Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving efficiency of a flooding-based routing protocol for underwater networks

Routing protocols based on limited flooding can be used reliably in small scale underwater networks for fleets of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Scalability issues inherent in flooding are addressed by COFSNET+ [3], a framework protocol that controls which nodes will retransmit a packet during its delivery. COFSNET+ does not specify a method for the selection of nodes; this paper proposes such a method, based on the past contribution of nodes in delivering packets to their destinations. A simulator study shows that the proposed method not only reduces the total number of nodes that retransmit a packet, but also that it can adapt to overcome packet loss conditions in the network. For scenarios where loss is negligible, the method converges on the equivalent of the shortest path. In case of higher packet loss rates, end-to-end robustness is achieved by allowing more nodes to retransmit each packet.
Preprocessing and Efficient Volume Rendering of 3-D Ultrasound Image

Visualization of 3-D ultrasound images is a challenging task due to the noisy and fuzzy nature of ultrasound imaging. This paper presents an efficient volume rendering technique for 3-D ultrasound image. A preprocessing technique of 2-D truncated-median filtering is proposed to reduce speckle noise of the ultrasound image. This paper also introduces an adaptive boundary detection method to reduce the computation time for volume rendering of ultrasound image. The proposed technique is compared to the conventional volume rendering methods with respect to the computation time and the subjective image quality. According to the comparison study, the proposed volume rendering method shows good performance for visualization of 3-D ultrasound image. key words: volume rendering, 3-D ultrasound imaging, truncated-median filter, ray casting, depth cueing
Simulating Cub Reporter Dialogues: The collection of naturalistic human-human dialogues for information access to text archives

This paper describes a dialogue data collection experiment and resulting corpus for dialogues between a senior mobile journalist and a junior cub reporter back at the office. The purpose of the dialogue is for the mobile journalist to collect background information in preparation for an interview or on-the-site coverage of a breaking story. The cub reporter has access to text archives that contain such background information. A unique aspect of these dialogues is that they capture information-seeking behavior for an open-ended task against a large unstructured data source. Initial analyses of the corpus show that the experimental design leads to real-time, mixedinitiative, highly interactive dialogues with many interesting properties.
Incremental Latent Semantic Indexing for Automatic Traceability Link Evolution Management

Maintaining traceability links among software artifacts is particularly important for many software engineering tasks. Even though automatic traceability link recovery tools are successful in identifying the semantic connections among software artifacts produced during software development, no existing traceability link management approach can effectively and automatically deal with software evolution. We propose a technique to automatically manage traceability link evolution and update the links in evolving software. Our novel technique, called incremental latent semantic indexing (iLSI), allows for the fast and low-cost LSI computation for the update of traceability links by analyzing the changes to software artifacts and by reusing the result from the previous LSI computation before the changes. We present our iLSI technique, and describe a complete automatic traceability link evolution management tool, TLEM, that is capable of interactively and quickly updating traceability links in the presence of evolving software artifacts. We report on our empirical evaluation with various experimental studies to assess the performance and usefulness of our approach.
Effect of culture media on porcine embryos produced by in vitro fertilization or parthenogenetic activation after oocyte maturation with cycloheximide

Summary This study evaluated the effects of reversible meiotic inhibition and different culture media (PZM3 or NCSU23) on production of porcine embryos by either in vitro fertilization (IVF) or parthenogenetic activation (PA). Oocytes from abattoir-derived ovaries were allocated into two groups for maturation: CHX (5 μg/ml cycloheximide for 10 h) or Control (no CHX). The percentage of metaphase II (MII) oocytes was determined at 36, 40 or 44 h of in vitro maturation. For IVF and PA, denuded oocytes were fertilized with purified sperm for 6 h or activated by electric stimuli. Zygotes were then subdivided into two culture groups: NCSU23 or PZM3. No effect of treatment with CHX and culture media was observed on cleavage (D3) and blastocyst (D7) rates in IVF and PA groups. There are no differences of quality or development rates between IVF-derived embryos cultured in NCSU23 or PZM3. However, we observed high quality PA embryos in PZM3 compared with NCSU23. Maturation arrest with CHX decreased the average blastocyst cell number in IVF while it was increased in PA embryos. As older oocytes are more effectively activated, CHX– blocked oocytes reached the mature stage faster than the control group. In conclusion, the CHX treatment for 10 h, followed by oocyte maturation for 40 h, is an efficient protocol to produce high quality parthenote embryos, especially when they are cultured in PZM3. However, this protocol is not satisfactory for IVF embryos production. In this case, a shorter maturation period could provide better embryo quality.
Identification of a talin binding site in the cytoskeletal protein vinculin

