Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Measuring Omega_m using clusters evolution

The constraints obtained by several authors (Eke et al. 1998; Henry 2000) on the estimated values of $Ω_{\rm m}$, $n$ and $σ_8$ are revisited in the light of recent theoretical developments: 1) new theoretical mass functions; 2) a more accurate mass-temperature relation, also determined for arbitrary $Ω_{\rm m}$ and $Ω_{\rm Λ}$. I re-derive the X-ray Temperature Function (XTF), similarly to Henry (2000) and Eke et al. (1999), re-obtaining the constraints on $Ω_{\rm m}$, $n$, $σ_8$. The result shows that changes in the mass function and M-T relation produces an increase in $Ω_{\rm m}$ of $ \simeq 20%$ and similar results in $σ_8$ and $n$.
Mapping Concrete Entities from PAROLE-SIMPLE-CLIPS to ItalWordNet: Methodology and Results

This paper describes a work in progress aiming at linking the two largest Italian lexical-semantic databases ItalWordNet and PAROLE-SIMPLE-CLIPS. The adopted linking methodology, the software tool devised and implemented for this purpose and the results of the first mapping phase regarding 1stOrderEntities are illustrated here.
Credit Risk Pricing with Multivariate Stochastic Volatility

This paper extends to the multi-assets framework the closed-form solution for options with stochastic volatility derived in Heston(1993) and Ball and Roma(1994). This extension introduces a risk premium in the return equation and considers Wishart dynamics for the process of the stochastic volatility matrix, which is the multi-assets simulation of the model of Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross(1985). This approach is used to extend Merton’s model for corporate default to a framework with stochastic liability.
Optimal Battery Dimensioning and Control of a CVT PHEV Powertrain

This paper presents convex modeling steps for the problem of optimal battery dimensioning and control of a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle with a continuous variable transmission. The power limits of the internal combustion engine and the electric machine are approximated as convex/concave functions in kinetic energy, whereas their losses are approximated as convex in both kinetic energy and power. An example of minimizing the total cost of ownership of a city bus including a battery wear model is presented. The proposed method is also used to obtain optimal charging power from an infrastructure that is to be designed at the same time the bus is dimensioned.
Complex support vector machines for quaternary classification

We present a support vector machines (SVM) rationale suitable for quaternary classification problems that use complex data, exploiting the notions of widely linear estimation and pure complex kernels. The recently developed Wirtinger's calculus on complex RKHS is employed in order to compute the Lagrangian and derive the dual optimization problem. We show that this approach is equivalent with solving two real SVM tasks exploiting a specific real kernel, which is induced by the chosen complex kernel.
ICS 243 E / Wireless Networking Final Report-Mobile Ad-hoc Networks Routing Protocols Simulation and Comparison

This report is my final report for ICS/EECS 243E course project. My project topic is – Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) Routing Protocols Simulation and Comparison. Reseaches and challenges on MANET will be briefly discussed in this report. A group of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) routing protocols – Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV), and Destination-Sequenced DistanceVector (DSDV) – will be introduced here. Based on one networks simulator – ns2[1], some experiments were designed in order to evaluate the above mentioned MANETs routing protocols. I will present comparison for the protocols and analyze the performance from different perspectives based on the simulation result and theoretical point of view.
What's on the grapevine?

User generated content and social media (in the form of blogs, wikis, online video, microblogs, etc) are proliferating online. Grapevine conducts large scale data analysis on the social media collective, distilling and extracting information in real time. It aims to track entities and stories of interest in millions of blog posts, thousands of tweets, news items, etc., daily. Grapevine facilitates the interactive exploration of content, allowing users to discover interesting or surprising stories, optionally narrowed down on a specific demographic of interest (e.g. "What are Torontonians talking about on blogs? ", "What are popular stories across news sources in Canada? ", "What are financiers in Texas blogging about today? "). Stories of interest can be explored in a variety of ways, such as modifying their scope, obtaining related content (blog posts, news, etc), and examining their temporal evolution.
Optimal Context Aware Transmission Strategy for non-Orthogonal D2D Communications

The increasing traffic demand in cellular networks has recently led to the investigation of new strategies to save precious resources like spectrum and energy. A possible solution employs direct device-to-device (D2D) communications, which is particularly promising when the two terminals involved in the communications are located in close proximity. The D2D communications should coexist with other transmissions, so they must be careful scheduled in order to avoid harmful interference impacts. In this paper, we analyze how a distributed context-awareness, obtained by observing few local channel and topology parameters, can be used to adaptively exploit D2D communications. We develop a rigorous theoretical analysis to quantify the balance between the gain offered by a D2D transmission, and its impact on the other network communications. Based on this analysis, we derive two theorems that define the optimal strategy to be employed, in terms of throughput maximization, when a single or multiple transmit power levels are available for the D2D communications. We compare this strategy to the state-of-the-art in the same network scenario, showing how context awareness can be exploited to achieve a higher sum throughput and an improved fairness.
Faculty and Curriculum: Examining Multicultural Competence and Inclusion

