Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rapport de stage Evolutions du système de réplication de bases de données GlobeTP

La majeure partie de ce rapport a été rédigée en anglais, d’une part car Paolo Costa n’est pas francophone et d’autre part car mes encadrants aimeraient en tirer une publication. Mon stage s’est déroulé du 15 mars au 15 août à la Vrije Universiteit d’Amsterdam, aux Pays-bas dans l’équipe de computer system. Celle-ci travaille sur divers sujets tels que les systèmes distribués, la programmation parallèle, des applications avancées de l’Internet. Cette équipe, dirigée par le professeur Andrew Tanenbaum, est composée d’une dizaine de professeurs ou assistants professeurs, d’une vingtaine de doctorants et de quelques post-doctorants. Je travaillais plus précisément avec Guillaume Pierre et Paolo Costa, qui étudient les méthodes d’hébergement de sites webs. Leurs travaux de recherches portent sur les techniques de cache et de réplication afin d’obtenir des serveurs webs (ou plus précisément l’ensemble constitué des serveurs traitant les requêtes http, les serveurs d’application et les serveurs de bases de données) capables de répondre plus rapidement à plus de clients simultanément. Mon travail se fondait sur les recherches précédentes de G. Pierre et son équipe sur la réplication de bases de données. L’objectif est de faire fonctionner plusieurs serveurs de bases de données ensemble dans le but d’une part de répartir la charge de calcul entre les machines, et donc en supporter une plus importante, et d’autre part apporter une tolérance aux défaillances d’une ou plusieurs machines. Nous nous sommes focalisés sur les performances du système, et dans cette optique la réplication pose certains problèmes. Pour maintenir les différents serveurs dans le même état, chaque écriture doit être traitée par tous les serveurs. Chaque lecture peut être traitée par un seul serveur. Seulement, quand le nombre de serveurs augmente, la proportion de requêtes en écriture reçues par un serveur particulier augmente (par exemple, pour 5 serveurs, chacun reçoit environ un cinquième des lectures, mais toutes les écritures). A partir d’un certain nombre de clients, les écritures seules suffisent à surcharger les serveurs, et en ajouter n’apporte rien. Il faut donc pouvoir répartir les écritures entre les serveurs, et une solution est de ne pas dupliquer toute la base sur chaque serveur. Ainsi, chaque serveur ne reçoit que la
Model-Based Self-Adaptive Embedded Programs with Temporal Logic Specifications

We propose a model-based framework for developing a self-adaptive embedded program, which monitors its own execution and reconfigures itself at runtime to avoid failure and improve performance. Our approach uses formal methods at different design stages to reduce the complexity of developing a self-adaptive embedded program. In our framework system requirement is rigidly encoded in temporal logics, and the original embedded system behavior is captured in a hybrid automaton-based model. We introduce the reconfiguration specification language REDL to specify reconfiguration requirements, and define a formal semantics of reconfiguration in context of hybrid automaton. Using formal methods also helps automate design and implementation: we use model-based runtime verification techniques introduced by Tan et al. (2001) to extend a system model to a self-monitoring model based on its temporal logic requirements; we then extend the self-monitoring model with a reconfiguration mechanism based on its REDL specification. Our approach works with models, and hence it may be incorporated into existing model-based design workflow: the resulting self-adaptive model can be analyzed using an existing model simulator and may be used to generate a self-adaptive embedded program for targeted platform
A Spectroscopic Approach to Investigate the Molecular Interactions between the Newly Approved Irreversible ErbB blocker "Afatinib" and Bovine Serum Albumin

