Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Definition and Extraction of Causal Relations for QA on Fault Diagnosis of Devices

Causal relations in ontology should be defined based on the inference types necessary to solve the tasks specific to application, as well as domain. In this paper, we present a model to define and to extract causal relations for application ontology, which is targeted, as a case study, to serve a question-answering (QA) system on fault-diagnosis of electronic devices. In the first phase, causal categories are defined by identifying the generic inference patterns of QA on fault-diagnosis. In the second, the semantic relations between concepts in the corpus denoting the causal categories are defined as causal relations. In the third, instances of causal relations are extracted using the lexical patterns from the definitional statements of terms in domain, and extended with information from thesaurus. On the evaluation by domain experts, our model shows precision of 92.3% in classifying relations at the definition phase and precision of 80.7% in identifying causal relations at the extraction phase.
Biogeosciences Spatially explicit analysis of gastropod biodiversity in ancient Lake Ohrid

The quality of spatial analyses of biodiversity is improved by (i) utilizing study areas with well defined physiogeographical boundaries, (ii) limiting the impact of widespread species, and (iii) using taxa with heterogeneous distributions. These conditions are typically met by ecosystems such as oceanic islands or ancient lakes and their biota. While research on ancient lakes has contributed significantly to our understanding of evolutionary processes, statistically sound studies of spatial variation of extant biodiversity have been hampered by the frequently vast size of ancient lakes, their limited accessibility, and the lack of scientific infrastructure. The European ancient Lake Ohrid provides a rare opportunity for such a reliable spatial study. The comprehensive horizontal and vertical sampling of a speciesrich taxon, the Gastropoda, presented here, revealed interesting patterns of biodiversity, which, in part, have not been shown before for other ancient lakes. In a total of 284 samples from 224 different locations throughout the Ohrid Basin, 68 gastropod species, with 50 of them (= 73.5%) being endemic, could be reported. The spatial distribution of these species shows the following characteristics: (i) within Lake Ohrid, the most frequent species are endemic taxa with a wide depth range, (ii) widespread species (i.e. those occurring throughout the Balkans or beyond) are rare and mainly occur in the upper layer of the lake, (iii) while the total number of species decreases with water depth, the proportion of endemics increases, and (iv) the deeper layers of Lake Ohrid appear to have a higher spatial homogeneity of biodiversity. Moreover, gastropod communities of Lake Ohrid and its feeder springs are both distinct from each other and from the surrounding waters. The analysis also shows that community similarity of Lake Correspondence to: T. Hauffe (torsten.hauffe@bio.uni-giessen.de) Ohrid is mainly driven by niche processes (e.g. environmental factors), but also by neutral processes (e.g. dispersal limitation and evolutionary histories of species). For niche-based mechanisms it is shown that large scale effects such as type of water body or water depth are mainly responsible for the similarity of gastropod communities, whereas small scale effects like environmental gradients affect gastropod compositions only marginally. In fact, neutral processes appear to be more important than the small scale environmental factors, thus emphasizing the importance of dispersal capacities and evolutionary histories of species.
A Yeast/Drosophila Screen to Identify New Compounds Overcoming Frataxin Deficiency

Friedreich's ataxia (FA) is a rare neurodegenerative disease which is very debilitating for the patients who progressively lose their autonomy. The lack of efficient therapeutic treatment of the disease strongly argues for urgent need to search for new active compounds that may stop the progression of the disease or prevent the appearance of the symptoms when the genetic defect is diagnosed early enough. In the present study, we used a yeast strain with a deletion of the frataxin homologue gene as a model of FA cells in a primary screen of two chemical libraries, a fraction of the French National Chemical Library (5500 compounds) and the Prestwick collection (880 compounds). We ran a secondary screen on Drosophila melanogaster flies expressing reduced levels of frataxin during larval development. Half of the compounds selected in yeast appeared to be active in flies in this developmental paradigm, and one of the two compounds with highest activities in this assay partially rescued the heart dilatation phenotype resulting from heart specific depletion of frataxin. The unique complementarity of these two frataxin-deficient models, unicellular and multicellular, appears to be very efficient to select new compounds with improved selectivity, bringing significant perspectives towards improvements in FA therapy.
Subgrouping of Coahuitlán Totonac 1

