Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Achievable performance and effective interrogator design for SAW RFID sensor tags

Remote sensing is a critical application that supports activities such as environmental monitoring, planetary science, structural shape and health monitoring, non-destructive evaluation, etc. that are critical to many NASA missions. The utility of the remote sensing devices themselves is greatly increased if they are "passive" - that is, they do not require any on-board power supply such as batteries - and if they can be identified uniquely during the sensor interrogation process. In this paper, we consider one very promising passive sensor technology, called surface acoustic wave (SAW) radio-frequency identification (RFID), that satisfies these criteria. Although SAW RFID tags have great potential for use in numerous space-based remote sensing applications, the limited collision resolution capability of current generation tags limits the performance in a cluttered sensing environment. That is, as more SAW-based sensors are added to the environment, numerous tag responses are superimposed at the receiver and decoding all or even a subset of the telemetry becomes increasingly difficult. Background clutter generated by reflectors other than the sensors themselves is also a problem, as is multipath interference and signal distortion, but the limiting factor in many remote sensing applications can be expected to be tag mutual interference. In this paper, we present the results of a research effort aimed at providing answers to the following questions: 1) What are the fundamental relationships between tag parameters such as bit-rate, time-bandwidth-product, SNR, and achievable collision resolution? 2) What are the differences in optimal or near-optimal interrogator designs between noise-limited environments and interference-limited environments? 3) What are the performance characteristics of different interrogator designs in term of parameters such as transmitter power level, range, and number of interfering tags?
Learning from Clinical Judgments: Semi-Markov-Modulated Marked Hawkes Processes for Risk Prognosis

Critically ill patients in regular wards are vulnerable to unanticipated adverse events which require prompt transfer to the intensive care unit (ICU). To allow for accurate prognosis of deteriorating patients, we develop a novel continuous-time probabilistic model for a monitored patient's temporal sequence of physiological data. Our model captures "informatively sampled" patient episodes: the clinicians' decisions on when to observe a hospitalized patient's vital signs and lab tests over time are represented by a marked Hawkes process, with intensity parameters that are modulated by the patient's latent clinical states, and with observable physiological data (mark process) modeled as a switching multi-task Gaussian process. In addition, our model captures "informatively censored" patient episodes by representing the patient's latent clinical states as an absorbing semi-Markov jump process. The model parameters are learned from offline patient episodes in the electronic health records via an EM-based algorithm. Experiments conducted on a cohort of patients admitted to a major medical center over a 3-year period show that risk prognosis based on our model significantly outperforms the currently deployed medical risk scores and other baseline machine learning algorithms.
Human premotor areas parse sequences into their spatial and temporal features

Skilled performance is characterized by precise and flexible control of movement sequences in space and time. Recent theories suggest that integrated spatio-temporal trajectories are generated by intrinsic dynamics of motor and premotor networks. This contrasts with behavioural advantages that emerge when a trained spatial or temporal feature of sequences is transferred to a new spatio-temporal combination arguing for independent neural representations of these sequence features. We used a new fMRI pattern classification approach to identify brain regions with independent vs integrated representations. A distinct regional dissociation within motor areas was revealed: whereas only the contralateral primary motor cortex exhibited unique patterns for each spatio-temporal sequence combination, bilateral premotor areas represented spatial and temporal features independently of each other. These findings advocate a unique function of higher motor areas for flexible recombination and efficient encoding of complex motor behaviours. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.03043. 001
Acoustic-prosodic, turn-taking, and language cues in child-psychologist interactions for varying social demand

