Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
(Re)framing Big Data: Activating Situated Knowledges and a Feminist Ethics of Care in Social Media Research

In this article, we seek to problematize assumptions and trends in “big data” digital methods and research through an intersectional feminist lens. This is articulated through a commitment to understand how a feminist ethics of care and Donna Haraway’s ideas about “situated knowledge” could work methodologically for social media research. Taking up current debates within feminist materialism and digital data, including big, small, thick, and “lively” data, the argument addresses how a set of coherent feminist methods and a corollary epistemology is being rethought in the field today. We consider how the “queering” of Hannah Arendt’s concept of “action” could contribute to a critically optimistic and inclusive reflection on the role of ethical political commitments to the subjects/objects of study imbricated in big data. Finally, we use our recent research to pose a number of practical questions about practices of care in social media research, pointing toward future research directions.
Computing the 2-blocks of directed graphs

Let $G$ be a directed graph. A \textit{$2$-directed block} in $G$ is a maximal vertex set $C^{2d}\subseteq V$ with $|C^{2d}|\geq 2$ such that for each pair of distinct vertices $x,y \in C^{2d}$, there exist two vertex-disjoint paths from $x$ to $y$ and two vertex-disjoint paths from $y$ to $x$ in $G$. In contrast to the $2$-vertex-connected components of $G$, the subgraphs induced by the $2$-directed blocks may consist of few or no edges. In this paper we present two algorithms for computing the $2$-directed blocks of $G$ in $O(\min\lbrace m,(t_{sap}+t_{sb})n\rbrace n)$ time, where $t_{sap}$ is the number of the strong articulation points of $G$ and $t_{sb}$ is the number of the strong bridges of $G$. Furthermore, we study two related concepts: the $2$-strong blocks and the $2$-edge blocks of $G$. We give two algorithms for computing the $2$-strong blocks of $G$ in $O( \min \lbrace m,t_{sap} n\rbrace n)$ time and we show that the $2$-edge blocks of $G$ can be computed in $O(\min \lbrace m, t_{sb} n \rbrace n)$ time. In this paper we also study some optimization problems related to the strong articulation points and the $2$-blocks of a directed graph. Given a strongly connected graph $G=(V,E)$, find a minimum cardinality set $E^{*}\subseteq E$ such that $G^{*}=(V,E^{*})$ is strongly connected and the strong articulation points of $G$ coincide with the strong articulation points of $G^{*}$. This problem is called minimum strongly connected spanning subgraph with the same strong articulation points. We show that there is a linear time $17/3$ approximation algorithm for this NP-hard problem. We also consider the problem of finding a minimum strongly connected spanning subgraph with the same $2$-blocks in a strongly connected graph $G$. We present approximation algorithms for three versions of this problem, depending on the type of $2$-blocks.
Steps to Ethnography : A Discussion of Inter-Disciplinary Contributions By

In this paper recent research involving inter-disciplinary ethnography is presented as an exploration of its contribution to studies of people and technology in the workplace. Three main patterns of interaction between ethnography and “the others” are examined. First, the influence of ethnography in promoting people-oriented perspectives of technology is discussed with reference to workplace studies in manufacturing. Second, ethnography contribution to the development of hybrid methods for the design and implementation of technology for use in the workplace is illustrated by several examples of such frameworks. Third, the influence of ethnographic research to providing a theoretical basis for computer-mediated communication is explored and documented by analyses of design teams working together as part of construction projects. From a practical point of view, this exploration has resulted in a brief discussion of the broad range of “users” in the real-life workplace who benefit from ethnographic research. Future work in this area will rely on a reflexive stance on the part of the ethnographer in relation to both users of technology and users of ethnography.
Multilingual Voice Creation Toolkit for the MARY TTS Platform

This paper describes an open source voice creation toolkit that supports the creation of unit selection and HMM-based voices, for the MARY (Modular Architecture for Research on speech Synthesis) TTS platform. We aim to provide the tools and generic reusable run-time system modules so that people interested in supporting a new language and creating new voices for MARY TTS can do so. The toolkit has been successfully applied to the creation of British English, Turkish, Telugu and Mandarin Chinese language components and voices. These languages are now supported by MARY TTS as well as German and US English. The toolkit can be easily employed to create voices in the languages already supported by MARY TTS. The voice creation toolkit is mainly intended to be used by research groups on speech technology throughout the world, notably those who do not have their own pre-existing technology yet. We try to provide them with a reusable technology that lowers the entrance barrier for them, making it easier to get started. The toolkit is developed in Java and includes intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI) for most of the common tasks in the creation of a synthetic voice.
Paging for Multicore (CMP) Caches

