Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CSF Aβ42/Aβ40 and Aβ42/Aβ38 ratios: better diagnostic markers of Alzheimer disease

The diagnostic accuracy of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease (AD) must be improved before widespread clinical use. This study aimed to determine whether CSF Aβ42/Aβ40 and Aβ42/Aβ38 ratios are better diagnostic biomarkers of AD during both predementia and dementia stages in comparison to CSF Aβ42 alone.
Analytical modeling of crosstalk noise waveforms using Weibull function

To analyze the failure of a CMOS circuit due to glitches induced by capacitive crosstalk, noise immunity curves (a.k.a. noise rejection curve) must be characterized. However, noise waveform models currently used for characterization such as ideal triangle and trapezoid can underestimate the propagated noise pulse by over 20% and result in missed violations. We provide an analytical solution to fit any given crosstalk noise waveform to a Weibull function, which can generate identical propagated glitch heights compared to SPICE, resulting in accurate noise immunity curves.
Measuring the functional size of a data warehouse application using COSMIC-FFP

A data warehouse system is not the kind of traditio nal system that is easily sized with FPA, although there have been a number of attempts in li terature to do so. In one of the proposed frameworks, the assumption has been made that it wo uld probably make more sense to do a functional size measurement in COSMIC-FFP, because of the layer concept available to the measurer. COSMIC-FFP is a fairly new functional siz ing method. One of the reasons this method is developed, is because practitioners found it hard to carry out function point analysis on modern types of functional documentatio n. This paper will explore the use of COSMIC-FFP to size data warehouse systems.
Using Timed Petri Nets to Model Spatial-temporal Group Scheduling Problems

Dealing with cyber-physical systems (CPS) puts a strong emphasis on the interaction between computing and non-computing elements. Since the physical world is characterized by being strongly distributed and concurrent, this is also reflected in the computational world making the design of such systems a challenging task. If a number of tasks shall be executed on a CPS where each task is bound to time and space, may have dependencies to other tasks and requires a specific amount of computing devices, a solution requires a four-dimensional space-time schedule which includes positioning of the devices resulting in an NPhard problem. In this paper, we address the problem of spatial-temporal group scheduling using Timed Petri nets. We use Timed Petri nets in order to model the spatial, temporal, ordered and concurrent character of our mobile, distributed system. Our model is based on a discrete topology in which devices can change their location by moving from cell to cell. Using the timed property of Petri nets, we model movement in a heterogeneous terrain as well as task execution or access to other resources of the devices. Given the modeling, we show how to find an optimal schedule by translating the problem into a shortest path problem, which is solvable with the known method of dynamic programming.
Multi-functionality and plasticity characterize epithelial cells in Hydra

Epithelial sheets, a synapomorphy of all metazoans but porifers, are present as 2 layers in cnidarians, ectoderm and endoderm, joined at their basal side by an extra-cellular matrix named mesoglea. In the Hydra polyp, epithelial cells of the body column are unipotent stem cells that continuously self-renew and concomitantly express their epitheliomuscular features. These multifunctional contractile cells maintain homeostasis by providing a protective physical barrier, by digesting nutrients, by selecting a stable microbiota, and by rapidly closing wounds. In addition, epithelial cells are highly plastic, supporting the adaptation of Hydra to physiological and environmental changes, such as long starvation periods where survival relies on a highly dynamic autophagy flux. Epithelial cells also play key roles in developmental processes as evidenced by the organizer activity they develop to promote budding and regeneration. We propose here an integrative view of the homeostatic and developmental aspects of epithelial plasticity in Hydra.
Scaling Nonparametric Bayesian Inference via Subsample-Annealing

We describe an adaptation of the simulated annealing algorithm to nonparametric clustering and related probabilistic models. This new algorithm learns nonparametric latent structure over a growing and constantly churning subsample of training data, where the portion of data subsampled can be interpreted as the inverse temperature beta(t) in an annealing schedule. Gibbs sampling at high temperature (i.e., with a very small subsample) can more quickly explore sketches of the final latent state by (a) making longer jumps around latent space (as in block Gibbs) and (b) lowering energy barriers (as in simulated annealing). We prove subsample annealing speeds up mixing time N^2 -> N in a simple clustering model and exp(N) -> N in another class of models, where N is data size. Empirically subsample-annealing outperforms naive Gibbs sampling in accuracy-per-wallclock time, and can scale to larger datasets and deeper hierarchical models. We demonstrate improved inference on million-row subsamples of US Census data and network log data and a 307-row hospital rating dataset, using a Pitman-Yor generalization of the Cross Categorization model.
Information flow enforcement in monadic libraries