Abstract Coahuitlán Totonac is spoken in Veracruz, Mexico, and has been variously ascribed to two different branches of the Totonacan family tree. While recent work has begun to bring empirical evidence to the internal structure of this family tree, there remain several important areas of disagreement, in addition to the disputed affiliation of Coahuitlán. This article informs the family tree and demonstrates that Coahuitlán belongs to the Northern branch using shared innovations and two computational methods. The comparative method seeks sets of shared innovations for evidence of subgrouping. This article presents proposed shared innovations in phonology, morphology, and lexicon, which fall into two sets, one belonging to the Sierra and Lowland branches, and the other belonging to the Northern. Coahuitlán Totonac overwhelmingly shares innovations found in Northern languages and lacks innovations found in Sierra. Two quantitative methods are also used to show that Coahuitlán groups groups closely with other Northern languages. Résumé Coahuitlán Totonac est parlé à Veracruz au Mexique et s'est vu assigné à deux branches différentes de l'arbre familial Totonacan. Malgré les travaux récents qui portent de nouveaux faits empiriques concernant la structure interne de cet arbre familial, plusieurs sujets inspirent encore la controverse. À l'aide d'innovations communes et de deux méthodes computationnelles, cet article éclaircit l'arbre familial et montre que Coahuitlán appartient à la branche du nord. La méthode comparative cherche des innovations communes pour établir des sous-groupes. Cet article présente des innovations communes aux niveaux phonologiques, morphologiques, et lexiques qui se divisent en deux groupes, l'un appartenant aux branches Sierra et Lowland, l'autre appartenant à la branche du nord. Coahuitlán Totonac présente surtout ces innovations caractéristiques des langues du nord et manque des innovations attestées en Sierra. Deux méthodes quantitatives sont également employées afin de montrer que le groupe Coahuitlán est similaire aux autres langues du nord.
Kaposi's Sarcoma-Associated Herpesvirus Subversion of the Anti-Inflammatory Response in Human Skin Cells Reveals Correlates of Latency and Disease Pathogenesis

KSHV is the etiologic agent for Kaposi's sarcoma (KS), a neoplasm that manifests most aggressively as multifocal lesions on parts of human skin with a propensity for inflammatory reactivity. However, mechanisms that control evolution of KS from a benign hyperplasia to the histologically complex cutaneous lesion remain unknown. In this study, we found that KSHV induces proteomic and morphological changes in melanocytes and melanoma-derived cell lines, accompanied by deregulation of the endogenous anti-inflammatory responses anchored by the MC1-R/α-MSH signaling axis. We also identified two skin-derived cell lines that displayed differences in ability to support long-term KSHV infection and mapped this dichotomy to differences in (a) NF-κB activation status, (b) processing and expression of KSHV latency-associated nuclear antigen isoforms putatively associated with the viral lytic cycle, and (c) susceptibility to virus-induced changes in expression of key anti-inflammatory response genes that antagonize NF-κB, including MC1-R, POMC, TRP-1, and xCT. Viral subversion of molecules that control the balance between latency and lytic replication represents a novel correlate of KSHV pathogenesis and tropism in skin and underscores the potential benefit of harnessing the endogenous anti-inflammatory processes as a therapeutic option for attenuating cutaneous KS and other proinflammatory outcomes of KSHV infection in high-risk individuals.
A Helicopter Control based on Eigenstructure Assignment

In this paper a controller based in the eigenvalues assignment technique is designed. The system to be stabilized is an unmanned helicopter. This eigenstructure based controller is designed considering all the measurable states. A LQ controller has also been applied to the same system in order to compare the responses regarding the robustness. The results are encouraging and prove that the eigenstructure assignment technique is useful for these nonlinear systems.
Human Ear recognition based on Multi-scale Local Binary Pattern descriptor and KL divergence

This paper presents a novel human ear recognition approach based on Multi-scale Local Binary Pattern (MLBP) descriptor to enhance the recognition performance. The proposed method includes the following two steps: (i) the feature extraction step that computes the MLBP descriptor-based features from human ear images, and (ii) the matching process that uses the Kullback Leibler (KL) distance to capture efficiently the similarities/dissimilarities between the feature vectors and then make a decision. The proposed method is performed using the IIT Delhi Ear database and then compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The results obtained have shown that the proposed method achieves satisfying identification performances up to 95% in terms of rank-1 identification rate.
Verification of Faulty Message Passing Systems with Continuous State Space in PVS

We present a library of Prototype Verification System (PVS) meta-theories that verifies a class of distributed systems in which agent commu nication is through message-passing. The theoretic work, outlined in, consists of iterative schemes for solving systems of linear equations , such as message-passing extensions of the Gauss and Gauss-Seidel me thods. We briefly review that work and discuss the challenges in formally verifying it.
Blind estimation of reverberation time based on spectro-temporal modulation filtering