Impaired social communication and social reciprocity are the primary phenotypic distinctions between autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and other developmental disorders. We investigate quantitative conversational cues in child-psychologist interactions using acoustic-prosodic, turn-taking, and language features. Results indicate the conversational quality degraded for children with higher ASD severity, as the child exhibited difficulties conversing and the psychologist varied her speech and language strategies to engage the child. When interacting with children with increasing ASD severity, the psychologist exhibited higher prosodic variability, increased pausing, more speech, atypical voice quality, and less use of conventional conversational cue such as assents and non-fluencies. Children with increasing ASD severity spoke less, spoke slower, responded later, had more variable prosody, and used personal pronouns, affect language, and fillers less often. We also investigated the predictive power of features from interaction subtasks with varying social demands placed on the child. We found that acoustic prosodic and turn-taking features were more predictive during higher social demand tasks, and that the most predictive features vary with context of interaction. We also observed that psychologist language features may be robust to the amount of speech in a subtask, showing significance even when the child is participating in minimal-speech, low social-demand tasks. Index Terms: autism spectrum disorders, atypical prosody, social reciprocity, turn-taking, language cues
ENUMERATING SUPER EDGE-MAGIC LABELINGS FOR THE UNION OF NONISOMORPHIC GRAPHS

Abstract A super edge-magic labeling of a graph G=(V,E) of order p and size q is a bijection f:V ∪E→{i}p+qi=1 such that: (1) f(u)+f(uv)+f(v)=k for all uv∈E; and (2) f(V )={i}pi=1. Furthermore, when G is a linear forest, the super edge-magic labeling of G is called strong if it has the extra property that if uv∈E(G) , u′,v′ ∈V (G) and dG (u,u′ )=dG (v,v′ )<+∞, then f(u)+f(v)=f(u′ )+f(v′ ). In this paper we introduce the concept of strong super edge-magic labeling of a graph G with respect to a linear forest F, and we study the super edge-magicness of an odd union of nonnecessarily isomorphic acyclic graphs. Furthermore, we find exponential lower bounds for the number of super edge-magic labelings of these unions. The case when G is not acyclic will be also considered.
Functional Characterization of Aspergillus nidulans ypkA, a Homologue of the Mammalian Kinase SGK

The serum- and glucocorticoid-regulated protein kinase (SGK) is an AGC kinase involved in signal cascades regulated by glucocorticoid hormones and serum in mammals. The Saccharomyces cerevisiae ypk1 and ypk2 genes were identified as SGK homologues and Ypk1 was shown to regulate the balance of sphingolipids between the inner and outer plasma membrane. This investigation characterized the Aspergillus nidulans YPK1 homologue, YpkA, representing the first filamentous fungal YPK1 homologue. Two conditional mutant strains were constructed by replacing the endogenous ypk1 promoter with two different regulatable promoters, alcA (from the alcohol dehydrogenase gene) and niiA (from the nitrate reductase gene). Both constructs confirmed that ypkA was an essential gene in A. nidulans. Repression of ypkA caused decreased radial growth, a delay in conidial germination, deficient polar axis establishment, intense branching during late stages of growth, a lack of asexual spores, and a terminal phenotype. Membrane lipid polarization, endocytosis, eisosomes and vacuolar distribution were also affected by ypkA repression, suggesting that YpkA plays a role in hyphal morphogenesis via coordinating the delivery of cell membrane and wall constituents to the hyphal apex. The A. nidulans Pkh1 homologue pkhA was also shown to be an essential gene, and preliminary genetic analysis suggested that the ypkA gene is not directly downstream of pkhA or epistatic to pkhA, rather, ypkA and pkhA are genetically independent or in parallel. BarA is a homologue of the yeast Lag1 acyl-CoA-dependent ceramide synthase, which catalyzes the condensation of phytosphingosine with a fatty acyl-CoA to form phytoceramide. When barA was absent, ypkA repression was lethal to the cell. Therefore, there appears to be a genetic interaction between ypkA, barA, and the sphingolipid synthesis. Transcriptional profiling of ypkA overexpression and down-regulation revealed several putative YpkA targets associated with the observed phenotypes.
Cosmological constant in broken maximal sugras

We examine the form of the cosmological constant in the loop expansion of broken maximally supersymmetric supergravity theories, and after embedding, within superstring and M-theory. Supersymmetry breaking at the TeV scale generates values of the cosmological constant that are in agreement with current astrophysical data. The form of perturbative quantum effects in the loop expansion is consistent with this parameter regime.
What's new in laser treatment for glaucoma?