In various scenarios, there is a need to expose a certain API to client programs which are not fully trusted. In cases where the client programs need access to sensitive data, confidentiality can be enforced using an information flow policy. This is a general and powerful type of policy that has been widely studied and implemented. Previous work has shown how information flow policy enforcement can be implemented in a lightweight fashion in the form of a library. However, these approaches all suffer from a number of limitations. Often, the policy and its enforcement are not cleanly separated from the underlying API, and the user of the API is exposed to a strongly and unnaturally modified interface. Some of the approaches are limited to functional APIs and have difficulty handling imperative features like I/O and mutable state variables. In addition, this previous work uses classic static information flow enforcement techniques, and does not consider more recent dynamic information flow enforcement techniques. In this paper, we show that information flow policies can be enforced on imperative-style monadic APIs in a modular and reasonably general way with only a minor impact on the interface provided to API users. The main idea of this paper is that we implement the policy enforcement in a monad transformer while the underlying monadic API remains unaware and unmodifoed. The policy is specified through the lifting of underlying monad operations. We show the generality of our approach by presenting implementations of three important information flow enforcement techniques, including a purely dynamic, a purely static and a hybrid technique. Two of the techniques require the use of a generalisation of the Monad type class, but impact on the API interface stays limited. We show that our technique lends itself to formal reasoning by sketching a proof that our implementation of the static technique is faithful to the original presentation. Finally, we discuss fundamental limitations of our approach and how it fits in general information flow enforcement theory.
Abstract analysis with aspect

Aspect is a static analysis technique for detecting bugs in code based on three forms of abstraction: declarative specification, data abstraction and partiality (ignoring some behavioural details). Together, they bring efficiency (the checker runs almost as fast as a type checker), modularity (a procedure can be analysed independently of the procedures it calls) and incrementality (allowing the checking of incomplete programs). Aspect can detect errors that are not detectable by other static means, especially errors of omission, which are pervasive but usually hard to detect.
Coupled voltage and frequency control for DVFS management

During the last decade, Dynamic Voltage-Frequency Scaling (DVFS) techniques have been widely proposed to improve integrated circuit efficiency. When these mechanisms are composed of independent actuators for supply voltage and clock frequency, a predefined sequence has to be used to switch from one state to another one in order to avoid undesirable conditions. On the contrary, when they are based on coupled drivers, the actuators need to be jointly designed. In the present work, a control mechanism is proposed to jointly control the voltage and frequency transient periods where both actuators are developed independently. At the same time that it ensures the global system stability and promotes design reuse, the proposed controller also increases the system performance during the transition. Implemented in STMicroelectronics 32nm bulk and 28nm FD-SOI technologies, it requires a relatively small silicon area and power consumption. Experimental results with two independently developed drivers are provided.
Structural monitoring with GPS and accelerometers: the chimney of the power plant in Piacenza, Italy

The construction industry is increasingly involved in the safety assessment and survey of existing structures, often following refurbishment and structural modification works. The increasing difficulty in selecting building areas and getting funding for new constructions, jointly to the not negligible costs related to the demolition of the old ones as well as to the costs for the following site clearance, has led to a greater environmental awareness and to a cultural desire to maintain ancient and historic structures. The Italian Centre for Experimental Electric Science (CESI) and Politecnico di Milano set up a monitoring system aimed at the detection of structural modification of slender structure in near real time. The system, installed on a 120 m high chimney of the Piacenza (Italy) power plant, acquires data at a frequency of 10 Hz from 3 GPS (one rover on the chimney, connected to the acquisition and processing unit by a WI-FI system, and two masters) and, at a frequency of 125 Hz, from 4 accelerometers. The paper reports on the acquisition system, explains the data analysis procedure as well as the results of the measurement campaign, three months long.
The role of religion when crisis looms: A church community at a crossroads

ABSTRACT The present study examined the relationship between religion and well-being in older adults during a time of financial difficulty within their religious community. Focus-group and one-on-one interviews were carried out with 39 participants sampled from three Anglican parishes in eastern Canada during a financial crisis that was likely to lead to the closing of two churches. Three main themes emerged from the analyses: Crisis, Transition, and Status Quo. The financial situation was discussed as a crisis; other issues were viewed as opportunities for transition, and personal faith was perceived as being stable and constant. The results of the present study suggest that for older adults, the more internal and faith-based aspects of religiosity have a stronger impact on well-being than do changes that revolve around the external or religious aspects of church participation.
Application of Software Mining to Automatic User Interface Generation

