Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling and Clustering Analysis of Broadband Convergence Networks

In contemporary telecommunication systems Markov processes are seldom observed, and the widely used Markovian models don't represent precisely the real system. In order to omit the need of modeling the system with a Markov chain we apply different clustering approaches for obtaining the steady state probabilities, which are represented by the data clusters. Some widely used data clustering methods are applied for performance evaluation of different telecommunication networks. However, in order to accomplish our investigation, we conduct our research with Markovian models, so that we have a solid ground for comparison, although the benefits of applying clustering techniques lie in the domain of the non-Markovian processes.
A low-power high-sensitivity CMOS voltage-to-frequency converter

This paper presents a low-cost high-speed CMOS voltage-to-frequency converter (VFC) which targets front-end sensor interfacing in wireless sensor networks applications. The proposed VFC, designed in a 0.35 µm CMOS technology supplied at 3 V, is very simple, obtaining at the same time high performance characteristics: it operates with a power consumption below 1.03 mW at output frequencies ranging from 1.198 MHz to 2.186 MHz given a 1.0–2.0 V input (1 MHz/V sensitivity) with an accuracy better than 1 %.
COMMUTATOR THEORY FOR COMPATIBLE UNIFORMITIES

We investigate commutator operations on compatible uniformities. We define a commutator operation for uniformities in the congruence-modular case which extends the commutator on congruences, and explore its properties. Introduction The purpose of this paper is to generalize the commutator of congruences to a commutator of compatible uniformities. Commutator theory (on congruences) works best for congruences of algebras in congruence-modular varieties. The same is true of the commutator of uniformities described here. In fact, the commutator of congruences α and β becomes a special case of that of uniformities, when we view α and β as the uniformities Ug{α } and Ug{ β } that they generate, because we have Ug{ [α, β] } = [Ug{α }, Ug{ β }]. We follow the development of Commutator Theory in [4] fairly closely. The main thesis of [10], where compatible uniformities were first studied systematically in the context of Universal Algebra, is that compatible uniformities can be considered a generalization of congruences. Often, there is a reasonably direct translation of congruence-theoretic arguments into uniformity-theoretic ones. Following this philosophy, we are able to generalize (in Sections 4 and 5) the concept of C(α, β; δ) (α centralizes β modulo δ) to compatible uniformities, and in the congruence-modular case, to define [U ,V] to be the least uniformity W such that C(U ,V;W). Another approach to the commutator [α, β], for congruences α and β, as discussed in [4], is to study congruences of the algebra A(α). The congruence β is pushed out along the homomorphism ∆α : A → A(α) that sends a ∈ A to 〈a, a〉, yielding a congruence ∆α,β which gives rise to [α, β]. In the case of uniformities, we can replace β by a uniformity U , and push it out along ∆α, yielding a compatible uniformity ∆α,U on A(α) which we then show gives rise to [Ug{α },U ] in the important special case of algebras having term operations comprising a group structure. (This includes many familiar varieties of algebras, such as groups, rings, and varieties of nonassociative algebras.) This is done in Section 6. It is natural to ask whether the theory can be extended to give an interpretation of [U ,V] in terms of compatible uniformities on some algebra A(U). Unfortunately, the necessary definition of A(U) is not yet available. Date: February 8, 2008. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary: 08A99; Secondary: 08B10.
Expatriation and career success: A human capital perspective

Very little is known about the linkages between expatriation and objective measures of career success. In this field study we address the expatriation–compensation attainment relationship, after controlling for different kinds of international experience, among 440 graduates of elite MBA programs from around the world. The results suggest that a positive compensation return only accrues to repatriates who have experienced more than one expatriate assignment, perceived acquired knowledge and skills to be utilized during post-repatriation periods, and who are working at higher organizational levels. These findings, along with a supplementary analysis, support an explanation of the results based on human capital theory. That is, expatriation relates to compensation attainment because it is an intense developmental experience, and not merely a selection or signaling mechanism. Furthermore, by incorporating the concepts of value of human capital, richness of human capital, and opportunity to display human capital, we provide a stronger test of when and for whom completing expatriate assignments is positively associated with compensation. The results also suggest that there are currently few readily available substitutes for expatriation.
The Strain-Encoded Relationship between PrPSc Replication, Stability and Processing in Neurons is Predictive of the Incubation Period of Disease

