Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cloud monitoring for optimizing the QoS of hosted applications

Cloud monitoring involves dynamically tracking the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters related to virtualized services (e.g., CPU, storage, network, appliances, etc.), the physical resources they share, and the applications running on them or data hosted on them. Monitoring techniques and services can help a cloud provider or application developer in regards to: (i) keeping the cloud services and hosted applications operating at peak efficiency; (ii) detecting variations in service and application performance; (iii) accounting the SLA violations of certain QoS parameters; and (iv) tracking the leave and join operations of cloud services due to failures and other dynamic configuration changes. In this paper, we describe the PhD research motivation, question, and approach and methodology related to developing novel cloud monitoring techniques and services enabling automated application QoS management under uncertainties.
Advances in Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Skull Base

Abstract Introduction Over the past 20 years, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has advanced due to new techniques involving increased magnetic field strength and developments in coils and pulse sequences. These advances allow increased opportunity to delineate the complex skull base anatomy and may guide the diagnosis and treatment of the myriad of pathologies that can affect the skull base. Objectives The objective of this article is to provide a brief background of the development of MRI and illustrate advances in skull base imaging, including techniques that allow improved conspicuity, characterization, and correlative physiologic assessment of skull base pathologies. Data Synthesis Specific radiographic illustrations of increased skull base conspicuity including the lower cranial nerves, vessels, foramina, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leaks, and effacement of endolymph are provided. In addition, MRIs demonstrating characterization of skull base lesions, such as recurrent cholesteatoma versus granulation tissue or abscess versus tumor, are also provided as well as correlative clinical findings in CSF flow studies in a patient pre- and post-suboccipital decompression for a Chiari I malformation. Conclusions This article illustrates MRI radiographic advances over the past 20 years, which have improved clinicians' ability to diagnose, define, and hopefully improve the treatment and outcomes of patients with underlying skull base pathologies.
Isolated Handwritten Roman Numerals Recognition Using Methods Based on Radon, Hough Transforms and Gabor Filter

This paper presents for isolated handwritten Roman numerals recognition a research interested for carrying out both comparisons between the performances in terms of precision and rapidity, the first comparison is realized between four hybrid methods used to extract the features from numerals that are the zoning combined with Radon transform in first time, then combined with Hough transform in second time, then combined with Gabor filter in third time, finally combined in the same time with all these three descriptors, while the other comparison is performed between three classifiers which the first one is neuronal that is the multi-layer perceptron whereas the second is probabilistic that is hidden Markov model, the third classifier is realized via a combination between these both classifiers. For this purpose we have employed for pre-processing each numeral image the median filter, the thresholding, the centering and the edge detection techniques.
Safe Composition of Web Communication Protocols for Extensible Edge Services

As new multi-party edge services are deployed on the Internet, application-layer protocols with complex communication models and event dependencies are increasingly being specified and adopted. To ensure that such protocols (and compositions thereof with existing protocols) do not result in undesirable behaviors (e.g., livelocks) there needs to be a methodology for the automated checking of the “safety” of these protocols. In this paper, we present ingredients of such a methodology. Specifically, we show how SPIN, a tool from the formal systems verification community, can be used to quickly identify problematic behaviors of application-layer protocols with non-trivial communication models—such as HTTP with the addition of the “100 Continue” mechanism. As a case study, we examine several versions of the specification for the Continue mechanism; our experiments mechanically uncovered multi-version interoperability problems, including some which motivated revisions of HTTP/1.1 and some which persist even with the current version of the protocol. One such problem resembles a classic degradation-of-service attack, but can arise between well-meaning peers. We also discuss how the methods we employ can be used to make explicit the requirements for hardening a protocol’s implementation against potentially malicious peers, and for verifying an implementation’s interoperability with the full range of allowable peer behaviors.
Molecular phylogeography and cryptic speciation in the mosses, Mielichhoferia elongata and M. mielichhoferiana (Bryaceae)

