Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Study and evaluation of an Irregular Graph Algorithm on Multicore and GPU Processor Architectures

One area of Computing applications which poses significant challenge of performance scalability on Chip Multiprocessors(CMP's) are Irregular applications. Such applications have very little computation and unpredictable memory access patterns making them memory-bound in contrast to compute-bound applications. Since the gap between processor and memory performance continues to exist, difficulty to hide and decrease this gap is one of the important factors which results in poor performance of these applications on CMP's. The goal of this thesis is to overcome many such challenges posed during performance acceleration of an irregular graph algorithm called Triad Census. We accelerated the Triad Census algorithm on two significantly different Chip Multiprocessors: Dual-socket Intel Xeon Multicore (8 hardware threads per socket) and 240-processor core NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPGPU(128 hardware threads per core). The experimental results obtained on Intel Multicore Xeon system shows performance speedups (w.r.t baseline sequential) of maximum 56x , average 33x and minimum 8.3x for real world graph data sets. On NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPGPU, we were able to match almost equally the Multicore results - 58.4x maximum, 32.8x average and 4.2x minimum speedups w.r. t baseline sequential. In terms of raw performance, for the graph data set called Patents network, our results on Intel Xeon Multicore(16 hw threads) were 1.27x times faster than previous results on Cray XMT(16 hw threads) while results achieved on GPGPU were comparatively slower(0.72x). To the best of our knowledge, this algorithm has only been accelerated on supercomputer class computer named Cray XMT and no work exists that demonstrates performance evaluation and comparison of this algorithm on relatively lower-cost Multicore and GPGPU based platforms.
An environment-projection approach to radiosity for mesh-connected computers

We describe a progressive re nement radiosity algorithm for highly-parallel meshconnected SIMD or MIMD computers. The technique is based on environmentprojection and scales easily to large machines and datasets. Form-factor computations can be performed using local communication by mapping the single-plane across the processor mesh. We report on the performance of an implementation on the MasPar MP-1, and discuss some potential improvements related to load balancing.
Homogenization-Based Mixed Multiscale Finite Elements for Problems with Anisotropy

Multiscale finite element numerical methods are used to solve flow problems when the coefficient in the elliptic operator is heterogeneous. A popular mixed multiscale finite element has basis functions which can be defined only over pairs of elements, so we call it a “dual-support” element. We show by example that it can fail to reproduce constant flow fields, and so fails to converge in any meaningful way. The problem arises when the coefficient is an anisotropic tensor. A new approach to multiscale finite elements based on the microscale structure theory of homogenization is presented to avoid the problems with anisotropy. Five numerical test cases are presented to evaluate and contrast the methods. The first involves anisotropy, and the second is similar in that, although it has an isotropic coefficient, its heterogeneity leads to an anisotropic homogenized coefficient. As expected, the popular method has difficulty—while the new method shows no difficulty—with either anisotropy or macroscale implied a.
Galaxyfly: A Novel Family of Flexible-Radix Low-Diameter Topologies for Large-Scales Interconnection Networks

Interconnection network plays an essential role in the architecture of large-scale high performance computing (HPC) systems. In the paper, we construct a novel family of low-diameter topologies, Galaxyfly, using techniques of algebraic graphs over finite fields. Galaxyfly is guaranteed to retain a small constant diameter while achieving a flexible tradeoff between network scale and bisection bandwidth. Galaxyfly lowers the demands for high radix of network routers and is able to utilize routers with merely moderate radix to build exascale interconnection networks. We present effective congestion-aware routing algorithms for Galaxyfly by exploring its algebraic property. We conduct extensive simulations and analysis to evaluate the performance, cost and power consumption of Galaxyfly against state-of-the-art topologies. The results show that our design achieves better performance than most existing topologies under various routing algorithms and traffic patterns, and is cost-effective to deploy for exascale HPC systems.
Detection of Human Herpesviruses (HHVs) in Semen of Human Male Infertile Patients

Recently we demonstrated an ectopic expression of the human herpesvirus 1 thymidine kinase (HHV1-TK) gene by functioning of an intrinsic endogenous promoter in the transgenic rat (TG-rat), suggesting that HHV1 infection in humans induces expression of the TK gene with the ectopic promoter in the testis and results in accumulation of HHV1-TK protein, triggering male infertility similar to that in the TG-rat. Hence, in this study, we started to investigate a relationship between infection of herpesvirus and human male infertility. Semen was donated by Chinese male infertile patients (153 men, aged 21–49 years) with informed consent, followed by DNA preparation and analysis by PCR and DNA sequencing. Semen volume, sperm number and density, and sperm motility were examined. DNAs of HHV1, HHV4, HHV5 and HHV6 were confirmed by PCR, electrophoresis and DNA sequencing. Finally, virus DNA was identified in 59 patients (39%). The number of carriers was 39 (25%) for HHV1, 6 (4%) for HHV4, 33 (22%) for HHV5 and 3 (2%) for HHV6, respectively. Moreover, double-infection was found in 22 out of 59 specimens (37%), most of which were double-infection of HHV1 and HHV5 (15 out of 22 carriers). Though slight severity was present in some of the carriers, the relationship between virus infection and sperm impairment was not conclusive. Accordingly, it is essential to examine whether the viral HHV1-TK gene is expressed in the testis of the infertile human HHV carrier.
The efficacy and safety of comfrey

