Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multiobjective Multifactorial Optimization in Evolutionary Multitasking

In recent decades, the field of multiobjective optimization has attracted considerable interest among evolutionary computation researchers. One of the main features that makes evolutionary methods particularly appealing for multiobjective problems is the implicit parallelism offered by a population, which enables simultaneous convergence toward the entire Pareto front. While a plethora of related algorithms have been proposed till date, a common attribute among them is that they focus on efficiently solving only a single optimization problem at a time. Despite the known power of implicit parallelism, seldom has an attempt been made to multitask, i.e., to solve multiple optimization problems simultaneously. It is contended that the notion of evolutionary multitasking leads to the possibility of automated transfer of information across different optimization exercises that may share underlying similarities, thereby facilitating improved convergence characteristics. In particular, the potential for automated transfer is deemed invaluable from the standpoint of engineering design exercises where manual knowledge adaptation and reuse are routine. Accordingly, in this paper, we present a realization of the evolutionary multitasking paradigm within the domain of multiobjective optimization. The efficacy of the associated evolutionary algorithm is demonstrated on some benchmark test functions as well as on a real-world manufacturing process design problem from the composites industry.
Robust Semi-Supervised Classification for Noisy Labels Based on Self-Paced Learning

Data labeling is a tedious and subjective task that can be time consuming and error-prone; however, most learning algorithms are sensitive to noisy labels. This problem raises the need to develop algorithms that can exploit large amount of unlabeled data and also be robust to noisy label information. In this letter, we propose a novel semi-supervised classification framework that is robust to noisy labels, named self-paced manifold regularization. The proposed framework naturally integrates self-paced learning regime into the manifold regularization framework for selecting labeled training samples in a theoretically sound manner, and utilizes locally linear reconstructions to control the smoothness of the classifier with respect to the manifold structure of data. Finally, the alternative search strategy is adopted for the proposed framework to obtain the classifier. The proposed method can not only suppress the negative effect of noisy initial labels in semi-supervised learning, but also obtain an explicit multiclass classifier for newly coming data points. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Modified Truthful Greedy Mechanisms for Dynamic Virtual Machine Provisioning and Allocation in Clouds

: In Cloud Computing models, Virtual Machines (VM) can be dynamically provisioned according to demand and released when not needed. Efficient Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning and allocation allows the cloud providers to effectively utilize their available resources and obtain higher profits. The existing static VM provisioning may not guarantee economically efficient allocation and thus cannot guarantee maximum revenue for cloud providers. A better solution would be to take into account the users' demand and dynamically provision VM instances. In the recent times, the cloud providers have introduced auction-based models for VM provisioning and allocation which allow users to submit bids for their requested VMs. MM Nejad, L. Mashayekhy and D Grosu have formulated a dynamic VM provisioning and allocation problem for the auction-based model as an integer program considering multiple types of resources. They have designed truthful greedy and optimal mechanisms for the problem such that the cloud provider provisions VMs based on the requests of the winning users and determines their payments. Since Virtual Machines are created by Hypervisors in the underlying physical machines and this would result in overhead and ultimately would impact the overall performance of the cloud. We propose that this overhead could be factored inthe design of Truthful Greedy mechanisms. It is hoped that our proposed idea can achieve better results in terms of revenue for the cloud provider.
60 GHz Radio Channel Measurements and Modeling in a Shielded Room

This report describes results from 60 GHz channel measurements and modelling in a shielded room. Final goal of this work is to investigate potential and feasibility of 60 GHz radios for very-high-data-rate short-range communications in medical applications. The measurement in a shielded room is meaningful for studying propagation characteristics in medical applications, since real surgery rooms are typically shielded. One particular usage scenario, i.e., real-time video streaming for ultrasonic imaging, was considered, where the antenna settings were adjusted to the usage scenario accordingly. Link budget and delay domain multipath characteristics were analyzed and modelled. Finally, model parameters that fit the measured power delay profiles were given.
Cooperative leases: scalable consistency maintenance in content distribution networks

In this paper, we argue that cache consistency mechanisms designed for stand-alone proxies do not scale to the large number of proxies in a content distribution network and are not flexible enough to allow consistency guarantees to be tailored to object needs. To meet the twin challenges of scalability and flexibility, we introduce the notion of cooperative consistency along with a mechanism, called cooperative leases, to achieve it. By supporting &Dgr;-consistency semantics and by using a single lease for multiple proxies, cooperative leases allows the notion of leases to be applied in a flexible, scalable manner to CDNs. Further, the approach employs application-level multicast to propagate server notifications to proxies in a scalable manner. We implement our approach in the Apache web server and the Squid proxy cache and demonstrate its efficacy using a detailed experimental evaluation. Our results show a factor of 2.5 reduction in server message overhead and a 20% reduction in server state space overhead when compared to original leases albeit at an increased inter-proxy communication overhead.
Combining aspects of genetic algorithms with weighted recommender hybridization

