Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance Assessment of Distributed Communication Architectures in Smart Grid

The huge amount of smart meters and growing frequent data readings have become a big challenge on data acquisition and processing in smart grid advanced metering infrastructure systems. This requires a distributed communication architecture in which multiple distributed meter data management systems (MDMSs) are deployed and meter data are processed locally. In this paper, we present the network model for supporting this distributed communication architecture and propose to use large-scale antenna array at the distributed MDMSs to further improve communication performance. We provide performance assessment for this architecture in terms of system throughput and cost efficiency. Specifically, we derive a closed-form asymptotic approximation to the system throughput, which exhibits a very good accuracy compared with simulation results. Based on this tight approximation, we have defined cost efficiency, which takes the deployment cost of distributed MDMSs into account. Our results demonstrate the significant advantages of the distributed architecture over the transitional centralized one in terms of communication performance and scalability. By carefully selecting the number of distributed MDMSs, the distributed communication architecture is also cost efficient.
Age-Related Anthropometric Changes and Undernutrition among Middle Aged and Older Savar Tribal Females of Keonjhar District, Orissa, India

Abstract A cross sectional study of 113 Savar tribal women of four villages of Keonjhar District, Orissa, India, was undertaken to examine age changes in anthropometric and body composition characteristics as well as to evaluate their nutritional status. Height, weight, circumferences and skinfolds data collected from subjects aged 41-75 years, along with body mass index and seven body composition variables. Significant negative age trends were observed for all anthropometric and body composition variables and indices. Correlation studies of age with these variables and indices revealed significant negative correlations. Linear regression analyses revealed that for all variables, age had a significant negative impact. Studies on the nutritional status of Savar women revealed that 53.1% belonged to the undernutrition category. In conclusion, this study showed that among these women, age was significantly negatively related with anthropometric and body composition variables and indices. Undernutrition was a serious problem in this group.
Data interpretation in breath biomarker research: pitfalls and directions

Most—if not all—potential diagnostic applications in breath research involve different marker concentrations rather than unique breath markers which only occur in the diseased state. Hence, data interpretation is a crucial step in breath analysis. To avoid artificial significance in breath testing every effort should be made to implement method validation, data cross-testing and statistical validation along this process. The most common data analysis related problems can be classified into three groups: confounding variables (CVs), which have a real correlation with both the diseased state and a breath marker but lead to the erroneous conclusion that disease and breath are in a causal relationship; voodoo correlations (VCs), which can be understood as statistically true correlations that arise coincidentally in the vast number of measured variables; and statistical misconceptions in the study design (SMSD). CV: Typical confounding variables are environmental and medical history, host factors such as gender, age, weight, etc and parameters that could affect the quality of breath data such as subject breathing mode, effects of breath sampling and effects of the analytical technique itself. VC: The number of measured variables quickly overwhelms the number of samples that can feasibly be taken. As a consequence, the chances of finding coincidental ‘voodoo’ correlations grow proportionally. VCs can typically be expected in the following scenarios: insufficient number of patients, (too) many measurement variables, the use of advanced statistical data mining methods, and non-independent data for validation. SMSD: Non-prospective, non-blinded and non-randomized trials, a priori biased study populations or group selection with unrealistically high disease prevalence typically represent misconception of study design. In this paper important data interpretation issues are discussed, common pitfalls are addressed and directions for sound data processing and interpretation are proposed.
Spatial tumor-immune modeling

In this paper, we carry out an examination of four mechanisms that can potentially lead to changing morphologies in a growing tumor: variations in nutrient consumption rates, cellular adhesion, excessive consumption of nutrients by tumor cells and immune cell interactions with the tumor. We present numerical simulations using a hybrid PDE-cellular automata (CA) model demonstrating the effects of each mechanism before discussing hypotheses about the contribution of each mechanism to morphology change.
Transmit/Receive Antenna Diversity for Frequency-Interleaved Single-Carrier Spread Spectrum Multi-Access with Frequency-Domain Equalization

Frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can significantly improve the downlink bit error rate (BER) performance of DS-CDMA in a frequency-selective fading channel. However, the uplink BER performance degrades due to a strong multi-user interference (MUI). We have proposed frequency-interleaved single-carrier spread spectrum multi-access (SC-SSMA) with MMSE-FDE, in which the subcarrier components of each user's signal are interleaved onto a wider bandwidth. Since frequency-interleaving patterns assigned to different users are orthogonal to each other, frequency-interleaved SC-SSMA can avoid the MUI completely while achieving frequency diversity gain with MMSE-FDE. In this paper, transmit/receive antenna diversity is applied to frequency-interleaved SC-SSMA with MMSE-FDE to further improve the BER performance. Its conditional BER is derived for the given set of channel gains. The average BER performance is numerically evaluated using the derived conditional BER and is confirmed by computer simulation.
Lifetime-aware LRU promotion policy for last-level cache

