Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using Libception to Understand and Improve HTTP Streaming Video Server Throughput

Video streaming applications generate a large fraction of Internet traffic. Much of this content is delivered over HTTP using standard web servers. Unlike other types of web workloads, HTTP video streaming workloads are typically disk bound, and therefore an important problem is that of optimizing disk access. In this paper we design, implement and evaluate Libception, an application-level shim library that implements techniques for improving disk I/O efficiency. Web servers can achieve the benefits of these techniques simply by linking with Libception, without the need to modify source code. In contrast to making kernel changes or attempting to optimize kernel tuning, Libception provides a portable and relatively simple setting in which techniques for optimizing I/O in HTTP video streaming servers can be implemented and evaluated. We report experimental results evaluating the efficacy of the aggressive prefetching and disk I/O serialization techniques currently implemented in Libception, for three web servers (Apache, nginx and the userver) and two operating systems (FreeBSD, Linux). We find that on FreeBSD, video streaming throughput with all three web servers can be doubled by linking with Libception. On Linux, performance similar to that provided with Libception was eventually obtained by examining the kernel source to understand and tune kernel parameters. With the default kernel parameter settings, however, and regardless of which Linux disk scheduler is selected, we find that use of Libception can approximately double throughput. We find that both aggressive prefetching and serialization are necessary to achieve these benefits.
Direct-adaptive neurocontrol of robots with unknown nonlinearities and velocity feedback

A neural network (NN) adaptive tracking controller for rigid revolute robots is presented that requires position measurements only. The controller is synthesized using a computed torque like control part of which a modified version of the nonlinear part of Lagrangian dynamics is learnt online by a neural estimator that needs no offline training phase. Therefore, the implementation of the control algorithm needs a reasonable knowledge of the inertia matrix alone. The combined neurocontroller-linear observer scheme can guarantee the uniform ultimate bounds (UUB) of the tracking errors and the observer errors under fairly general conditions on the controller-observer gains.
Risk and the evolution of human exchange

Compared with other species, exchange among non-kin is a hallmark of human sociality in both the breadth of individuals and total resources involved. One hypothesis is that extensive exchange evolved to buffer the risks associated with hominid dietary specialization on calorie dense, large packages, especially from hunting. ‘Lucky’ individuals share food with ‘unlucky’ individuals with the expectation of reciprocity when roles are reversed. Cross-cultural data provide prima facie evidence of pair-wise reciprocity and an almost universal association of high-variance (HV) resources with greater exchange. However, such evidence is not definitive; an alternative hypothesis is that food sharing is really ‘tolerated theft’, in which individuals possessing more food allow others to steal from them, owing to the threat of violence from hungry individuals. Pair-wise correlations may reflect proximity providing greater opportunities for mutual theft of food. We report a laboratory experiment of foraging and food consumption in a virtual world, designed to test the risk-reduction hypothesis by determining whether people form reciprocal relationships in response to variance of resource acquisition, even when there is no external enforcement of any transfer agreements that might emerge. Individuals can forage in a high-mean, HV patch or a low-mean, low-variance (LV) patch. The key feature of the experimental design is that individuals can transfer resources to others. We find that sharing hardly occurs after LV foraging, but among HV foragers sharing increases dramatically over time. The results provide strong support for the hypothesis that people are pre-disposed to evaluate gains from exchange and respond to unsynchronized variance in resource availability through endogenous reciprocal trading relationships.
A systematic literature review on modified condition and decision coverage

One of the requirements of Modified Condition and Decision Coverage (MCDC) is that test cases should be selected to demonstrate that a condition can independently affect the outcome of a decision. However, it is known that test cases cannot be selected to satisfy this "independently-affect" requirement when a decision contains strongly coupled conditions. Researchers have proposed various forms of MCDC in addressing this issue. In last 20 years, these variant MCDC forms have been discussed and applied as test data adequacy criteria in white-box testing, and as fault revealing techniques in empirical studies. In this paper, we performed a systematic literature review (SLR) on these MCDC variants. By clarifying the existing meanings of these variants, we are able to define another MCDC form. Moreover, we performed an empirical study to compare the fault detecting ability of this new form with other existing MCDC variants. The results showed that this new form of MCDC has a higher fault detecting ability than the others.
Message-Passing for Approximate MAP Inference with Latent Variables

