Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Region-based landmark discovery by crowdsourcing geo-referenced photos

We propose a novel model for landmark discovery that locates region-based landmarks on map in contrast to the traditional point-based landmarks. The proposed method preserves more information and automatically identifies candidate regions on map by crowdsourcing geo-referenced photos. Gaussian kernel convolution is applied to remove noises and generate detected region. We adopt F1 measure to evaluate discovered landmarks and manually check the association between tags and regions. The experiment results show that more than 90% of attractions in the selected city can be correctly located by this method.
An efficient implementation of anytime k-medoids clustering for time series under dynamic time warping

Time series clustering is one of the crucial tasks in time series data mining. So far, time series clustering has been most used with Euclidean distance. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance measure has increasingly been used as a similarity measurement for various data mining tasks in place of traditional Euclidean distance due to its superiority in sequence-alignment flexibility. However, there exist some difficulties in clustering time series with DTW distance, for example, the problem of speeding up DTW distance calculation in the context of clustering. So far, there have been two proposed methods for time series clustering with DTW and both of them work in batch scheme. Recently, Zhu et al. proposed a framework of anytime clustering for time series with DTW which uses a data-adaptive approximation to DTW. In this paper, we present an efficient implementation of anytime K-medoids clustering for time series data with DTW distance. In our method, we exploit the anytime clustering framework with DTW proposed by Zhu et al., apply a method for medoid initialization, and develop a multithreading technique to speed-up DTW distance calculation. Experimental results on benchmark datasets validate our proposed implementation method for anytime K-medoids clustering for time series with DTW.
Oxidized low-density lipoproteins inhibit endothelial cell proliferation by suppressing basic fibroblast growth factor expression.

BACKGROUND Hyperlipidemia inhibits proliferation of endothelial cells (ECs) in culture and angiogenesis in vivo and in arterial explants. Elucidation of the mechanisms may suggest novel therapies against atherosclerosis. METHODS AND RESULTS Basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) expression and mitogenic effects were assessed in bovine aortic ECs incubated with oxidized LDL (ox-LDL). Compared with native LDL and lipoprotein-free controls, ox-LDL reduced bFGF mRNA levels in a time- and concentration-dependent manner, 100 microg/mL producing a maximum reduction of 40% to 50% within 24 to 48 hours. There were commensurate reductions in intracellular and extracellular bFGF concentrations, DNA and total RNA syntheses, and cell replication. FGF receptor 1 and beta-actin mRNA levels were unchanged. Ox-LDL accelerated bFGF mRNA degradation in actinomycin D-treated cells. However, inhibition of bFGF expression by ox-LDL was attenuated by cyclohexamide, indicating a requirement for continuous new protein synthesis for posttranscriptional destabilization. Reduced syntheses of DNA and total RNA were completely restored by bFGF but not by vascular endothelial growth factor. Inhibition of total RNA synthesis achieved by exposing cells to a bFGF-neutralizing antibody was similar in magnitude to that induced by ox-LDL. CONCLUSIONS Cytotoxic effects of ox-LDL on ECs are attributable in part to suppression of bFGF expression.
Simplifying the beamforming optimality region for practical mimo scenarios

The optimality region for beamforming is redefined in terms of two parameters, the signal to noise ratio and the product of the antenna separation and the angular spread in the transmitter. This is possible by finding an interesting univocal relationship between the two main eigenvalues of the transmitter correlation in terms of this product. This relationship holds for many realistic scenarios, particularly in those where beamforming is a transmission alternative
THROMBOSIS AND HEMOSTASIS Activated protein C b-glycoform promotes enhanced noncanonical PAR 1 proteolysis and superior resistance to ischemic injury

Department of Clinical Medicine, School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, United Kingdom; National Children’s Research Centre, Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital Crumlin, Crumlin, Dublin, United Kingdom; Atherothrombosis Laboratory, Center for Applied Medical Research, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain; Department of Haematology, Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital Crumlin, Crumlin, Dublin, United Kingdom; and Haemostasis Research Group, School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, United Kingdom
SC-FDE with OQPSK-Type Schemes: An Efficient Transmission Technique for Broadband Wireless Systems

This paper considers frequency-domain re- ceiver design for OQPSK-type schemes. Since the I-Q interference can lead to significant performance degra- dation we propose an FDE design (Frequency-Domain Equalization) where there is no I-Q interference in the sampling instants for the predominant OQPSK constella- tion. We also propose iterative FDEs with I-Q interference cancelation, as well as the cancelation of unintended OQPSK components.
Synchronizations and Rollbacksin Optimistic Distributed Simulation SchemeXiannong MengDepartment of Mathematics and Computer ScienceUniversity of Texas {

This paper describes a study of coordination issues in optimistic distributed simulations that are implemented over a loosely coupled environment. Detailed study of relations among the factors such as the number, the depth and the frequency of rollbacks, the event intensity, and the speedup of the distributed simulations are studied. This study shows that centralized coordination can perform very eeectively in certain types of simulation tasks; the rollbacks have diierent characteristics at diierent event intensities; and how the overall performance of optimistic distributed simulations is aaected by message intensity, communications overhead, and rollback frequency.
Automatic analysis of single-channel sleep EEG: validation in healthy individuals.