The traditional LRU replacement policy is susceptible to memory-intensive workloads with large non-reused data like thrashing applications and scan applications. For such workloads, the majority of cache blocks don't get any cache hits during residing in the cache. Cache performance can be improved by reducing the interference from non-reused data. Therefore, the lifetime of other blocks is increased and it can contribute to cache hit. We propose a Lifetime-aware LRU Promotion Policy and show that changing the promotion policy can effective reduce cache miss in the last-level cache. Our promotion policy dynamically adjusts promotion strategy and increases the lifetime for useful cache blocks. The experimental results show that our proposal reduces the average MPKI by 6% and 9% over EAF and DIP, respectively. In multicore, we also improve the performance and reduce the MPKI.
A Comparative Analysis of Trust Models for Safety Applications in IoT-enabled Vehicular Networks

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET) is a vital transportation technology that facilitates the vehicles to share sensitive information (such as steep-curve warnings and black ice on the road) with each other and with the surrounding infrastructure in real-time to avoid accidents and enable comfortable driving experience.To achieve these goals, VANET requires a secure environment for authentic, reliable and trusted information dissemination among the network entities. However, VANET is prone to different attacks resulting in the dissemination of compromised/false information among network nodes. One way to manage a secure and trusted network is to introduce trust among the vehicular nodes. To this end, various Trust Models (TMs) are developed for VANET and can be broadly categorized into three classes, Entity-oriented Trust Models (ETM), Data oriented Trust Models (DTM) and Hybrid Trust Models (HTM). These TMs evaluate trust based on the received information (data), the vehicle (entity) or both through different mechanisms. In this paper, we present a comparative study of the three TMs. Furthermore, we evaluate these TMs against the different trust, security and quality-of-service related benchmarks. Simulation results revealed that all these TMs have deficiencies in terms of end-to-end delays, event detection probabilities and false positive rates. This study can be used as a guideline for researchers to design new efficient and effective TMs for VANET.
Accelerated Telomere Attrition Is Associated with Relative Household Income, Diet and Inflammation in the pSoBid Cohort

Background It has previously been hypothesized that lower socio-economic status can accelerate biological ageing, and predispose to early onset of disease. This study investigated the association of socio-economic and lifestyle factors, as well as traditional and novel risk factors, with biological-ageing, as measured by telomere length, in a Glasgow based cohort that included individuals with extreme socio-economic differences. Methods A total of 382 blood samples from the pSoBid study were available for telomere analysis. For each participant, data was available for socio-economic status factors, biochemical parameters and dietary intake. Statistical analyses were undertaken to investigate the association between telomere lengths and these aforementioned parameters. Results The rate of age-related telomere attrition was significantly associated with low relative income, housing tenure and poor diet. Notably, telomere length was positively associated with LDL and total cholesterol levels, but inversely correlated to circulating IL-6. Conclusions These data suggest lower socio-economic status and poor diet are relevant to accelerated biological ageing. They also suggest potential associations between elevated circulating IL-6, a measure known to predict cardiovascular disease and diabetes with biological ageing. These observations require further study to tease out potential mechanistic links.
A recoverable object store

A design is presented for the storage component of a self-recovering distributed operating system. This component consists of an object manager, which maintains objects on main memory and on the disk, and a recovery layer, which incorporates a collection of highly optimized algorithms based on optimistic recovery. With optimistic recovery it is possible for a machine (or collection of machines) to present a fault-free interface to programs running on it (or them), making all data appear to be persistent. The optimizations presented make it possible to do this at a cost no higher than that of transaction systems. <<ETX>>
A Telemetric Pressure Sensor System for Biomedical Applications

A new implantable pressure sensor for long-term monitoring of intracranial pressure is presented. The sensor is powered by telemetry and can be interrogated wirelessly. A capacitive pressure transducer, whose capacitance is converted to a frequency-encoded signal by an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), senses the absolute pressure. The pressure-encoded signal, the ASIC input voltage, and onboard calibration parameters are transmitted to an external reading unit. The proposed novel packaging solution is designed for long-term stability and reliability of the sensor. The accuracy of sensor at body temperature is better than 2 mbar across a pressure range of 600-1200 mbar. The sensor is 13 mm in diameter and 4.5 mm in height.
Genome-Wide Haplotype Changes Produced by Artificial Selection during Modern Rice Breeding in Japan