Many software projects spend a significant proportion of their time developing the User Interface, so any degree of automation in this area has clear benefits. Research projects to date generally take one of three approaches: interactive graphical specification tools, model-based generation tools, or languagebased tools. The first two have proven popular in industry but are labour intensive and error-prone. The third is more automated but has practical problems which limit its usefulness. This paper proposes applying the emerging field of software mining to perform runtime inspection of an application's architecture and reduce the labour intensive nature of interactive graphical specification tools and model-based generation tools. It also proposes UI generation can be made more practical by delimiting useful bounds to the generation process. The paper concludes with a description of a prototype project that implements these ideas.
Complex-valued online classifier

In order to improve the identification accuracy of the online classifier in binary classification problems, we here propose complex-valued online machine learning algorithms. The Perceptron is commonly used in simple form of online machine learning. First, we extended it to the complex domain. The real-valued inputs are projected to points on the first quarter of unit circle on the complex plane. The real and imaginary parts of inputs are fed separately to two different Perceptrons. In each Perceptron, a real-valued weight vector is applied to the input vector. Outputs of two Perceptrons are plotted on a complex plane. The upper half of the plane is considered as the class 1 and the lower half as the class -1. If misclassified, the weight vectors are modified. We here term it the complex-valued Perceptron (CP). The results on some benchmarks showed that the identification accuracy of the online classifier with the CP was higher than that with the conventional Perceptron. Secondly, we adopted the Passive-Aggressive (PA) algorithm, as well as PA-I and PA-II with noise immunity. We term them CPA, CPA-I and CPA-II, respectively. For the benchmarks, the identification accuracies of the online classifier with these PA algorithms was higher than those with the conventional PA algorithms. Since the CP used here is simple in principle, complex-valued online classifiers, CP, CPA, CPA-I and CPA-II, can be applied to various practical problems.
FPGA implementation of a MIMO receiver front-end for the UMTS downlink

Multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) systems have received great attention to boost the capacity of wireless communication systems. Multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver are used to exploit the spatial diversity in a rich scattering environment to concurrently transmit multiple data streams in the same frequency band thereby increasing spectral efficiency. Besides the actual MIMO decoder a significant part of the implementation complexity of such a system turns out to be in the receiver front-end. In this paper an efficient implementation of a MIMO receiver frontend based on a modified FDD UMTS downlink is presented. A new method for the efficient realization of a MIMO channel estimation is being introduced. The implementation of the RAKE receiver as well as the frequency-offset estimation is also discussed.
Testing auditory sensitivity in the great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo sinensis): Psychophysics vs. Auditory brainstem response

Psychoacoustic and electrophysiological methods were used to measure the in-air hearing sensitivity of the great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo sinensis). One individual was used to determine the behavioral thresholds, which was then compared to previously collected data on the auditory brainstem response (ABR) thresholds from 11 individuals. The behavioral hearing sensitivities were measured at 500 Hz, 1 kHz, 2 kHz, 4 kHz, and 6 kHz, while the ABR hearing sensitivities were measured at 500 Hz, 1 kHz, 2 kHz, and 6 kHz. For both methods the sensitivities were found to be lowest at 2 kHz. The ABR hearing thresholds were found to be 23-53 dB higher than the hearing thresholds determined from the psychoacoustic results, but the audiograms derived with the two methods shared similarities in shape. The results from this study show that the hearing sensitivities of the great cormorant are more sensitive in the behavioral results than from the ABR measurements.
Behavior Fusion for Visually-Guided Service Robots

Mobile service robots are the class of robots that have tools to understand the environments at home and office. The development of mobile robots is increasing world-wide due to the availability of moderate price sensing and computing devices. Moreover, there is a strong belief that the market for service robots is just about to undergo a radical increase in the next few years. Despite the huge literature of the mobile robot navigation, the development of intelligent robots able to navigate in unknown and dynamic environment is still a challenging task (Walther et al., 2003). Therefore, developing techniques for robust navigation of mobile robots is both important and needed. The classical approach for mobile robot control used the "Model, Sense, Plan, Act", MSPA serial strategy, which proved to be inherently slow and totally fails if one module is out of order. We may call this approach as a planner-based control approach. The appearance of behavior-based navigation approach (Arkin, 1998; Brooks, 1986) was a remarkable evolution, in which the reactive behaviors were designed to run simultaneously in parallel giving tight interaction between sensors and actuators. The reactive behaviors allow for incremental improvements and addition of more application-specific behaviors. Building several behaviors, each concerned with a sole objective, will produce different decisions for the robot control parameters, and they have to be combined in some way to reach the final motion decision. The fusion of independent behaviors is not an easy task and several approaches were proposed in the literature to solve this problem (Arkin, 1998; Borenstein & Koren, 1991; Carreras et al., 2001; Saffiotti, 1997). Coordination of behaviors can be classified into two further approaches, a competitive, as was originally proposed by (Brooks, 1986), and cooperative strategies (Carreras et al., 2001). Depending on the environment, the competitive approach may fail and become unstable in critical situations demanding higher switching frequencies between behaviors. In the subsumption architecture (Brooks, 1986) behaviors are activated once at a time but this may be inadequate for a variety of situations requiring several behaviors to be active at the same time. In the cooperative approach, all behaviors contribute to the output, rather than a single behavior dominates after passing an objective criterion. An example of the cooperative O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w . ite ch on lin e. co m
Performance comparison of desktop multiprocessing and workstation cluster computing