Purpose of review This review highlights recently published studies on prevailing and newer laser therapies in glaucoma and critically evaluates their roles in the treatment algorithm. Recent findings Recently published studies suggest a role for selective laser trabeculoplasty (SLT) as initial therapy for open-angle glaucoma and ocular hypertension and have demonstrated efficacy in other glaucoma subtypes. Novel laser applications (micropulse diode laser trabeculoplasty, titanium sapphire laser trabeculoplasty and excimer laser trabeculotomy) have shown favorable early results. Endoscopic and transscleral cyclophotocoagulation (ECP, TCP) are generally reserved for refractory glaucomas, although some recent studies report its use in patients with good visual acuity. The effectiveness of laser iridotomy with or without iridoplasty for long-term prevention of primary angle closure glaucoma is undetermined. Laser goniopuncture is an important adjunct to nonpenetrating surgery, but wide adoption of the procedure is lacking. Summary The use of lasers in glaucoma continues to evolve, with a trend towards primary and earlier intervention. SLT is assuming an expanded role in the treatment of additional subtypes of glaucoma, whereas ECP and TCP are generally reserved for refractory glaucomas. Newer laser modalities show promise as alternatives and adjuncts to topical medications and nonpenetrating surgery. Additional research is needed to better define their safety and efficacy.
Role of RNase MRP in Viral RNA Degradation and RNA Recombination

ABSTRACT RNA degradation, together with RNA synthesis, controls the steady-state level of viral RNAs in infected cells. The endoribonucleolytic cleavage of viral RNA is important not only for viral RNA degradation but for RNA recombination as well, due to the participation of some RNA degradation products in the RNA recombination process. To identify host endoribonucleases involved in degradation of Tomato bushy stunt virus (TBSV) in a Saccharomyces cerevisiae model host, we tested eight known endoribonucleases. Here we report that downregulation of SNM1, encoding a component of the RNase MRP, and a temperature-sensitive mutation in the NME1 gene, coding for the RNA component of RNase MRP, lead to reduced production of the endoribonucleolytically cleaved TBSV RNA in yeast. We also show that the highly purified yeast RNase MRP cleaves the TBSV RNA in vitro, resulting in TBSV RNA degradation products similar in size to those observed in yeast cells. Knocking down the NME1 homolog in Nicotiana benthamiana also led to decreased production of the cleaved TBSV RNA, suggesting that in plants, RNase MRP is involved in TBSV RNA degradation. Altogether, this work suggests a role for the host endoribonuclease RNase MRP in viral RNA degradation and recombination.
Obsessive-compulsive symptoms, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and related disorders in Parkinson's disease.

This study evaluated the frequency of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS), and related disorders (e.g., tic disorders, trichotillomania, and body dysmorphic disorder) in 100 patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and 100 individually matched controls. When compared with controls, OCD, OCS, and related disorders were not higher in PD. Findings revealed an association of some OCS with left side motor symptom predominance in PD patients, particularly for symmetry and ordering/arranging. These findings suggest that the right hemisphere likely functions in the expression of OCS.
Shape grammars and grammatical evolution for evolutionary design

We describe the first steps in the adoption of Shape Grammars with Grammatical Evolution for application in Evolutionary Design. Combining the concepts of Shape Grammars and Genetic Programming opens up the exciting possibility of truly generative design assist tools. In this initial study we provide some background on the adoption of grammar-based Genetic Programming for Evolutionary Design, describe Shape Grammars, and give a brief overview of Grammatical Evolution before detailing how Grammatical Evolution used Shape Grammars to successfully rediscover some benchmark target structures.
Software-directed power-aware interconnection networks