We consider a general inference setting for discrete probabilistic graphical models where we seek maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimates for a subset of the random variables (max nodes), marginalizing over the rest (sum nodes). We present a hybrid message-passing algorithm to accomplish this. The hybrid algorithm passes a mix of sum and max messages depending on the type of source node (sum or max). We derive our algorithm by showing that it falls out as the solution of a particular relaxation of a variational framework. We further show that the Expectation Maximization algorithm can be seen as an approximation to our algorithm. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets, against several baselines, demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed algorithm.
The Intercalated Disc Protein, mXinα, Is Capable of Interacting with β-Catenin and Bundling Actin Filaments*

Targeted deletion of mXinα results in cardiac hypertrophy and cardiomyopathy with conduction defects (Gustafson-Wagner, E., Sinn, H. W., Chen, Y.-L., Wang, D.-Z., Reiter, R. S., Lin, J. L.-C., Yang, B., Williamson, R. A., Chen, J. N., Lin, C.-I., and Lin, J. J.-C. (2007) Am. J. Physiol. 293, H2680-H2692). To understand the underlying mechanisms leading to such cardiac defects, the functional domains of mXinα and its interacting proteins were investigated. Interaction studies using co-immunoprecipitation, pull-down, and yeast two-hybrid assays revealed that mXinα directly interacts with β-catenin. The β-catenin-binding site on mXinα was mapped to amino acids 535-636, which overlaps with the known actin-binding domains composed of the Xin repeats. The overlapping nature of these domains provides insight into the molecular mechanism for mXinα localization and function. Purified recombinant glutathione S-transferase- or His-tagged mXinα proteins are capable of binding and bundling actin filaments, as determined by co-sedimentation and electron microscopic studies. The binding to actin was saturated at an approximate stoichiometry of nine actin monomers to one mXinα. A stronger interaction was observed between mXinα C-terminal deletion and actin as compared with the interaction between full-length mXinα and actin. Furthermore, force expression of green fluorescent protein fused to an mXinα C-terminal deletion in cultured cells showed greater stress fiber localization compared with force-expressed GFP-mXinα. These results suggest a model whereby the C terminus of mXinα may prevent the full-length molecule from binding to actin, until the β-catenin-binding domain is occupied by β-catenin. The binding of mXinα to β-catenin at the adherens junction would then facilitate actin binding. In support of this model, we found that the actin binding and bundling activity of mXinα was enhanced in the presence of β-catenin.
Music Life Cycle Support through Ontologies

The focus of this paper is the exploration of ontologies as a means for knowledge sharing in music information retrieval scenarios. Our approach is intended to support the complete “life cycle of digital music” and focuses on the implications of a digital world for all the actors involved in the process of creation, consumption and modification of such entities. As a novelty we take care about legal aspects, digital rights management being heavily tangled in such scenarios. MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 vocabularies are considered as basic ingredients for our ontology which ensures in this way interoperability within the multimedia delivery and music research communities.
Measuring the relationship between income and NHEs

This article uses recently published time series data for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries to estimate income elasticities for health care expenditures. Several different models and alternative specifications are examined to determine the sensitivity and robustness of the estimated relationships. Income is the dominant-determinant of health care spending and longrun income elasticity for health care is significantly greater than unity. This implies that health care is a luxury good, and expenditures will tend to rise with the level of national income. There is little evidence that the degree of public finance reduces the level of health care expenditures.
Image-domain waveform inversion with the adjoint-state method

Waveform inversion is a velocity model building technique based on full seismograms as the input and seismic wavefields as the information carrier. Conventional waveform inversion is implemented in the data-domain. Similar techniques can be formulated in the image domain, with seismic image as the input and seismic wavefields as the information carrier. The objective function for image-domain waveform inversion is designed to optimize the coherency of reflections in extended common-image gathers. The function applies a penalty operator to the gathers, thus highlighting inaccuracies due to the velocity model error. Minimizing the objective function optimizes the model and improves the image quality. The gradient of the objective function is computed using the adjoint-state method in a similar way to the data-domain implementation. We present a parallel derivation for waveform inversion in data-domain and imagedomain, and show that these two approaches are only different in the choice of the objective function. The image-domain formulation is implemented with various types of extended image gathers with almost identical workflows. The results obtained from these approaches applied to the same synthetic model are quite different. The methods implemented with space-lag gathers and common-image-point gathers recover the model and improve the image quality. The approach with time-lag gathers is less effective to reconstruct the model compared to other formulations because it is less sensitive in capturing the image incoherency due to the model error.
Low‐cost upscaling compatibility of five different ITO‐free architectures for polymer solar cells

