Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
European Conference on Information Systems ( ECIS ) Summer 10-6-2011 MAKING & GIVING SENSE TO THE GLOBAL DATA SYNCHRONIZATION NETWORK STANDARD ADOTPION

Despite the widespread diffusion of interorganizational systems (IOS), both retailers and manufacturers suffer significant inaccuracies, flaws, and discrepancies in product information, which undermines the quality of the data they exchange. To remedy this situation, an interorganizational Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) standard has emerged since the beginning the last decade. Initial enthusiasm about this cutting-edge standard notwithstanding, the technology has not reached the adoption breadth predicted by business consulting firms and technology initiators. This research uses sensemaking/sensegiving theoretical lenses to conduct an in-depth, qualitative case study of five groups of stakeholders (retailers, manufacturers, standards setters, data pools, and certified GDSN providers) in an attempt to unravel the barriers to GDSN standard adoption.
Riding the Reciprocal Teaching Bus. A Teacher’s Reflections on Nurturing Collaborative Learning in a School Culture Obsessed by Results

Abstract This article examines the author’s interactions with the teaching strategy known as Reciprocal Teaching, sometimes also called Reciprocal Reading, which involves students learning to read collaboratively in small groups. Reciprocal Teaching typically involves students teaching each other by following a rubric of activities that are aimed at primarily improving their comprehension skills. In brief, students read a text in a group and collectively try to understand it, using prescribed procedures. This article scrutinises the original research by Palincsar and Brown which created the strategy and questions some of its claims. While many other investigations into Reciprocal Teaching have aimed to prove or disprove its efficacy, this enquiry studies the discourses which inform the strategy, arguing that there are problems with its presentation in the original article which have affected subsequent representations of Reciprocal Teaching. The article shows how the author, an English teacher in a large secondary school, taught Reciprocal Teaching to teenagers for a year and argues that the presentation of Reciprocal Teaching he read in a well-regarded teaching handbook caused him to deploy Reciprocal Teaching problematically. It was only when he taught Reciprocal Teaching in a more imaginative fashion that he found greater success.
On fuzzy c-means clustering for uncertain data using quadratic regularization of penalty vectors

In recent years, data from many natural and social phenomena are accumulated into huge databases in the world wide network of computers. Thus, advanced data analysis techniques to get valuable knowledge from data using computing power of today are required. Clustering is one of the unsupervised classification technique of the data analysis and both of hard and fuzzy c-means clusterings are the most typical technique of clustering.
Analysis of Integrate-and-Fire Neurons: Synchronization of Synaptic Input and Spike Output

A new technique for analyzing the probability distribution of output spikes for the integrate-and-fire model is presented. This technique enables us to investigate models with arbitrary synaptic response functions that incorporate both leakage across the membrane and a rise time of the postsynaptic potential. The results, which are compared with numerical simulations, are exact in the limit of a large number of small-amplitude inputs. This method is applied to the synchronization problem, in which we examine the relationship between the spread in arrival times of the inputs (the temporal jitter of the synaptic input) and the resultant spread in the times at which the output spikes are generated (output jitter). The results of previous studies, which indicated that the ratio of the output jitter to the input jitter is consistently less than one and that it decreases for increasing numbers of inputs, are confirmed for three classes of the integrate-and-fire model. In addition to the previously identified factors of axonal propagation times and synaptic jitter, we identify the variation in the spike-generating thresholds of the neurons and the variation in the number of active inputs as being important factors that determine the timing jitter in layered networks. Previously observed phase differences between optimally and suboptimally stimulated neurons may be understood in terms of the relative time taken to reach threshold.
Comprehensive analysis of transcriptome response to salinity stress in the halophytic turf grass Sporobolus virginicus

The turf grass Sporobolus virginicus is halophyte and has high salinity tolerance. To investigate the molecular basis of its remarkable tolerance, we performed Illumina high-throughput RNA sequencing on roots and shoots of a S. virginicus genotype under normal and saline conditions. The 130 million short reads were assembled into 444,242 unigenes. A comparative analysis of the transcriptome with rice and Arabidopsis transcriptome revealed six turf grass-specific unigenes encoding transcription factors. Interestingly, all of them showed root specific expression and five of them encode bZIP type transcription factors. Another remarkable transcriptional feature of S. virginicus was activation of specific pathways under salinity stress. Pathway enrichment analysis suggested transcriptional activation of amino acid, pyruvate, and phospholipid metabolism. Up-regulation of several unigenes, previously shown to respond to salt stress in other halophytes was also observed. Gene Ontology enrichment analysis revealed that unigenes assigned as proteins in response to water stress, such as dehydrin and aquaporin, and transporters such as cation, amino acid, and citrate transporters, and H+-ATPase, were up-regulated in both shoots and roots under salinity. A correspondence analysis of the enriched pathways in turf grass cells, but not in rice cells, revealed two groups of unigenes similarly up-regulated in the turf grass in response to salt stress; one of the groups, showing excessive up-regulation under salinity, included unigenes homologos to salinity responsive genes in other halophytes. Thus, the present study identified candidate genes involved in salt tolerance of S. virginicus. This genetic resource should be valuable for understanding the mechanisms underlying high salt tolerance in S. virginicus. This information can also provide insight into salt tolerance in other halophytes.
Product and process innovation in the food processing industry: case study in Guangxi province