STUDY OBJECTIVE To assess the performance of automatic sleep scoring software (ASEEGA) based on a single EEG channel comparatively with manual scoring (2 experts) of conventional full polysomnograms. DESIGN Polysomnograms from 15 healthy individuals were scored by 2 independent experts using conventional R&K rules. The results were compared to those of ASEEGA scoring on an epoch-by-epoch basis. SETTING Sleep laboratory in the physiology department of a teaching hospital. PARTICIPANTS Fifteen healthy volunteers. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS The epoch-by-epoch comparison was based on classifying into 2 states (wake/sleep), 3 states (wake/REM/ NREM), 4 states (wake/REM/stages 1-2/SWS), or 5 states (wake/REM/ stage 1/stage 2/SWS). The obtained overall agreements, as quantified by the kappa coefficient, were 0.82, 0.81, 0.75, and 0.72, respectively. Furthermore, obtained agreements between ASEEGA and the expert consensual scoring were 96.0%, 92.1%, 84.9%, and 82.9%, respectively. Finally, when classifying into 5 states, the sensitivity and positive predictive value of ASEEGA regarding wakefulness were 82.5% and 89.7%, respectively. Similarly, sensitivity and positive predictive value regarding REM state were 83.0% and 89.1%. CONCLUSIONS Our results establish the face validity and convergent validity of ASEEGA for single-channel sleep analysis in healthy individuals. ASEEGA appears as a good candidate for diagnostic aid and automatic ambulant scoring.
Multi-Resolution and Wavelet Representations for Identifying Signatures of Disease

Identifying physiological and anatomical signatures of disease in signals and images is one of the fundamental challenges in biomedical engineering. The challenge is most apparent given that such signatures must be identified in spite of tremendous inter and intra-subject variability and noise. Crucial for uncovering these signatures has been the development of methods that exploit general statistical properties of natural signals. The signal processing and applied mathematics communities have developed, in recent years, signal representations which take advantage of Gabor-type and wavelet-type functions that localize signal energy in a joint time-frequency and/or space-frequency domain. These techniques can be expressed as multi-resolution transformations, of which perhaps the best known is the wavelet transform. In this paper we review wavelets, and other related multi-resolution transforms, within the context of identifying signatures for disease. These transforms construct a general representation of signals which can be used in detection, diagnosis and treatment monitoring. We present several examples where these transforms are applied to biomedical signal and imaging processing. These include computer-aided diagnosis in mammography, real-time mosaicking of ophthalmic slit-lamp imagery, characterization of heart disease via ultrasound, predicting epileptic seizures and signature analysis of the electroencephalogram, and reconstruction of positron emission tomography data.
Towards Improving Dialogue Topic Tracking Performances with Wikification of Concept Mentions

Dialogue topic tracking aims at analyzing and maintaining topic transitions in on-going dialogues. This paper proposes to utilize Wikification-based features for providing mention-level correspondences to Wikipedia concepts for dialogue topic tracking. The experimental results show that our proposed features can significantly improve the performances of the task in mixed-initiative human-human dialogues.
Flash Flood Early Warning System Reference Guide 2-1 Flash Flood Science

