Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Support for the social dimension of shopping through web based sales configurators

Mass Customizers (MCs) often sell personalized products through Web Based Sales Configurators (WBSCs). Recently, a number of them have connected their WBSCs with Social Software Applications (SSAs). This is not surprising since SSAs provide an interactive and socially rich shopping experience, which makes shopping on WBSCs more similar to retail shopping experiences. Even though interaction with customers is a distinctive characteristic of MCs, research on the use of SSAs by MCs is very limited. The present paper reports the preliminary results of research that aims to (i) describe how existing WBSCs connect with SSAs, (ii) understand which stages of the configuration-shopping process are supported by the different WBSCs-SSAs connections, and (iii) explain how the different WBSCs-SSAs connections support fulfilment of the needs for social feedback and for social involvement that WBSC users perceive during their shopping experiences.
Fast and accurate flow-insensitive points-to analysis

In order to analyze a program that involves pointers, it is necessary to have (safe) information about what each pointer points to. There are many different approaches to computing points-to information. This paper addresses techniques for flow- and context-insensitive interprocedural analysis of stack-based storage.The paper makes two contributions to work in this area: ¿ The first contribution is a set of experiments that explore the trade-offs between techniques previously defined by Lars Andersen and Bjarne Steensgaard. The former has a cubic worst-case running time, while the latter is essentially linear. However, the former may be much more precise than the latter. We have found that in practice, Andersen's algorithm is consistently more precise than Steensgaard's. For small programs, there is very little difference in the times required by the two approaches; however, for larger programs, Andersen's algorithm can be much slower than Steensgaard's. ¿ The second contribution is the definition of two new algorithms. The first algorithm can be "tuned" so that its worst-case time and space requirements, as well as its accuracy range from those of Steensgaard to those of Andersen. We have experimented with several versions of this algorithm; one version provided a significant increase in accuracy over Steensgaard's algorithm, while keeping the running time within a factor of two. The second algorithm uses the first as a subroutine. Its worst-case time and space requirements are a factor of log N (where N is the number of variables in the program) worse than those of Steensgaard's algorithm. In practice, it appears to run about ten times slower than Steensgaard's algorithm; however it is significantly more accurate than Steensgaard's algorithm, and significantly faster than Andersen's algorithm on large programs.
PET study of competition between intravenous cocaine and [11C]raclopride at dopamine receptors in human subjects.

OBJECTIVE Animal data suggest that the strong euphoriant effects of cocaine are related to the drug's enhancement of available dopamine at the synaptic cleft. The authors' goal was to determine whether this mechanism is the same in humans because the development of putative pharmacological agents for treatment of cocaine dependence depends on this knowledge. METHOD Positron emission tomography with [11C]raclopride was used to examine the effects of the intravenous administration of 48 mg of cocaine (a typical "street" dose) on the occupancy of dopamine 2 receptors in the putamen of 11 self-identified intravenous drug abusers. RESULTS All 11 subjects reported subjective stimulation and euphoria in response to cocaine administration. Radioligand occupancy at dopamine receptors was decreased significantly after cocaine administration, suggesting that higher dopamine concentrations were competing at the receptor site. CONCLUSIONS These results support the concept of dopamine system involvement in human cocaine abuse.
Fast Direct Injection Mass-Spectrometric Characterization of Stimuli for Insect Electrophysiology by Proton Transfer Reaction-Time of Flight Mass-Spectrometry (PTR-ToF-MS)

Electrophysiological techniques are used in insect neuroscience to measure the response of olfactory neurons to volatile odour stimuli. Widely used systems to deliver an olfactory stimulus to a test insect include airstream guided flow through glass cartridges loaded with a given volatile compound on a sorbent support. Precise measurement of the quantity of compound reaching the sensory organ of the test organism is an urgent task in insect electrophysiology. In this study we evaluated the performances of the recent realised proton transfer reaction-time of flight mass-spectrometry (PTR-ToF-MS) as a fast and selective gas sensor. In particular, we characterised the gas emission from cartridges loaded with a set of volatile compounds belonging to different chemical classes and commonly used in electrophysiological experiments. PTR-ToF-MS allowed a fast monitoring of all investigated compounds with sufficient sensitivity and time resolution. The detection and the quantification of air contaminants and solvent or synthetic standards impurities allowed a precise quantification of the stimulus exiting the cartridge. The outcome of this study was twofold: on one hand we showed that PTR-ToF-MS allows monitoring fast processes with high sensitivity by real time detection of a broad number of compounds; on the other hand we provided a tool to solve an important issue in insect electrophysiology.
A video interpretation platform applied to bank agency monitoring