Prion strains are characterized by differences in the outcome of disease, most notably incubation period and neuropathological features. While it is established that the disease specific isoform of the prion protein, PrPSc, is an essential component of the infectious agent, the strain-specific relationship between PrPSc properties and the biological features of the resulting disease is not clear. To investigate this relationship, we examined the amplification efficiency and conformational stability of PrPSc from eight hamster-adapted prion strains and compared it to the resulting incubation period of disease and processing of PrPSc in neurons and glia. We found that short incubation period strains were characterized by more efficient PrPSc amplification and higher PrPSc conformational stabilities compared to long incubation period strains. In the CNS, the short incubation period strains were characterized by the accumulation of N-terminally truncated PrPSc in the soma of neurons, astrocytes and microglia in contrast to long incubation period strains where PrPSc did not accumulate to detectable levels in the soma of neurons but was detected in glia similar to short incubation period strains. These results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that a decrease in conformational stability results in a corresponding increase in replication efficiency and suggest that glia mediated neurodegeneration results in longer survival times compared to direct replication of PrPSc in neurons.
RFID: From Supply Chains to Sensor Nets

The next generation internet will be the internet of things (and not just of computing devices like PCs, PDAs); this is presumed to be enabled by integrating simple computing plus communications capabilities into common objects of everyday use. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a compelling technology for creation of such pervasive sensor networks due to its potential for ubiquitous, low-cost/low-maintenance use. However, the current drivers for RFID deployment emphasize supply chain management using passive tags, implying that RFID sensor nets require advances beyond the components and system designs aimed at supply chain applications. This work provides a glimpse of how this may be achieved.
A QUALITY ASSESSMENT METHOD FOR 3D ROAD POLYGON OBJECTS

With the development of the economy, the fast and accurate extraction of the city road is significant for GIS data collection and update, remote sensing images interpretation, mapping and spatial database updating etc. 3D GIS has attracted more and more attentions from academics, industries and governments with the increase of requirements for interoperability and integration of different sources of data. The quality of 3D geographic objects is very important for spatial analysis and decision-making. This paper presents a method for the quality assessment of the 3D road polygon objects which is created by integrating 2D Road Polygon data with LiDAR point cloud and other height information such as Spot Height data in Hong Kong Island. The quality of the created 3D road polygon data set is evaluated by the vertical accuracy, geometric and attribute accuracy, connectivity error, undulation error and completeness error and the final results are presented.
gHull: A GPU algorithm for 3D convex hull

A novel algorithm is presented to compute the convex hull of a point set in ℝ3 using the graphics processing unit (GPU). By exploiting the relationship between the Voronoi diagram and the convex hull, the algorithm derives the approximation of the convex hull from the former. The other extreme vertices of the convex hull are then found by using a two-round checking in the digital and the continuous space successively. The algorithm does not need explicit locking or any other concurrency control mechanism, thus it can maximize the parallelism available on the modern GPU. The implementation using the CUDA programming model on NVIDIA GPUs is exact and efficient. The experiments show that it is up to an order of magnitude faster than other sequential convex hull implementations running on the CPU for inputs of millions of points. The works demonstrate that the GPU can be used to solve nontrivial computational geometry problems with significant performance benefit.
Unsynchronized Distributed Motion Planning with Safety Guarantees under Second-Order Dynamics by Devin Kieber

Unsynchronized Distributed Motion Planning with Safety Guarantees under Second-Order Dynamics by Devin Kieber Grady Robots are increasingly found to operate together in the same environment where they must coordinate their motion. Such an operation is simple if the motion is quasi-static. Under second-order dynamics, the problem becomes challenging even for a known environment. Planning must guarantee safety by ensuring collision-free paths for the considered period by not bringing the robot to states where collisions are inevitable. This can be addressed with communication among robots, but it becomes complicated when the replanning cycles of different robots are not synchronized and robots make planning decisions at different times. This thesis shows how to guarantee safety for communicating second-order vehicles, whose replanning rates do not coincide, through a distributed motion planning framework without a global time reference. The method is evaluated through simulation where each robot has its own address space, and communicates with message passing. A proof of safety is presented, and simulation results are used to investigate performance of the framework.
Turkish emotional speech database

Success of an emotion recognition systems from speech signal is directly dependent to the database used in system modeling as in any pattern recognition problem. In this work, we give the detailed description of the new Turkish emotional speech database we created. Our database consists of 5304 speech signal and their textual contents extracted from 55 Turkish movies. Speech signals are labeled by numerous evaluators both categorically (happy, surprised, sad, angry, fear, neutral and other) and in 3-dimensional emotional space (valence, activation and dominance). We believe that our database will be very helpful in further studies on acoustical analysis of Turkish emotional speech and emotion recognition.
Water Molecular System Dynamics Associated with Amyloidogenic Nucleation as Revealed by Real Time Near Infrared Spectroscopy and Aquaphotomics