A flash flood is generally defined as a rapid onset flood of short duration with a relatively high peak discharge (World Meteorological Organization). The American Meteorological Society defines it as a " …flood that rises and falls quite rapidly with little or no advance warning, usually as the result of intense rainfall over a relatively small area. " The U.S. National Weather Service employs a more detailed definition: A rapid and extreme flow of high water into a normally dry area, or a rapid water level rise in a stream or creek above a predetermined flood level, beginning within six hours of the causative event (e.g., intense rainfall, dam failure, ice jam). However, the actual time threshold may vary in different parts of the country. Ongoing flooding can intensify to flash flooding in cases where intense rainfall results in a rapid surge of rising flood waters. Regardless of which definition is applied, the distinctive characteristics of flash flooding mean that forecasting processes are quite different for this hazard than for other types of hydrometeo-rological hazards. Flash floods can be triggered by a variety of events including intense rainfall, failure of a natural (e.g., glacial lake debris) or manmade (e.g., dam, levee) structure that is impounding water, or the sudden impoundment of water upstream of a river ice jam. This chapter should be read by persons who require a basic understanding of the hydrology associated with flash floods caused by heavy rain. The chapter briefly discusses how soil characteristics , basin features, stream density, and land use affect the development and intensity of flash floods. Flash floods are rapid-onset hydrologic events that can be difficult to forecast. A combination of a high rainfall rate with rapid and often efficient runoff production processes is common to most flash flood events. Therefore, the nature of the rainfall and the anticipated runoff processes are key elements in the forecast process. The following figure (Fig. 2.1) describes the overall flood prediction process and how flash floods relate to that larger process.
Fault Detection and Fault Diagnosis in SRAM-Based FPGA Using BIST 1

We propose a novel approach to detect and diagnosis the faults in SRAM FPGA. BIST is a design technique that allows a circuit to test itself. The BIST technique can provide shorter test time compared to an externally applied test and allows the use of low-cost test equipment during all stages of production. The use of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to implement complex logic functions in digital applications has become increasingly common. FPGAs are regular structures of logic modules that communicate through an interconnected architecture of lines and switches. The logic modules and the interconnect structures are programmed to select a particular function of each logic module and specific interconnect paths to realize the global function of the FPGA. This proposed work presents a built-in self-test (BIST) design for fault detection and fault diagnosis of static-RAM (SRAM)-based field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The proposed FPGA BIST structure can test both the interconnect resources [wire channels and programmable switches (PSs)] and lookup tables (LUTs) in the configurable logic blocks (CLBs). The test pattern generator and output response analyzer are configured by existing CLBs in FPGAs; thus, no extra area overhead is needed for the proposed BIST structure. The target fault detection/diagnosis of the proposed BIST structure are open/short and delay faults in the wire channels, stuck on/off faults in PSs, and stuck-at-0/1 faults in LUTs.
The inhibitory effect of ABA on floral transition is mediated by ABI5 in Arabidopsis

Seed germination and flowering initiation are both transitions responding to similar seasonal cues. This study shows that ABSCISIC ACID-INSENSITIVE MUTANT 5 (ABI5), a bZIP transcription factor, which plays an important role in the abscisic acid (ABA)-arrested seed germination, is robustly associated with the floral transition in Arabidopsis. Under long-day conditions, overexpression of ABI5 could delay floral transition through upregulating FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC) expression. In contrast, ectopically overexpressing FLC in an abi5 mutant reversed the earlier flowering phenotype. Further analysis indicated that transactivation of FLC could be promoted by ABI5 and/or other abscisic acid-responsive element (ABRE)-binding factors (ABFs). The expression of FLC that was promoted by ABI5 and/or other ABFs could be blocked in a triple SNF1-related protein kinase (SnRK) mutant, snrk2.2/2.3/2.6, despite the presence of ABA. In sharp contrast, when SnRK2.6 was coexpressed, the reduction of transactivity of FLC was reverted in mesophyll protoplasts of snrk2.2/2.3/2.6. Additional results from analysing transgenic plants carrying mutations of phosphoamino acids (ABI5 S42AS145AT201A), which are conserved in ABI5, suggested that SnRK2-mediated ABI5 and/or ABF phosphorylation may be crucial for promoting FLC expression. The transgenic plants ABI5 S42AS145AT201A were insensitive to ABA in seed germination, in addition to having an earlier flowering phenotype. Direct binding of ABI5 to the ABRE/G-box promoter elements existing in FLC was demonstrated by chromatin immunoprecipitation. Mutations at the ABRE/G-box regions in FLC promoter sequences abolished the ABI5-promoted transactivation of FLC. In summary, these results may decipher the inhibitory effect of ABA on floral transition in Arabidopsis.
A Study of Execution Plan Aware Mutations for Genetic Cyclic Query Optimization

Resumen— The increasing number of applications requiring the use of large join queries reinforces the search for good methods to determine the best execution plan. Specially, when the number of joins is too large to be calculated by a traditional optimizer. Previous literature describes Genetic optimizers that may yield invalid execution trees that have to be repaired. Most of them use non-database-conscious operations. In this paper we propose a set of mutation strategies that are conscious of the nature of execution plans, and show that their combination, or their use with crossover operations, yields faster convergence and better plans than other more trivial mutation strategies. In addition, our mutations do not require repair operations after applying them.
RReplay: A Record and Replay System Based on Restricted Multi-threading