China's food processing sector has arrived at a critical stage and the challenges for the food industry including undergoing relevant structural adjustments are well documented (OECD 2000). The Chinese domestic economy continues to boom and living standards of people continue to improve. Food processors need to adjust to increasingly diversified consumer demands and improve the quality and nutritional content of foods. The food industry also needs to enhance its international market access through product quality, variety, safety and other attributes of their food products. Product and process innovation has become one of the top driving forces for improving the competitiveness of Chinaâ€™s food processing industry both domestically and internationally (OECD 2000). This paper examines through case study analysis the response of several food processors in China to the changes in their external business environment and makes some assessment of their adoption or otherwise of innovative strategies. While relevant studies have been pervasive in Western countries, there is a dearth of analysis of such issues in China.
Suffix-DDs : Substring Indices Based on Sequence BDDs for Constrained Sequence Mining

In this paper, we study an efficient index structure, called Suffix Decision Diagrams (SuffixDDs), for knowledge discovery in large sequence data. Recently, Loekito, Bailey, and Pei (KAIS, 2009) proposed a new data structure for sequence data, called Sequence Binary Decision Diagram (SeqBDD), which is an extension of Zero-suppressed Binary Decision Diagrams (ZDDs) for sequences. SuffixDD is a compact substring indices based on SeqBDD for efficiently representing the set of all substrings of a given string. Furthermore, SuffixDD provides a rich collection of operations for sets of sequences inherited from ZDDs and SeqBDDs, which are useful for implementing sequence mining algorithms. Then, we present an efficient algorithm for constructing a SuffixDD for a given text, and then, we show the correctness and the complexity. Furthermore, we present a set of extended operations for manipulating SuffixDDs with application to constrained sequence mining. Finally, we give experimental results on the efficiency of SuffixDD.
PhotoSlap: A Multi-player Online Game for Semantic Annotation

Multimedia content presents special challenges for the search engines, and could benefit from semantic annotation of images. Unfortunately, manual labeling is too tedious and time-consuming for humans, whereas automatic image annotation is too difficult for the computers. In this paper, we explore the power of human computation by designing a multi-player online game, PhotoSlap, to achieve the task of annotating metadata for a collection of digital photos. PhotoSlap engages users in an interactive game that capitalizes on human ability in deciphering quickly whether the same person shows up in two consecutive images presented by the computer. The game mechanism supports the objection and trap actions to encourage truthful input from the players. This research extends human computation research in two aspects: game-theoretic design principles and quantitative evaluation metrics. In particular, PhotoSlap can be shown to reach subgame perfect equilibrium with the target strategy when players are rational and without collusion. Experiments involving four focus groups have been conducted, and the preliminary results demonstrated the game to be fun and effective in annotating people metadata for photo collections.
Ink Jet Printing Approaches to Solar Cell Contacts