We present a real time platform for semantic video interpretation applied to bank agency monitoring. The proposed system is a multicamera platform, which recognizes user-predefined scenarios, such as bank attack scenarios. These scenarios are modelled by domain experts using a back and forth process and based on a representation language. In order to address bank monitoring issues, the system has been improved based on two evaluation types. First, a repair stage guided by a careful technical evaluation has been performed at each level of the interpretation chain. As a consequence, the robustness obtained was sufficient enough to recognize all scenarios of interest. Second, an end-user evaluation has helped the experts to improve the scenario models to adapt them to real life situations. We report results of scenario recognition performances on real video sequences taken in a bank agency.
Modelling Dynamic Scenes at Unsignalised Road Intersections

Understanding dynamic scenes at road intersections is both crucial and challenging for intelligent vehicles. In order to detect potentially dangerous situations, algorithms are needed that can interpret the behaviour of the actors in the scene and predict its likely evolution. The difficulty of this task arises from the large number of possible scenarios. The conventional answer to this issue is to discard vehicle interactions in the manoeuvre prediction process, i.e. to infer the manoeuvre performed by each vehicle from its past and current behaviour, independently from the other vehicles in the scene. In this paper we show how this affects collision risk estimation in very common scenarios, making it unusable in practice for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) applications. As an alternative we propose a probabilistic model for vehicles traversing unsignalised intersections that accounts for the mutual influence between vehicle manoeuvres. The focus is on the utilisation of contextual information (i.e. layout of the intersection, presence of other vehicles and traffic rules) to interpret a vehicle's behaviour. We show how the model can be used for accurate situation and risk assessment.
CHI 2039: speculative research visions

This paper presents a curated collection of fictional abstracts for papers that could appear in the proceedings of the 2039 CHI Conference. It provides an opportunity to consider the various visions guiding work in HCI, the futures toward which we (believe we) are working, and how research in the field might relate with broader social, political, and cultural changes over the next quarter century.
Opinion evolution in closed community

A simple Ising spin model which can describe a mechanism of making a decision in a closed community is proposed. It is shown via standard Monte Carlo simulations that very simple rules lead to rather complicated dynamics and to a power law in the decision time distribution. It is found that a closed community has to evolve either to a dictatorship or a stalemate state (inability to take any common decision). A common decision can be taken in a "democratic way" only by an open community.
Predicting resistance mutations using protein design algorithms

Drug resistance resulting from mutations to the target is an unfortunate common phenomenon that limits the lifetime of many of the most successful drugs. In contrast to the investigation of mutations after clinical exposure, it would be powerful to be able to incorporate strategies early in the development process to predict and overcome the effects of possible resistance mutations. Here we present a unique prospective application of an ensemble-based protein design algorithm, K∗, to predict potential resistance mutations in dihydrofolate reductase from Staphylococcus aureus using positive design to maintain catalytic function and negative design to interfere with binding of a lead inhibitor. Enzyme inhibition assays show that three of the four highly-ranked predicted mutants are active yet display lower affinity (18-, 9-, and 13-fold) for the inhibitor. A crystal structure of the top-ranked mutant enzyme validates the predicted conformations of the mutated residues and the structural basis of the loss of potency. The use of protein design algorithms to predict resistance mutations could be incorporated in a lead design strategy against any target that is susceptible to mutational resistance.
On the Isomorphism of Fractional Factorial Designs

Two fractional factorial designs are called isomorphic if one can be obtained from the other by relabeling the factors, reordering the runs, and switching the levels of factors. To identify the isomorphism of two s-factor n-run designs is known to be an NP hard problem, when n and s increase. There is no tractable algorithm for the identification of isomorphic designs. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm based on the centered L2-discrepancy, a measure of uniformity, for detecting the isomorphism of fractional factorial designs. It is shown that the new algorithm is highly reliable and can significantly reduce the complexity of the computation. Theoretical justification for such an algorithm is also provided. The efficiency of the new algorithm is demonstrated by using several examples that have previously been discussed by many others.
The ISL TC-STAR Spring 2006 ASR Evaluation Systems

The project Technology and Corpora for Speech to Speech Translation (TC-STAR) aims at making a break-through in speech-to-speech translation research, significantly reducing the gap between the performance of machines and humans at this task. Technological and scientific progress is driven by periodic, competitive evaluations within the project. For automatic speech recognition the Interactive Systems Laboratories participated in the English European Parliamentary Sessions (EPPS) and Mandarin Chinese Broadcast News task within these evaluations. In this paper we present our evaluation systems with which we participated in the TC-STAR Spring 2006 evaluation for the two tasks mentioned.
Who's Time Is It Anyway?: Investigating the Accuracy of Camera Timestamps

