop an efficient bandwidth allocation algorithm that takes explicitly into account traffic statistics to increase the users’ benefit and the network revenue simultaneously. We demonstrate through simulation in several realistic network scenarios that the proposed dynamic provisioning model is superior to static provisioning in providing resource allocation both in terms of total accepted load and network revenue.
An Automated Microarchitecture Design Tool for FPGAs

This paper proposes a novel approach to the automated generation of hardware microarchitectures targeting FPGA devices. The approach offers both high level architecture synthesis and VHDL generation based on dataflow graphs, as well as the generation of an architecture-level functional/performance simulator that can be used for quick and accurate testing of the design. We demonstrate the use of this approach through the derivation of architectures to implement computational kernels commonly encountered in Molecular Dynamics simulations.
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology Development of Sex Specific Molecular Markers in Dioecious Piper Longum.l Plants by Differential Display

In the absence of any genetic or sequence information of a closely related species or individuals, showing morphological similarity and limited difference, differential display becomes an important technique to look into their genetic similarity and differences. Plants showing difference like disease resistance and susceptibility can be screened by this technique and sequence homology search can be carried out. Once some potent cDNA fragments were identified, they can be sequenced for full length gene and also design specific primers to screen the particular trait. Using this technique we could identify male and female plants of Piper longum at a younger stage.
Effects of diversification among assets in an agent-based market model

We extend to the multi-asset case the framework of a discrete time model of a single asset financial market developed in Ghoulmié et al.1 In particular, we focus on adaptive agents with threshold behavior allocating their resources among two assets. We explore numerically the effect of this diversification as an additional source of complexity in the financial market and we discuss its destabilizing role. We also point out the relevance of these studies for financial decision making.
Corneal confocal microscopy: Recent progress in the evaluation of diabetic neuropathy

The present brief review discusses recent progress with corneal confocal microscopy for the evaluation of diabetic sensorimotor polyneuropathy. Corneal confocal microscopy is a new, non‐invasive and reproducible diagnostic modality, and it can also be easily applied for patient follow up. It enables new perspectives of studying the natural history of diabetic sensorimotor polyneuropathy, severity of nerve fiber pathology and documenting early nerve fiber regeneration after therapeutic intervention. It shows moderate to high sensitivity and specificity for the timely diagnosis of diabetic sensorimotor polyneuropathy. Currently, corneal confocal microscopy is mainly used in specialized centers, but deserves more widespread application for the assessment of diabetic sensorimotor polyneuropathy. Finally, further progress is required in terms of technical improvements for automated nerve fiber quantification and for analysis of larger images.
Agent-Based Decision Support for Moving Target Technology Deployment

Moving target (MT) technologies seek to protect cyber systems by making them less homogenous, less static, and less deterministic in order to increase the complexity required for a successful cyber attack. While such technologies provide a promising avenue for defense, they are often associated with significant performance costs. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the tradeoffs between the security and performance of a candidate MT technique before deploying it in a live setting. However, testing the effectiveness and usage costs of an MT technique on a live network is a costly and difficult process. This paper presents an agent-based approach for simulating an operational network and measuring the impact of security policies that incorporate MT technologies. It captures a computer network with mission-critical and non-mission-critical users and traffic, cyber attacks sent by malicious actors, and an MT technique to be evaluated. The agent-based system produces metrics that measure the effects of attacks and security policies on overall and mission-specific network operations and allows for the evaluation of multiple candidate MT policies without having to test these policies on a live network. Furthermore, it serves to guide the search for optimal policies that maximize the protection provided by the MT technology, while minimizing its performance overhead. We demonstrate the model via a case study that evaluates a particular MT technology and provides decision support for setting the optimal policy associated with its deployment.
Prostate Pathology of Genetically Engineered Mice: Definitions and Classification. The Consensus Report from the Bar Harbor Meeting of the Mouse Models of Human Cancer Consortium Prostate Pathology Committee

The Pathological Classification of Prostate Lesions in Genetically Engineered Mice (GEM) is the result of a directive from the National Cancer Institute Mouse Models of Human Cancer Consortium Prostate Steering Committee to provide a hierarchical taxonomy of disorders of the mouse prostate to facilitate classification of existing and newly created mouse models and the translation to human prostate pathology. The proposed Bar Harbor Classification system is the culmination of three meetings and workshops attended by various members of the Prostate Pathology Committee of the Mouse Models of Human Cancer Consortium. A 2-day Pathology Workshop was held at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, in October 2001, in which study sets of 93 slides from 22 GEM models were provided to individual panel members. The comparison of mouse and human prostate anatomy and disease demonstrates significant differences and considerable similarities that bear on the interpretation of the origin and natural history of their diseases. The recommended classification of mouse prostate pathology is hierarchical, and includes developmental, inflammatory, benign proliferative, and neoplastic disorders. Among the neoplastic disorders, preinvasive, microinvasive, and poorly differentiated neoplasms received the most attention. Specific criteria were recommended and will be discussed. Transitions between neoplastic states were of particular concern. Preinvasive neoplasias of the mouse prostate were recognized as focal, atypical, and progressive lesions. These lesions were designated as mouse prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (mPIN). Some atypical lesions were identified in mouse models without evidence of progression to malignancy. The panel recommended that mPIN lesions not be given histological grades, but that mPIN be further classified as to the absence or presence of documented associated progression to invasive carcinoma. Criteria for recognizing microinvasion, for classification of invasive gland-forming adenocarcinomas, and for characterizing poorly differentiated tumors, including neuroendocrine carcinomas, were developed and are discussed. The uniform application of defined terminology is essential for correlating results between different laboratories and models. It is recommended that investigators use the Bar Harbor Classification system when characterizing new GEM models or when conducting experimental interventions that may alter the phenotype or natural history of lesion progression in existing models.