Abstract Herbal medication has gathered increasing recognition in recent years with regard to both treatment options and health hazards. Pyrrolizidine alkaloids have been associated with substantial toxicity after their ingestion as tea and in the setting of contaminated cereals have led to endemic outbreaks in Jamaica, India and Afghanistan. In Western Europe, comfrey has been applied for inflammatory disorders such as arthritis, thrombophlebitis and gout and as a treatment for diarrhoea. Only recently was the use of comfrey leaves recognized as a substantial health hazard with hepatic toxicity in humans and carcinogenic potential in rodents. These effects are most likely due to various hepatotoxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids such as lasiocarpine and symphytine, and their related N-oxides. The mechanisms by which toxicity and mutagenicity are conveyed are still not fully understood, but seem to be mediated through a toxic mechanism related to the biotransformation of alkaloids by hepatic microsomal enzymes. This produces highly reactive pyrroles which act as powerful alkylating agents. The main liver injury caused by comfrey (Symphytum officinale) is veno-occlusive disease, a non-thrombotic obliteration of small hepatic veins leading to cirrhosis and eventually liver failure. Patients may present with either acute or chronic clinical signs with portal hypertension, hepatomegaly and abdominal pain as the main features. Therapeutic approaches include avoiding intake and, if hepatic failure is imminent, liver transplantation. In view of the known serious hazards and the ban on distributing comfrey in Germany and Canada, it is difficult to understand why comfrey is still freely available in the United States.
New Tests of Forecast Optimality Across Multiple Horizons

We propose new joint tests of forecast optimality that exploit information contained in multi-horizon forecasts. In addition to implying zero bias and zero autocorrelation in forecast errors, we show that forecast optimality under squared error loss also implies testable restrictions on second moments of the data ordered across forecast horizons. In particular, the variance of the forecast error should be increasing in the horizon; the variance of the forecast itself should be decreasing in the horizon; and the variance of forecast revisions should be bounded by twice the covariance of revisions with the target variable. These bounds on second moments can be restated as inequality constraints in a regression framework and tested using the approach of Wolak (1989). Moreover, some of the proposed tests can be conducted without the need for data on the target variable, which is particularly useful in the presence of large measurement errors. We also propose a new univariate optimal revision test that constrains the coe¢ cients in a regression of the target variable on the long-horizon forecast and the sequence of interim forecast revisions. The size and power of the new tests are compared with those of extant tests through Monte Carlo simulations. An empirical application to the Federal Reserve’s Greenbook forecasts is used to illustrate the tests.
Linking learner corpus and experimental data in studying second language learners’ knowledge of verb-argument constructions

Abstract This paper combines data from learner corpora and psycholinguistic experiments in an attempt to find out what advanced learners of English (first language backgrounds German and Spanish) know about a range of common verbargument constructions (VACs), such as the ‘V about n’ construction (e.g. she thinks about chocolate a lot). Learners’ dominant verb-VAC associations are examined based on evidence retrieved from the German and Spanish subcomponents of ICLE and LINDSEI and collected in lexical production tasks in which participants complete VAC frames (e.g. ‘he ___ about the.’) with verbs that may fill the blank (e.g. talked, thought, wondered). The paper compares findings from the different data sets and highlights the value of linking corpus and experimental evidence in studying linguistic phenomena
Computational Force: A Unifying Concept for Scalability Analysis

c © 2007 by John von Neumann Institute for Computing Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal or classroom use is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise requires prior specific permission by the publisher mentioned above.
Phyllotactic pattern and stem cell fate are determined by the Arabidopsis homeobox gene BELLRINGER

Lateral organs in plants arise from the meristem in a stereotypical pattern known as phyllotaxy. Spiral patterns result from initiation of successive organs at a fixed angle of divergence but variable patterns of physical contact. Such patterns ultimately give rise to individual leaves and flowers at positions related to each other by consecutive terms in the mathematical series first described by Leonardo Fibonacci. We demonstrate that a BELL1 related homeodomain protein in Arabidopsis, BELLRINGER, maintains the spiral phyllotactic pattern. In the absence of BELLRINGER, the regular pattern of organ initiation is disturbed and lateral organs are initiated more frequently. BELLRINGER is also required for maintenance of stem cell fate in the absence of the regulatory genes SHOOT MERISTEMLESS and ASYMMETRIC LEAVES1. We propose a model whereby BELLRINGER coordinates the maintenance of stem cells with differentiation of daughter cells in stem cell lineages.
Analysis and Synthesis of Human and Machine Motion at UL FE

