Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Empirical Evaluation of State Event Fault Tree and Dynamic Fault Tree for the Safety Analysis of Ambient Assisted Living

Most of the evolution in ambient assisted living is due to embedded systems that dynamically adapt themself to react to environmental changes or component/subsystem failures to maintain a certain level of safety. Following this evolution fault tree analysis techniques have been extended with concept for dynamic adaptation but resulting techniques such as dynamic fault trees or state event fault trees analysis are not widely used as expected. In this report we describe a controlled experiment to analyze these two techniques with regard to their applicability and efficiency in modeling dynamic behavior of ambient assisted living systems. Results of the experiment show that Dynamic Fault Trees are easier and more effective to use, although they produce better results (models) with State Events Fault Trees.
Uridine Affects Liver Protein Glycosylation, Insulin Signaling, and Heme Biosynthesis

Purines and pyrimidines are complementary bases of the genetic code. The roles of purines and their derivatives in cellular signal transduction and energy metabolism are well-known. In contrast, the roles of pyrimidines and their derivatives in cellular function remain poorly understood. In this study, the roles of uridine, a pyrimidine nucleoside, in liver metabolism are examined in mice. We report that short-term uridine administration in C57BL/6J mice increases liver protein glycosylation profiles, reduces phosphorylation level of insulin signaling proteins, and activates the HRI-eIF-2α-ATF4 heme-deficiency stress response pathway. Short-term uridine administration is also associated with reduced liver hemin level and reduced ability for insulin-stimulated blood glucose removal during an insulin tolerance test. Some of the short-term effects of exogenous uridine in C57BL/6J mice are conserved in transgenic UPase1 −/− mice with long-term elevation of endogenous uridine level. UPase1 −/− mice exhibit activation of the liver HRI-eIF-2α-ATF4 heme-deficiency stress response pathway. UPase1 −/− mice also exhibit impaired ability for insulin-stimulated blood glucose removal. However, other short-term effects of exogenous uridine in C57BL/6J mice are not conserved in UPase1 −/− mice. UPase1 −/− mice exhibit normal phosphorylation level of liver insulin signaling proteins and increased liver hemin concentration compared to untreated control C57BL/6J mice. Contrasting short-term and long-term consequences of uridine on liver metabolism suggest that uridine exerts transient effects and elicits adaptive responses. Taken together, our data support potential roles of pyrimidines and their derivatives in the regulation of liver metabolism.
Effects of verb bias and syntactic ambiguity on reading in people with aphasia

Background: The Lexical Bias Hypothesis claims that people with aphasia (PWA) have difficulty understanding sentences when the verb’s argument structure bias conflicts with the sentence structure. This hypothesis can account for comprehension deficits that affect simple sentences, but the role of verb bias has not been clearly demonstrated in temporarily ambiguous sentences. Aims: This study examined how verb bias affects comprehension of temporarily ambiguous and unambiguous sentences using self-paced reading. Methods & Procedures: PWA and controls read sentences that contained sentential complements (e.g., The talented photographer accepted (that) the fire could not have been prevented). The main verb was biased to take a direct object (e.g., accepted) or a sentential complement (e.g., admitted). In addition, the sentential complement was either introduced by the complementiser that (i.e., unambiguous) or unmarked (i.e., ambiguous). Results: The reading times of PWA were affected more by verb bias than by the presence of the complementiser, whereas the control group’s reading times were more affected by the presence or absence of the complementiser. Conclusions: The results were generally consistent with the Lexical Bias Hypothesis, and showed that a mismatch between verb bias and sentence structure affected the processing of unambiguous and temporarily ambiguous sentences in PWA.
interface to an image database using a

In the QBIC (Query By Image Content) project we are studying methods to query large on-line image databases using the images' content as the basis of the queries. Examples of the content we use include color, texture, and shape of image objects and regions. Potential applications include medical (\Give me other images that contain a tumor with a texture like this one"), photo-journalism (\Give me images that have blue at the top and red at the bottom"), and many others in art, fashion, cataloging, retailing, and industry. We describe a set of novel features and similarity measures allowing query by color, texture, and shape of image object. We demonstrate the e ectiveness of the QBIC system with normalized precision and recall experiments on test databases containing over 1000 images and 1000 objects populated from commercially available photo clip art images, and of images of airplane silhouettes. We also consider the e cient indexing of these features, speci cally addressing two problems: (a) for our feature vectors, the desired distance function is not Euclidean, and/or (b) the vectors have high dimensionality. We propose novel, general solutions to both problems by allowing some \false alarms" (\false hits", or \false positives") but no false dismissals. For the rst problem, we introduce a new theorem that makes indexing possible by bounding the non-Euclidean, full cross-term quadratic distance expression with a simple Euclidean distance. For the second, we illustrate how orthogonal transforms, such as the Karhunen Loeve transform, can help reduce the dimensionality, without introducing false dismissals. The resulting QBIC system o ers high quality of output, and signi cant speedup over straightforward indexing alternatives. The system is implemented in X/Motif and C running on an RS/6000. On sabbatical from Univ. of Maryland, College Park. His work was partially supported by SRC, by the National Science Foundation under the grant IRI-8958546 (PYI).
An Algorithm for Detecting Hand Orientation and Palmprint Location from a Highly Noisy Image

