Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Echo State Network for the Remaining Useful Life Prediction of a Turbofan Engine

Among the various data-driven approaches used for RUL prediction, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have certain prima facie advantages over other approaches because the connections between internal nodes form directed cycles, thus creating internal states which enables the network to encapsulate dynamic temporal behavior and also to properly handle the noise affecting the collected signals. However, the application of traditional RNNs is limited by the difficulty of optimizing their numerous internal parameters and the significant computational effort associated with the training process. In this work, we explore the use of the Echo State Network (ESN), a relatively new type of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). One of the main advantages of ESN is the training procedure, which is based on a simple linear regression. Unlike traditional RNNs, ESNs can be trained with fairly little computational effort, while still providing the generalization capability characteristic of RNNs. In this paper, we use Differential Evolution (DE) for the optimization of the ESN architecture for RUL prediction of a turbofan engine working under variable operating conditions. A procedure for pre-processing of the monitored signals and for identification of the onset of acceleration of degradation (i.e., the so-called elbow point in the degradation trend) will be shown. The datasets used to validate the approach have been taken from the NASA Ames Prognostics CoE Data Repository. These datasets were generated using a turbofan engine simulator, based on a detailed physical model that allows input variations of health-related parameters under variable operating conditions and records values from some specific sensor measurements. The results obtained on these data confirm the ESN’s capability to provide accurate RUL predictions.
Automatic recovery from runtime failures

We present a technique to make applications resilient to failures. This technique is intended to maintain a faulty application functional in the field while the developers work on permanent and radical fixes. We target field failures in applications built on reusable components. In particular, the technique exploits the intrinsic redundancy of those components by identifying workarounds consisting of alternative uses of the faulty components that avoid the failure. The technique is currently implemented for Java applications but makes little or no assumptions about the nature of the application, and works without interrupting the execution flow of the application and without restarting its components. We demonstrate and evaluate this technique on four mid-size applications and two popular libraries of reusable components affected by real and seeded faults. In these cases the technique is effective, maintaining the application fully functional with between 19% and 48% of the failure-causing faults, depending on the application. The experiments also show that the technique incurs an acceptable runtime overhead in all cases.
Reconciling performance and programmability in networking systems

Challenges in addressing the memory bottleneck have made it difficult to design a packet processing platform that simultaneously achieves both ease-of-programming and high performance. Today's commercial processors support two architectural mechanisms - namely, hardware multithreading and caching - to overcome the memory bottleneck. The configurations of these mechanisms (e.g., cache capacity, number of threads per processor core) are fixed at processor-design time. The relative effectiveness of these mechanisms, however, varies significantly with application, traffic, and system characteristics. Thus, programmers often struggle to achieve high performance from a processor that is not well-suited to a particular deployment. To address this challenge, we first make a case for, and then develop a malleable processor architecture that facilitates the dynamic reconfiguration of cache capacity and number of threads to best-suit the needs of each deployment. We then present an algorithm that can determine the optimal thread-cache balance at run-time. The combination of these two allows us to simultaneously achieve the goals of ease-of-programming and high performance. We demonstrate that our processor outperforms a processor similar to Intel's IXP2800 - a state-of-the-art commercial Network Processor - in about 89% of the deployments we consider. Further, in about 30% of the deployments our platform improves the throughput by as much as 300%.
The Use of Group Work to Fight Acute External Threats to a Community-Based Organization During Harsh Economic Times

This article addresses the use of group work in a community-based outpatient children's mental health agency to respond to financial threats by county and state government during the economic downturn of 2008–2009. Three specific threats that came within months of one another are discussed: (1) the threat to close down a chemical dependency treatment service for youth, (2) severe funding cuts to an outreach program for immigrant youth and their families, and (3) a state government plan to restructure/reform reimbursement for outpatient mental health services that promises to reduce access to care for underinsured families. Group work was used to organize, educate, and activate staff, board, community, and consumer groups, in large and small groups, to counter the threats and build a culture of advocacy. Lending a vision, empowering advocates, managing polarity, and shaping the advocacy message were essential elements of the advocacy process.
Massive MIMO with 1-bit ADC

We investigate massive multiple-input-multiple output (MIMO) uplink systems with 1-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) on each receiver antenna. Receivers that rely on 1-bit ADC do not need energy-consuming interfaces such as automatic gain control (AGC). This decreases both ADC building and operational costs. Our design is based on maximal ratio combining (MRC), zero-forcing (ZF), and least squares (LS) detection, taking into account the effects of the 1-bit ADC on channel estimation. Through numerical results, we show good performance of the system in terms of mutual information and symbol error rate (SER). Furthermore, we provide an analytical approach to calculate the mutual information and SER of the MRC receiver. The analytical approach reduces complexity in the sense that a symbol and channel noise vectors Monte Carlo simulation is avoided.
Family structure and home-leaving: a further specification of the relationship.

