Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generalized Higher Order Energy Based Instantaneous Amplitude and Frequency Estimation and Their Applications to Power Disturbance Detection

The instantaneous amplitude (IA) based on the higher order differential energy operator is proposed. And its general form for arbitrary order is also proposed. The various definitions of the IA and the instantaneous frequency (IF) estimators are considered. The IA and IF estimators based on the energy operators need less computational cost than the conventional IF and IA estimators exploiting the Hilbert transform. The IF and IA estimators are compared in terms of the frequency and amplitude tracking accuracy of the AM-FM signals. For noiseless case, the IA and IF estimators based on the Teager-Kaiser energy operator show better tracking performance than the IF and IA estimators based on the higher energy operators. However, under noisy condition, the IF and IA estimator based on the higher order energy operators with the order 3 and 4 show better tracking than the Teager-Kaiser energy based estimators. The IF and IA estimators are applied to signals in the various power anomalies to show their usefulness as the disturbance detectors.
Software-Based Lightweight Multithreading to Overlap Memory-Access Latencies of Commodity Processors

Emerging services applications operate on vast datasets that are kept in DRAM to minimize latency and to improve throughput. A considerable part of them have irregular memory references and then caused the serious locality issue. This paper presents a Software-based LIght weight Multithreading framework, SLIM, to conquer this problem for commodity hardware, which still keeps the simple style of multithreading programming. The principle is fairly straight: as issuing an irregular memory reference, the current fine-granularity thread uses some primitive of asynchronous memory-accesses and then switches itself out for others' execution to overlap long memory-latencies. Meanwhile, SLIM tries to maintain most contents of thread-contexts in the on-chip cache to reduce cache-misses. Therefore, the main challenge lies in how to improve the cache behavior at the expense of more instructions involved for context-switches and smaller cache-space left for applications. Consequently, we have proposed a corresponding performance model to guide the design, which is also verified by tests. Moreover, an optimized synchronization mechanism has been designed. For some classic irregular application, excessive tests have been carried out to explore the effects on performance of system configurations, including the aggressiveness of data-pre-fetch, the distribution of tasks among cores / CPUs, etc. Results show that it can achieve higher performance than the counterpart using traditional threads, under different data scales. Even compared to some tricky codes with manual optimizations, its performance is comparable and it has still reserved the simple programing manner of high-concurrency applications.
L-4F Alters Hyperlipidemic (But Not Healthy) Mouse Plasma to Reduce Platelet Aggregation

Background and Purpose—Hyperlipidemia is associated with platelet hyperreactivity. We hypothesized that L-4F, an apolipoprotein A-I mimetic peptide, would inhibit platelet aggregation in hyperlipidemic mice. Methods and Results—Injecting L-4F into apolipoprotein E (apoE)–null and low-density lipoprotein receptor–null mice resulted in a significant reduction in platelet aggregation in response to agonists; however, there was no reduction in platelet aggregation after injection of L-4F into wild-type (WT) mice. Consistent with these results, injection of L-4F into apoE-null mice prolonged bleeding time; the same result was not found in WT mice. Incubating L-4F in vitro with apoE-null platelet-rich plasma also resulted in decreased platelet aggregation. However, incubating washed platelets from either apoE-null or WT mice with L-4F did not alter aggregation. Compared with WT mice, unstimulated platelets from apoE-null mice contained significantly more 12-hydroxy 5,8,10,14-eicosatetraenoic acid, thromboxane A2, and prostaglandins D2 and E2. In response to agonists, platelets from L-4F–treated apoE-null mice formed significantly less thromboxane A2, prostaglandins D2 and E2, and 12-hydroxy 5,8,10,14-eicosatetraenoic acid. Conclusion—By binding plasma-oxidized lipids that cause platelet hyperreactivity in hyperlipidemic mice, L-4F decreases platelet aggregation.
Hybrid precoding for millimetre wave MIMO systems based on particle swarm optimisation

Millimetre wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have been proposed to enable Gbps communication for next-generation cellular systems and local area networks. To compensate for the severe propagation loss of the mmWave channel, a cost-effective hybrid precoding architecture, combining a digital precoder and an analogue precoder, is widely used in mmWave MIMO systems. In this study, two hybrid precoding algorithms based on particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm will be proposed for two different hybrid precoding structures, i.e. the fully connected and partially connected structures. First, the authors use the phase of the analogue precoding variable to replace the corresponding variable with the constraints of the unit norm to solve the non-convex constraints skillfully. Then they design analogue precoding by using PSO algorithm and compute the digital precoding based on the least squares solution. Finally, the proposed algorithms are compared with the existing advanced algorithms. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can approach the optimal performance under the corresponding structure.
High Dynamic Range Imaging with the Android Platform Group 8 :