Binding of the cytoskeletal protein vinculin to talin is one of a number of interactions involved in linking F-actin to cell-matrix junctions. To identify the talin binding domain in vinculin, we expressed the NH2-terminal region of the molecule encoded by two closely similar, but distinct vinculin cDNAs, using an in vitro transcription translation system. The 5' Eco RI-Bam HI fragment of a partial 2.89-kb vinculin cDNA encodes a 45-kD polypeptide containing the first 398 amino acids of the molecule. The equivalent restriction enzyme fragment of a second vinculin cDNA (cVin5) lacks nucleotides 746- 867, and encodes a 41-kD polypeptide missing amino acids 167-207. The radiolabeled 45-kD vinculin polypeptide bound to microtiter wells coated with talin, but not BSA, and binding was inhibited by unlabeled vinculin. In contrast, the 41-kD vinculin polypeptide was devoid of talin binding activity. The role of residues 167-207 in talin binding was further analyzed by making a series of deletions spanning this region, each deletion of seven amino acids contiguous with the next. Loss of residues 167-173, 174-180, 181-187, 188-194, or 195-201 resulted in a marked reduction in talin binding activity, although loss of residues 202-208 had much less effect. When the 45-kD vinculin polypeptide was expressed in Cos cells, it localized to cell matrix junctions, whereas the 41-kD polypeptide, lacking residues 167-207, was unable to do so. Interestingly, some deletion mutants with reduced ability to bind talin in vitro, were still able to localize to cell matrix junctions.
Evolutional Dependency Parse Trees for Biological Relation Extraction

Due to the rapid growth in biological technology, the development of high-quality information extraction systems is needed and still remains a challenge. Several recently proposed approaches to biological relation extraction are based on machine learning techniques on lexical and syntactic information. Most use the dependency path between two genes/proteins instead of the whole dependency tree of a sentence for identifying relationships. However, the dependency path may not have any node between two entities. If a limited set of annotated training corpora is used for the construction of tree information of biological relationships, the training corpus will lack some sentence structures and cannot predict whether the sentence has a biological relationship. In this paper, we developed a biological relation extraction system called Evolutional Tree Extraction System ¨C ETree. We extended the dependency path to the dependency subtree and developed a method that can automatically expand and prune these existing dependency subtrees into various dependency subtrees. These dependency subtrees are called ¨DEvolutional Trees¡¬ and are used to predict the biological relationship sentences.
Low-power design methodology for an on-chip with adaptive bandwidth capability

This paper describes a low-power design methodology for a bus architecture based on hybrid current/voltage mode signaling for deep sub-micrometer on-chip interconnects that achieves high data transmission rates while minimizing the number of repeaters by nearly 1/3. The technique uses low-impedance current-mode sensing to increase the data throughput and minimizes the static power dissipation inherent to current-mode signaling by adaptively changing the interconnection bandwidth given a change in input signal activity. Since bandwidth is related to power dissipation, the adaptive bus attains energy efficient data transmission by expending minimum power required to support the bus signal activity. The design method is based on statistical analysis of address streams extracted for typical benchmark programs using a microprocessor time-based simulator in combination with circuit-level power analysis. Simulation results indicate improvements in power dissipation of up to 65% and 40% over current and voltage mode signaling schemes, respectively.
International Archives of Medicine Percutaneous Transluminal Angioplasty in the Treatment of Stenosis of Arteriovenous Fistulae for Hemodialysis

Background: Thrombosis following stenosis of arteriovenous fistulae resulting in the loss of vascular access for hemodialysis is an important complication in patients with chronic renal failure. Percutaneous transluminal angioplasty is being used more frequently in the treatment of stenosis aiming at increasing the patency of arteriovenous fistulae.
Evolutionary algorithm based off-line path planner for UAV navigation

An off-line path planner for Unmanned Air Vehicles is presented. The planner is based on Evolutionary Algorithms, in order to calculate a curved pathline with desired characteristics in a three-dimensional environment. The pathline is represented using B-Spline curves, with the coordinates of its control points being the genes of the Evolutionary Algorithm artificial chromosome. The method was tested in an artificial three-dimensional terrain, for different starting and ending points, providing very smooth pathlines under difficult constraints.
Empirical Investigations into Full-Text Protein Interaction Article Categorization Task (ACT) in the BioCreative II.5 Challenge