Recommender systems are established means to inspire users to watch interesting movies, discover baby names, or read books. The recommendation quality further improves by combining the results of multiple recommendation algorithms using hybridization methods. In this paper, we focus on the task of combining unscored recommendations into a single ensemble. Our proposed method is inspired by genetic algorithms. It repeatedly selects items from the recommendations to create a population of items that will be used for the final ensemble. We compare our method with a weighted voting method and test the performance of both in a movie- and name-recommendation scenario. We were able to outperform the weighted method on both datasets by 20.3 % and 31.1 % and decreased the overall execution time by up to 19.9 %. Our results do not only propose a new kind of hybridization method, but introduce the field of recommender hybridization to further work with genetic algorithms.
Reconstruction of Tissue Heterogeneity by Near Infrared Imaging: a Novel Algorithm and Benchtop Validation

A novel algorithm has been developed for near infrared (NIR) imaging of tissue optical properties with embedded heterogeneity. The algorithm was based on the optical measurements of the absorption perturbation by a matrix of multiple source detector pairs. Direct superimposition algorithm was used to calculate the two dimensional projected image of the tissue absorption. This absorption map is then compared with that of the homogenous phantom in order to reconstruct the absorption perturbation caused by the embedded object. Benchtop setup has been developed to validate this reconstruction scheme. Simulating tumors made of gelatin cylinders of high absorption coefficients were placed inside a homogenous intralipid phantom of specific background absorption. The depth of the tumor was adjusted at different levels and the diffuse reflectance was measured by a tissue imager consisting of a matrix of 4 sources and 4 detectors. The measured absorption coefficients were compared with the actual tumor absorption coefficients at different tumor depths in order to determine the reconstruction accuracy
Towards Incremental Speech Generation in Dialogue Systems

We present a first step towards a model of speech generation for incremental dialogue systems. The model allows a dialogue system to incrementally interpret spoken input, while simultaneously planning, realising and self-monitoring the system response. The model has been implemented in a general dialogue system framework. Using this framework, we have implemented a specific application and tested it in a Wizard-of-Oz setting, comparing it with a non-incremental version of the same system. The results show that the incremental version, while producing longer utterances, has a shorter response time and is perceived as more efficient by the users.
Selling Task Characteristics and the Job Satisfaction of Industrial Salespeople

AbstractHypotheses were tested concerning the relationship between selling task characteristics and industrial salesforce job satisfaction. The specific explanatory model included the five core task variables measured by the “Job Diagnostic Survey Instrument” designed by Hackman and Lawler. The hypotheses tested were that salespersons' job satisfaction will be greater to the extent that they perceive their selling jobs to be characterized by high skill variety requirements, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and performance feedback from the job. In addition, based upon previous research in non-selling occupations, the salesperson's higher order need strength was examined as a possible moderator variable for the task characteristic/job satisfaction relationship.
CD4 trajectory adjusting for dropout among HIV-positive patients receiving combination antiretroviral therapy in an East African HIV care centre

Estimates of CD4 response to antiretroviral therapy (ART) obtained by averaging data from patients in care, overestimate population CD4 response and treatment program effectiveness because they do not consider data from patients who are deceased or not in care. We use mathematical methods to assess and adjust for this bias based on patient characteristics.
Temporal Gradient in the Clock Gene and Cell-Cycle Checkpoint Kinase Wee1 Expression along the Gut

Circadian clocks were recently discovered in the rat and mouse colon as well as mouse stomach and jejunum. The aim of this study was to determine whether clocks in the upper part of the gut are synchronized with those in the lower part, or whether there is a difference in their circadian phases. Moreover, the profiles of core clock-gene expression were compared with the profiles of the clock-driven Wee1 gene expression in the upper and lower parts of the gut. Adult rats were transferred to constant darkness on the day of sampling. 24 h expression profiles of the clock genes Per1, Per2, Rev-erbα, and Bmal1 and the cell-cycle regulator Wee1 were examined by a reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction within the epithelium of the rat duodenum, ileum, jejunum, and colon. In contrast to the duodenum, the rhythms in expression of all genes but Rev-erbα and Bmal1 in the colon exhibited non-sinusoidal profiles. Therefore, a detailed analysis of the gene expression every 1 h within the 12 h interval corresponding to the previous lights-on was performed. The data demonstrate that rhythmic profiles of the clock gene Per1, Per2, Bmal1, Rev-erbα, and clock-driven Wee1 expression within the epithelium from different parts of the rat gut exhibited a difference in phasing, such that the upper part of the gut, as represented by the duodenum, was phase-advanced to the lower part, as represented by the distal colon. Our data demonstrate that the circadian clocks within each part of the gut are mutually synchronized with a phase delay in the cranio-caudal axis. Moreover, they support the view that the individual circadian clocks may control the timing of cell cycle within different regions of the gut.
Substrate-Dependent Evolution of Cytochrome P450: Rapid Turnover of the Detoxification-Type and Conservation of the Biosynthesis-Type