High Dynamic Range imaging is an technique allowing to encode a greater dynamic range of luminance in the same picture. Here we present an implementation of HDR imaging generation that works by taking different pictures with different exposure settings, aligning them, merging them into one single picure, and finally doing a tone mapping operation in order to display the HDR image on a LDR device, as the Android phone screen. This report illustrates our approach to bring HDR photography on the Android phone.
An Evolutionary Approach to Automatic Video Editing

Digital video has become affordable and attractive to home users, but skill and manual labour are still required to transform amateur footage into aesthetically pleasing movies. We present a novel algorithm for transforming raw home video footage into concise, temporally salient clips. We interpret the sequence of editing operations applied to footage as a ‘program’ comprising cutting, panning and zooming constructs. We develop a Genetic Programming (GP) framework for representing and evolving such programs. Under this framework, the search for an aesthetically pleasing video edit becomes a search for the optimal genetic program. Our aesthetic criterion promotes the inclusion of people in shots, whilst penalising rapid shot changes or shot changes in the presence of camera motion. We present results on some representative home videos.
SWS task: Articulatory phonetic units and sliding DTW

This paper describes the experiments conducted for spoken web search at MediaEval 2011 evaluations. The task consists of searching for audio segments within audio content using an audio query. The current approach uses a broad articulatory phonetic units for indexing the audio files and to obtain audio segments. Sliding DTW is applied on the audio segments to determine the time instants.
Utterance Selection Based on Sentence Similarities and Dialogue Breakdown Detection on NTCIR-12 STC Task

This paper describes our contribution for the NTCIR-12 STC Japanese task. The purpose of the task is to retrieve tweets that suits as responses of a chat-oriented dialogue system from a huge number of tweets pool. Our system re-trieves tweets based on following two steps: (cid:12)rst it retrieves tweets that resemble to input sentences, and then, it (cid:12)lters inappropriate tweets in terms of the dialogue (cid:13)ow naturalness using a dialogue breakdown detection system. Our experiments show that although the dialogue breakdown detection cannot distinguish best and medium appropriateness, it works well even in data domains that are slightly diﬀerent from expected ones.
N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor siRNA inhibits the release of Weibel-Palade bodies in endothelial cells

The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of small interfering RNA (siRNA) methods on the expression of N-ethylmaleimide sensitive factor (NSF) and Weibel-Palade body (WPB) release in endothelial cells. A small hairpin RNA (shRNA), mediated with an adenovirus vector, was designed to target the N-terminal functional area of NSF. Subsequently, viruses were transfected into human aortic endothelial cells. The mRNA and protein expression levels of NSF were detected using reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction and Western blot analyses, respectively, and the release of WPBs in the endothelial cells was examined using immunofluorescence. The mRNA expression of NSF in the endothelial cells, which were transfected with the adenoviruses carrying the NSF-shRNA was significantly decreased, compared with the negative control group (P=0.035) and blank control group (P=0.02). In addition, the mRNA expression of NSF was gradually decreased as duration increased; there were marked differences between the 24, 48 and 72 h groups (P<0.05). The protein expression of NSF was significantly decreased in the experimental group, compared with the negative control group (P=0.004) and blank control group (P=0.031), however, no difference was observed between the negative control and blank control groups (P=0.249). The immunofluorescence staining showed that the release of WPBs in the endothelial cells induced with thrombin was inhibited markedly following transfection with the virus carrying the NSF-shRNA. Therefore NSF-siRNA inhibited the mRNA and protein expression levels of NSF, and inhibited the release of WPBs in endothelial cells induced with thrombin. These results suggested that NSF-siRNA may be valuable for preventing and treating atherosclerosis and acute coronary syndrome.
Multimodal Cryptosystem Based on Fuzzy Commitment

Biometric information security is a relatively new research interest in the field of biometric authentication. In view of the special relationship of human face and human ear in physiological position, the fusion of face and ear is a natural form of multimodal authentication system used for non-intrusive personal identification. This paper proposes a template protection method for multimodal biometric template. The first step is to apply feature level fusion after feature extraction using principal component analysis. The second step converts the face and ear fused real-valued template to binary template using non-invertible transformation. The third step encrypts the binary template by means of fuzzy commitment. The authentication experimental results on a face and ear multimodal dataset show that multimodal biometric template encryption performs better than the unimodal biometric encryption.
My goodness — and yours : a history , and some possible futures , of DALY meanings and valuation procedures