Five different indium-tin-oxide free (ITO-free) polymer solar cell architectures provided by four participating research insti- tutions that all presented a laboratory cell performance sufficient for use in mobile and information and communication technology (ICT) were evaluated based on photovoltaic performance and lifetime tests according to the ISOS protocols. The comparison of the dif- ferent device architectures was performed using the same active material (P3HT: PCBM) and tested against an ITO-based reference de- vice. The active area was 1 cm 2 and rigid glass or flexible polyester substrates were employed. The performance results were corrobo- rated by use of a round robin methodology between the four participating laboratories (DTU/DK, ECN/NL, Frauenhofer ISE/DE, and the Holst Centre/NL), while the lifetime testing experiments were carried out in only one location (DTU). Five different lifetime testing experiments were carried out for a minimum of 1000 h: (1) shelf life (according to ISOS-D-1); (2-3) stability under continuous 1 sun illumination (1000 Wm � 2 , AM1.5G) at low (37 6 3 � C) and high (80 6 5 � C) temperatures (according to ISOS-L-1 and ISOS-L-2); (4) stability under continuous low-light conditions at 0.1 sun (100 Wm � 2 , AM1.5G, 32 � C) (according to ISOS-LL); (5) continuous illumi- nation (670 Wm � 2 , AM1.5G) at high temperature (65 � C) and high humidity (50% RH) (according to ISOS-L-3). Finally, the upscaling compatibility of these device architectures based on the device photovoltaic behavior, stability and scalability were identified and we confirm that an architecture that presents a high score in only one aspect of the solar cell performance is not sufficient to justify an investment in upscaling. Many will require further technical development. V C 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 130: 944-954, 2013
Implementation of an all-analog active reflector

A 3.65-GHz all-analog wireless reflector acting as a cooperative diversity repeater is built in 0.13-μm CMOS technology and its performance is evaluated. Interfaced with a folded dipole antenna, the circuit can achieve a 23.5-dB gain for a very low power consumption equal to 300 μW.
Two Processes in Early Bimanual Motor Skill Learning

Most daily activities are bimanual and their efficient performance requires learning and retention of bimanual coordination. Despite in-depth knowledge of the various stages of motor skill learning in general, how new bimanual coordination control policies are established is still unclear. We designed a new cooperative bimanual task in which subjects had to move a cursor across a complex path (a circuit) as fast and as accurately as possible through coordinated bimanual movements. By looking at the transfer of the skill between different circuits and by looking at training with varying circuits, we identified two processes in early bimanual motor learning. Loss of performance due to the switch in circuit after 15 min of training amounted to 20%, which suggests that a significant portion of improvements in bimanual performance is specific to the used circuit (circuit-specific skill). In contrast, the loss of performance due to the switch in circuit was 5% after 4 min of training. This suggests that learning the new bimanual coordination control policy dominates early in the training and is independent of the used circuit. Finally, switching between two circuits throughout training did not affect the early stage of learning (i.e., the first few minutes), but did affect the later stage. Together, these results suggest that early bimanual motor skill learning includes two different processes. Learning the new bimanual coordination control policy predominates in the first minutes whereas circuit-specific skill improvements unfold later in parallel with further improvements in the bimanual coordination control policy.
A SOA-based framework for integration of intelligent rock bolts with internet of things

The mining industry is seeing a bright future with a high demand for minerals and relatively high material prices. Much of this is driven by the rapid industrial expansion in countries such as China and others. However, even though the mining business seems promising, there are some important issues that must be addressed in order to maintain a cost-effective and competitive edge. Worker and environment safety, working conditions, are very important issues. Another issue is attracting skilled personal to work in the deep mines of the future. Today, the mining industry has problems hiring personnel, due to hazardous working environments and re-locating to the distant regions. If the workers' safety could be increased, attracting skilled personnel would become one less problem. Rock bolts and shotcrete are in use today to reinforce tunnel walls, and expensive measurement devices are used in order to monitor seismic activity and rock stress. However, by not having real-time monitoring of rock bolts makes it difficult to monitor them. A better approach would be to make rock bolts intelligent and have them measure stress and seismic activity. Furthermore, by connecting the rock bolts to a network, real-time monitoring of them is made feasible. In this paper, we propose the merger of the Internet of Things (IoT) approach with traditional rock bolts, thereby allowing online monitoring of rock bolt status. This enables an increased possibility to enhance work safety by being able to detect anomalies on the rock earlier, thereby giving workers and machinery an earlier alarm to evacuate hazardous locations in the mine.
Remote sensing image registration based on feature points of global edge