ABSTRACT We are developing inkjet printing as a low cost, high throughput approach to the deposition of front contacts for Si solar cells. High deposition rates of 1µm per printing pass were achieved with a new metalorganic ink composed of silver(trifluoroacetate) in ethylene glycol. The printing conditions were optimized to achieve a relatively high line resolution of 120 µm. The optimal parameters for the piezoelectric inkjet were a pulse frequency of 50 Hz and pulse amplitude of 25 V. The best resolution and the line quality were achieved at a substrate temperature of 180 °C and drop separation of 40 µm. 1. Introduction Inkjet-printing is an attractive alternative to screen-printing or vacuum evaporation for fabrication of the front contacts to solar cells[1]. Vacuum evaporation is effective but requires patterning and is capital intensive. Screen-printing is a low-cost, atmospheric printing technique, but has resolution and throughput problems. Inkjet printing is an inherently suitable approach to mass manufacturing and conveyor processing of cells and modules. Inkjet printing should also provide better line resolution and improved aspect ratios for the conducting grid lines, which would lead to improved solar cell performance. A significant advantage of inkjet printing over screen-printing is that it is a non-contact, conformal deposition technique and therefore it is especially suitable for processing fragile and uneven poly-Si wafers. An essential element in the development of inkjet-based contacts is the formulation of the ink. For contact grids the optimization of the ink components is focused on achieving high deposition rates, good line resolution, high conductivity of the printed lines, and high quality ohmic contact to the substrate. Such inks should have a long storage and use life and be suitable for the chosen inkjet. In previous work, we have demonstrated highly conductive inkjet and spray-printed silver layers [2-4] deposited at elevated temperatures (300-400 °C ) from a metalorganic (MO) silver ink. The deposition rate reported for these inks was rather low 300-500 A per printing pass. The lines that were inkjet-printed from these inks were either broad and thin or composed of isolated islands [2]. We report here on improved deposition rates and line qualities for inkjet-printed silver contact patterns. We have achieved resolution and aspect ratios comparable to those for screen-printed lines. The ink composition and the processing parameters were optimized to achieve higher deposition rates and to control the spreading of the drops to achieve better continuity and resolution. The details of the optimization study will be presented below.
Medium access and radio resource management for ad hoc networks based on UTRA TDD

The goal of the FleetNet project is to develop an air-interface for inter-car communication and road telematics. For the raido interface, the framework of the UMTS Terrrestrial Radio Access Time Division Duplex (UTRA TDD) air-interface shall be used with modifications. This paper introduces a concept for the air-interface, highlights the challenges for its use in an ad hoc network with rapidly changing topology and offers a description as well as an evaluation of the required changes within the medium access control and radio resource management layer
Demand-based coordinated scheduling for SMP VMs

As processor architectures have been enhancing their computing capacity by increasing core counts, independent workloads can be consolidated on a single node for the sake of high resource efficiency in data centers. With the prevalence of virtualization technology, each individual workload can be hosted on a virtual machine for strong isolation between co-located workloads. Along with this trend, hosted applications have increasingly been multithreaded to take advantage of improved hardware parallelism. Although the performance of many multithreaded applications highly depends on communication (or synchronization) latency, existing schemes of virtual machine scheduling do not explicitly coordinate virtual CPUs based on their communication behaviors. This paper presents a demand-based coordinated scheduling scheme for consolidated virtual machines that host multithreaded workloads. To this end, we propose communication-driven scheduling that controls time-sharing in response to inter-processor interrupts (IPIs) between virtual CPUs. On the basis of in-depth analysis on the relationship between IPI communications and coordination demands, we devise IPI-driven coscheduling and delayed preemption schemes, which effectively reduce synchronization latency and unnecessary CPU consumption. In addition, we introduce a load-conscious CPU allocation policy in order to address load imbalance in heterogeneously consolidated environments. The proposed schemes are evaluated with respect to various scenarios of mixed workloads using the PARSEC multithreaded applications. In the evaluation, our scheme improves the overall performance of consolidated workloads, especially communication-intensive applications, by reducing inefficient synchronization latency.
HLA-F Surface Expression on B Cell and Monocyte Cell Lines Is Partially Independent from Tapasin and Completely Independent from TAP1

In this study we examined HLA-F expression in normal cells and cell lines, with a particular focus on identifying cells that express surface protein. While HLA-F protein was expressed in a number of diverse tissues and cell lines, including bladder, skin, and liver cell lines, no surface expression could be detected in the majority of them. However, surface expression was observed on EBV-transformed lymphoblastoid cell lines and on some monocyte cell lines. Expression on B lymphoblastoid cell lines was observed, while no surface expression on normal B cells or on any peripheral blood lymphocytes could be detected. Surface expression correlated with the presence of a limited amount of endoglycosidase H (Endo H)-resistant HLA-F. However, clearly not all surface-expressed HLA-F was fully glycosylated. We further examined the requirement of HLA-F surface expression for functional TAP and tapasin molecules and identified a clear departure from the dependence shown by other class I molecules on TAP. In contrast, of the two surface glycosylation forms expressed, an Endo H-sensitive form was tapasin independent, while an Endo H-resistant form was clearly tapasin dependent. Finally, we tested whether HLA-F could be stabilized for surface expression without peptide by using the classical cold treatment for surface stabilization of empty class I. Of several cell lines tested, only MHC deletion mutant 721.221 demonstrated a typical class I phenotype, indicating that control of surface stabilization may have a genetic basis resident in the MHC.
Gender and Climate Change in the Indian Himalayas : Global Threats , Local Vulnerabilities , and Livelihood Diversification at the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve

Global climate change has numerous implications for members of mountain communities who feel the impacts in both physical and social dimensions. In the western Himalayas of India, a majority of residents maintain a livelihood strategy that includes a combination of subsistence or small-scale agriculture, livestock rearing, seasonal or long-term migration, and localized natural resource extraction. While warming temperatures, irregular patterns of precipitation and snowmelt, and changing biological systems present challenges to the viability of these traditional livelihood portfolios in general, we find that climate change is also undermining local communities’ livelihood assets in gender-specific ways. In this paper, we present a case study from the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (Uttarakhand, India) that both outlines the implications of climate change for women farmers in the area and highlights the potential for ecotourism (as a form of livelihood diversification) to strengthen both key livelihood assets of women and local communities’ adaptive capacity more broadly. The paper intentionally employs a categorical focus on women but also addresses issues of inter-group and gender diversity. With this special issue in mind, suggestions for related research are proposed for consideration by climate scientists and social systems and/or policy modelers seeking to support gender justice through socially transformative perspectives and frameworks.
Exploiting topic tracking in real-time tweet streams

Microblogs such as Twitter have become an increasingly popular source of real-time information.Users tend to keep up-to-date with the developments of topics they are interested in. In this paper, we present an effective real-time tweets filtering system to exploit topic tracking in social media streams. We combine background corpus with foreground corpus to handle the cold start problem. Then we build the Content Model to describe the characteristics of tweets, in which we utilize the link information to expand tweets' content aiming at enriching the semantic information of tweets, and we also analyze the influence of tweet's quality measured by a group of well-defined symbols. Moreover, the Pseudo Relevance Feedback approach triggered by a fixed-width temporal sliding window is employed to adapt our system to the alteration of topics over time. Experimental results on Tweet11 corpus indicate that our system achieves good performance in both T11SU and F-0.5 metrics, and the proposed system has better performance than the best one of TREC2012 real-time filtering pilot task.
Efficient Consistent Query Answering Based on Attribute Deletions

Data integrated from multiple sources may contain inconsistencies. A consistent query answer (CQA) in a possibly inconsistent database is an answer which is true in every minimal repair of the database. It is proved that for most constraints and queries CQA is a NP problem based on repairing by tuple deletions, therefore there are little applications based on CQA. Under closed world assumption, only attributes of tuples violating constraints are inconsistent and repair by deleting tuples will lose information. So we present a new repair semantic based on attribute deletions which can preserve consistent values in the tuple and we prove CQA can be computed in PTIME with respect to this repair semantic. Aided by well designed repair index table, we can compute CQA efficiently by SQL rewriting. We study the performance of our new approach for CQA by detailed experiments.
outputs Tracking trash

Using active self reporting tags we were able to follow the journey of 2,000 objects through the waste management system of Seattle. We used this data to define measures of efficiency for what could be called the ‘removal chain’. We found that over 95% of the traces reached a compliant end destination. However, there were concerns with special categories of waste (cellphones, e-waste, and household hazardous waste) and specific geographic locations (trash from Bellevue and Redmond in particular did not follow the recommended best practices). We believe that similar studies may increase knowledge and systemic performance of waste management systems and, at a personal level, reduce the ‘out of sight out of mind’ attitude to trash.
Risk Premium Impact in the Perturbative Black Scholes Model

We study the risk premium impact in the Perturbative Black Scholes model. The Perturbative Black Scholes model, developed by Scotti, is a subjective volatility model based on the classical Black Scholes one, where the volatility used by the trader is an estimation of the market one and contains measurement errors. In this article we analyze the correction to the pricing formulas due to the presence of an underlying drift different from the risk free return. We prove that, under some hypothesis on the parameters, if the asset price is a sub-martingale under historical probability, then the implied volatility presents a skewed structure, and the position of the minimum depends on the risk premium $\lambda$.
Regression Analysis With Linked Data

Record linkage, or exact matching, can be used to join together two files that contain information on the same individuals but lack unique personal identification codes. The possibility of errors in linkage causes problems for estimating the relationships between variables on the two files. The effect is analogous to the impact of measurement error. A model of a linear regression relationship between variables in linked files is proposed. Assuming the probabilities that pairs of records are links are known, an unbiased estimator of the regression coefficients is derived. Methods for estimating the linkage probabilities by using mixture models are discussed. A consistent estimator of the covariance matrix of the proposed estimator is proposed. A bootstrap estimator is used to reflect the impact of the uncertainty in record linkage model parameters on the estimators of the regression parameters. A simulation study compares the performance of the proposed estimator and alternatives.