Interconnection networks have been deployed as the communication fabric in a wide range of parallel computer systems. With recent technological trends allowing growing quantities of chip resources and faster clock rates, there have been prevailing concerns of increasing power consumption being a major limiting factor in the design of parallel computer systems, from multiprocessor SoCs to multi-chip embedded systems and parallel servers. To tackle this, power-aware networks must become inherent components of single-chip and multi-chip system.On the hardware design side, while there has been some recent interconnection network power reduction research, especially targeted towards communication links, the techniques presented are ad hoc and are not tailored to the application running on the network. We show that with these ad hoc techniques, power savings and corresponding impact on network latency vary significantly from one application to the next -- in many cases network performance can suffer severely. On the software side, extensive research on compile-time optimization has produced parallelizing compilers that can efficiently map an application onto hardware for high performance. However, research into power-aware parallelizing compilers is in its infancy; none addressed communication power.In this paper, we take the first steps towards tailoring applications' communication needs at run-time for low power. We propose software techniques that extend the flow of a parallelizing compiler in order to direct run-time network power optimization. We target network links, the dominant power consumer in these systems, allowing DVS instructions extracted during static compilation to orchestrate link voltage and frequency transitions for power savings during application runtime. Concurrently, a hardware online mechanism measures network congestion levels and adapts these off-line DVS settings to optimize network performance. Our simulations show that link power consumption can be greatly reduced by up to 76.3%, with a minor increase in network latency in the range of 0.23 to 6.78% across a number of benchmark suites running on three existing parallel architectures, from very fine-grained single-chip to coarse-grained multi-chip architectures.
Experiments in Cross Language Query Focused Multi-Document Summarization

The twin challenges of massive information overload via the web and ubiquitous computers present us with an unavoidable task: developing techniques to handle multilingual information robustly and efficiently, with as high quality performance as possible. Previous research activities on multilingual information access systems have studied cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), information extraction and factoid based question answering tasks in detail. It is believed by the research community and also previously acknowledged in a US-NSF report [Hovy et al., 1999] that a cross-language query focused summarization could play a vital role in multilingual information access, as a bridge between CLIR and machine translation. Surprisingly enough, no detailed studies exist yet on the effects of cross-linguality to query focused summarization. In this paper we study the effects of adding a cross-language dimension to query focused multi-document summarization for the Telugu-English language pair. We use a cross-lingual relevance based language modeling approach to generate extraction based summary. We evaluate the system using DUC 1 2005 dataset using ROUGE 2 metrics and compare with the mono-lingual baseline which uses relevance based language modeling in mono-lingual setting.
Active Ranking using Pairwise Comparisons

This paper examines the problem of ranking a collection of objects using pairwise comparisons (rankings of two objects). In general, the ranking of $n$ objects can be identified by standard sorting methods using $n log_2 n$ pairwise comparisons. We are interested in natural situations in which relationships among the objects may allow for ranking using far fewer pairwise comparisons. Specifically, we assume that the objects can be embedded into a $d$-dimensional Euclidean space and that the rankings reflect their relative distances from a common reference point in $R^d$. We show that under this assumption the number of possible rankings grows like $n^{2d}$ and demonstrate an algorithm that can identify a randomly selected ranking using just slightly more than $d log n$ adaptively selected pairwise comparisons, on average. If instead the comparisons are chosen at random, then almost all pairwise comparisons must be made in order to identify any ranking. In addition, we propose a robust, error-tolerant algorithm that only requires that the pairwise comparisons are probably correct. Experimental studies with synthetic and real datasets support the conclusions of our theoretical analysis.
Industrial strength compiler construction with equations

Industrial strength compilers need not only be robust and efficient but also understandable, maintainable, and extensible. To make compilers more manageable there has been a strong trend towards the high-level specification of the different phases of the compilation process. However, the high-level specification of one phase - the semantic analysis - has not been very successful in terms of production quality standards. In this paper we propose the use of a language based on equations for the specification of the semantic analysis phase of compilers.
Proton Probing of the Charybdotoxin Binding Site of Shaker K+ Channels