In the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project the question has been raised whether disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) should measure average health only, or also capture concerns for fairness and equity. The following is a brief comment on this issue. I first distinguish between goodness in health care in terms of objective health gain, individual utility, and societal value. I then show the role of these concepts and their operationalization in the history of DALYs. I proceed to discussing the latest proposal for defining health in the GBD project (Murray et al. 2000), and its possible implications for procedures for determining disability weights. I finally discuss the pros and cons of different candidate weighting procedures.
Location-Based Reliable Multicast Routing Algorithm for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A location-based reliable multicast algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks is proposed in this paper. A grid network with geographical location information is divided into a high-channel subnetwork and a low-channel subnetwork according to labels of grids. Then destination nodes are partitioned into groups by using location information, the multicast routing is done in label order for each group. The proposed algorithm does not require the maintenance of a distribution structure(e.g., a tree or a mesh) or a planar graph, which introduces extra cost. A forwarding node only uses information about positions of its destinations and its own neighbors to determine next hops and to detour obstacles or faulty nodes. The localized operations can take advantage of the power saving in wireless network. The proposed algorithm is thus very well suited for highly dynamic networks. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by means of simulation.
An Initial Study In the Development of Smartphone Addiction Scale for Student (SAS-S)

The purpose of this study was to develop a new scale, Smartphone addiction scale for Student (SAS-S) was developed to measure the level of smartphone addiction in high school students. A total of 32 item scales were developed through literature studies. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is used to examine the structure of factors formed in this scale. The results show the Smartphone addiction scale for Student (SAS-S) has 22 good items from 6 factor structures that are formed, including: (1) Self Control Disorder, (2) loss of time, (3) sleep disturbances, (4) can not be without smartphones, (5) changes in feelings and, (6) concerned smartphone. SAS-S is a good scale that can be used by any high school student. Another point also shows that the scale of smartphone addiction for high school students has a strong level of validity and reliability.
Improving the diagnostics of tuberculosis and drug resistance with Xpert MTB/RIF in a district general hospital in Sierra Leone: a quality improvement project

Sierra Leone has a high tuberculosis (TB) burden with a prevalence of 441 cases per 100 000 population. As a result of the Global Fund, some facilities in the country have access to improved diagnostics, including Xpert MTB/RIF testing, of particular use in diagnosing those at risk of drug resistance, in the form of rifampicin-resistant (RR) TB. This quality improvement project describes how a small, rural district general hospital in Masanga village improved the diagnosis of TB and RR-TB by creating a formal link with the regional hospital in Makeni city. In an effort to improve diagnosis, all patients with a suspicion of TB and one of the following would have a sample sent for Xpert MTB/RIF testing: previous TB treatment (of any course length), HIV positive or known contact of a RR-TB case. The samples were transported by the logistics team, who already drove weekly from Masanga to Makeni for supplies, and the results were texted to the clinician in charge of the medical ward. Over the course of the first 4 months of this intervention, 34 samples had Xpert MTB/RIF testing performed compared with two samples in the previous 12 months since the machine had been installed. This yielded nine additional diagnoses of TB (in patients with negative or unavailable smear results) and five diagnoses of RR-TB with subsequent appropriate isolation and transfer to the central tertiary centre. This study shows that it is feasible to centralise Xpert MTB/RIF testing in low-resource settings using creative methods for sample transfer and results dissemination, leading to both improved diagnostics and infection control.
Visualizing astrophysical N-body systems

I begin with a brief history of N-body simulation and visualization and then go on to describe various methods for creating images and animations of modern simulations in cosmology and galactic dynamics. These techniques are incorporated into a specialized particle visualization software library called MYRIAD that is designed to render images within large parallel N-body simulations as they run. I present several case studies that explore the application of these methods to animations in star clusters, interacting galaxies and cosmological structure formation.
Learning finite state word representations for unsupervised Twitter adaptation of POS taggers

Brown clusters enable POS taggers to generalize better to words that did not occur in the labeled data, clustering distributionally similar seen and unseen words, thereby making models more robust to sparsity effects and domain shifts. However, Brown clustering is a transductive clustering method, and OOV effects still arise. Words neither in the labeled data nor in the unlabeled data cannot be assigned to a cluster, and hence, are frequently mis-tagged. This paper presents a simple method of learning ﬁnite state automata from Brown clusters that accept and give representations to truly unseen words. We show that using automata rather than Brown clusters lead to signiﬁcant improvements in performance in unsupervised cross-domain POS tagging.
The 3–cocycles of the Alexander quandles