Nucleotide sequence variation in the ITS1–5.8S–ITS2 region of nuclear ribosomal DNA (nrDNA) from 70 populations of Mielichhoferia elongata and M. mielichhoferiana, plus two outgroup species, was analysed using maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood methods. High levels of nucleotide substitution and numerous insertion–deletion events were detected within and between the two species. M. elongata is monophyletic with regard to nrDNA variation, but M. mielichhoferiana is paraphyletic. (M. elongata is nested within it.) A clade within M. mielichhoferiana provides evidence of vicariance, with North American and Scandinavian sister groups of populations. Two major clades are resolved in M. elongata by sequence data that are completely congruent with previous isozyme work. One clade includes populations from both North America and Europe whereas the other is strictly North American. These two clades, resolved by multiple independent loci, clearly represent cryptic species within the morphologically uniform M. elongata. Certain geographical areas, most notably southwestern Colorado in Ouray and San Juan Counties, harbour diverse populations of M. elongata with distinct phylogenetic and phylogeographical histories. Morphologically indistinguishable but phylogenetically distant populations were detected a few metres apart at one site. In contrast, all populations collected over hundreds of kilometres in California belong to a single clade. Arctic North American populations belong to a clade that includes disjunct populations in Alaska, northern Ellesmere Island, and the northeastern USA, but not subarctic Swedish populations, which are more closely related to plants from the Rocky Mountains. Morphological uniformity belies complex infraspecific phylogenetic patterns within M. elongata and M. mielichhoferiana.
Fifteen years SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics: life science databases, tools and support

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (www.isb-sib.ch) was created in 1998 as an institution to foster excellence in bioinformatics. It is renowned worldwide for its databases and software tools, such as UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, PROSITE, SWISS-MODEL, STRING, etc, that are all accessible on ExPASy.org, SIB's Bioinformatics Resource Portal. This article provides an overview of the scientific and training resources SIB has consistently been offering to the life science community for more than 15 years.
Automatic Scaling of Internet Applications for Cloud Computing Services

Many Internet applications can benefit from an automatic scaling property where their resource usage can be scaled up and down automatically by the cloud service provider. We present a system that provides automatic scaling for Internet applications in the cloud environment. We encapsulate each application instance inside a virtual machine (VM) and use virtualization technology to provide fault isolation. We model it as the Class Constrained Bin Packing (CCBP) problem where each server is a bin and each class represents an application. The class constraint reflects the practical limit on the number of applications a server can run simultaneously. We develop an efficient semi-online color set algorithm that achieves good demand satisfaction ratio and saves energy by reducing the number of servers used when the load is low. Experiment results demonstrate that our system can improve the throughput by 180% over an open source implementation of Amazon EC2 and restore the normal QoS five times as fast during flash crowds. Large scale simulations demonstrate that our algorithm is extremely scalable: the decision time remains under 4 s for a system with 10 000 servers and 10 000 applications. This is an order of magnitude improvement over traditional application placement algorithms in enterprise environments.
Randward and Lamar : Randomizing the FF Heuristic

We present two planners, Randward and Lamar, which are respectively built upon the Downward and LAMA planners. The technique developed in these planners is to randomize heuristic construction so that heuristic plateaus are less frequent and the bias introduced by poor, arbitrary nondeterministic choices in heuristic construction is removed. Specifically, we randomize the FF heuristic, naming the resulting planner Randward, and with the addition of the landmark count heuristic, name it Lamar. Within the FF heuristic, we randomize planning graph construction, which is akin to a random-walk in the relaxed planning space. From this randomized planning graph, we extract a relaxed plan heuristic (exactly as would FF).
The Effects of Adapting to Complex Motions: Position Invariance and Tuning to Spiral Motions