Raechele L. Pope is Associate Professor of Higher Education at The University of Buffalo, State University of New York. John A. Mueller is Associate Professor of Student Affairs in Higher Education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. As multicultural research in student affairs literature diversifies and expands, new areas of study continue to emerge. Exploration of multicultural issues in student affairs preparation programs is one of those developing areas of research. Although some studies have been completed, there is limited information about the demographic composition of students and faculty members, exploration of multicultural issues within the curriculum, and the multicultural competence of faculty and staff. For student affairs practitioners to be more multiculturally competent in all aspects of their work, it is vital that diversity issues be effectively and systematically infused into preparation programs. Knowledge and understanding about faculty members who design curriculum and courses, supervise practica, and teach within student affairs preparation programs is essential to fully appreciate the strengths and challenges that exist in creating a more multiculturally sensitive and skilled profession. The researchers gathered important information about faculty members who are teaching in student affairs programs, such as the amount of multicultural education and training they have received and their level of multicultural competence. Multicultural competence has been described as having the multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills essential for creating multicultural campuses (Pope & Reynolds, 1997). This knowledge can assist the profession in curricular transformation within preparation programs and designing additional multicultural education and training for faculty (cf., McEwen & Roper, 1994; Pope, Reynolds, & Mueller, 2004). Talbot (1996) and Talbot and Kocarek (1997) gathered data about the gender, racial, and sexual orientation background of two distinct national samples of student affairs faculty members and graduate students. In Talbot’s study, and Talbot and Kocarek’s study, 84% and 92%, respectively of the faculty members were White, and 57% to 59% were male (Talbot & Kocarek). Racial background of the graduate students was somewhat similar with 82% being White; however, there were far fewer men (29%) among the students (Talbot). Talbot also reported that 8% of the graduate students identified themselves as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Although these demographic results are somewhat dated and not necessarily indicative of the percentages found in the profession today, recent scholarly work supports the notion that the student affairs profession remains predominantly White (Liang & Sedlacek, 2002; Mueller, 1999). In terms of the curriculum, data are limited regarding the degree to which multicultural issues are integrated in student personnel coursework. Talbot (1996) investiFaculty and Curriculum: Examining Multicultural Competence and Inclusion
Frequency analysis of switched capacitor circuits

A new method for modeling circuits with switched capacitors (SC) is proposed. Similar to the SPICE-simulation of circuits in their linear mode of operation for a small ac signals analysis, this method allows you to determine the amplitude and phase frequency responses of the analog-discrete circuits such as sample-hold circuits and SC-filters. The paper shows the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed technique compared with the algorithm used in periodic AC analysis in the simulator for RF circuits, SPECTRERF of Cadence Design Systems, Bracknell, Berkshire, UK. The proposed method enables the incorporation of periodic AC analysis into SPICE-simulators that do not normally support this simulation mode.
A Large-Scale Structural Classification of Antimicrobial Peptides

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are potent drug candidates against microbial organisms such as bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses. AMPs have abundant sequences and structures, two fundamental resources for bioinformatics researches, but analyses on how they associate with each other are either nonexistent or limited to partial classification and data. We thus present A Database of Anti-Microbial peptides (ADAM), which contains 7,007 unique sequences and 759 structures, to systematically establish comprehensive associations between AMP sequences and structures through structural folds and to provide an easy access to view their relationships. 30 distinct AMP structural fold clusters with more than one structure are detected and about a thousand AMPs are associated with at least one structural fold cluster. According to ADAM, AMP structural folds are limited—AMPs only cover about 3% of the overall protein fold space.
New directions in traffic measurement and accounting: Focusing on the elephants, ignoring the mice