The interaction of afatinib (AFB) with bovine serum albumin (BSA) was examined via fluorescence and UV-Vis spectroscopy. Spectrofluorimetric measurements revealed that AFB can strongly quench the BSA intrinsic fluorescence through producing a non-fluorescent complex. This quenching mechanism was thoroughly investigated with regard to the type of quenching, binding constant, number of binding locations and the fundamental thermodynamic parameters. Subsequently, the association constant of AFB with BSA was computed at three different temperatures and was found to range from 7.34 to 13.19 x105 L mol-1. Thermodynamic parameters calculations demonstrated a positive ΔSƟvalue with both negative ΔHϴand ΔGϴvalues for AFB–BSA complex, which in turn infers thata spontaneous binding is taking place with both electrostatic bonding and hydrophobic interactions participating in the binding of AFB and BSA. Similarly, the UV absorption spectra of AFB-BSA system were studied and confirmed the interaction. Conformational alteration of the protein upon binding to AFB was elaborated with the aid of three dimensional fluorescence measurements as well as synchronous fluorescence spectra.
Multiple Search Centers Based Fast Motion Estimation Algorithm for H.264/AVC

Motion estimation is the most computationally intensive part in a typical video encoder. This paper introduces a novel prediction method based on multiple search centers, which can efficiently improve the prediction accuracy. According to the amount and the magnitude of predictive search centers, the search range is dynamically adjusted in order to reduce the computational complexity. Based on multiple search centers prediction and dynamic search range adjustment, a new fast algorithm is proposed. Experimental results show that, on an average, the proposed algorithm gains similar rate-distortion performance to the original FFS, UMHexagonS and EPZS algorithms in H.264 reference software, while reducing about 97.4%, 63.0%, and 42.9% computational complexity respectively.
How are students on the autism spectrum affected by bullying? Perspectives of students and parents

Previous research has focused on the prevalence of bullying of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with little attention given to its emotional effect. This mixed methods study examined levels of worry about bullying and bullying experiences reported by students and parents. To determine whether some students with ASD are differentially affected, we explored associations between students’ characteristics (understanding of bullying, age and co-morbid conditions) and their bullying experiences and worries. Surveys exploring bullying experiences and levels of worry about bullying were completed by 89 students with ASD without intellectual disability aged 11–16 years and their parents. We also qualitatively explored parents’ perceptions of how bullying affects their children, through semi-structured interviews of nine parents. Students with comorbid anxiety disorders were more likely to report face-to-face victimization and were more troubled by both face-to-face bullying and cyberbullying, while students with depression were more likely to report cyber victimization. Parental concerns included the impact of victimization on school attendance, self-esteem, mental health, social participation, academic performance, and behaviour. The significantly higher levels of worry about bullying and higher victimization rates reported by students with internalizing symptoms suggest that these students may be disproportionately at risk of psychological harm.
AN ADAPTIVE APPROACH TOWARDS CONTENT-BASED IMAGE RETRIEVAL

We propose and evaluate an adaptive approach towards content-based image retrieval (CBIR), which is based on the Ostensive Model of developing information needs. We use ostensive relevance to capture the user’s current need and tailor the retrieval accordingly. Our approach supports content-assisted browsing, by incorporating an adaptive query learning scheme based on implicit user feedback. Textual and colour features are employed to characterise images, which are combined using the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence combination. Results from a user-centred, task-oriented evaluation show that the ostensive interface is preferred over a traditional interface with manual query facilities. Its strengths lie in its ability to adapt to the user’s need, and its very intuitive and ﬂuid way of operation.
A Window on Shared Virtual Environments

This paper presents the architecture of a multiuser distributed virtual environment (VE) software system currently used in the Virtual Perception Laboratory at the SRI International. It shows how the Linda parallel language helped in the realization of that system. An unusual interface used to fly through this shared VE is also presented: a hand-held display (HHD).
Clostridium difficile Toxins Disrupt Epithelial Barrier Function by Altering Membrane Microdomain Localization of Tight Junction Proteins