Recent neurophysiological evidence (e.g., Graziano, Andersen, & Snowden, 1994) suggested that some cells in the medial superior temporal area (MST) of the Old World monkey are sensitive to complex motions such as those brought about by a surface moving in depth or rotating. Two important findings were that these cells show position invariance (i.e., their preferred stimulus does not change across the receptive field), and that some cells were selective for spiralling stimuli rather than pure rotations or pure expansion/contractions. This paper attempts to provide evidence for similar processes in the human visual system by employing the technique of selective adaptation. We have simulated surfaces undergoing a motion in depth (div) or a rotation (curl), but have removed any cues that are not related to global motion. After adapting to a large pattern undergoing, say, an expansion, an aftereffect that contained an element of contraction could be elicited by placing small test patterns anywhere in the adapted area. This suggests that the global structure of the motion field must have been encoded as well as the local motion. Likewise thresholds for detecting motions similar to the adapting motion were elevated across the adapted area, while thresholds for other motions were not. Hence the effects of adaptation are both selective and show a degree of position invariance. Adaptation to pure div or pure curl stimuli was compared with adaptation to spiralling stimuli. Threshold elevation was always selective for the adapting motion and the shape and broadness of tuning did not vary. In simulations we could not reproduce our results using a model that had only div and curl detectors, but we could reproduce them if we allowed for detectors tuned for a broad range of spiral pitches. Our results suggest that humans encode the complex motion of surfaces by detectors tuned to many different types of motion and that the detectors are invariant across space in their properties.
Reconstruction of big sensor data

With ubiquitous sensors continuously monitoring and collecting large amounts of information, there is no doubt that this is an era of big data. One of the important source for scientific big data is the datasets collected by Internet of things (IoT). For an IoT application to analyze big sensor data, it is necessary that the data are clean and lossless. However, data loss in IoT is common due to unreliable wireless link or hardware failure in the nodes. To reconstruct the big sensor data, this paper first presents an algorithm based on matrix completion method. Then for multi-attributes sensor data, a tensor-based method is provided to estimate missing values. Moreover, an effective solution is proposed using the alternating direction method of multipliers. Finally, the experiments with real-word sensor data show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Coupling camera-tracked humans with a simulated virtual crowd

Our objective with this paper is to show how we can couple a group of real people and a simulated crowd of virtual humans. We attach group behaviors to the simulated humans to get a plausible reaction to real people. We use a two stage system: in the first stage, a group of people are segmented from a live video, then a human detector algorithm extracts the positions of the people in the video, which are finally used to feed the second stage, the simulation system. The positions obtained by this process allow the second module to render the real humans as avatars in the scene, while the behavior of additional virtual humans is determined by using a simulation based on a social forces model. Developing the method required three specific contributions: a GPU implementation of the codebook algorithm that includes an auxiliary codebook to improve the background subtraction against illumination changes; the use of semantic local binary patterns as a human descriptor; the parallelization of a social forces model, in which we solve a case of agents merging with each other. The experimental results show how a large virtual crowd reacts to over a dozen humans in a real environment.
Identification of the Adenosine Uptake Sites in Guinea Pig Brain

Nitrobenzylthioinosine (NBMPR), a potent and specific inhibitor of nucleoside transport, was employed as a photolabile probe of the adenosine transporter in guinea pig brain membranes. Reversible, high‐affinity binding of [3H]NBMPR to a crude preparation of guinea pig brain membranes was demonstrated (apparent KD 0.075 ± 0.012 nM; Bmax values of 0.24 ± 0.04 pmol/mg protein). Adenosine, uridine, dipyridamole, and nitrobenzylthioguanosine inhibited high‐affinity binding. Low concentrations of cyclohexoadenosine (10–300 nM) had no effect on NBMPR binding. These properties of the high‐affinity NBMPR binding sites were consistent with NBMPR binding to the nucleoside transport protein. Exposure of brain membranes in the presence of [3H]NBMPR and dithiothreitol, a free‐radical scavenger, to ultraviolet light resulted in covalent incorporation of 3H into polypeptides of apparent MW 66,000–45,000, a value similar to that for the human erythrocyte nucleoside transporter. Covalent attachment of [3H]NBMPR was inhibited by adenosine, dipyridamole, and nitrobenzyl‐thioguanosine.
Pronunciation lexicon adaptation for TTS voice building