We introduce an innovative approach for detecting the region of interest in palmprint identification, from a highly noisy image, using a combinatorial algorithm. The existing research faces some critical issues such as noise, shadows, illumination variance, scars, rings, hand disorientation, disability (missing fingers) and different age group samples. All above inconvenient points are overcome by the proposed technique, in the preprocessing phase of palmprint verification. This is done by filling the hand shape with non overlap disks and by locating the disk with maximum possible radius, which contains the palm with biometric features, such as principal lines and wrinkles. Additionally, a quick process computes the hand orientation. The results in a wide range of test bed images lead to the correct computed disk, even in the worst cases. Finally, a comparison with prior work takes place in order to confirm the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Measurement study of adjacent channel interference in mobile WLANs

Over the last few years, mobile wireless LANs (m-WLANs), which are characterized by portable access points (APs) and a small number of connected clients, are becoming popular. When a large number of such personal mobile APs operate close to each other, for example in crowded urban areas and conference venues, the quality of service (QoS) of the connected clients can be severely degraded due to co-channel and adjacent-channel interference. While there exists a large pool of literature on interference management techniques for fixed WLANs, the small form-factor mobile APs present new challenges in terms of high-density deployments and mobility-induced dynamic interference relations. The importance of minimizing interference in m-WLANs is additionally motivated from an energy-efficiency point of view. Since mobile APs rely on limited battery power, packet collisions and retransmissions have a direct impact on the on-time of the APs. In this paper, we present results from a detailed measurement study based on commercially-available m-WLAN devices - two brands of mobile APs and smartphone based clients. While the QoS characteristics of m-WLANs operating on the same channel have been investigated in prior work, we believe this is the first study of adjacent-channel interference using real-world mobile APs. Our experiments reveal the relationship between the distance between m-WLANs and the total throughput of each m-WLAN in various combinations of channels used. Further, we outline how the results can be used for designing optimal channel allocations in dense m-WLAN settings.
Exploring software systems

Software evolution is required to keep a software system in sync with the ever-changing needs of the system's users and environment. An unfortunate side-effect of evolution is that it often causes the knowledge about a system to degrade, which in turn impedes further evolution. In the dissertation, we investigate techniques and tools that help remedy this situation by supporting the exploration of a software system and improving its legibility (Moonen, 2002). We examine the analogy with urban exploration and present innovative techniques for the extraction, abstraction, and presentation of information needed for understanding software.
TAKING ADVANTAGE OF HETEROGENEOUS PLATFORMS IN IMAGE AND VIDEO PROCESSING

Image and video processing algorithms present an important tool for various domains related to computer vision such as pattern recognition, video surveillance, medical imaging, etc. Due to the fast turning towards high definition on images and videos, the performances of these algorithms have been so hampered. Indeed, they require more resources and memory to achieve their computations. In this work, we propose a development scheme enabling an efficient exploitation of parallel (GPU) and heterogeneous (Multi-CPU/Multi-GPU) platforms, in order to improve performance of both image and video processing algorithms. This scheme enables an efficient scheduling of hybrid tasks and an effective management of heterogeneous memories. Based on this scheme, we developed heterogeneous implementations of
Towards decentralized coordination of multi robot systems in industrial environments: A hierarchical traffic control strategy

This paper describes an innovative approach to manage multiple Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) in an industrial environment. The proposed approach is based on a two layer architecture for path planning. This architecture consists of a topological layer, composed by macro-cells, and of a route map layer in which the AGVs have to move along fixed paths. The traffic is managed in a decentralized manner. Each AGV computes autonomously its own path both at topological layer and at route map layer. The coordination among the AGVs is based on the negotiation of shared resources. An early phase of validation is provided by the simulation in a structured environment.
Masculinity and Rhythmic Gymnastics. An Exploration on the Transgression of Gender Order in Sport