In the last few years, multicore processors have become the dominant processor architecture. While cache eviction policies have been widely studied both in theory and practice for sequential processors, in the case in which various simultaneous processes use a shared cache the performance of even the most common eviction policies is not yet fully understood, nor do we know if current best strategies in practice are optimal. In particular, there is almost no theoretical backing for the use of current eviction policies in multicore processors. Recently, a work by Hassidim [14] initiated the theoretical study of cache eviction policies for multicore processors under the traditional competitive analysis, showing that LRU is not competitive against an offline policy that has the power of arbitrarily delaying requests sequences to its advantage. In this paper we study caching under the more conservative model in which requests must be served as they arrive. We perform a thorough all-to-all comparison of strategies providing lower and upper bounds for the ratios between performances. We show that if the cache is partitioned, the partition policy has a greater influence on performance than the eviction policy. On the other hand, we show that sharing the cache among cores is in general better than partitioning the cache, unless the partition is dynamic and changes frequently, in which case shared cache strategies and dynamic partitions are essentially equivalent when serving disjoint requests. ∗David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Ave. W. , N2L 3G1, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, e-mail: {alopez-o,ajsalinger}@uwaterloo.ca.
Audio Beat Tracking Algorithm for MIREX 2006

This paper describes an audio beat tracking algorithm submitted to the MIREX 2006 contest. The algorithm has been described in detail in the article “Analysis of the Meter of Acoustic Musical Signals” published in IEEE Trans. Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 14(1), 2006. In summary, the method analyses musical meter jointly at three time scales, of which only the beat (tactus) level is used in this MIREX task.
Localization of the site of origin of cardiac activation by means of a heart-model-based electrocardiographic imaging approach

The authors have developed a new approach to solve the inverse problem of electrocardiography in terms of heart model parameters. The inverse solution of the electrocardiogram (ECG) inverse problem is defined, in the present study, as the parameters of the heart model, which are closely related to the physiological and pathophysiological status of the heart, and is estimated by using an optimization system of heart model parameters, instead of solving the matrix equation relating the body surface ECGs and equivalent cardiac sources. An artificial neural network based preliminary diagnosis system has been developed to limit the searching space of the optimization algorithm and to initialize the model parameters in the computer heart model. The optimal heart model parameters were obtained by minimizing the objective functions, as functions of the observed and model-generated body surface ECGs. The authors have tested the feasibility of the newly developed technique in localizing the site of origin of cardiac activation using a pace mapping protocol. The present computer simulation results show that, the present approach for localization of the site of origin of ventricular activation achieved an averaged localization error of about 3 mm [for 5-/spl mu/V Gaussian white noise (GWN)] and 4 mm (for 10-/spl mu/V GWN), with standard deviation of the localization errors of being about 1.5 mm. The present simulation study suggests that this newly developed approach provides a robust inverse solution, circumventing the difficulties of the ECG inverse problem, and may become an important alternative to other ECG inverse solutions.
PD64-06 COMPARISON OF PERFORMANCE OF PI-RADSV2 AND A QUANTITIATIVE PI-RADSV1 BASED PROTOCOL IN 3T MULTIPARAMETRIC MRI FOR DETECTION, GRADING AND STAGING OF PROSTATE CANCER USING WHOLE MOUNT HISTOPATHOLOGY AS REFERENCE STANDARD IN 569 PATIENTS.

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES: To investigate the performance of PI-RADSv2 & a quantitative PI-RADSv1 based scoring system in 3T multiparametric-MRI (3TmpMRI) for prostate cancer (PCa) detection, grading & staging with whole-mount histopathology (WMHP) correlation. METHODS: This HIPAA-compliant, IRB-approved retrospective study, included 569 men with PCa, who underwent 3TmpMRI prior to prostatectomy, 12/2009-10/2017. The performance of a quantitative PI-RADSv1 based protocol (method 1) was compared to PIRADSv2 (method 2), evaluating sensitivity, PPV, grading & staging. In method 1, lesions were assigned an assessment grade based on the formula (T2WI+ 2*ADC + DCE âˆ’ 0.25*transition zone (TZ))/4, where T2WI, ADC, & DCE were 1â&OV0556;“5 assessment, & TZ was the binary assessment of TZ (1 if the lesion was in TZ and 0 if not). Method 2 was the standard protocol for PIRADSv2. For both methods, score 3 was considered as low suspicion & scores 4 & 5 were considered as high suspicion for PCa. All 3TmpMRI & histopathology lesions were included and evaluated using STATAv12. RESULTS: 1353 PCa lesions in 569 patients were included in the study. Methods 1 and 2 had similar sensitivity (44.3% vs 45%) and PPV (81.2% and 81.5%), respectively. The AUROC for PCa grading (Gleason score 6 vs >6) for methods 1 was slightly but non-significantly higher than method 2 (0.67 vs 0.64)(roccomp command, p = 0.25). However, both methods showed similar AUROC for PCa staging (<T3 vs â‰¥T3)(0.57 vs 0.57)(roccomp command, p = 0.84). CONCLUSIONS: In this study the quantitative PI-RADSv1 and qualitative PI-RADSv2 based methods had similar performance for PCa detection, grading and staging. Source of Funding: This work was supported by funds from the Integrated Diagnostics Program, Department of Radiological Sciences & Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Table. No title available.
Decoding Algorithms and Error Probability Bounds for Convolutional Codes EE 229 B-Error Control Coding Project