We have investigated the interaction of charybdotoxin (CTX) with Shaker K channels. We substituted a histidine residue for the wild-type phenylalanine (at position 425) in an inactivation-removed channel. The nature of the imidazole ring of the histidine provides the ability to change the charge on this amino acid side chain with solution hydrogen ion concentration. Wild-type, recombinant CTX blocked wild-type Shaker channels in a bimolecular fashion with a half-blocking concentration (K d) of 650 nM (at a membrane potential of 0 mV). The F425H mutant channels were much more sensitive to CTX block with an apparent K d (at pH 7.0) of 75 nM. Block of F425H but not wild-type channels was strongly pH sensitive. A pH change from 7 to 5.5 rendered the F425H channels >200-fold less sensitive to CTX. The pH dependence of CTX block was steeper than expected for inhibition produced by H+ ions binding to identical, independent sites. The data were consistent with H+ ions interacting with subunits of the channel homotetrameric structure. The in situ pK for the imidazole group on the histidine at channel position 425 was determined to be near 6.4 and the dissociation constant for binding of toxin to the unprotonated channel was near 50 nM. We estimate that the binding of a H+ ion to each subunit adds 0.8 kcal/mol or more of interaction energy with CTX. We used mutant toxins to test electrostatic and steric interactions between specific CTX residues and channel position 425. Our results are consistent with a model in which protons on F425H channel subunits interact with three positive charges on CTX at an effective distance 6–7 Å from this channel position.
Thinning, photonic beamsplitting, and a general discrete Entropy power Inequality

Many partially-successful attempts have been made to find the most natural discrete-variable version of Shannon's entropy power inequality (EPI). We develop an axiomatic framework from which we deduce the natural form of a discrete-variable EPI and an associated entropic monotonicity in a discrete-variable central limit theorem. In this discrete EPI, the geometric distribution, which has the maximum entropy among all discrete distributions with a given mean, assumes a role analogous to the Gaussian distribution in Shannon's EPI. The entropy power of X is defined as the mean of a geometric random variable with entropy H(X). The crux of our construction is a discrete-variable version of Lieb's scaled addition X ? η Y of two random variables X and Y with η ∈ (0, 1). We discuss the relationship of our discrete EPI with recent work of Yu and Johnson who developed an EPI for a restricted class of random variables that have ultra-log-concave (ULC) distributions. Even though we leave open the proof of the aforesaid natural form of the discrete EPI, we show that this discrete EPI holds true for variables with arbitrary discrete distributions when the entropy power is redefined as eH(X) in analogy with the continuous version. Finally, we show that our conjectured discrete EPI is a special case of the yet-unproven Entropy Photon-number Inequality (EPnI), which assumes a role analogous to Shannon's EPI in capacity proofs for Gaussian bosonic (quantum) channels.
Characterizing the Performance of “Big Memory” on Blue Gene Linux

Efficient use of Linux for high-performance applications on Blue Gene/P (BG/P) compute nodes is challenging because of severe performance hits resulting from translation lookaside buffer (TLB) misses and a hard-to-program torus network DMA controller. To address these difficulties, we present the design and implementation of “Big Memory”— an alternative, transparent memory space for computational processes. Big Memory uses extremely large memory pages available on PowerPC CPUs to create a TLB-miss-free, flat memory area that can be used for application code and data and is easier to use for DMA operations. One of our singlenode memory benchmarks shows that the performance gap between regular PowerPC Linux with 4KB pages and IBM BG/P compute node kernel (CNK) is about 68% in the worst case. Big Memory narrows the worst case performance gap to just 0.04%. We verify this result on 1024 nodes of Blue Gene/P using the NAS Parallel Benchmarks and find the performance under Linux with Big Memory to fluctuate within 0.7% of CNK. Originally intended exclusively for compute node tasks, our new memory subsystem turns out to dramatically improve the performance of certain I/O node applications as well. We demonstrate this performance using the central processor of the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) radio telescope as an example.