Quandle cohomology H∗(X,A) is defined for any quandle X and any abelian group A, and may be used (see [1, 2, 7] for details) to construct isotopy invariants of classical knots and links, and also of higher-dimensional embeddings. In particular, such invariants obtained from 3–cocycles play an interesting rôle in the study of 2–knots (see [8, 9] for example). However, there are not very many concrete examples of nontrivial 3–cocycles, and so it would be useful to find a systematic method of constructing nontrivial 3–cocycles with calculable forms for some classes of quandles.
Mobile sensing to suggest customized tours to visitors in museums

Recently, the scientific community has shown a remarkable interest in the mobile sensor networks and in the application of this kind of networks to museums. In our work we use mobile sensor networks to improve the tour quality of a visitor of a museum. In particular, we provide an algorithm that recompute dynamically the best tour for a specific visitor on the basis of his physical reactions induced by each artwork. We originally use MDCs to acquire these reactions.
Automatic view composition for improving co-training

In this paper, we propose a view composition method for co-training. In order to compose views properly, two assumptions should be satisfied. One is that two views are class-conditionally independent on each other; the other is that the classification information between labels and view is high. We apply Class-Conditional Independent Component Analysis (CC-ICA) to obtain new features which are mutually independent, and compose views hold a high classification information. We show that our method is promising and effective through the experiment.
Restriction versus guidance in protein structure prediction

Conformational restriction by fragment assembly and guidance in molecular dynamics are alternate conformational search strategies in protein structure prediction. We examine both approaches using a version of the associative memory Hamiltonian that incorporates the influence of water-mediated interactions (AMW). For short proteins (<70 residues), fragment assembly, while searching a restricted space, compares well to molecular dynamics and is often sufficient to fold such proteins to near-native conformations (4Å) via simulated annealing. Longer proteins encounter kinetic sampling limitations in fragment assembly not seen in molecular dynamics which generally samples more native-like conformations. We also present a fragment enriched version of the standard AMW energy function, AMW-FME, which incorporates the local sequence alignment derived fragment libraries from fragment assembly directly into the energy function. This energy function, in which fragment information acts as a guide not a restriction, is found by molecular dynamics to improve on both previous approaches.
Development of an economic model to assess the cost-effectiveness of hawthorn extract as an adjunct treatment for heart failure in Australia

Objective An economic model was developed to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of hawthorn extract as an adjunctive treatment for heart failure in Australia. Methods A Markov model of chronic heart failure was developed to compare the costs and outcomes of standard treatment and standard treatment with hawthorn extract. Health states were defined by the New York Heart Association (NYHA) classification system and death. For any given cycle, patients could remain in the same NYHA class, experience an improvement or deterioration in NYHA class, be hospitalised or die. Model inputs were derived from the published medical literature, and the output was quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). Probabilistic sensitivity analysis was conducted. The expected value of perfect information (EVPI) and the expected value of partial perfect information (EVPPI) were conducted to establish the value of further research and the ideal target for such research. Results Hawthorn extract increased costs by $1866.78 and resulted in a gain of 0.02 QALYs. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio was $85 160.33 per QALY. The cost-effectiveness acceptability curve indicated that at a threshold of $40 000 the new treatment had a 0.29 probability of being cost-effective. The average incremental net monetary benefit (NMB) was −$1791.64, the average NMB for the standard treatment was $92 067.49, and for hawthorn extract $90 275.84. Additional research is potentially cost-effective if research is not proposed to cost more than $325 million. Utilities form the most important target parameter group for further research. Conclusions Hawthorn extract is not currently considered to be cost-effective in as an adjunctive treatment for heart failure in Australia. Further research in the area of utilities is warranted.
The Game of Paxos

We introduce the Game of Paxos to simplify the presentation of Paxos-style consensus protocols. We use this game to show how Lamport’s Paxos and Castro and Liskov’s PBFT are the same consensus protocol, but for different failure models. In this game, players try to store some value in a write-once register and quit only when they learn the register’s final value. The write-once register contains two novel abstractions: (i) a Paxos register that captures how processes in both Paxos and PBFT propose and decide values and (ii) tokens that capture how these protocols guarantee agreement despite partial failures. We encapsulate the differences between Paxos and PBFT in the implementation details of these