This article investigates the impact of childhood family structure on the timing of home-leaving [in the United States]. This research builds on previous work by examining the influence of a wider array of childhood living arrangements on home-leaving and by exploring the differential impact of family structure on the transitions to semiautonomy marriage and residential independence.The results.show that childhood family structure has a substantial impact on both the timing of first home-leaving and the pathway out of the parental home. For both men and women exposure to most forms of nonintact family structure increases the probability of an early transition to residential independence and decreases the likelihood of leaving to attend school. Among the nonintact family types adoption and nonparental living arrangements exert the strongest influence on home-leaving. Data are from the 1987-1988 National Survey of Families and Households. (EXCERPT)
Coordination design

Coordination design (CoorD) is about designing the coordination work. It looks for coordination patterns in work practices, identifies coordinative constructs and tries to identify structures in activities carried out It describes how to provide elements necessary to produce computer support for coordination work. Coordination design is integrated in a system design process, starts at the same time and ends before implementation. It is interdisciplinary and contains several engineering techniques like requirement analysis or modeling as well as methods from other disciplines like ethnography. It uses coordination rules to describe the temporal and logical order of tasks performed in a cooperative work setting. Coordination design is participatory, contextual, situative, object-oriented, model-driven and rule-based. It consists of several steps: contextual inquiry, task analysis, domain modeling, rule creation and deployment of coordination rules. This paper introduces coordination design and shows its methodology in detail.
Efficient Neural-based patent document segmentation with Term Order Probabilities

The internationally growing trend of patent applications puts great pressure on the agents involved in managing this kind of information and creates a demand for eﬃcient and eﬀective patent analysis methods. This work presents a computationally eﬃcient approach for patent document segmentation based on structured ANNs and a simple distributional semantics composition method. The conducted experiments indicate eﬀec-tiveness of the approach, which bene(cid:12)ts a wide array of patent processing techniques that work upon structured inputs.
Skeletal strokes

A skeletal stroke is a kind of general brush stroke for changing the shape of pictures as if by bending, shearing, twisting, while conservating the aspect ratio of selected features on the picture. It is neither a simple warping nor texture mapping technique, but a new method for controlling the deformation of a picture. A deformation model of a coordinate system has been proposed taking into account cases of discontinuous or extreme bending. Complicated pictures can be built up hierarchically by defining higher order strokes and recursive strokes. It is therefore a powerful general drawing tool and extended image transformation instrument. The use of skeletal strokes as a replacement for affine transformations in IFS coding has been explored. A novel general anchoring mechanism is proposed, which allows arbitrary control of any point in the picture. This control flexibility is particularly desirable in computer animation and digital typography. As a result, virtual ‘2-D models’ of cartoon characters as well as pseudo 3-D objects can be created and manipulated with ease.
Treatment of Handwriting Problems in Beginning Writers: Transfer from Handwriting to Composition.

Almost 700 children were screened to identify 144 1st graders at risk for handwriting problems who were randomly assigned to 1 of 6 treatment conditions. Treatment was delivered to groups of 3 that met twice a week in 20-min sessions until they completed 24 lessons. Five groups received 10 min of different kinds of handwriting instruction. The contact control group received 10 min of phonological awareness training. All 6 groups composed and shared their writing for 10 min. Converging evidence across multiple measures showed that combining numbered arrows and memory retrieval was the most effective treatment for improving both handwriting and compositional fluency (composing with time limits). Thus instruction aimed at improving transcription transfers to improved text generation in beginning writers.
Synthesis and anti-HCMV activity of novel cyclopropyl phosphonic acid nucleosides

A simple synthetic route for novel acyclic phosphonate nucleosides is described. The characteristic cyclopropyl moiety 8 was constructed employing the Simmons-Smith reaction as key step starting from simple acyclic 2-butene-1,4-diol. The condensation of the mesylate 11 with natural nucleosidic bases (A,C,T,U) under nucleophilic substitution conditions (K2CO3, 18-Crown-6, DMF) and hydrolysis afforded the target nucleosides 16, 17, 18, and 19. In addition, the antiviral evaluations against various viruses were performed.
Reading the Markets : Forecasting Prediction Markets By News Content Analysis