In this paper, in view of the grayscale information and morphological changes of remote sensing images, a registration algorithm based on the distribution information of the global edge and the local information of the feature points is proposed. Lifting wavelet transform is used for multi-scale edge extraction of stable global edge, such as river and coastline. On the basis of SIFT feature point detection, the Equivalent DoG (EDoG) pyramid is constructed and the scale-invariant feature points on edge are extracted. The SIFT descriptor is combined with the global descriptor to construct Global-SIFT (G-SIFT) descriptor. The algorithm is tested on the remote sensing images before and after severe natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods and storms. Compared with the performance of SIFT algorithm, the algorithm has advantages in terms of algorithm stability, matching accuracy and registration precision. It can meet the registration accuracy requirement in remote sensing image with large changes.
PATS: A Parallel GUI Testing Framework for Android Applications

Android is currently the most widely used operating system for mobile devices. GUI testing for Android applications becomes an important research area in which many studies have been conducted. The past studies show that testing a complicated GUI design may need a large number of test cases which increases exponentially due to the complexity of the GUI. Developers then need to spend a large amount of testing time in executing the test cases to explore the potential software defects. Unfortunately, the testing efficiency issue has not been comprehensively discussed in related studies. In this paper, we describe a parallel GUI testing platform called PATS (Parallel Android Testing System) which performs GUI testing based on a master-slave model. In PATS, the application under test is analyzed dynamically under the cooperation of the master and the slaves. Since the test cases are also generated in parallel at the runtime, the testing efficiency can be improved. We have implemented a prototype and conducted experiments with Android apps. The experimental results show that PATS can effectively improve the testing time with 18.87-35.78% performance improvements.
Mooring system analysis of multiple wave energy converters in a farm configuration

Like all other floating structures, wave energy converters (WECs) need to be kept in position by station-keeping systems in order to realize its functionality and ensure its safety. A compliant mooring system is normally applied and survivability is the main concern for mooring system design. However, WECs based on relative motions impose special requirements on their mooring systems to ensure that they do not affect the energy capture significantly. The purpose of this study is to investigate possible mooring systems for the FO3 WEC which extracts wave energy based on the principle of relative motions between a platform and multiple point absorbers. The study focuses on the survivability of the mooring system for one WEC and for multiple WECs in a farm configuration under extreme environmental conditions. Coupled time-domain simulation of the mooring system for a single WEC is used and compared with the frequency-domain analysis. An integrated mooring system for nine WECs connected by lines is designed and the dynamic behaviour of the whole system in random seas is analyzed by the time-domain method. Based on the analyses of configurations investigated, it is found that the individual mooring is more feasible than the integrated mooring.
Eigen-trend: trend analysis in the blogosphere based on singular value decompositions

The blogosphere - the totality of blog-related Web sites - has become a great source of trend analysis in areas such as product survey, customer relationship, and marketing. Existing approaches are based on simple counts, such as the number of entries or the number of links. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept, coined eigen-trend, to represent the temporal trend in a group of blogs with common interests and propose two new techniques for extracting eigen-trends in blogs. First, we propose a trend analysis technique based on the singular value decomposition. Extracted eigen-trends provide new insights into multiple trends on the same keyword. Second, we propose another trend analysis technique based on a higher-order singular value decomposition. This analyzes the blogosphere as a dynamic graph structure and extracts eigen-trends that reflect the structural changes of the blogosphere over time. Experimental studies based on synthetic data sets and a real blog data set show that our new techniques can reveal a lot of interesting trend information and insights in the blogosphere that are not obtainable from traditional count-based methods.
Matrix metalloproteinase 14 participates in corneal lymphangiogenesis through the VEGF-C/VEGFR-3 signaling pathway

The aim of the present study was to investigate the roles of matrix metalloproteinase 14 (MMP-14) in corneal inflammatory lymphangiogenesis. The expression of MMP-14 in vivo was detected by immunohistochemistry, reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) and western blot assays, under various corneal conditions. pCMV-MMP-14 or empty pCMV vectors were injected into mouse corneal stroma, 3 days after suture placement in a standard suture-induced inflammatory corneal neovascularization assay. The outgrowth of blood and lymphatic vessels and macrophage recruitment were analyzed using immunofluorescence. The expression levels of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) subtypes were tested by RT-qPCR. MMP-14 expression was upregulated significantly following various corneal injuries. The results demonstrated, for the first time, that MMP-14 strongly promotes corneal lymphangiogenesis and macrophage infiltration during inflammation. Furthermore, expression levels of VEGF-C and VEGF receptor-3, but not other VEGF components, were significantly upregulated by the intrastromal delivery of MMP-14 during corneal lymphangiogenesis. In conclusion, this study indicates that MMP-14 is critically involved in the processes of lymphangiogenesis. Inhibition of MMP-14 may provide a viable treatment for transplant rejection and other lymphatic disorders.