A novel method for blind estimation of the reverberation time (RT60) is proposed based on applying spectro-temporal modulation filters to time-frequency representations. 2D-Gabor filters arranged in a filterbank enable an analysis of the properties of temporal, spectral, and spectro-temporal filtering for this task. Features are used as input to a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) classifier combined with a simple decision rule that attributes a specific RT60 to a given utterance and allows to assess the reliability of the approach for different resolutions of RT60 classification. While the filter set including temporal, spectral, and spectro-temporal filters already outperforms an MFCC baseline, the error rates are further reduced when relying on diagonal spectro-temporal filters alone. The average error rate is 1.9% for the best feature set, which corresponds to a relative reduction of 58.3% compared to the MFCC baseline for RT60s in 0.1 s resolution.
Texture transfer based on continuous structure of texture patches for design of artistic Shodo fonts

This paper presents a texture transfer that considers continuous structure of texture patches in target and source images. Previous texture transfers focus on local features, such as color distance, standard deviation and directional factors. In addition to those local factors it might be important and useful to use continuous structure of texture patches in the images of some cases. For instance, we aim at design of "Shodo" fonts based on examples. Shodo, the Japanese calligraphy, is a form of artistic writing used for writing the Japanese and Chinese language. This study proposes and develops a method of designing Japanese calligraphic fonts which contain artistic representations similar to actual Shodo art. Figure 1c illustrates our result which preserves the flow of salient brushwork of the source image (Figure 1a). On the other hand, Figure 1d, which is generated by the algorithm of Texture by numbers [Hertzmann et al. 2001], doesn't seem to express the flow of brushwork of the source. Our approach deals with the flow of brushwork as the continuous structure of texture patches. Our results could be preserve the continuous structure of source texture patches and express the artistic effect of brushwork.
Bi-DCT: DCT-based Local Binary Descriptor for Dense Stereo Matching

In this letter, we present a novel DCT-based local binary descriptor for the dense matching of multiple view stereo (MVS). Recently, although much progress has been made in the field of MVS, a key component of which, i.e., dense matching, is still a challenging task because it has two difficult issues: robust matching over non-salient regions (e.g., lines and textureless regions) and fast matching of a large number of pixels. To deal with these issues effectively, in the proposed dense descriptor, 2D DCT-based local features are utilized to achieve high discriminative power even for the non-salient regions. A binary representation is adopted to increase the matching performance as well as accelerate the matching speed via the Hamming distance. In addition, the discriminability of binarized vectors is further improved by a space-frequency pooling scheme. Through extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets for MVS, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed descriptor over the state-of-the-art descriptors in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
Real time localization, path planning and motion control for autonomous parking in cluttered environment with narrow passages

This paper propose a novel practical method for autonomous parking in cluttered environment with narrow passages. We present a modified FastSLAM algorithm for environment mapping to reduce the map entropy and increase the localization accuracy for autonomous parking. The proposed path planning method is based on predefined arc paths for real time generation of smooth paths to avoid obstacles. The corresponding control commands are generated to minimize the steering angle control error which executed by the vehicle actuators. The proposed parking method is implemented on an autonomous vehicle platform and evaluated in the different environments with narrow passages.
Cloud-aware processing of MapReduce-based OLAP applications

As the volume of data to be processed in a timely manner soars, the scale of computing and storage systems has much trouble keeping up with such a rate of explosive data growth. A hybrid cloud combining two or more clouds is emerging as an appealing alternative to expand local/private systems. However, the effective use of such an expanded cloud system is limited primarily by low network bandwidth and high latency between clouds (i.e., large intercloud data transmission overheads) when applications/services span across clouds, and they deal with large data in particular. Online analytical processing (OLAP) applications are a typical class of data-intensive application. These applications process multi-dimensional analytical queries dealing with 'big data' (or data warehouses). In this paper, we address the effective processing of MapReduce-based OLAP applications in a hybrid-cloud environment, and present a (hybrid) cloud-aware OLAP system incorporating data filtering techniques. Our system filters out unnecessary data for intercloud transmission with the ultimate goal of optimizing the performance to cost ratio, or cost efficiency. Based on experimental results obtained using two large-scale data analysis benchmarks, our system demonstrates its efficacy in improving the cost efficiency with the reduction in intercloud network traffic from 76%-99%.
Content-Based Image Retrieval using Local Features Descriptors and Bag-of-Visual Words

Image retrieval is still an active research topic in the computer vision field. There are existing several techniques to retrieve visual data from large databases. Bag-of-Visual Word (BoVW) is a visual feature descriptor that can be used successfully in Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) applications. In this paper, we present an image retrieval system that uses local feature descriptors and BoVW model to retrieve efficiently and accurately similar images from standard databases. The proposed system uses SIFT and SURF techniques as local descriptors to produce image signatures that are invariant to rotation and scale. As well as, it uses K-Means as a clustering algorithm to build visual vocabulary for the features descriptors that obtained of local descriptors techniques. To efficiently retrieve much more images relevant to the query, SVM algorithm is used. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated by calculating both precision and recall. The experimental results reveal that this system performs well on two different standard datasets.
Measuring Skills in Developing Countries