We present a system for predicting price fluctuations in Prediction Markets, such as TradeSports and the Iowa Electronic Markets. Our approach utilizes both market history and public news articles, published before the beginning of trading each day, to produce a set of recommended investment actions. Since there is evidence that prediction markets are very good indicators of future events, we hypothesize that the converse is true: past/present events can potentially assist in predicting future prices in these markets. We empirically show that these markets are surprisingly predictable, even by purely market-historical techniques. Furthermore, analyzing relevant news articles captures information independent of the market’s history, and combining the two methods significantly improves results. Capturing this signal from news articles requires some linguistic sophistication – the standard naïve bag-of-words approach does not yield predictive features. Instead, we use part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing and semantic role labeling to generate features that improve system accuracy. We evaluate our system on eight political markets from 2004 and show that we can make effective investment decisions based on our system’s predictions, whose profits greatly exceed those generated by a baseline system. Additionally, our market prediction system can be applied to any Prediction Market with a known end date and for which a set of relevant entities (people, places, or things) can be defined.
Direct and Activating Instruction: Evaluation of a Preservice Course

Abstract In this study, the implementation effects of a preservice course on direct and activating instruction are described. The course was conducted at 3 different teacher-education colleges in The Netherlands. On the basis of precourse and postcourse observations, the authors found a significant treatment effect for the use of direct and activating instructional skills by student teachers. The observations were conducted independently by external observers and cooperating teachers. In contrast to the successful implementation of direct and activating instructional skills, the implementation of cooperative-learning activities proved less successful. Although the course on direct and activating instruction was quite positively rated by the student teachers, less than half of them succeeded in applying cooperative-learning activities during their lessons.
Scalable Network Management with Merlin

This paper presents the Merlin network management framework. With Merlin, network administrators express functionality such as accounting, bandwidth provisioning, and traffic filtering in a high-level policy language, and use automated tools and mechanisms to implement them. The framework includes: (i) a declarative language for specifying policies, (ii) infrastructure for distributing, refining, and coordinating enforcement of policies, and (iii) a run-time monitor that inspects incoming and outgoing traffic on end hosts. We describe Merlin’s policy language and enforcement infrastructure, illustrate the use of Merlin on case studies, and present experimental results demonstrating that Merlin is more efficient and scalable than equivalent implementations based on programmable switches and centralized middleboxes. Overall, Merlin simplifies the task of network administration by providing high-level abstractions and tools for specifying and enforcing rich network policies.
Examination of Testicular Gene Expression Patterns in Yorkshire Pigs with High and Low Levels of Boar Taint

Boar taint refers to the objectionable odor and flavor in meat of some uncastrated male pigs, which is primarily due to high levels of androstenone, a steroid produced in the testis, and 3-methylindole (skatole) which is produced by bacterial degradation of tryptophan in the intestinal tract. We determined testicular gene expression patterns of Yorkshire pigs with high and low levels of boar taint using swine DNA microarrays with two-color hybridization. The microarrays contained 19486 annotated probes; the expressions of 8719 genes were detected. Fifty-three genes were significantly up-regulated in the high boar taint group and four were significantly down-regulated (p < 0.05; fold change > ±1.55). Gene ontology (GO) analysis short-listed 11 significant GO terms (p < 0.05), most of which are associated with steroid metabolism and mitochondrial components. Comparing the results of this study with published work on Duroc and Norwegian Landrace boars, 1 eleven genes (HSB17B4, FDX1, CYP11A1, DHRS4, PRDX1, CYB5, CYP17A1, FTL, IDI1, SULT2A1, and RDH12) were over-expressed in all three breeds with a high androstenone level. The current findings confirmed a number of candidate genes identified in previous functional studies and suggest several new genes differentially expressed with different levels of boar taint.
HOW LOCALITY, FREQUENCY OF COMMUNICATION AND INTERNET USAGE AFFECT MODES OF COMMUNICATION WITHIN CORE SOCIAL NETWORKS