Error control codes are a way of combatting uncertainty in the transmission of information from one point to another. Information theory shows the existence of codes that allow for arbitrarily reliable communication when the rate of transmission is less than the channel capacity. However, it doesn’t provide schemes that are practical to achieve this. Error control coding strives to find codes that provide for good performance in terms of error probability, but also low complexity in encoding and decoding. The first major class of codes designed for this purpose was linear block codes, having been invented in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Linear block codes take a fixed number, k, of input symbols and encode them into a larger, fixed number, n, of output symbols in some linear fashion. Some of the major classes of linear block codes we have discussed in class are Hamming codes, Reed-Muller codes, BCH codes and Reed-Solomon codes. Each of these codes introduces redundancy into a sequence of input symbols in a controlled manner to improve the resistance of the transmitted codewords to noise. However, each block has no dependence on other blocks. Convolutional codes were first introduced in the mid-1950’s as an alternative to block codes. At each time step, a convolutional code takes k input symbols and encodes them into n output symbols. However, we allow for each block to depend on other blocks of k inputs in a manner that can be implemented as a finite state machine. We will assume that each block is allowed to depend only on previous blocks of inputs, and not future blocks of inputs. The use of memory in convolutional codes makes the code structure more complicated than a block code and increases complexity in the encoder by the use of shift registers storing previous inputs, but the additional structure has advantages in decoding. A convolutional code can be represented by a trellis. The trellis describes the codewords of the code as paths through a directed graph. If we weight the edges of this trellis with log-likelihoods, then maximum-likelihood decoding can
Persistent and Transient Replication of Full-Length Hepatitis C Virus Genomes in Cell Culture

ABSTRACT The recently developed subgenomic hepatitis C virus (HCV) replicons were limited by the fact that the sequence encoding the structural proteins was missing. Therefore, important information about a possible influence of these proteins on replication and pathogenesis and about the mechanism of virus formation could not be obtained. Taking advantage of three cell culture-adaptive mutations that enhance RNA replication synergistically, we generated selectable full-length HCV genomes that amplify to high levels in the human hepatoma cell line Huh-7 and can be stably propagated for more than 6 months. The structural proteins are efficiently expressed, with the viral glycoproteins E1 and E2 forming heterodimers which are stable under nondenaturing conditions. No disulfide-linked glycoprotein aggregates were observed, suggesting that the envelope proteins fold productively. Electron microscopy studies indicate that cell lines harboring these full-length HCV RNAs contain lipid droplets. The majority of the core protein was found on the surfaces of these structures, whereas the glycoproteins appear to localize to the endoplasmic reticulum and cis-Golgi compartments. In agreement with this distribution, no endoglycosidase H-resistant forms of these proteins were detectable. In a search for the production of viral particles, we noticed that these cells release substantial amounts of nuclease-resistant HCV RNA-containing structures with a buoyant density of 1.04 to 1.1 g/ml in iodixanol gradients. The same observation was made in transient-replication assays using an authentic highly adapted full-length HCV genome that lacks heterologous sequences. However, the fact that comparable amounts of such RNA-containing structures were found in the supernatant of cells carrying subgenomic replicons demonstrates a nonspecific release independent of the presence of the structural proteins. These results suggest that Huh-7 cells lack host cell factors that are important for virus particle assembly and/or release.
Stable Route Selection for Interdomain Traffic Engineering