The paper gives insight into main fields of analysis and synthesis of human motion in the recent years or into the works that are still under development. After general introduction half to one page of description is provided for each topics. Simple explanations are omitting theoretical details and rather each use one to two pictures to provide quickly accessible information, which is similar to digest structure. Topics are covering from fingers, hand, arms to the lower extremities, measurement systems to the systems using VR and haptics. In conclusion can be found a look into possible future activities.
Condensation heat transfer on nanoengineered surfaces

This thesis presents a series of three related studies with the aim of developing a surface that promotes robust dropwise condensation. Due to their remarkably low droplet adhesion, superhydrophobic surfaces were investigated for application to dropwise condensation. Although precise model superhydrophobic surfaces were necessary to gain insight into these phenomena, it was recognized that wide-scale implementation necessitates a surface that can be mass-produced at an industrial scale. To this end, anodized metal oxide surfaces were pursued as candidate condenser materials. First, a study was performed to determine the precise conditions leading to the transition between wetting and non-wetting states. By depositing pendant drops of various sizes on a superhydrophobic surface and observing their wetting behavior, a hitherto unknown mechanism for wetting transition is reported. A new phase diagram was developed which shows that both large and small droplet can transition to wetted states due to the new deceleration-driven and the previously-known Laplace mechanisms. It is shown that the attainment of a non-wetted superhydrophobic state is more restrictive than previously thought. Second, we investigate the large-scale fabrication of superhydrophobic surfaces via two different methods: solvent-induced crystallization of a thermoplastic polymer, and anodic oxidation of aluminum. Although the polymer surface as not able to withstand the high temperatures seen during condensation, the applicability of the anodized metal surface to dropwise condensation was further investigated. Third, to replicate the conditions of a typical power plant or desalination plant, an apparatus was constructed that condenses steam at pressures below 1 atm. It employs a vacuum chamber in which a surface is exposed to saturated steam at various pressures. The rig design and operating principles are explained, and the results of condensation tests on superhydrophobic anodized metal oxide surfaces are presented. It was found that although the metal oxide surfaces were able to resist wetting of macroscale droplets, they suffered from non-preferential nucleation and droplet growth. This led to the eventual growth of a macroscale Wenzel droplet, which proved to be difficult to shed from the surface. Thesis Supervisor: Kripa K. Varanasi Title: d'Arbeloff Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
CRAMP: Cost-efficient Resource Allocation for Multiple web applications with Proactive scaling

This paper presents a prediction-based dynamic resource allocation approach for web applications called CRAMP (Cost-efficient Resource Allocation for Multiple web applications with Proactive scaling). The proposed approach provides automatic deployment and proactive scaling of multiple simultaneous web applications on a given Infrastructure as a Service cloud in a shared hosting environment. It monitors and uses resource utilization metrics and does not require a performance model of the applications or the infrastructure dynamics. The shared hosting environment allows us to share virtual machine (VM) resources among deployed applications, reducing the number of required VMs. The approach is demonstrated in a prototype implementation that has been deployed in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
Finding and Indexing of Eccentric Events in Video Emanates

We propose a methodology that first extracts features of video emanates and detects eccentric events in a crowded environment. Afterwards eccentric events are indexed for retrieval. The motivation of the framework is the discrimination of features which are independent from the application domains. Low-level as well as midlevel features are generic and independent of the type of abnormality. High-level features are dependent and used to detect eccentric events, whereas both mid-level and highlevel features are run through the indexing scheme for retrieval. To demonstrate the interest of the methodology, we primarily present the obtained results on collapsing events in real videos amassed by single camera installed an airport escalator exits to monitor the circumstances of those regions.
Information visualisation for social media analytics

This paper tackles the audio visual renderings of geolocated datasets harvested from social networks. These datasets are noisy, multimodal and heterogeneous by nature, providing different fields of information. We focus here on the information of location (GPS), time (timestamp) and text from tweets from which sentiment is extracted. We provide two ways for visualising datasets and for which demos can be seen online.
Matrix Attachment Regulates FAS-Induced Apoptosis in Endothelial Cells