The number of ways that people communicate with their social networks has changed dramatically in the last 50 years. Traditionally, the local community was the basis for people's social interactions; most of people's closest friends resided locally and face-to-face communication was the predominant mode of communication. Yet, today face-to-face meetings are no longer the primary way to communicate as one can use a landline telephone or any number of the computer mediated communications such as email. This paper explores the modes of communication rural individuals use most often with their three closest friends and how these modes of communication vary by three factors: (1) social tie locality, (2) frequency of communication, and (3) degree of Internet usage. Using a 2005 random sample mail survey of 1,315 residents in an isolated region of the Western United States, the results show that people actively use email to maintain core social networks, particularly when alters live at a distance. However, contradictory to previous research, the results suggest that increases in Internet usage are associated with decreases in other modes of communication, with proficiency of Internet use serving as a mediating factor in this relationship.
Very rapid mixing of the Glauber dynamics for proper colorings on bounded‐degree graphs

Recent results have shown that the Glauber dynamics for graph colorings has optimal mixing time when (i) the graph is triangle‐free and Δ‐regular and the number of colors k is a small constant fraction smaller than 2Δ, or (ii) the graph has maximum degree Δ and k=2Δ. We extend both these results to prove that the Glauber dynamics has optimal mixing time when the graph has maximum degree Δ and the number of colors is a small constant fraction smaller than 2Δ. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Random Struct. Alg. , 20, 98–114, 2002
Adapting the SERVQUAL model to a physical activity break satisfaction scale

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to create a “physical activity break” (PAB) satisfaction scale, for this, the RATER dimensions of the service quality model SERVQUAL were used. Design/methodology/approach – The study opted for a correlational study and used a psychometric approach. Totally, 69 administrative workers at a public university of Chile participated in a physical activity programme and completed a satisfaction questionnaire including sections adapted from the SERVQUAL model. Findings – The study created a PAB satisfaction scale, which shows appropriate psychometric indicators. Furthermore, satisfaction scores were positively correlated with perceived psychological and physical benefits, attendance motivation and intention to participate again in future programmes. Research limitations/implications – Because measures perceived psychological and physical benefits, attendance motivation and intention to participate again in future programmes are measured by single items, futures studies shou.
PROJECTIVE PROCESSING SCHEDULES IN QUEUEING STRUCTURES ; Applications to Packet Scheduling in Communication Network Switches

We consider a processing system having several queues, where Xq is the workload in queue q. At any point in time, the system can be set to one of several service configurations, which form a set S. When the system is set to service configuration/vector S ∈ S, queueq receives service at rate Sq. It has been known [1, 2, 3] that – under very general traffic traces – the schedule, which chooses the service vector S maximizing the inner product 〈S,AX〉 = q SqαqXq when the workload vector is X, provides the highest possible throughput under any fixed diagonalmatrixA = diag{αq} with positiveentries. That is, it stabilizes the system under the maximum possible traffic load, for very general traffic traces. In this paper, the above result is substantially extended. It is shown that throughput maximization is achieved by any schedule, which chooses a service vector S ∈ S that maximizes the inner product 〈S,BX〉 = ∑
Discourse description : diverse linguistic analyses of a fund-raising text

This text presents a variety of approaches to text description that have been proposed in the linguistic literature in the last decade or so. The book is organized to make it easy to understand and compare the various approaches. Since all the researchers are analyzing the same text their differences are readily seen. The text they analyze is a letter, mailed in bulk by a Washington-based lobbying organization which is supported by contributions from donors. Far from simply informing the readers, the letter seeks to appeal to them on many levels, intellectual, emotional and financial.
Activity of Thalidomide and Lenalidomide in Mantle Cell Lymphoma

Thalidomide and lenalidomide are immunomodulatory drugs that show promise in mantle cell lymphoma (MCL). In this study, their potential mechanisms of action against MCL cells were investigated, both alone and in combination with rituximab. Thalidomide, lenalidomide and rituximab have no direct effect on MCL cell viability. However, both immunomodulatory drugs indirectly affect viability by enhancing peripheral blood mononuclear cell-mediated cytotoxicity, with lenalidomide inducing significantly higher levels of toxicity than thalidomide. Rituximab induces both complement-dependent and antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC) against MCL cells. Rituximab-induced ADCC is enhanced by lenalidomide and, to a lesser extent, thalidomide. Preliminary in vivo findings in MCL patients treated with thalidomide support a role for natural killer cells in the efficacy of these drugs. In conclusion, our data support a role for immunomodulatory drugs in the treatment of MCL.