The formation of amyloid fibrils proceeds via a nucleation-dependent mechanism in which nucleation phase is generally associated with a high free energy resulting in the rate-limiting step. On the basis of this kinetic feature, the nucleation is one of the most crucial phases controlling the pathogenesis of amyloidoses, but little is known about the details of how protein molecules and surrounding environment vary at this stage. Here, we applied near infrared (NIR) spectral monitoring of water structural changes in real time during the nucleation-dependent fibrillation of insulin. Whilst multivariate spectral analysis in the 2050–2350 nm spectral region indicated cross-β formation, characteristic transformations of water structure have been detected in the spectral region 1300–1600 nm corresponding to the first overtone of water OH stretching vibrations. Furthermore, specific water spectral patterns (aquagrams) related to different water molecular conformations have been found along the course of protein nucleation and aggregation. Right in the beginning, dissociation of hydrogen-bonded network in bulk water and coinstantaneous protein and ion hydration were observed, followed by water hydrogen-bonded networks development, presumably forcing the nucleation. These specific transformations of water spectral pattern could be used further as a biomarker for early non-invasive diagnosis of amyloidoses prior to explosive amplification and deposits of amyloid fibrils.
Hubble Space Telescope Imaging of the WR 38 / WR 38 a Cluster 1

We are conducting a high angular resolution imaging survey of Galactic WolfRayet stars using the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 aboard the Hubble Based on observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Present address: NASA/GSFC, Code 685, Building 21, Greenbelt, MD, 20771, wallace@exo1.gsfc. nasa.gov Member of Carrera del Investigador, CIC-BA, Argentina
Phosphoglucomutase is absent in Trypanosoma brucei and redundantly substituted by phosphomannomutase and phospho-N-acetylglucosamine mutase

The enzymes phosphomannomutase (PMM), phospho‐N‐acetylglucosamine mutase (PAGM) and phosphoglucomutase (PGM) reversibly catalyse the transfer of phosphate between the C6 and C1 hydroxyl groups of mannose, N‐acetylglucosamine and glucose respectively. Although genes for a candidate PMM and a PAGM enzymes have been found in the Trypanosoma brucei genome, there is, surprisingly, no candidate gene for PGM. The TbPMM and TbPAGM genes were cloned and expressed in Escherichia coli and the TbPMM enzyme was crystallized and its structure solved at 1.85 Å resolution. Antibodies to the recombinant proteins localized endogenous TbPMM to glycosomes in the bloodstream form of the parasite, while TbPAGM localized to both the cytosol and glycosomes. Both recombinant enzymes were able to interconvert glucose‐phosphates, as well as acting on their own definitive substrates. Analysis of sugar nucleotide levels in parasites with TbPMM or TbPAGM knocked down by RNA interference (RNAi) suggests that, in vivo, PGM activity is catalysed by both enzymes. This is the first example in any organism of PGM activity being completely replaced in this way and it explains why, uniquely, T. brucei has been able to lose its PGM gene. The RNAi data for TbPMM also showed that this is an essential gene for parasite growth.
Real-Time Identification of Operating Room State from Video

Managers of operating rooms (ORs) and of units upstream (e.g., ambulatory surgery) and downstream (e.g., intensive care and post-anesthesia care) of the OR require real-time information about OR occupancy. Which ORs are in use, and when will each ongoing operation end? This information is used to make decisions about how to assign staff, when to prepare patients for the OR, when to schedule add-on cases, when to move cases, and how to prioritize room cleanups (Dexter et at. 2004). It is typically gathered by OR managers manually, by walking to each OR and estimating the time to case completion. This paper presents a system for determining the state of an ongoing operation automatically from video. Support vector machines are trained to identify relevant image features, and hidden Markov models are trained to use these features to compute a sequence of OR states from the video. The system was tested on video captured over a 24 hour period in one of the 19 operating rooms in Baltimore's R. Adams Crowley Shock Trauma Center. It was found to be more accurate and have less delay while providing more fine-grained state information than the current state-of-the-art system based on patient vital signs used by the Shock Trauma Center.
Analysis of the GSTF disk scheduling algorithm

Modern disk drives have the ability to queue incoming read and write requests and to service them in an out of order fashion. In the disk scheduling problem we are given at any given moment a set of queued requests and we wish to service them in an order which minimizes the service rate, or equivalently, in an order which maximizes the number of requests serviced per time unit. The disk scheduling problem with various assumptions has a long history of both experimental and theoretical work, see [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 11] among many others.
Social role clustering with topic model