This paper describes reducing phone label errors in TTS voice building by means of modeling of speaker pronunciation variants. Each speaker has his or her own unique pronunciations (and context-dependent variations), so that no one standard lexicon is able to cover all of the speaker’s variations. Creating speaker-dependent pronunciation lexicons for automatic speech labeling of our TTS voice databases helped to eliminate many pronunciation errors that resulted from mis-matches between lexical pronunciations and how the speaker (voice talent) actually pronounced a word. We also found that it contributed other synthesis quality improvement as well. A perceptual test showed that our work contributed to MOS improvement for American English male and female voices.
A Meier-Gorlin syndrome mutation in a conserved C-terminal helix of Orc6 impedes origin recognition complex formation

In eukaryotes, DNA replication requires the origin recognition complex (ORC), a six-subunit assembly that promotes replisome formation on chromosomal origins. Despite extant homology between certain subunits, the degree of structural and organizational overlap between budding yeast and metazoan ORC has been unclear. Using 3D electron microscopy, we determined the subunit organization of metazoan ORC, revealing that it adopts a global architecture very similar to the budding yeast complex. Bioinformatic analysis extends this conservation to Orc6, a subunit of somewhat enigmatic function. Unexpectedly, a mutation in the Orc6 C-terminus linked to Meier-Gorlin syndrome, a dwarfism disorder, impedes proper recruitment of Orc6 into ORC; biochemical studies reveal that this region of Orc6 associates with a previously uncharacterized domain of Orc3 and is required for ORC function and MCM2–7 loading in vivo. Together, our results suggest that Meier-Gorlin syndrome mutations in Orc6 impair the formation of ORC hexamers, interfering with appropriate ORC functions. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.00882. 001
An Architecture to Support Learning, Awareness, and Transparency in Social Software Engineering

Classical tools for supporting software engineering teams (collaborative development environment, CDE) are designed to support one team during the development of a product. Often the required data sources or experts reside outside of the internal project team and thus not provided by these CDEs. This paper describes an approach for a community-embedded CDE (CCDE), which is capable of handling multiple projects of several organizations, providing inter-project knowledge sharing and developer awareness. The presented approach uses the mashup pattern to integrate multiple data sources in order to provide software teams with an exactingly development environment.
Efficient modelling of guided ultrasonic waves using the Scaled Boundary FEM towards SHM of composite pressure vessels

The Scaled Boundary Finite Element Method (SBFEM) is a semi-analytical method that shows promising results in modelling of guided ultrasonic waves. Efficiency and low computational cost of the method are achieved by a discretisation of the boundary of a computational domain only, whereas for the domain itself the analytical solution is used. By means of the SBFEM different types of defects, e.g. cracks, pores, delamination, corrosion, integrated into a structure consisting of anisotropic and isotropic materials can be modelled. In this contribution, the SBFEM is used to analyse the propagation of guided waves in a structure consisting of an isotropic metal bonded to anisotropic carbon fibre reinforced material. The method allows appropriate wave types (modes) to be identified and to analyse their interaction with different defects. Results obtained are used to develop a structural health monitoring system for composite pressure vessels used in automotive and aerospace industries.
The breast cancer resistance protein (Bcrp1/Abcg2) restricts exposure to the dietary carcinogen 2-amino-1-methyl-6-phenylimidazo[4,5-b]pyridine.