Patriarchal dominance in our Western society has oppressed not only women but it has also isolated many men who did not comply with hegemonic masculinity patterns. The aim of this study is to know and analyse the experiences of a group of boys who practise rhythmic gymnastics, traditionally linked to the feminine reality. Within this interpretative paradigm, eight interviews has been done to gymnasts (8-19 years old), who practise rhythmic gymnastics in a competitive or amateur level. The boys express the familiar support that they have had when deciding to practise a traditionally feminine sport. However, many gymnasts have been insulted or mocked by other boys. Therefore, it is important to work with families in order to eliminate stereotypes and prejudices in this masculine discipline in the future. Similarly, rhythmic gymnastics must be promoted among boys, since a higher presence of boys in clubs would ease their reception among girls.
Social Support Networks of Italian Couples

During the last decades, researchers have shown great interest in the topic of social support and international literature has illustrated the importance of the network of relationships that bind an individual to the people who are close to him in his everyday life. This set of people represents the “social space” surrounding individuals (Pattison et al., 2004). The social space can take shape in the (immediate or extended) family and the circles of friends, workmates, or neighbors; it can generate strong or weak ties that interact with individual choices, and it can take the form of emotional support, instrumental support, or social companionship. According to this line of research, we intend: i) to analyze the Potential Support Ego (PSE)-centered networks of Italian couples along the different phases of family formation; ii) to extract structurally similar groups (PSE-network typologies) from partners’ ego-networks by means of multivariate techniques for categorical data. More specifically, our research questions concern: the characteristics of partners’ egosocial support networks; the types of help couples receive from people outside the immediate family; the effect of network typologies on the probability of receiving help in the household life course.
Focused matrix factorization for audience selection in display advertising

Audience selection is a key problem in display advertising systems in which we need to select a list of users who are interested (i.e., most likely to buy) in an advertising campaign. The users' past feedback on this campaign can be leveraged to construct such a list using collaborative filtering techniques such as matrix factorization. However, the user-campaign interaction is typically extremely sparse, hence the conventional matrix factorization does not perform well. Moreover, simply combining the users feedback from all campaigns does not address this since it dilutes the focus on target campaign in consideration. To resolve these issues, we propose a novel focused matrix factorization model (FMF) which learns users' preferences towards the specific campaign products, while also exploiting the information about related products. We exploit the product taxonomy to discover related campaigns, and design models to discriminate between the users' interest towards campaign products and non-campaign products. We develop a parallel multi-core implementation of the FMF model and evaluate its performance over a real-world advertising dataset spanning more than a million products. Our experiments demonstrate the benefits of using our models over existing approaches.
Quality assessment of videos compressed by HEVC based on video content complexity

In the last few years, online video services have experienced great development. When we watching videos, we all want to get better watching experiences, but the delivery of the videos are restricted by Internet bandwidth. In order to get better video quality with limited Internet environment, people have formulated a lot of compression standards to make the size of video files smaller. But during the procedure of video compressing, the video quality may decrease. So it is important for us to use appropriate encoding parameters for the videos with different content complexity. In 2013, the newest compression standard called High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) was promoted by the Joint Collaborative Team, and it is also called H.265. So far, a lot of encoders have been developed on the basis of HEVC standard and the most widely-used one is x265. As we know, video content complexity can be affected together by spatial perceptual information (SI) and temporal perceptual information (TI) of test sequences. We use scene criticality (CI) to combine the two factors. In the paper, we want to find the relationship between quality of video sequences with different resolutions and their content complexity. In the experiment, the test video sequences have diverse content complexity and they are all compressed by x265 encoder with different encoding settings.
Functional role of parallel circuits in the hippocampus

The hippocampal formation is one of the primary structures involved in episodic and spatial memory. Although the gross anatomy of hippocampus and its role in learning has been studied extensively, little is known about the microcircuits that underlie the computations involved and most of the studies also treat hippocampus as a single unit. However, the discovery of segregated parallel pathways of principal neurons in the hippocampus (Deguchi Y et al, 2011) across the three main sub regions (Dentate gyrus to CA3, CA3 to CA3, CA3 to CA1) implies that there could be differential processing of incoming information with little or complete absence of interference. In this thesis, the main question I address is what could be the role of these parallel circuits in the hippocampus and how does selective connectivity contribute to their role. In the first part I investigated the roles of principal neuron subpopulations in various hippocampal learning paradigms using activity and plasticity markers. The data from this part suggests that different principal neuron subpopulations are recruited by different types of learning. In the second part of the thesis, I explored how the selective connectivity contributes to the hippocampal memory formation by pharmacologically altering the selective connectivity during early stages of circuit development. The structural and behavioral evidence from the mice with altered connectivity clearly show that they have impaired hippocampal learning. In summary, the results in my thesis provide insight about the role of parallel circuits in hippocampus during different forms of learning and provides strong evidence that hippocampal circuits use biased connectivity to extract and process specific types of information.
Psychological Contracts in Coaching