ABSTRACT The anaerobic bacterium Clostridium difficile is the etiologic agent of pseudomembranous colitis. C. difficiletoxins TcdA and TcdB are UDP-glucosyltransferases that monoglucosylate and thereby inactivate the Rho family of GTPases (W. P. Ciesla, Jr., and D. A. Bobak, J. Biol. Chem. 273:16021–16026, 1998). We utilized purified reference toxins of C. difficile, TcdA-10463 (TcdA) and TcdB-10463 (TcdB), and a model intestinal epithelial cell line to characterize their influence on tight-junction (TJ) organization and hence to analyze the mechanisms by which they contribute to the enhanced paracellular permeability and disease pathophysiology of pseudomembranous colitis. The increase in paracellular permeability induced by TcdA and TcdB was associated with disorganization of apical and basal F-actin. F-actin restructuring was paralleled by dissociation of occludin, ZO-1, and ZO-2 from the lateral TJ membrane without influencing the subjacent adherens junction protein, E-cadherin. In addition, we observed decreased association of actin with the TJ cytoplasmic plaque protein ZO-1. Differential detergent extraction and fractionation in sucrose density gradients revealed TcdB-induced redistribution of occludin and ZO-1 from detergent-insoluble fractions constituting “raft-like” membrane microdomains, suggesting an important role of Rho proteins in maintaining the association of TJ proteins with such microdomains. These toxin-mediated effects on actin and TJ structure provide a mechanism for early events in the pathophysiology of pseudomembranous colitis.
Bird Diversity and Distribution in relation to Urban Landscape Types in Northern Rwanda

Using the point count method, linear mixed models, Shannon's diversity index, and Bray-Curtis cluster analysis, we conducted a study of the effect of urban fabric layout on bird diversity and distribution in northern Rwanda. The results showed a significant effect of city landscapes on bird richness and relative abundance; residential neighborhoods, institutional grounds, and informal settlements had the highest species diversity in comparison to other microlandscape types. Riversides were characterized by specialized bird species, commonly known to be restricted to wetland environments. Built-up areas and open field landscapes had comparable results. One Albertine Rift endemic bird species, the Ruwenzori Double-collared Sunbird (Cinnyris stuhlmanni), was recorded. Three migratory birds were found in Musanze city for the first time: the Common Sandpiper (Actitis hypoleucos), the Spotted Flycatcher (Muscicapa striata), and the Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus). Two bird species have not been previously reported in Rwanda: the Garden Warbler (Sylvia borin) and the Lesser Spotted Eagle (Aquila pomarina). The implications of this study are particularly relevant to urban decision makers who should consider the existence of a great diversity of avian fauna when developing and implementing master plans, especially when villages and cities are in proximity of protected areas or natural reserves.
A probabilistic approach for discovering authoritative Web pages

The World Wide Web (WWW) is becoming the most important system for delivering information. Search services on the WWW are becoming increasing popular among users because of the huge amount of data available and consequently it is difficult to retrieve and filter it. Several works have argued that traditional term-based search engines are not very useful since the resulting ranking depends on the precision of the user in expressing the query. However, usually, users are unclear about the information they need and so they do not give much thought to query formulation. Moreover, if the query pertains to topics which are abundant on the Web, search services become unusable because of the huge number of pages obtained. For instance, at the time of this work, AltaVista returned more than 18,000,000 pages in reply to the query asking for the documents related to the word "java".
Face detection based on skin color model and connected component with template matching

Face detection has been the most important phase in identifying facial expressions. To detect a face has been more difficult and since then more methods have been evolving to simplify the task. One such method is to first segment the image based on the skin area and then to detect the face. The approach of this paper is to segment facial region based on L*a*b color model, apply some efficient parameters to detect the skin area of a face, apply morphological operations and draw bounding box using connected component to detect the face and match it with the face template to register the region as face. The experiments observed that the skin color model based approach for face detection has an accuracy of 92% and face registration using template matching has an accuracy of 98%.
Finding the Source of Type Errors Interactively (draft)