People take photos all over the world at all times of day; each photo depicting a place and a moment worth capturing. In the context of multimedia analysis and social computing, accurate location and time information about where and when these photos were taken is of importance for understanding event semantics, image content and many other purposes. While location information associated with photos is known to be relatively accurate, time is not. From a sample of 10 million public Flickr photos, we observe that 37% of the photos differ more than an hour between their camera timestamps and GPS timestamps with respect to local time at the locations where the photos were taken. Erroneous time information may adversely influence the correctness of any kind of temporal analysis that relies on camera timestamps, as well as research and real-world applications that require accurate knowledge of when and where photos were captured. In light of our observations we propose a simple yet effective metadata-only technique for improving the accuracy of camera timestamps.
Impact of Loop Unrolling on Area, Throughput and Clock Frequency for Window Operations Based on a Data Schedule Method

Window operations which are computationally intensive and data intensive are frequently used in image compression, pattern recognition and digital signal processing. Reconfigurable hardware boards provide a convenient and flexible solution to speed up these algorithms. This paper studies the effect of loop unrolling on the area, clock speed and throughput based on a data schedule method to find the latent connections between the three capabilities and loop unrolling. Our results indicate that due to the unique design of the compilation framework. Inner loop unrolling makes the controllers become more complicated than outer loop unrolling and increase the requirement of areas at the same time. However, outer loop unrolling demands more memory elements to keep the reused data. The clock speed begins to decrease when the number of RAM modules extends to a certain size, and the throughput increase in different degrees for different operations.
Concept for improving industrial goods via contextual knowledge provision

At present, product lifecycle data is provided, used, and archived only for very specific purposes. Textual data generated in product use can be very comprehensive and contain valuable information beyond its original purpose, e.g. for product development or improvement. This kind of information, however, is not fed back systematically, as its evaluation is currently not possible due to a lack of suitable methods and tools in product development. The paper in hand presents a concept designed to support product developers by introducing maintenance, service, and customer data, which has undergone restructuring into textual form in the product use phase, into product development. To process the restructured textual data, customized text mining methods are generated as a part of knowledge management in product development. These methods aim at identifying products, product generations, and failure descriptions, as well as the relationships among them. The knowledge gained through text mining is visualized in the work environment familiar to the product developer, and implements utilitarian visualization methods. Visualization is integrated into existing IT systems and provides knowledge required for product improvement or development in a target-oriented way. This extension to knowledge-based product development facilitates more efficient improvement of current and future products.
An improved cluster-based P2P multicasting approach

In this paper, we describe our work-in-progress end system multicast approach, capacity-aware cluster based multicast (CCM). Cluster overlay is a widely used scalable P2P overlay in which peers are organized into groups and are not aware of the whole system. We address the problem of peer heterogeneity and extend current approaches by providing an ESM approach on cluster overlay able to provide capacity-aware multicast. Our approach works well even when constructing a multicast chain with restricted peer capacities. This work was supported by NNSF of China (No.60502032 and No. 60672068).
Transcription Factors Bind Negatively Selected Sites within Human mtDNA Genes

Transcription of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)-encoded genes is thought to be regulated by a handful of dedicated transcription factors (TFs), suggesting that mtDNA genes are separately regulated from the nucleus. However, several TFs, with known nuclear activities, were found to bind mtDNA and regulate mitochondrial transcription. Additionally, mtDNA transcriptional regulatory elements, which were proved important in vitro, were harbored by a deletion that normally segregated among healthy individuals. Hence, mtDNA transcriptional regulation is more complex than once thought. Here, by analyzing ENCODE chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing (ChIP-seq) data, we identified strong binding sites of three bona fide nuclear TFs (c-Jun, Jun-D, and CEBPb) within human mtDNA protein-coding genes. We validated the binding of two TFs by ChIP-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (c-Jun and Jun-D) and showed their mitochondrial localization by electron microscopy and subcellular fractionation. As a step toward investigating the functionality of these TF-binding sites (TFBS), we assessed signatures of selection. By analyzing 9,868 human mtDNA sequences encompassing all major global populations, we recorded genetic variants in tips and nodes of mtDNA phylogeny within the TFBS. We next calculated the effects of variants on binding motif prediction scores. Finally, the mtDNA variation pattern in predicted TFBS, occurring within ChIP-seq negative-binding sites, was compared with ChIP-seq positive-TFBS (CPR). Motifs within CPRs of c-Jun, Jun-D, and CEBPb harbored either only tip variants or their nodal variants retained high motif prediction scores. This reflects negative selection within mtDNA CPRs, thus supporting their functionality. Hence, human mtDNA-coding sequences may have dual roles, namely coding for genes yet possibly also possessing regulatory potential.
MAGNETIC FLUX LEAKAGE INVESTIGATION OF INTERACTING DEFECTS: COMPETITIVE EFFECTS OF STRESS CONCENTRATION AND MAGNETIC SHIELDING