The research sets out to explore the influence of the coach’s unconscious mind on the coaching process and to the answer the question, How does the coach’s unconscious mind influence the coaching process? This research is based on the psychodynamic concept that the unconscious mind is omnipresent and a strong influence on thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and sought to ascertain the extent to which the coach’s unconscious mind is at work in the coaching process. Brunning (2006) suggests that the term psychodynamic links psycho (from the psyche Greek meaning soul or mind) and dynamic (from the Greek dynamis, meaning strength or power). Thus, psychodynamic work is based on ways of understanding how the mental forces operating intrapersonally and interpersonally in and between individuals and groups affect their thinking and behaviour. It involves eight participants, all of whom are professionally trained and accredited coaches, working in the public sector in Scotland as either internal or external coaches. The research invited participants to explore their lived experience in relation to the intrapersonal process; the interpersonal process, relationships with parties to the coaching contract and the coaching process. The data collection followed three distinct yet inter-related stages, engaging participants in semi-structured interviews using metaphor, symbolic representation and creation of metaphoric landscapes, culminating in indirect observation of the coach at work. The narrative is a journey of discovery for both the researcher and the participants, with data emerging that identifies the coach’s relationship not only with the external parties but also with the different parts of self. In the three stages of this journey, the participants travel from mental activity, reflecting on lived experience, perceptions and events, to the exploration of mental process and constructs which are inferred, discovered and translated into conscious awareness throughout the research interviews. The professional significance of this research is the consideration of where the need for psychological awareness sits within the context of professional coach education and accreditation, which moves the coach beyond technique to psychological understanding, self-awareness and self-regulation.
Infrequent Expression of the Cancer-Testis Antigen, PASD1, in Ovarian Cancer

Ovarian cancer is very treatable in the early stages of disease; however, it is usually detected in the later stages, at which time, treatment is no longer as effective. If discovered early (Stage I), there is a 90% chance of five-year survival. Therefore, it is imperative that early-stage biomarkers are identified to enhance the early detection of ovarian cancer. Cancer-testis antigens (CTAs), such as Per ARNT SIM (PAS) domain containing 1 (PASD1), are unique in that their expression is restricted to immunologically restricted sites, such as the testis and placenta, which do not express MHC class I, and cancer, making them ideally positioned to act as targets for immunotherapy as well as potential biomarkers for cancer detection where expressed. We examined the expression of PASD1a and b in a number of cell lines, as well as eight healthy ovary samples, eight normal adjacent ovarian tissues, and 191 ovarian cancer tissues, which were predominantly stage I (n = 164) and stage II (n = 14) disease. We found that despite the positive staining of skin cancer, only one stage Ic ovarian cancer patient tissue expressed PASD1a and b at detectable levels. This may reflect the predominantly stage I ovarian cancer samples examined. To examine the restriction of PASD1 expression, we examined endometrial tissue arrays and found no expression in 30 malignant tumor tissues, 23 cases of hyperplasia, or 16 normal endometrial tissues. Our study suggests that the search for a single cancer-testes antigen/biomarker that can detect early ovarian cancer must continue.
Uniform approximation of singularly perturbed reaction‐diffusion problems by the finite element method on a Shishkin mesh

We consider the numerical approximation of singularly perturbed reaction‐diffusion problems over two‐dimensional domains with smooth boundary. Using the h version of the finite element method over appropriately designed piecewise uniform (Shishkin) meshes, we are able to uniformly approximate the solution at a quasi‐optimal rate. The results of numerical computations showing agreement with the analysis are also presented. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 19: 89–111, 2003
Art Experts and Auctions: Are Pre-Sale Estimates Unbiased and Fully Informative?

Public sales art catalogues include low and high pre-sale price estimates by experts. This makes it possible to analyze whether pre-sale estimates are unbiased predictors of realized prices. Unbiasedness is tested using a sample of some 1,600 lots of English silver auctioned by Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Results show that estimates are slightly (but significantly) biased and that experts do not use all the information that is available to them when they make their estimates.
Tense and Connective Constraints on the Expression of Causality

Starting from descriptions of French connectives (in particular "donc"---therefore), on the one hand, and aspectual properties of French tenses passe simple and imparfait on the other hand, we study in this paper how the two interact with respect to the expression of causality. It turns out that their interaction is not free. Some combinations are not acceptable, and we propose an explanation for them. These results apply straightforwardly to natural language generation: given as input two events related by a cause relation, we can choose among various ways of presentation (the parameters being (i) the order, (ii) the connective, (iii) the tense) so that we are sure to express a cause relation, without generating either an incorrect discourse or an ambiguous one.