The food carcinogen 2-amino-1-methyl-6-phenylimidazo[4,5-b]pyridine (PhIP) is the most abundant heterocyclic amine found in various protein containing foods. PhIP is mutagenic and carcinogenic in rodents, inducing lymphomas in mice and colon, mammary and prostate carcinomas in rats. It has also been implicated in human breast carcinogenesis. Humans on a normal Western diet are exposed to PhIP on a daily basis. The breast cancer resistance protein (BCRP/ABCG2) transports various anticancer drugs from cells, causing multidrug resistance. By its presence in the apical membrane of the intestine and bile canalicular membrane, it also protects the body from substrate drugs and toxins. We investigated whether Bcrp1 could affect PhIP exposure of the body because this could implicate BCRP activity in the cancer risk due to PhIP. Using polarized cell lines, we found that PhIP is efficiently transported by murine Bcrp1. In vivo pharmacokinetic studies showed that at a dose of 1 mg/kg [(14)C]PhIP the area under the curve for oral administration was 2.9-fold higher in Bcrp1(-/-) compared with wild-type mice (306 +/- 39 versus 107 +/- 15 h.ng/ml) and, for i.v. administration, 2.2 fold higher (386 +/- 36 versus 178 +/- 8.9 h.ng/ml). Wild-type mice cleared [(14)C]PhIP mainly by fecal excretion, but this shifted to primarily urinary excretion in Bcrp1(-/-) mice. In mice with a cannulated gall bladder, both hepatobiliary and direct intestinal excretion of [(14)C]PhIP were greatly impaired in Bcrp1(-/-) compared with wild-type mice (9.0 +/- 4.4 versus 36.5 +/- 9.4% and 1.5 +/- 0.8 versus 4.2 +/- 1.5%, respectively). We conclude that Bcrp1 effectively restricts the exposure of mice to ingested PhIP by decreasing its uptake from the gut lumen and by mediating hepatobiliary and intestinal elimination. Intra- or interindividual differences in BCRP activity in humans may thus also affect the exposure to PhIP and related food carcinogens, with possible implications for cancer susceptibility.
Direct benefits of choosing a high‐fitness mate can offset the indirect costs associated with intralocus sexual conflict

Intralocus sexual conflict generates a cost to mate choice: high‐fitness partners transmit genetic variation that confers lower fitness to offspring of the opposite sex. Our earlier work in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, revealed that these indirect genetic costs were sufficient to reverse potential “good genes” benefits of sexual selection. However, mate choice can also confer direct fitness benefits by inducing larger numbers of progeny. Here, we consider whether direct benefits through enhanced fertility could offset the costs associated with intralocus sexual conflict in D. melanogaster. Using hemiclonal analysis, we found that females mated to high‐fitness males produced 11% more offspring compared to those mated to low‐fitness males, and high‐fitness females produced 34% more offspring than low‐fitness females. These direct benefits more than offset the reduction in offspring fitness caused by intralocus sexual conflict, creating a net fitness benefit for each sex to pairing with a high‐fitness partner. Our findings highlight the need to consider both direct and indirect effects when investigating the fitness impacts of mate choice. Direct fitness benefits may shelter sexually antagonistic alleles from selection, suggesting a novel mechanism for the maintenance of fitness variation.
Efficient topologies for large-scale cluster networks

Increasing integrated-circuit pin bandwidth has motivated a corresponding increase in the degree or radix of interconnection networks and their routers. This paper describes the flattened butterfly, a cost-efficient topology for high-radix networks. On benign (load-balanced) traffic, the flattened butterfly approaches the cost/performance of a butterfly network and has roughly half the cost of a comparable performance Clos network. The advantage over the Clos is achieved by eliminating redundant hops when they are not needed for load balance. On adversarial traffic, the flattened butterfly matches the cost/performance of a folded-Clos network and provides an order of magnitude better performance than a conventional butterfly. In this case, global adaptive routing is used to switch the flattened butterfly from minimal to non-minimal routing - using redundant hops only when they are needed. Different routing algorithms are evaluated on the flattened butterfly and compared against alternative topologies. We also provide a detailed cost model for an interconnection network and compare the cost of the flattened butterfly to alternative topologies to show the cost advantages of the flattened butterfly.