Survival of endothelial cells is critical for cellular processes such as angiogenesis. Cell attachment to extracellular matrix inhibits apoptosis in endothelial cells both in vitro and in vivo, but the molecular mechanisms underlying matrix-induced survival signals or detachment-induced apoptotic signals are unknown. We demonstrate here that matrix attachment is an efficient regulator of Fas-mediated apoptosis in endothelial cells. Thus, matrix attachment protects cells from Fas-induced apoptosis, whereas matrix detachment results in susceptibility to Fas-mediated cell death. Matrix attachment modulates Fas-mediated apoptosis at two different levels: by regulating the expression level of Fas, and by regulating the expression level of c-Flip, an endogenous antagonist of caspase-8. The extracellular signal–regulated kinase (Erk) cascade functions as a survival pathway in adherent cells by regulating c-Flip expression. We further show that detachment-induced cell death, or anoikis, itself results from activation of the Fas pathway by its ligand, Fas-L. Fas-L/Fas interaction, Fas–FADD complex formation, and caspase-8 activation precede the bulk of anoikis in endothelial cells, and inhibition of any of these events blocks anoikis. These studies identify matrix attachment as a survival factor against death receptor–mediated apoptosis and provide a molecular mechanism for anoikis and previously observed Fas resistance in endothelial cells.
Kinetic-Potential Energy Shaping for Mechanical Systems With Applications to Tracking

In this letter, we propose a new closed-loop structure for mechanical systems with dissipation, controlled via energy shaping. The structure generalizes the well-established potential energy shaping technique by introducing a kinetic-potential function which has both configuration and momentum states as arguments. As a consequence of this generalization, dissipation terms are able to be added to the configuration coordinates of the system, resulting in both exponential stability and input-to-state stability (ISS) properties of the closed-loop. The developments are applied to the tracking problem where it is shown that the scheme is ISS with respect to friction modelling error.
Hydrophilic direct bonding of monocrystalline (111) diamond substrate onto Si wafer

An OH-terminated monocrystalline (111) diamond substrate was directly bonded onto a thermally oxidized Si substrate by hydrophilic bonding. For the hydrophilic bonding of diamond, it has been an obstacle to functionalize the surface with hydroxyl group without an increase in roughness. In the present study, the (111) diamond substrate was OH-terminated using $\text{H}_{\mathbf {2}} \mathbf {SO} _{\mathbf {4}} {/\mathbf {H}} _{\mathbf {2}} \mathbf {O} _{\mathbf {2}}$ mixture at a moderate temperature, and it was bonded with a thermally oxidized Si substrate irradiated by oxygen plasma. After contacting the substrates, it was annealed at $200 ^{\circ}\mathrm {C}$ for dehydration reaction. While the edges of diamond substrate were rarely bonded, the diamond and Si substrates form direct bonding in atmospheric air without irradiation of energic particles that transforms diamond into amorphous carbon layer.
Bridging Best Traditional SWD Practices with XP to Improve the Quality of XP Projects

Software quality is the main factor for the software reliability and software performance. Extreme programming strongly argues that it improves the quality of the software through feedback from iterative software development and by practicing pair programming and test driven development. Software quality is mainly depends on non-functional requirements. In most of cases non-functional requirements are not covered in the exploration phase. Especially in XP it is difficult to address non-functional requirements on the story cards. Our objective of this paper is knowledge based support to story cards to improve story cards and other XP practices by bridging them with the design of testability to improve non-functional user requirements, and predefined the factors for software testability on story cards with acceptance tests.
Speech Translation Enhanced ASR for European Parliament Speeches - On the Influence of ASR Performance on Speech Translation

In this paper we describe our work in coupling automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) in a speech translation enhanced automatic speech recognition (STE-ASR) framework for transcribing and translating European parliament speeches. We demonstrate the influence of the quality of the ASR component on the MT performance, by comparing a series of WERs with the corresponding automatic translation scores. By porting an STE-ASR framework to the task at hand, we show how the word errors for transcribing English and Spanish speeches can be lowered by 3.0% and 4.8% relative, respectively.
Developing Ubiquitous Multi-touch Sensing and Displaying Systems with Vision-Based Finger Detection and Event Identification Techniques

This study presents efficient vision-based finger detection, tracking, and event identification techniques, as well as a low-cost hardware framework for multi-touch sensing and display applications. A fast bright-blob segmentation process based on automatic multilevel histogram thresholding is performed to extract pixels of touch blobs from the captured image sequences obtained from the scattered infrared lights by the video camera. Given the touch blobs extracted from each of the captured frames, a blob tracking and event recognition process is then conducted to analyze the spatial and temporal information of these touch blobs from consecutive frames and determine the possible touch events issued by users. This process also refines the detection results and corrects for errors and occlusions caused by noise and errors during the blob extraction processes. Our proposed blob tracking and touch event recognition process includes two phases. First, the phase of blob tracking associates the motion correspondence of blobs in succeeding frames by analyzing their spatial and temporal features. Then the phase of touch event recognition process can identify meaningful touch events activated by users from the motion information of touch blobs. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed vision-based finger detection, tracking, and event identification system is feasible and effective for multi-touch sensing applications in various operational environments and conditions.