The magnetic flux leakage (MFL) method is used for in-line inspection of oil and gas pipelines. Corrosion-induced MFL signals are sensitive to the level of stress and magnetic flux density existing in the pipe wall. Defects act as stress raisers, locally influencing the magnetization of the material, and subsequently the path of flux flow. Two adjacent corrosion pits can furthermore complicate this situation by the superposition of their stress concentrations and by the mutual shielding of the defects from the applied flux density. This type of defect geometry is termed interacting defects . In this study, various degrees of interaction were considered by modifying the separation and direction of alignment of the two defects. The MFL signals generated by these defect geometries were analyzed as a function of applied stress and magnetic flux density in the bulk material. While the overall MFL signal amplitude dependence on stress was minimized at high flux densities, it was observed that the shape of the MFL profile was dictated by the interacting defect geometry. The absolute MFL amplitude was found to be influenced by the local residual stress developed at the defect edges.
Serum calcium, magnesium, phosphorous and lipid profile in healthy Iranian premenopausal women.

INTRODUCTION Recent epidemiological evidence suggests that alteration in calcium, phosphorous or magnesium metabolism may have direct cardiovascular consequences. However, it is unknown whether variations in serum values of these minerals are in relationship with lipid profile and adiposity as metabolic risk factors of cardiovascular events in premenopausal women independent of confounders. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between serum calcium, magnesium and phosphorous with lipid profile in healthy premenopausal women. MATERIALS AND METHODS This study was performed on 82 reproductive age women aged 17-50 who were randomly selected from general population of Tabriz, Iran. They were assigned into obese and none-obese groups. Weight and height for BMI calculation were measured using a calibrated Seca scale and cotton ruler which was attached to the wall. Body composition was analyzed by bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA). Serum magnesium, calcium and phosphorous were measured colorimetrically; fasting blood glucose (FBG) and serum lipids were assessed by enzymatic methods. RESULTS Obese woman had significantly lower serum magnesium (P = 0.035) and significantly higher fasting blood glucose (P = 0.028), total cholesterol (P = 0.035), triglyceride (P = 0.019), low density lipoprotein (P =0.003) and parathyroid hormone concentrations (P = 0.031) compared to non obese women. In correlation coefficient analysis, serum calcium concentrations had a positive weak relationship with total cholesterol (r = 0.267, P = 0.013) and triglyceride (r = 0.301, P = 0.005) concentrations in all participants; whereas in separate analysis of subjects as obese and non obese groups, these relationships lost their significance. Serum phosphorous had a weak positive relationship with total cholesterol (r = 0.31, P = 0.002) and an inverse weak relationship with parathyroid hormone (r = -0.32, P = 0.002). After adjusting for confounding variables by multiple regression analysis, the positive relationship between serum calcium, triglyceride, high density lipoprotein and low density lipoprotein cholesterol were significant. CONCLUSION Our results indicate that abnormality in serum calcium and phosphorous is significantly correlated with serum lipids. Further studies are warranted for interpretation of these associations and understanding the underlying mechanisms.
Extending the lifetime of flash-based storage through reducing write amplification from file systems

Flash memory has gained in popularity as storage devices for both enterprise and embedded systems because of its high performance, low energy and reduced cost. The endurance problem of flash memory, however, is still a challenge and is getting worse as storage density increases with the adoption of multi-level cells (MLC). Prior work has addressed wear leveling and data reduction, but there is significantly less work on using the file system to improve flash lifetimes. Some common mechanisms in traditional file systems, such as journaling, metadata synchronization, and page-aligned update, can induce extra write operations and aggravate the wear of flash memory. This problem is called write amplification from file systems. In order to mitigate write amplification, we propose an object-based flash translation layer design (OFTL), in which mechanisms are co-designed with flash memory. By leveraging page metadata, OFTL enables lazy persistence of index metadata and eliminates journals while keeping consistency. Coarse-grained block state maintenance reduces persistent free space management overhead. With byte-unit access interfaces, OFTL is able to compact and co-locate the small updates with metadata to further reduce updates. Experiments show that an OFTL-based system, OFSS, offers a write amplification reduction of 47.4%-89.4% in SYNC mode and 19.8%-64.0% in ASYNC mode compared with ext3, ext2, and btrfs on an up-to-date page-level FTL.
Towards Interoperability of ISO Standards for Language Resource Management

This paper reviews and evaluates some of the ISO documents for language resource management. Being developed under ISO/TC 37/SC 4, these documents are at the last stage of approval and publication as interna- tional standards. They provide speciﬁcation languages for the annotation of primary lin- guistic data and also for the representation of annotated data. The paper makes some tech- nical recommendations to make these speciﬁ- cation languages interoperable at the level of both annotation and representation, thus mak- ing the use of the resulting language resources sustainable in various areas of language tech- nology applications.