1 Introduction All modern functional languages use variants of the Hindley/Milner type system. This system is quite exible since it allows values to have more than one type, and it is convenient because types can be derived automatically, making explicit type declarations unnecessary. Most trivial programming errors cause the type-deriver to emit error messages, which are usually easy to understand. However, the code where an inconsistency is detected is sometimes not the code that caused the error. When the type-deriver reports an inconsistency at the wrong place, most programmers use cumbersome trial-and-error to nd their mistake: either they give types to expressions manually and recompile until the type-deriver disagrees, or else they remove large parts of the program and recompile until the error disappears. Can we improve this situation? We could try to make the type-deriver better at pinpointing the real error, but we should not expect full success, since the location of a type error is subjective and depends on the programmer's intentions. This paper gives the outline of a type-deriver that can explain its reasoning in response to questions. First, we should be able to point at a subexpression and ask what type it has; such an interface has been implemented by Jan Sparud at Chalmers [6]. Second, we should be able to ask why a certain type has been derived; such a type-deriver has been implemented by Mitchell Wand [7]. When an error is detected, Wand's type-deriver suggests a number of possible error sites. One of these should be the subjective error, but sometimes too many possibilities are given. Therefore, I will propose an interactive way to access the information provided by Wand's type-deriver. Warning: The paper describes work that has hardly begun. I have not implemented anything, and realistic hand-simulations are dicult. But I do think an interactive interface is important: the type-deriver knows the type of every subexpression and how they were derived, but since it does not know the programmer's intentions and mistaken beliefs, it cannot decide by itself how much to tell. And if it tells all it knows at once, the programmer will be swamped.
Research on modular multilevel converter based STATCOM

A new modular multilevel converter (MMC) based static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) is proposed and hereafter called M-STATCOM. The new shunt compensator, features with the characteristics such as high modularity, availability, low generation of harmonics, etc., is well suitable for medium- or high-voltage utility grid without line-frequency transformers. M-STATCOM can not only be controlled in static var generating condition for reactive power compensation purpose, but also be suitable for the comprehensive mitigation of all the power quality problems under the three-phase unbalanced power systems. The structural characteristics and operating principles of M-STATCOM for both static var generating condition and comprehensive compensating condition are analyzed in detail. Moreover, two corresponding control schemes were proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy and feasibility of analysis is validated by the simulation results.
Building an Indonesian rule-based part-of-speech tagger

This paper describes work on a part-of-speech tagger for the Indonesian language by employing a rule-based approach. The system tokenizes documents while also considering multi-word expressions and recognizes named entities. It then applies tags to every token, starting from closed-class words to open-class words and disambiguates the tags based on a set of manually defined rules. The system currently obtains an accuracy of 79% on a manually tagged corpus of roughly 250.000 tokens.
Diseño y validación de un instrumento para medir actitudes machistas, violencia y estereotipos en adolescentes

espanolObjetivo: diseno y validacion psicometrica de un instrumento para evaluar las actitudes machistas, violencia y estereotipos en adolescentes. Metodo: a partir de las consideraciones teoricas se construyo un banco de items preliminares que fue sometido a la consideracion de un panel de expertos, para garantizar la validez de contenido. El cuestionario formado por los 26 items se administro a una muestra de estudiantes de Educacion Secundaria, junto con instrumentos que permitian medir: doble moral, bienestar subjetivo, autoestima y resiliencia. Para medir la consistencia interna (fiabilidad) de la escala se utilizo el coeficiente alfa de Cronbach. La validez de constructo se evaluo mediante un analisis factorial exploratorio. La tabulacion y analisis de los datos se realizo con el programa SPSS 21.0. Resultados: la muestra estuvo formada por 283 estudiantes (174 mujeres y 109 hombres), con una media de edad (DE) de 16,68 (0,85). La escala definitiva, EVAMVE, formada por 20 items, presento un coeficiente alfa de Cronbach de 0,878 (IC95% 0,860-0,895) y correlaciones positivas y significativas (p Conclusiones: la escala presenta propiedades satisfactorias de fiabilidad y validez, que permite su uso en la identificacion de actitudes machistas, violentas y estereotipos en la poblacion adolescente, y la diferenciacion de los diferentes componentes del fenomeno. Se considera que este instrumento puede ser util en la evaluacion de actividades orientadas a la prevencion de la violencia de genero en dicha poblacion. Palabras clave EnglishObjective: the design and psychometric validation of a tool to evaluate sexist attitudes, violence and stereotypes among adolescents. Method: based on theoretical considerations, a preliminary bank of items was built and then submitted to a panel of experts for consideration, in order to guarantee the validity of its contents. The questionnaire including these 26 items was administered to a sample of High School students, together with tools that allowed to measure: double standards, subjective wellbeing, self-esteem and resilience. Cronbach’s Alpha Coefficient was used in order to measure the internal consistency (reliability) of the scale. Construct validity was evaluated through exploratory factor analysis. Tabulation and data analysis was conducted with the SPSS 21.0 program. Results: the sample included 283 students (174 women and 109 men), with 16.68 (0.85) as mean age (SD). The final 20-item scale, EVAMVE, presented a Cronbach’s Alpha Coefficient of 0.878 (CI 95% 0,860-0,895) and positive and significant correlations (p Conclusions: the scale presents satisfactory features of reliability and validity, allowing its use for detecting sexist and violent attitudes and stereotypes among the adolescent population, as well as the differentiation of their different components. It is considered that this tool might be useful for assessing activities targeted to prevention of gender violence in said population.
CARS: the CFHTLS-Archive-Research Survey. I. Five-band multi-colour data from 37 sq. deg. CFHTLS-wid