The selection of protein interaction documents is one important application for biology research and has a direct impact on the quality of downstream BioNLP applications, i.e., information extraction and retrieval, summarization, QA, etc. The BioCreative II.5 Challenge Article Categorization task (ACT) involves doing a binary text classification to determine whether a given structured full-text article contains protein interaction information. This may be the first attempt at classification of full-text protein interaction documents in wide community. In this paper, we compare and evaluate the effectiveness of different section types in full-text articles for text classification. Moreover, in practice, the less number of true-positive samples results in unstable performance and unreliable classifier trained on it. Previous research on learning with skewed class distributions has altered the class distribution using oversampling and downsampling. We also investigate the skewed protein interaction classification and analyze the effect of various issues related to the choice of external sources, oversampling training sets, classifiers, etc. We report on the various factors above to show that 1) a full-text biomedical article contains a wealth of scientific information important to users that may not be completely represented by abstracts and/or keywords, which improves the accuracy performance of classification and 2) reinforcing true-positive samples significantly increases the accuracy and stability performance of classification.
Self-organized lane formation and optimized traffic flow in army ants

We show how the movement rules of individual ants on trails can lead to a collective choice of direction and the formation of distinct traffic lanes that minimize congestion. We develop and evaluate the results of a new model with a quantitative study of the behaviour of the army ant Eciton burchelli. Colonies of this species have up to 200 000 foragers and transport more than 3000 prey items per hour over raiding columns that exceed 100 m. It is an ideal species in which to test the predictions of our model because it forms pheromone trails that are densely populated with very swift ants. The model explores the influences of turning rates and local perception on traffic flow. The behaviour of real army ants is such that they occupy the specific region of parameter space in which lanes form and traffic flow is maximized.
Kabuki syndrome and cancer in two patients

Both hepatoblastoma and neuroblastoma are occasionally associated with congenital syndromes such as Beckwith–Wiedemann syndrome and trisomy 18. There have been no reports of hepatoblastoma in patients with Kabuki syndrome, whereas one patient with neuroblastoma and this syndrome has been reported. In this paper we present two patients with Kabuki syndrome and a neoplasm: a child of 6 years with hepatoblastoma and an infant, of 6 months affected by neuroblastoma. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A weighting-based local search heuristic algorithm for the Set Covering Problem

The Set Covering Problem (SCP) is NP-hard and has many applications. In this paper, we introduce a heuristic algorithm for SCPs based on weighting. In our algorithm, a local search framework is proposed to perturb the candidate solution under the best objective value found during the search, a weighting scheme and several search strategies are adopted to help escape from local optima and make the search more divergent. The effectiveness of our algorithm is evaluated on a set of instances from the OR-Library and Steiner triple systems. The experimental results show that it is very competitive, for it is able to find all the optima or best known results with very small runtimes on non-unicost instances from the OR-Library and outperforms two excellent solvers we have found in literature on the unicost instances from Steiner triple systems. Furthermore, it is conceptually simple and only needs one parameter to indicate the stopping criterion.
Feature location for software product line migration: a mapping study

Developing software from scratch is a high cost and error-prone activity. A possible solution to reduce time-to-market and produce high quality software is the reuse of existing software. But when the number of features in the system grows, the maintenance becomes more complex. In such cases, to adopt a systematic approach, such as Software Product Line Engineering, is necessary. Existing systems are generally migrated to a product line, allowing systematic reuse of artefacts and easing maintenance. To this end, some approaches have been proposed in the literature in the last years. A mapping of works on this subject and the identification of some research gaps can lead to an improvement of such approaches. This paper describes the main outcomes of a systematic mapping study on the evolution and migration of systems to SPL. The main works found are presented and classified according to adopted strategy, artefacts used, and evaluation conducted. Analysis of the evolution along the past years are also presented. At the end, we summarize some trends and open issues to serve as reference to new researches.
Practical drift conditions for subgeometric rates of convergence

We present a new drift condition which implies rates of convergence to the stationary distribution of the iterates of a \psi-irreducible aperiodic and positive recurrent transition kernel. This condition, extending a condition introduced by Jarner and Roberts [Ann. Appl. Probab. 12 (2002) 224-247] for polynomial convergence rates, turns out to be very convenient to prove subgeometric rates of convergence. Several applications are presented including nonlinear autoregressive models, stochastic unit root models and multidimensional random walk Hastings-Metropolis algorithms.
Persistent Robotic Tasks: Monitoring and Sweeping in Changing Environments

In this paper, we present controllers that enable mobile robots to persistently monitor or sweep a changing environment. The environment is modeled as a field that is defined over a finite set of locations. The field grows linearly at locations that are not within the range of a robot and decreases linearly at locations that are within range of a robot. We assume that the robots travel on given closed paths. The speed of each robot along its path is controlled to prevent the field from growing unbounded at any location. We consider the space of speed controllers that are parametrized by a finite set of basis functions. For a single robot, we develop a linear program that computes a speed controller in this space to keep the field bounded, if such a controller exists. Another linear program is derived to compute the speed controller that minimizes the maximum field value over the environment. We extend our linear program formulation to develop a multirobot controller that keeps the field bounded. We characterize, both theoretically and in simulation, the robustness of the controllers to modeling errors and to stochasticity in the environment.
A New Whole-mouth Gustatory Test Procedure: II. Effects of Aging, Gender and Smoking