The paper describes initial findings regarding the performance tradeoffs between cluster computing where the participating processors are independent machines connected by a high speed switch and desktop multiprocessing where the processors reside within a single workstation and share a common memory. While interprocessor communication time has typically been cited as the limiting force on performance in the cluster, bus and memory contention have had similar effects in shared memory systems. The advent of high speed interconnects and improved bus and memory access speeds have enhanced the performance curves of both platforms. We present comparisons of the execution times of three applications with varying levels of data dependencies-numerical integration, matrix multiplication, and Jacobi iteration across three environments: the PVM distributed memory model, the PVM shared memory model, and the Solaris threads package.
Modeling of braided pneumatic actuators for robotic control

Braided pneumatic actuators exhibit non-linear force-length properties grossly similar to muscle, and have a high strength-to-weight ratio. These properties make them desirable for legged robots. The work emphasizes understanding the actuator properties for later use in simulation and control of legged robots. Static and dynamic mathematical models for the actuators are reported and verified through testing and simulation. In addition, a dynamic air flow model modulated by a solenoid valve was developed to provide modular actuation subroutines for simulation.
Localized spectro-temporal features for noise-robust speech recognition

In speech recognition there has been a trend to incorporate more and more knowledge about human hearing into the feature extraction step. One such approach is the application of localized spectro-temporal analysis, which is inspired by neurophysiological studies. Here we experiment with extracting features from the patches of the widely used critical-band log-energy spectrum by applying the two-dimensional cosine transform. Compared to earlier similar studies with the spectrogram representation, we find that our method is not worse, and faster. In experiments with noisy speech the proposed representation proves more noise-robust than the conventional mel-frequency cepstral features.
Genomic epidemiology of the current wave of artemisinin resistant malaria

Artemisinin resistant Plasmodium falciparum is advancing across Southeast Asia in a soft selective sweep involving at least 20 independent kelch13 mutations. In a large global survey, we find that kelch13 mutations which cause resistance in Southeast Asia are present at low frequency in Africa. We show that African kelch13 mutations have originated locally, and that kelch13 shows a normal variation pattern relative to other genes in Africa, whereas in Southeast Asia there is a great excess of non-synonymous mutations, many of which cause radical amino-acid changes. Thus, kelch13 is not currently undergoing strong selection in Africa, despite a deep reservoir of standing variation that could potentially allow resistance to emerge rapidly. The practical implications are that public health surveillance for artemisinin resistance should not rely on kelch13 data alone, and interventions to prevent resistance must account for local evolutionary conditions, shown by genomic epidemiology to differ greatly between geographical regions.
Development of a Bolus Injection System to Achieve Storage and Controlled Delivery of Nanoparticles to Human Lung

This paper presents work carried out in developing a precision, bolus injection system to study the effect of regional deposition of fine particulate matter (PM) within the human respiratory system and to investigate the optimal conditions for inhaled drug delivery. In contrast to existing methods, the new system computes parameters necessary and injects PM into breath cycles by a process of dynamic breath pattern analysis and statistical data relating to stored PM to achieve a highly controlled delivery within specified exposure times and intervals.
Correct-by-construction distributed control for multi-vehicle transport systems

In this work we deal with a system of autonomous mobile vehicles with limited communication range and consider the problem of the formally correct distributed control, i.e., the design of the local control for each particular agent so that it ensures globally correct behavior of the system. A particular problem is the fact that the knowledge about the system state possessed by the agents is partial and never accurate, as during the time of information acquisition (by querying other agents) the state of the agents can change. The paper capitalizes on the results of [1] and contributes with: 1) further development of the theoretical idea toward the distributed supervisory control and the concept of robustness, 2) application of the results in the design of a transport agent, and 3) development of a demonstrator, i.e., a computer application that enables the user to specify a considered transport system and its tasks, creates a virtual environment, where each particular vehicle is represented by a particular software agent implementing the control model of (2), and allows observation of the agents concurrent operation and quantitative assessment of the system performance.