Context. We present the CFHTLS-Archive-Research Survey (CARS). It is a virtual multi-colour survey that is based on public archive images from the Deep and Wide components of the CFHT-Legacy-Survey (CFHTLS). Our main scientific interests in the CFHTLS Wide-part of CARS are optical searches for galaxy clusters from low to high redshift and their subsequent study with photometric and weak-gravitational lensing techniques. Aims. As a first step in the CARS project, we present multi-colour catalogues from 37 sq. degrees of the CFHTLS-Wide component. Our aims are first to create astrometrically and photometrically well-calibrated co-added images from publicly available CFHTLS data. Second, we offer five-band ($u^*g'r'i'z'$) multi-band catalogues with an emphasis on reliable estimates for object colours. These are subsequently used for photometric redshift estimates. Methods. We consider all those CFHTLS-Wide survey pointings that were publicly available on January 2008 and that also have five-band coverage in $u^*g'r'i'z'$. The data were calibrated and processed with our GaBoDS/THELI image processing pipeline. The quality of the resulting images was thoroughly checked against the Sloan-Digital-Sky Survey (SDSS) and already public high-end CFHTLS data products. From the co-added images we extracted source catalogues and determined photometric redshifts using the public code Bayesian Photometric Redshifts (BPZ). Fifteen of our survey fields directly overlap with public spectra from the VIMOS VLT deep (VVDS), DEEP2 and SDSS redshift surveys, which we used for calibration and verification of our redshift estimates. Furthermore we applied a novel technique, based on studies of the angular galaxy cross-correlation function, to quantify the reliability of photo- z 's. Results. With this paper we present 37 sq. degrees of homogeneous and high-quality five-colour photometric data from the CFHTLS-Wide survey. The median seeing of our data is better than $0\farcs 9$ in all bands and our catalogues reach a $5\sigma$ limiting magnitude of about $i'_{\rm AB}\approx$ 24.5. Comparisons with the SDSS indicate that most of our survey fields are photometrically calibrated to an accuracy of 0.04 mag or better. This allows us to derive photometric redshifts of homogeneous quality over the whole survey area. The accuracy of our high-confidence photo- z sample (10-15 galaxies per sq. arcmin) is estimated with external spectroscopic data to $\sigma_{\Delta_z/(1+z)}\approx$ 0.04-0.05 up to $i'_{\rm AB}$ < 24 with typically only 1-3% outliers. In the spirit of the Legacy Survey we make our catalogues available to the astronomical community. Our products consist of multi-colour catalogues and supplementary information, such as image masks and JPEG files to visually inspect our catalogues. Interested users can obtain the data by request to the authors.