We investigate a general model of route selection for interdomain traffic engineering where the routing of multiple destinations can be coordinated. We identify potential instability and inefficiency problems, derive practical guidelines to guarantee stability without global coordination, and evaluate routing instability of interdomain traffic engineering using realistic Internet topology. We further extend our model so that the local preference of an AS can depend on not only its routes to the destinations but also its ingress traffic patterns.
On the Expressiveness of the Choice Quantiier

We deene process algebras with a generalised operation P for choice. For every innnite cardinal , we prove that the algebra of transition trees with branching degree < is free in the class of process algebras in which P is deened for all subsets with a cardinality <. We explain how the expressions of a fragment of the speciication language CRL may be used to denote elements of our process algebras. In particular, we explain how choice quantiiers may be used to denote innnite sums. We show that choice quantiiers can simulate both the existential and the universal quantiiers of rst-order logic, while the input preex mechanism can only simulate the universal quantiier.
Incorporating emergency alarms in reliable wireless process control

Recent years have witnessed adoption of wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs) in process control. Many real-world process control systems must handle various emergency alarms under stringent timing constraints in addition to regular control loops. However, despite considerable theoretical results on wireless control, the problem of incorporating emergency alarms in wireless control has received little attention. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first systematic approach to incorporate emergency alarms into wireless process control. The challenge in emergency communication lies in the fact that emergencies occur occasionally, but must be delivered within their deadlines when they occur. The contributions of this work are three-fold: (1) we propose efficient real-time emergency communication protocols based on slot stealing and event-based communication; (2) we build an open-source WirelessHART protocol stack in the Wireless Cyber-Physical Simulator (WCPS) for holistic simulations of wireless control systems; (3) we conduct systematic studies on a coupled water tank system controlled over a 6-hop 21-node WSAN. Our results demonstrate our real-time emergency communication approach enables timely emergency handling, while allowing regular feedback control loops to effectively share resources in WSANs during normal operations.
A New Semi-supervised Method for Lip Contour Detection

Lip contour detection is regarded as an essential issue in many applications such as personal identification, facial expressions classification, and man-machine interaction. Moreover, semi-supervised learning is utilized to automatically exploit unlabeled data in addition to labeled data to improve the performance of certain machine learning approaches. In this paper, three contour preprocessing approaches for eliminate lip image noise, i.e., Average filtering, Bilateral filtering, and Edge preserving smoothing techniques are compared. Furthermore, a hybrid approach combing level set theory and semi-supervised Fisher transformation for lip contour detection is proposed. Experiment results show that the proposed semi-supervised strategy for lip contour detection is effective.
Optimization of crude oil blending with neural networks

Crude oil blending is an important unit in petroleum refining industry. Most of blend automation system is a real-time optimizer (RTO). RTO is a model-based optimization approach that uses current process information to update the model and predict the optimal operating policy. But in many oil fields, people hope to make decisions and conduct supervision control based on the history data, i.e., they want to know the optimal inlet flow rates without online analyzers. To overcome the drawback of the conventional RTO, in this paper we use neural networks to model the blending process by the history data. Then the optimization is carried out via the neural model. The contributions of this paper are: (1) we propose a new approach to solve the problem of blending optimization based on history data; (2) sensitivity analysis of the neural optimization is given; (3) real data of an oil field is used to show effectiveness of the proposed method.
SVD- based method for ECG denoising

In this paper an efficient filtering procedure based on the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has been proposed. SVD, a high resolution spectrum estimation tools, is used to decompose the ECG data matrix into orthogonal subspaces. Due to the energy-preserving orthogonal transformation in the SVD, these subspaces correspond to the signal and noise components contained in the ECG data. Projection of the data onto the desired subspace eliminates the noise and the unwanted signal components.
A DUSTY COMPONENT TO THE GASEOUS DEBRIS DISK AROUND THE WHITE DWARF SDSS J1228+1040

We present Infrared Spectrometer And Array Camera (ISAAC) spectroscopy and ISAAC, UKIDSS, and Spitzer Space Telescope broadband photometry of SDSS J1228+1040—a white dwarf for which evidence of a gaseous metal-rich circumstellar disk has previously been found from optical emission lines. The data show a clear excess in the near- and mid-infrared (IR), providing compelling evidence for the presence of dust in addition to the previously identified gaseous debris disk around the star. The IR excess can be modeled in terms of an optically thick but geometrically thin disk. We find that the inner disk temperatures must be relatively high (∼1700 K) in order to fit the spectral energy distribution in the near-IR. These data provide the first evidence for the coexistence of both gas and dust in a disk around a white dwarf, and show that their presence is possible even around moderately hot (∼22,000 K) stars.