During the last 90 years, the breeding of rice has delivered cultivars with improved agronomic and economic characteristics. Crossing of different lines and successive artificial selection of progeny based on their phenotypes have changed the chromosomal constitution of the ancestors of modern rice; however, the nature of these changes is unclear. The recent accumulation of data for genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in rice has allowed us to investigate the change in haplotype structure and composition. To assess the impact of these changes during modern breeding, we studied 177 Japanese rice accessions, which were categorized into three groups: landraces, improved cultivars developed from 1931 to 1974 (the early breeding phase), and improved cultivars developed from 1975 to 2005 (the late breeding phase). Phylogenetic tree and structure analysis indicated genetic differentiation between non-irrigated (upland) and irrigated (lowland) rice groups as well as genetic structuring within the irrigated rice group that corresponded to the existence of three subgroups. Pedigree analysis revealed that a limited number of landraces and cultivars was used for breeding at the beginning of the period of systematic breeding and that 11 landraces accounted for 70% of the ancestors of the modern improved cultivars. The values for linkage disequilibrium estimated from SNP alleles and the haplotype diversity determined from consecutive alleles in five-SNP windows indicated that haplotype blocks became less diverse over time as a result of the breeding process. A decrease in haplotype diversity, caused by a reduced number of polymorphisms in the haplotype blocks, was observed in several chromosomal regions. However, our results also indicate that new haplotype polymorphisms have been generated across the genome during the breeding process. These findings will facilitate our understanding of the association between particular haplotypes and desirable phenotypes in modern Japanese rice cultivars.
Emerging Antigenic Variants at the Antigenic Site Sb in Pandemic A(H1N1)2009 Influenza Virus in Japan Detected by a Human Monoclonal Antibody

The swine-origin pandemic A(H1N1)2009 virus, A(H1N1)pdm09, is still circulating in parts of the human population. To monitor variants that may escape from vaccination specificity, antigenic characterization of circulating viruses is important. In this study, a hybridoma clone producing human monoclonal antibody against A(H1N1)pdm09, designated 5E4, was prepared using peripheral lymphocytes from a vaccinated volunteer. The 5E4 showed viral neutralization activity and inhibited hemagglutination. 5E4 escape mutants harbored amino acid substitutions (A189T and D190E) in the hemagglutinin (HA) protein, suggesting that 5E4 recognized the antigenic site Sb in the HA protein. To study the diversity of Sb in A(H1N1)pdm09, 58 viral isolates were obtained during the 2009/10 and 2010/11 winter seasons in Osaka, Japan. Hemagglutination-inhibition titers were significantly reduced against 5E4 in the 2010/11 compared with the 2009/10 samples. Viral neutralizing titers were also significantly decreased in the 2010/11 samples. By contrast, isolated samples reacted well to ferret anti-A(H1N1)pdm09 serum from both seasons. Nonsynonymous substitution rates revealed that the variant Sb and Ca2 sequences were being positively selected between 2009/10 and 2010/11. In 7,415 HA protein sequences derived from GenBank, variants in the antigenic sites Sa and Sb increased significantly worldwide from 2009 to 2013. These results indicate that the antigenic variants in Sb are likely to be in global circulation currently.
Network-Aware Adaptation Techniques for Mobile File Systems

Wireless networks present unusual challenges for mobile file system clients, since they are characterised by unpredictable connectivity and widely-varying bandwidth. The traditional approach to adapting network communication to these conditions is to write back file updates asynchronously when bandwidth is low. Unfortunately, this can lead to underutilisation of bandwidth and inconsistencies between clients. We describe a new mobile file system, MAFS, that supports graceful degradation of file system performance as bandwidth is reduced, as well as rapid propagation of essential file updates. MAFS is able to achieve 10-20% improvements in execution time for real-life file system traces featuring read-write contention
Forecasting Rainfall in Thailand: A Case Study of Nakhon Ratchasima Province

Abstract—In this paper, we study the rainfall using a time series for weather stations in Nakhon Ratchasima province in Thailand by various statistical methods to enable us to analyse the behaviour of rainfall in the study areas. Time-series analysis is an important tool in modelling and forecasting rainfall. The ARIMA and Holt-Winter models were built on the basis of exponential smoothing. All the models proved to be adequate. Therefore it is possible to give information that can help decision makers establish strategies for the proper planning of agriculture, drainage systems and other water resource applications in Nakhon Ratchasima province. We obtained the best performance from forecasting with the ARIMA Model(1,0,1)(1,0,1)12.
ODE - Augmented Training Improves Anomaly Detection in Sensor Data from Machines