In this paper, we propose a new role analyzing paradigm for social networks enlightened by topic modeling, which can be adopted as a primitive building block in various security related tasks, such as hidden community finding, important person recognizing and so on. We first present the social network under analyzing as a heterogeneous network constructed by both the users and the subjects discussed among them. We then view this network in a Bag-of-Users schema, which mimics its classical Bag-of-Words counterpart. In this schema, the subjects discussed are treated as “documents” while the users are treated as “words” which construct the “documents”. Based on this novel presentation, we finally apply topic modeling technology to perform the social role clustering. Experiments on a practical security-related social network dataset prove the effectiveness of our approach.
Rate-based scheduling policy for QoS flows in networks on chip

Several propositions of NoC architectures claim providing quality of service (QoS) guarantees, which is essential for e.g. real time and multimedia applications. The state-of-art in NoC literature provides QoS at design time, using circuit switching and/or priority-based scheduling. Both methods optimize a given network template to achieve the QoS requirements after traffic generation and network simulation. However, modern SoCs may execute applications not devised at design time, and these may easily have its QoS requirements violated by a previously fixed NoC structure. This paper proposes a method to achieve QoS requirements in NoCs at execution time. The proposed rate-based scheduling policy is employed to determine the priority of each QoS flow being transmitted through the network. The basis of this scheduling method is the difference between the rate required by a given flow and the rate currently used by this flow. This difference corresponds to the flow priority used by the scheduler. Differently from traditional priority-based scheduling, the priority is dynamically adjusted. Preliminary results show the efficiency of the rate-based scheduling to meet QoS requirements, by comparing the proposed scheduling to priority-based scheduling.
Scalable Social Analytics for Live Viral Event Prediction

Large-scale, predictive social analytics have proven effective. Over the last decade, research and industrial efforts have understood the potential value of inferences based on online behavior analysis, sentiment mining, influence analysis, epidemic spread, etc. The majority of these efforts, however, are not yet designed with realtime responsiveness as a first-order requirement. Typical systems perform a post-mortem analysis on volumes of historical data and validate their “predictions” against already-occurred events.We observe that in many applications, real-time predictions are critical and delays of hours (and even minutes) can reduce their utility. As examples: political campaigns could react very quickly to a scandal spreading on Facebook; content distribution networks (CDNs) could prefetch videos that are predicted to soon go viral; online advertisement campaigns can be corrected to enhance consumer reception. This paper proposes CrowdCast, a cloud-based framework to enable real-time analysis and prediction from streaming social data. As an instantiation of this framework, we tune CrowdCast to observe Twitter tweets, and predict which YouTube videos are most likely to “go viral” in the near future. To this end, CrowdCast first applies online machine learning to map natural language tweets to a specific YouTube video. Then, tweets that indeed refer to videos are weighted by the perceived “influence” of the sender. Finally, the video’s spread is predicted through a sociological model, derived from the emerging structure of the graph over which the video-related tweets are (still) spreading. Combining metrics of influence and live structure, CrowdCast outputs sets of candidate videos, identified as likely to become viral in the next few hours. We monitor Twitter for more than 30 days, and find that CrowdCast’s real-time predictions demonstrate encouraging correlation with actual YouTube viewership in the near future.
Reading ‘Class’ in International Law

While critical histories of international law on the interwar period have focused primarily on nationalism, early conceptions of the right to self-determination, and the dynamic of cultural difference, this article brings to bear another dimension that shaped interwar governmentality of legal institutions, namely class subjectivity. How did international institutions manage ‘class’ in a colonial context and at the height of the ‘self-determination talk’ of the interwar period? Through this inquiry, I study the details of the concrete practices of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in one of its earlier missions sent to Egypt in the 1930s. The claimed success of the ILO’s intervention hinged upon shaping a new politics of expertise through law that divided a fluid and hybrid sphere of social activity into rigid and separate domains: the technical and the political.
Link stability based routing in mobile ad hoc networks

Node mobility is one of the dominant factors causing decreased performance in mobile ad hoc networks, thus stability of selected path is of prime importance. The proposed method uses link stability factor (LSF) and path stability factor (PSF) to select a stable path while minimizing number of hops. The node's transmission range is divided into stable zone and caution zone. Rerouting is initiated when the distance between two neighboring communicating nodes exceeds the stable zone, before the old path actually breaks, thus realizing soft handoff and reducing the data packet's ETE delay. The proposed LSB_AODV routing scheme is evaluated by simulation and results show that an improved packet delivery ratio and reduced ETE delay can be obtained.