Accurate network traffic measurement is required for accounting, bandwidth provisioning and detecting DoS attacks. These applications see the traffic as a collection of flows they need to measure. As link speeds and the number of flows increase, keeping a counter for each flow is too expensive (using SRAM) or slow (using DRAM). The current state-of-the-art methods (Cisco's sampled NetFlow), which count periodically sampled packets are slow, inaccurate and resource-intensive. Previous work showed that at different granularities a small number of "heavy hitters" accounts for a large share of traffic. Our paper introduces a paradigm shift by concentrating the measurement process on large flows only---those above some threshold such as 0.1% of the link capacity.We propose two novel and scalable algorithms for identifying the large flows: sample and hold and multistage filters, which take a constant number of memory references per packet and use a small amount of memory. If M is the available memory, we show analytically that the errors of our new algorithms are proportional to 1/M; by contrast, the error of an algorithm based on classical sampling is proportional to 1/&sqrt;M, thus providing much less accuracy for the same amount of memory. We also describe optimizations such as early removal and conservative update that further improve the accuracy of our algorithms, as measured on real traffic traces, by an order of magnitude. Our schemes allow a new form of accounting called threshold accounting in which only flows above a threshold are charged by usage while the rest are charged a fixed fee. Threshold accounting generalizes usage-based and duration based pricing.
AN IMPROVED BOUND ON THE LIST SIZE IN THE GURUSWAMI-SUDAN ALGORITHM FOR AG CODES

Given an algebraic geometry code CL(D,αP ), the GuruswamiSudan algorithm produces a list of all codewords in CL(D,αP ) within a specified distance of a received word. The initialization step in the algorithm involves parameter choices that bound the degree of the interpolating polynomial and hence the length of the list of codewords generated. In this paper, we use simple properties of discriminants of polynomials over finite fields to provide improved parameter choices for the Guruswami-Sudan list decoding algorithm for algebraic geometry codes. As a consequence, we obtain obtain a better bound on the list size.
Male production in stingless bees: variable outcomes of queen–worker conflict

The genetic structure of social insect colonies is predicted to affect the balance between cooperation and conflict. Stingless bees are of special interest in this respect because they are singly mated relatives of the multiply mated honeybees. Multiple mating is predicted to lead to workers policing each others’ male production with the result that virtually all males are produced by the queen, and this prediction is borne out in honey bees. Single mating by the queen, as in stingless bees, causes workers to be more related to each others’ sons than to the queen's sons, so they should not police each other. We used microsatellite markers to confirm single mating in eight species of stingless bees and then tested the prediction that workers would produce males. Using a likelihood method, we found some worker male production in six of the eight species, although queens produced some males in all of them. Thus the predicted contrast with honeybees is observed, but not perfectly, perhaps because workers either lack complete control or because of costs of conflict. The data are consistent with the view that there is ongoing conflict over male production. Our method of estimating worker male production appears to be more accurate than exclusion, which sometimes underestimates the proportion of males that are worker produced.
Observations of the 327 MHz Deuterium Hyperfine Transition

We report measurements of the 327 MHz line of deuterium for regions in the Galactic plane at 171°, 183°, and 195° longitude using an array of 24 stations of fixed phased-antenna elements. The anticenter region was observed using simultaneous multiple beams at each station over a period of just over 2 years from 2004 June to 2006 July. The average deuterium-to-hydrogen (D/H) ratio in the Galactic anticenter region derived from these observations is 21 ± 7 parts per million. The error is ±3 σ and includes the model-dependency error in conversion of the line amplitudes to the D/H ratio.
Understanding the role of gender on perceived value to the smartphone users' switching behavior

Value-based model (VAM), different from technology acceptance model based studies that solely focused on benefit of action, take both benefit and cost into consideration simultaneously and emphasize the mediating role of perceived value between benefits, costs, and behavioral intention. This concept is widely adopted to understand behavioral intention in IS area. While some researchers notice the fully mediating role of perceived value, some researchers only find a partial mediating effect. In this study, we attempt to move further and argue that the mediating role of perceived value may be contingent on other factors. Specifically, we argue that the mediating role of perceived value may be contingent on gender.
In vivo MRI tracking of iron oxide nanoparticle-labeled human mesenchymal stem cells in limb ischemia

Background Stem cell transplantation has been investigated for repairing damaged tissues in various injury models. Monitoring the safety and fate of transplanted cells using noninvasive methods is important to advance this technique into clinical applications. Methods In this study, lower-limb ischemia models were generated in nude mice by femoral artery ligation. As negative-contrast agents, positively charged magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (aminopropyltriethoxysilane-coated Fe2O3) were investigated in terms of in vitro labeling efficiency, effects on human mesenchymal stromal cell (hMSC) proliferation, and in vivo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) visualization. Ultimately, the mice were sacrificed for histological analysis three weeks after transplantation. Results With efficient labeling, aminopropyltriethoxysilane-modified magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (APTS-MNPs) did not significantly affect hMSC proliferation. In vivo, APTS-MNP-labeled hMSCs could be monitored by clinical 3 Tesla MRI for at least three weeks. Histological examination detected numerous migrated Prussian blue-positive cells, which was consistent with the magnetic resonance images. Some migrated Prussian blue-positive cells were positive for mature endothelial cell markers of von Willebrand factor and anti-human proliferating cell nuclear antigen. In the test groups, Prussian blue-positive nanoparticles, which could not be found in other organs, were detected in the spleen. Conclusion APTS-MNPs could efficiently label hMSCs, and clinical 3 Tesla MRI could monitor the labeled stem cells in vivo, which may provide a new approach for the in vivo monitoring of implanted cells.
Improving machine translation via triangulation and transliteration