Machines of all kinds from vehicles to industrial equipment are increasingly instrumented with hundreds of sensors. Using such data to detect anomalous behaviour is critical for safety and efficient maintenance. However, anomalies occur rarely and with great variety in such systems, so there is often insufficient anomalous data to build reliable detectors. A standard approach to mitigate this problem is to use one class methods relying only on data from normal behaviour. Unfortunately, even these approaches are more likely to fail in the scenario of a dynamical system with manual control input(s). Normal behaviour in response to novel control input(s) might look very different to the learned detector which may be incorrectly detected as anomalous. In this paper, we address this issue by modelling time-series via Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) and utilising such an ODE model to simulate the behaviour of dynamical systems under varying control inputs. The available data is then augmented with data generated from the ODE, and the anomaly detector is retrained on this augmented dataset. Experiments demonstrate that ODE-augmented training data allows better coverage of possible control input(s) and results in learning more accurate distinctions between normal and anomalous behaviour in time-series.
Generalization of Kurokawa's stability criterion considering the dynamic nonlinearities in microwave oscillators

In this paper generalization of Kurokawa stability criterion is developed. The proposed approach considers both the static and dynamic nonlinear elements of the device model, while the original Kurokawa' s criterion takes into account only the static "resistive" elements of the form of v /spl equiv/ R/sub NL/ (i) or i /spl equiv/ G/sub NL/ (v). This assumption imposes some serious restrictions on the microwave oscillator model. The new proposed criterion is derived analytically and has been applied to a diode oscillator. It is also compared with the original Kurokawa criterion.
Chromosomal transposition of PiggyBac in mouse embryonic stem cells

Transposon systems are widely used for generating mutations in various model organisms. PiggyBac (PB) has recently been shown to transpose efficiently in the mouse germ line and other mammalian cell lines. To facilitate PB's application in mammalian genetics, we characterized the properties of the PB transposon in mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells. We first measured the transposition efficiencies of PB transposon in mouse embryonic stem cells. We next constructed a PB/SB hybrid transposon to compare PB and Sleeping Beauty (SB) transposon systems and demonstrated that PB transposition was inhibited by DNA methylation. The excision and reintegration rates of a single PB from two independent genomic loci were measured and its ability to mutate genes with gene trap cassettes was tested. We examined PB's integration site distribution in the mouse genome and found that PB transposition exhibited local hopping. The comprehensive information from this study should facilitate further exploration of the potential of PB and SB DNA transposons in mammalian genetics.
Cohomology of Categorical Self-Distributivity

We define self-distributive structures in the categories of coalgebras and cocommutative coalgebras. We obtain examples from vector spaces whose bases are the elements of finite quandles, the direct sum of a Lie algebra with its ground field, and Hopf algebras. The self-distributive operations of these structures provide solutions of the Yang--Baxter equation, and, conversely, solutions of the Yang--Baxter equation can be used to construct self-distributive operations in certain categories. Moreover, we present a cohomology theory that encompasses both Lie algebra and quandle cohomologies, is analogous to Hochschild cohomology, and can be used to study deformations of these self-distributive structures. All of the work here is informed via diagrammatic computations.
New Techniques to Measure Lens Tilt , Decentration and Longitudinal Chromatic Aberration in Phakic and Pseudophakic Eyes

A new automated technique is presented to measure lens tilt and decentration in phakic and pseudophakic human eyes, along with new data on the variances of these variables in the phakic eye. Our data shows that the natural lens has variable orientation in different subjects and that it is significantly tilted towards the temporal side, relative to the fixation axis. Furthermore, polychromatic eccentric photorefraction is used for the first time to measure chromatic aberration in the eye. Interestingly, no significant chromatic aberration was found, perhaps because the fundal layers show wavelength-dependent reflection in different depths and with different angular distributions. This assumption is supported by the observation that chromatic aberration could be measured in two different artificial eyes with a “mono-layered retina”.
Scalable Processing of Location-Based Social Networking Queries

Using GPS-enabled smart phones, social network services are enriched with location information which allows users to share geo-tagged contents with their friends. This so called location-based social network (LBSN) data has a dual spatial and graph nature. The growing scale and importance of LBSN data necessitate a platform which (i) has both spatial and graph capabilities, (ii) supports a wide range of queries, e.g., selection, structural, and aggregate queries, (iii) supports scalable distributed processing of large data volumes. In this paper, we propose such a platform, called Geo Social-GraphX, that segregates the LBSN data into several specific graphs capturing user-user, user-location, and location-location relationships, and enables a wide range of LBSN queries by proposing a comprehensive set of query primitives that can be composed into more advanced queries. We implement the platform based on GraphX, a map-reduce infrastructure for distributed graph computation. We further improve the query performance in several ways. For social-related data, we use vertex-centric messaging operators which better address the recursive nature of graph data than traditional two-stage map-reduce. For spatial-related data, we use effective spatial partitioning and indexing methods. Experiments on both synthetic and real LBSN datasets show that Geo Social-GraphX can process a variety of LBSN queries efficiently, scales on multicore architectures, and achieves much better performance than the state of the art competing framework, Spatial Hadoop.