This paper presents RReplay: a novel record & replay system for multi-threaded programs to solve their debugging problems caused by non-deterministic thread interleavings. The idea of RReplay is to only record the key non-deterministic behaviors that mostly affect performance. Different from existing approaches, RReplay requires that the programs be executed in a restricted environment so that the freedom of non-determinism is controlled and limited. By doing so, most non-deterministic thread interleavings are eliminated. This simplifies the complexity of traditional record & replay systems as well as improves performance. As the non-deterministic behaviors are much less in the restricted environment, the size of recorded logs is also greatly reduced. We design the Restriction Execution Runtime (RER) to restrict the freedom of non-deterministic thread interleavings. Our Recorder and Replayer are built upon RER, which provides the non-deterministic events for the Recorder and accepts the deterministic control from the Replayer. We build a simulator to evaluate RReplay. The results show that RReplay only incurs 38.6% recording overhead and it produces logs at speed of 23.4KB/s.
Cognitive Operations in Tropes: The Case of Parameterisation

Over the last few years, the study of cognitive operations from both a pragmatic and a cognitive angle (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera, 2014) has gradually received more and more attention. According to Ruiz de Mendoza & Galera (2014), parameterisation is based on world knowledge and is cued by the linguistic expression, resulting in the fixation of a generic value which is otherwise undefined to a greater or lesser extent, as in John drinks standing for ‘John usually drinks alcohol’ or Something has happened meaning ‘something bad has happened. ’ Following Herrero (2009), in this paper we attempt to analyse how parameterisation applies in some tropes (overstatement, understatement, euphemism, and dysphemism) by placing constraints on how far the operations that underlie them, strengthening and mitigation, can go. The examples have been extracted from a multi-faced corpus compiled from The British National Corpus, The Corpus of American English, and Google searches.
Extracting product features from online reviews for sentimental analysis

For elaborately understanding what product features the reviews focuses on, we propose an approach based on patterns to extraction features (titles). Trough setting length, upper and lower limit probability and frequency thresholds, we extract patterns of POS tags and features from the training corpus. To enhance adaptability of the pattern set, we merge some fundamental patterns into a new fuzzy pattern. Then a pattern matching algorithm is applied to extract the titles and opinion words from the reviews. We conducted a platform to extract features from product reviews automatically, the result of our experiments shows that our approach is effective.
Low complexity DCT-based distributed source coding with Gray code for hyperspectral image

Hyperspectral image compression demands simple onboard encoder. Contrary to most distributed source coding (DSC) compression methods in wavelet transform (WT) domain, we propose a low complexity discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based DSC paradigm with Gray code. We use a set-partitioning approach on reorganized DCT coefficients to extract bitplanes; then we apply Gray code to refinement bits; lastly low density parity check (LDPC)-based Slepian-Wolf coder is implemented to our DSC strategy. Hence the coding strategy shifts the complexity from encoder to decoder. Experimental results for AVIRIS (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer) data illustrate that the proposed scheme can improve up to 2dB better than DSC-based coder in WT domain, regardless of the using DCT-based coder worse than wavelet-based one. It also reaches up to 6dB by comparison with that independently using 2-Dimensional (2D) DCT-based coder.
Who Moved My Curriculum? Leadership Preparation Programs and the Core Technology of Schools

This cross-case study utilizes the publically available data of three urban low-performing, low-socioeconomic-status districts designated as districts in need of improvement under No Child Left Behind legislation. Despite multiple interventions aimed at improving student learning, these and other districts remain in corrective action. Critics attribute responsibility for such low-performing schools in part to leadership preparation programs and their failure to prepare leaders who are capable of improving student learning. Current research points to the value of preparation programs focusing on the development of instructional leaders and a curriculum that focuses on improving student achievement (Darling-Hammond, Meyerson, LaPointe, & Orr, 2010). We argue that preparation programs must prepare leaders who can ensure that a well-articulated curriculum aligned to the state standards exists and, more important, is implemented effectively.
Linear Grammars with Labels

The purpose of the paper is to show that we can work in the spirit of Minimalist Grammars by means of an unirected deductive system called LGE, enhanced with constraints on the use of assumptions. Lexical entries can be linked to sequences of controlled hypotheses which represent intermediary sites. The assumptions must be introduced in the derivation and then discharged in tandem by their proper entry which will therefore manage to find its final position: this allows to logically simulate move operation. Relevance of this formalism is stressed by showing its ability to give a compositional semantics in the line of R. Montague.