In this paper we improve Urdu→Hindi English machine translation through triangulation and transliteration. First we built an Urdu→Hindi SMT system by inducing triangulated and transliterated phrase-tables from Urdu–English and Hindi–English phrase translation models. We then use it to translate the Urdu part of the Urdu-English parallel data into Hindi, thus creating an artificial Hindi-English parallel data. Our phrase-translation strategies give an improvement of up to +3.35 BLEU points over a baseline Urdu→Hindi system. The synthesized data improve Hindi→English system by +0.35 and English→Hindi system by +1.0 BLEU points.
The Link between Corporate Environmental and Corporate Financial Performance—Viewpoints from Practice and Research

For more than 40 years, a tremendous number of studies have empirically explored the relationship between Corporate Environmental Performance (CEP) and Corporate Financial Performance (CFP). This study considers the relationship from a new perspective—via a qualitative research approach based on expert interviews. First, practitioners are queried for their view on the link between CEP and CFP and how to measure it. Since the vast majority see a positive relationship, this study contributes with a new form of evidence that it pays to be green. The chosen qualitative approach also allows a more detailed analysis of underlying cause-and-effect mechanisms. For instance, interviewed practitioners emphasize a direct and indirect impact from CEP on CFP. Second, the study conducts interviews with experts from research and associations (non-practitioners) and compares the viewpoints of the two interview groups. One prevalent difference refers to the fact that non-practitioners do not focus on the two impact levels. Moreover, business experts perceive the link between CEP and CFP as much less complex and reveal more pragmatically oriented considerations. The study then discusses how the interview results and identified differences can be used to direct future research and to support corporations in their move towards sustainability.
Correlation discovery from network monitoring data in a big data cluster

Monitoring of telecommunications network is a tedious task. Diverse monitoring data is propagated through the network to different kinds of monitoring software solutions. Processing rules are needed for monitoring the data. As manually entering the rules is not an option in today’s telecommunication network sizes, automatic data mining inclusive solutions are needed. Existing solutions of data mining the network monitoring data are impacted by performance issues of computationally demanding algorithms. A scalable distributed solution is needed. This paper surveys existing studies on distributed solutions for data mining and processing the network monitoring data. We also summarize and evaluate experiment results of these studies and propose direction for future research.
Accumulation of trans C18:1 Fatty Acids in the Rumen after Dietary Algal Supplementation Is Associated with Changes in the Butyrivibrio Community

ABSTRACT Optimization of the fatty acid composition of ruminant milk and meat is desirable. Dietary supplementation of algae was previously shown to inhibit rumen biohydrogenation, resulting in an altered milk fatty acid profile. Bacteria involved in biohydrogenation belong to the Butyrivibrio group. This study was aimed at relating accumulation of biohydrogenation intermediates with shifts in Butyrivibrio spp. in the rumen of dairy cows. Therefore, an experiment was performed with three rumen-fistulated dairy cows receiving a concentrate containing algae (9.35 g/kg total dry matter [DM] intake) for 20 days. Supplementation of the diet with algae inhibited biohydrogenation of C18:2 omega 6 (n-6) and C18:3n-3, resulting in increased concentrations of biohydrogenation intermediates, whereas C18:0 decreased. Addition of algae increased ruminal C18:1trans fatty acid concentrations, mainly due to 6- and 20-fold increases in C18:1trans 11 (t11) and C18:1t10. The number of ciliates (5.37 log copies/g rumen digesta) and the composition of the ciliate community were unaffected by dietary algae. In contrast, supplementation of the diet with algae changed the composition of the bacterial community. Primers for the Butyrivibrio group, including the genera Butyrivibrio and Pseudobutyrivibrio, were specifically designed. Denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis showed community changes upon addition of algae without affecting the total amount of Butyrivibrio bacteria (7.06 log copies/g rumen DM). Clone libraries showed that algae affected noncultivated species, which cluster taxonomically between the genera Butyrivibrio and Pseudobutyrivibrio and might play a role in biohydrogenation. In addition, 20% of the clones from a randomly selected rumen sample were related to the C18:0-producing branch, although the associated C18:0 concentration decreased through supplementation of the diet with algae.