Measures of cognitive, noncognitive, and technical skills are increasingly used in surveys in developing countries, but have mostly been validated in high-income countries. We use a survey experiment in Western Kenya to test the reliability and validity of commonly used skills measures. Cognitive skills measures are found to be reliable and internally consistent, technical skills are very noisy, and measurement error in noncognitive skills is found to be nonclassical. Addressing both random and systematic measurement error using common psychometric practices and repeated measures leads to some improvements and clearer predictions, though concerns remain. These findings hold for a replication in Colombia.
A Fast Concept H I erarchy Constructor for Discrete or Mixed Mode Databases

In this paper we propose an algorithm that automatically creates concept hierarchies or lattices for discrete databases and datasets. The reason for doing this is to accommodate later data mining operations on the same sets of data without having an expert create these hierarchies by hand. Each step of the algorithm will be examined; We will show inputs and output for each step using a small example. The theoretical upper bound of the complexity for each part of the algorithm will be presented, as well as real time measurements for a number of databases. We will finally present a time model of the algorithm in terms of a number of attributes of the databases.
OBJECT-BASED CLASSIFICATION OF URBAN AIRBORNE LIDAR POINT CLOUDS WITH MULTIPLE ECHOES USING SVM

Abstract. Airborne LiDAR point clouds classification is meaningful for various applications. In this paper, an object-based analysis method is proposed to classify the point clouds in urban areas. In the process of classification, outliers in the point clouds are first removed. Second, surface growing algorithm is employed to segment the point clouds into different clusters. The above point cloud segmentation is helpful to derive useful features such as average height, size/area, proportion of multiple echoes, slope/orientation, elevation difference, rectangularity, ratio of length to width, and compactness. At last, SVM-based classification is performed on the segmented point clouds with radial basis function as kernel. Two datasets with high point densities are employed to test the proposed method, and three classes are predefined. The results suggest that our method will produce the overall classification accuracy larger than 97% and the Kappa coefficient larger than 0.95.
On the Accuracy of Trace Replay Methods for File System Evaluation

Current trace replay methods for file system evaluation fail to represent traced workloads accurately. When using a misrepresented workload one may take wrong conclusions about the system evaluation. For example, a system designer can miss performance problems if the replay of a trace produces an under loaded representation of the real workload. Even worse, one can take wrong design decisions, leading to optimization of untypical workloads. In this study, we captured and replayed traces from standard file systems using methods proposed in the literature, to exemplify the inaccuracy of state-of-art trace replay methods. We also exposed a shortcoming of current methodologies, in a replay of a general purpose workload trace, we observed a difference of up to 100% on request response time, caused by the choice of trace replay method.
Endothelial Cell Expression of Vascular Cell Adhesion Molecule-1 Androgen Exposure Increases Human Monocyte Adhesion to Vascular Endothelium and

Endothelial Cell Expression of Vascular Cell Adhesion Molecule-1 Androgen Exposure Increases Human Monocyte Adhesion to Vascular Endothelium and Print ISSN: 0009-7322. Online ISSN: 1524-4539 Copyright © 1999 American Heart Association, Inc. All rights reserved. is published by the American Heart Association, 7272 Greenville Avenue, Dallas, TX 75231 Circulation doi: 10.1161/01.CIR. 99.17. 2317 1999;99:2317-2322 Circulation. http://circ.ahajournals. org/content/99/17/2317 World Wide Web at: The online version of this article, along with updated information and services, is located on the
Internal shock model for

We present a model for the radio outbursts of microquasars based on the assumption of quasi-continuous jet ejection. The jets arèlit up' by shock fronts trav-eling along the jets during outbursts. The shocks accelerate relativistic particles which emit the observed synchrotron radiation. The observed comparatively at decay light curves combined with gradually steepening spectral slopes are explained by a superposition of the radiation of the aging relativistic particle population left behind by the shocks. This scenario is the low energy, time-resolved equivalent to the internal shock model for GRBs. We show that this model predicts energy contents of the radiating plasma similar to the plasmon model. At the same time, the jet model relaxes the severe requirements on the central source in terms of the rate at which this energy must be supplied to the jet. Observations of`mini-bursts' with at spectral slopes and of infrared emission far from the source centre suggest two diierent states of jet ejections: (i) A `mini-burst' mode with relatively stable jet production and weak radio emission with at spectra and (ii) an outburst mode with strong variations in the jet bulk velocities coupled with strong radio emission with steeper spectra. We also show that the continuous jets in microquasars should terminate in strong shocks and possibly innate radio lobes similar to extragalactic jet sources. Finally, we investigate the possibility of testing the predictions of this model with resolved radio observations.