Members of the cytochrome P450 family are important metabolic enzymes that are present in all metazoans. Genes encoding cytochrome P450s form a multi-gene family, and the number of genes varies widely among species. The enzymes are classified as either biosynthesis- or detoxification-type, depending on their substrates, but their origin and evolution have not been fully understood. In order to elucidate the birth and death process of cytochrome P450 genes, we performed a phylogenetic analysis of 710 sequences from 14 vertebrate genomes and 543 sequences from 6 invertebrate genomes. Our results showed that vertebrate detoxification-type genes have independently emerged three times from biosynthesis-type genes and that invertebrate detoxification-type genes differ from vertebrates in their origins. Biosynthetic-type genes exhibit more conserved evolutionary processes than do detoxification-type genes, with regard to the rate of gene duplication, pseudogenization, and amino acid substitution. The differences in the evolutionary mode between biosynthesis- and detoxification-type genes may reflect differences in their respective substrates. The phylogenetic tree also revealed 11 clans comprising an upper category to families in the cytochrome P450 nomenclature. Here, we report novel clan-specific amino acids that may be used for the qualitative definition of clans.
Capacity building and predictors of success for HIV-1 drug resistance testing in the Asia-Pacific region and Africa

The TREAT Asia Quality Assessment Scheme (TAQAS) was developed as a quality assessment programme through expert education and training, for laboratories in the Asia‐Pacific and Africa that perform HIV drug‐resistance (HIVDR) genotyping. We evaluated the programme performance and factors associated with high‐quality HIVDR genotyping.
Interleaved Concatenations of Polar Codes With BCH and Convolutional Codes

We analyze interleaved concatenation schemes of polar codes with outer binary BCH codes and convolutional codes. We show that both BCH-polar and Conv-polar codes can have a frame error rate that decays exponentially with the code length for all rates up to capacity, which is a substantial improvement in the error exponent over stand-alone polar codes. Interleaved concatenation with long constraint length convolutional codes is an effective way to leverage the fact that polarization increases the cutoff rate of the channel. Simulation results show that Conv-polar codes when decoded with the proposed soft-output multistage iterative decoding algorithm can outperform stand-alone polar codes decoded with successive cancellation or belief propagation decoding. It may be comparable to stand-alone polar codes with list decoding in the high SNR regime. In addition to this, we show that the proposed concatenation scheme requires lower memory and decoding complexity in comparison to belief propagation and list decoding of polar codes. Practically, the scheme enables rate compatible outer codes which ease hardware implementation. Our results suggest that the proposed method may strike a better balance between performance and complexity compared to existing methods in the finite-length regime.
Unsupervised Learning of Acoustic Sub-word Units

Accurate unsupervised learning of phonemes of a language directly from speech is demonstrated via an algorithm for joint unsupervised learning of the topology and parameters of a hidden Markov model (HMM); states and short state-sequences through this HMM correspond to the learnt sub-word units. The algorithm, originally proposed for unsupervised learning of allophonic variations within a given phoneme set, has been adapted to learn without any knowledge of the phonemes. An evaluation methodology is also proposed, whereby the state-sequence that aligns to a test utterance is transduced in an automatic manner to a phoneme-sequence and compared to its manual transcription. Over 85% phoneme recognition accuracy is demonstrated for speaker-dependent learning from fluent, large-vocabulary speech.
Image processing with complex wavelets

We first review how wavelets may be used for multi–resolution image processing, describing the filter–bank implementation of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and how it may be extended via separable filtering for processing images and other multi–dimensional signals. We then show that the condition for inversion of the DWT (perfect reconstruction) forces many commonly used wavelets to be similar in shape, and that this shape produces severe shift dependence (variation of DWT coefficient energy at any given scale with shift of the input signal). It is also shown that separable filtering with the DWT prevents the transform from providing directionally selective filters for diagonal image features. Complex wavelets can provide both shift invariance and good directional selectivity, with only modest increases in signal redundancy and computation load. However, development of a complex wavelet transform (CWT) with perfect reconstruction and good filter characteristics has proved difficult until recently. We now propose the dual–tree CWT as a solution to this problem, yielding a transform with attractive properties for a range of signal and image processing applications, including motion estimation, denoising, texture analysis and synthesis, and object segmentation.
Catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia: a rare cause of recurrent syncope

Catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT) is an inherited arrhythmia characterized by adrenergically induced polymorphic or bidirectional ventricular tachycardia (VT). Although a rare disease, its recognition is important because of its high mortality rate when left untreated. We report an index case of a 32-year-old woman who presented with recurrent syncope. The diagnosis was confirmed by exercise-induced polymorphic ventricular premature beats and episodes of non-sustained VT, in the absence of structural heart abnormalities. She remained event free with beta-blocker therapy. CPVT is a potentially life-threatening disease and should be considered in the case of recurrent syncope, in young individuals. Diagnosis is based on clinical history and exercise testing, which is the gold standard. Therapy is mandatory in all diagnosed individuals. Exercise testing in first-degree relatives is recommended, even in the case of a mutation-negative index patient.
The role of SDF-1/CXCR4 in the vasculogenesis and remodeling of cerebral arteriovenous malformation

Background Cerebral arteriovenous malformation (AVM) involves the vasculogenesis of cerebral blood vessels and can cause severe intracranial hemorrhage. Stromal cell-derived factor-1 (SDF-1) and its receptor, CXCR4, are believed to exert multiple physiological functions including angiogenesis. Thus, we investigated the role of SDF-1/CXCR4 in the vasculogenesis of cerebral AVM. Methods Brain AVM lesions from surgical resections were analyzed for the expression of SDF-1, CXCR4, VEGF-A, and HIF-1 by using immunohistochemical staining. Flow cytometry was used to quantify the level of circulating endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs). Further, in an animal study, chronic cerebral hypoperfusion model rats were analyzed for the expression of SDF-1 and HIF-1. CXCR4 antagonist, AMD3100, was also used to detect its effects on cerebral vasculogenesis and SDF-1 expression. Results Large amounts of CXCR4-positive CD45+ cells were found in brain AVM lesion blood vessel walls, which also have higher SDF-1 expression. Cerebral AVM patients also had higher level of EPCs and SDF-1. In chronic cerebral hypoperfusion rats, SDF-1, HIF-1, and CD45 expressions were elevated. The application of AMD3100 effectively suppressed angiogenesis and infiltration of CXCR4-positive CD45+ cells in hypoperfusion rats compared to controls. Conclusion The SDF-1/CXCR4 axis plays an important role in the vasculogenesis and migration of inflammatory cells in cerebral AVM lesions, possibly via the recruitment of bone marrow EPCs.
A Prospective, Clinical Study on Asymptomatic Sensitisation and Development of Allergic Rhinitis: High Negative Predictive Value of Allergological Testing

Background: Asymptomatic aeroallergen sensitisation affects approximately 10% of Western adolescents and is an established risk factor for the development of respiratory allergy. The reported incidence is 2–20% annually. Previous studies are based on out-seasonal symptom recollection or selected populations, conferring bias towards higher incidence rates. Objective: The aim was to determine the incidence of onset of symptoms among clinically well-characterised asymptomatic, sensitised subjects compared with controls, and to evaluate the predictive values of common allergological tests. Methods: We performed a prospective, clinical, non-interventional, 2-year follow-up study on subjects (identified by population screening) with seasonal allergic birch or grass pollen rhinitis (n = 52), asymptomatic sensitisation to grass or birch (AS, n = 52) or non-atopic, healthy control subjects (n = 39). Experimental allergen susceptibility was assessed at inclusion and at follow-up by skin prick test, conjunctival challenge, intradermal late-phase reaction and measurement of specific IgE. Participants completed in-seasonal symptom and medication diaries during 2 subsequent seasons. Results: We observed an annual incidence rate of 5% for the onset of symptoms in the AS group (healthy control group 0%). At baseline, the AS group displayed intermediate experimental allergen susceptibility. Subjects developing symptoms had higher levels of specific IgE and larger late-phase reaction than those persistently asymptomatic. However, the positive predictive values were low (14–27%) in contrast to the negative predictive values (95–100%). Conclusion: In a well-characterised young population, asymptomatic aeroallergen sensitisation conferred a low risk for onset of symptoms during the 2-year follow-up. Persistent asymptomatic phenotype could be accurately predicted by negative results from simple allergological testing.