Taste detection and recognition thresholds for the 4 basic tastes were measured in 670 healthy subjects using a new whole-mouth method in which test solutions of the 4 basic tastes were diluted 1 : 1 with distilled water successively in 13 steps. The taste thresholds were measured by spraying a 1 ml aliquot of solution into the mouth, starting with the lowest concentration, and asking the subject to swallow and note if a taste was detected and, if so, which one. The mouth was rinsed with distilled water only between different taste test solutions. Multiple comparison analysis showed a clear age-related increase in thresholds for salty, sour and bitter tastes for subjects in their eighth decade of life. From the third decade onwards, female subjects had significantly lower thresholds compared to males for sour taste in about half of the age groups and for salty and bitter tastes in some age groups. In contrast, for 18- and 19-year-old subjects, the gustatory thresholds of male subjects were lower than those of female subjects. Regarding smoking, male smokers in their third decade had significantly higher thresholds for bitter taste compared to male non-smokers in this age group.
Resonance of Open Ring Frequency Selective Surface Arrays

Introduction Frequency Selective Surfaces (FSSs), which have the band pass or band stop characteristics, find widespread applications as filters for microwaves in radomes and sub reflectors. These surfaces comprise periodically arranged resonant cells in two directions. The resonant cell may be metallic patch element or aperture element within a metallic screen[1-2]. In this paper, FSSs with a new resonant cell—open ring are introduced and the resonant characteristics are analyzed in detail.
Power and Delay Analysis of a 2-to-1 Multiplexer Implemented in Multiple Logic Styles for Multiplexer-Based Decoder in Flash ADC

Thermometer - to - Binary decoders has become bottleneck in the ultra-high speed flash ADCs. Among various types of decoders available multiplexer-based decoder requires less hardware, has more regular structure and shorter critical path. A 2-to-1 multiplexer is the leaf cell in the decoder. In this paper the authors have analyzed a 2-to-1 multiplexer circuit using complementary CMOS, dynamic and pass-transistor logic styles. The power consumption, delay, area and power-delay product of various logic styles are compared. This paper shows that 2T multiplexer is an optimum device level design which has characteristics of high speed with minimum power compared with other realizations.
An assessment of submissions made to the Predictive Toxicology Evaluation Challenge

Constructing "good" models for chemical carcinogenesis was identified in IJCAI-97 as providing a substantial challenge to "knowledge discovery" programs. Attention was drawn to a comparative exercise which called for predictions on the outcome of 30 rodent carcinogenicity bioassays. This-the Predictive Toxicology Evaluation (or PTE) Challenge - was seen to provide AI programs with an opportunity to participate in an enterprise of scientific merit, and a yardstick for comparison against strong competition. Here we provide an assessment of the machine learning (ML) submissions made. Models submitted are assessed on: (1) their accuracy, in comparison to models developed with expert collaboration; and (2) their explanatory value for toxicology. The principal findings were: (a) using structural information available from a standard modelling package, layman-devised features, and outcomes of established biological tests, results from MLderived models were at least as good as those with expert-derived techniques. This was surprising; (b) the combined use of structural and biological features by ML-derived models was unusual, and suggested new avenues for toxicology modelling. This was also unexpected; and (c) significant effort was required to interpret the output of even the most "symbolic" of ML-derived models. Much of this could have been alleviated with measures for converting the results into a more "toxicology-friendly" form. As it stands, their absence is sufficient to prevent a whole-hearted acceptance of these promising methods by toxicologists. This suggests that ML techniques have been able to respond -not fully, but nevertheless substantially -to the PTE Challenge.
Improved parametrization of K[superscript +] production in p-Be collisions at low energy using Feynman scaling

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. This paper describes an improved parametrization for proton-beryllium production of secondary K þ mesons for experiments with primary proton beams from 8.89 to 24 GeV=c. The parametrization is based on Feynman scaling in which the invariant cross section is described as a function of x F and p T. This method is theoretically motivated and provides a better description of the energy dependence of kaon production at low beam energies than other parametrizations such as the commonly used modified Sanford-Wang model. This Feynman scaling parametrization has been used for the simulation of the neutrino flux from the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermilab and has been shown to agree with the neutrino interaction data from the SciBooNE experiment. This parametrization will also be useful for future neutrino experiments with low primary beam energies, such as those planned for the Project X accelerator.