Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extending CometCloud to Process Dynamic Data Streams on Heterogeneous Infrastructures

Coordination of multiple concurrent data stream processing, carried out through a distributed Cloud infrastructure, is described. The coordination (control) is carried out through the use of a Reference net (a particular type of Petri net) based interpreter, implemented alongside the Comet Cloud system. One of the benefits of this approach is that the model can also be executed directly to support the coordination action. The proposed approach supports the simultaneous processing of data streams and enables dynamic scale-up of heterogeneous computational resources on demand, while meeting the particular quality of service requirements (throughput) for each data stream. We assume that the processing to be applied to each data stream is known a priori. The workflow interpreter monitors the arrival rate and throughput of each data stream, as a consequence of carrying out the execution using Comet Cloud. We demonstrate the use of the control strategy using two key actions - allocating and deal locating resources dynamically based on the number of tasks waiting to be executed (using a predefined threshold). However, a variety of other control actions can also be supported and are described in this work. Evaluation is carried out using a distributed Comet Cloud deployment - where the allocation of new resources can be based on a number of different criteria, such as: (i) differences between sites, i.e. Based on the types of resources supported (e.g. GPU vs. CPU only, FPGAs, etc), (ii) cost of execution, (iii) failure rate and likely resilience, etc.
3-Oxoabolene and 1-Oxocurcuphenol, Aromatic Bisabolanes from the Sponge Myrmekioderma sp

Two new aromatic bisabolane sesquiterpenes possessing an oxo functionality on the prenyl chain, (+)-3-oxoabolene (3) and (+)-1-oxocurcuphenol (4), along with two known sesquiterpenes, (+)-curcuphenol (1) and (+)-curcudiol (2), were isolated from the sponge Myrmekioderma sp. The antiproliferative activity of 2–4 was determined and showed an interesting selectivity; i.e., a good activity against HT-29 cells with IC50s in the μM range, but a weak and incalculable toxicity against Hela and normal fibroblast cells.
A comparison of eigensolvers for large‐scale 3D modal analysis using AMG‐preconditioned iterative methods

The goal of our paper is to compare a number of algorithms for computing a large number of eigenvectors of the generalized symmetric eigenvalue problem arising from a modal analysis of elastic structures. The shift‐invert Lanczos algorithm has emerged as the workhorse for the solution of this generalized eigenvalue problem; however, a sparse direct factorization is required for the resulting set of linear equations. Instead, our paper considers the use of preconditioned iterative methods. We present a brief review of available preconditioned eigensolvers followed by a numerical comparison on three problems using a scalable algebraic multigrid (AMG) preconditioner. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Randomized load balancing with general service time distributions

Randomized load balancing greatly improves the sharing of resources in a number of applications while being simple to implement. One model that has been extensively used to study randomized load balancing schemes is the supermarket model. In this model, jobs arrive according to a rate-nλ Poisson process at a bank of n rate-1 exponential server queues. A notable result, due to Vvedenskaya et.al. (1996), showed that when each arriving job is assigned to the shortest of d ≥ 2 randomly chosen queues, the equilibrium queue sizes decay doubly exponentially in the limit as n to ∞. This is a substantial improvement over the case d=1, where queue sizes decay exponentially. The method of analysis used in the above paper and in the subsequent literature applies to jobs with exponential service time distributions and does not easily generalize. It is desirable to study load balancing models with more general, especially heavy-tailed, service time distributions since such service times occur widely in practice. This paper describes a modularized program for treating randomized load balancing problems with general service time distributions and service disciplines. The program relies on an ansatz which asserts that any finite set of queues in a randomized load balancing scheme becomes independent as n to ∞. This allows one to derive queue size distributions and other performance measures of interest. We establish the ansatz when the service discipline is FIFO and the service time distribution has a decreasing hazard rate (this includes heavy-tailed service times). Assuming the ansatz, we also obtain the following results: (i) as n to ∞, the process of job arrivals at any fixed queue tends to a Poisson process whose rate depends on the size of the queue, (ii) when the service discipline at each server is processor sharing or LIFO with preemptive resume, the distribution of the number of jobs is insensitive to the service distribution, and (iii) the tail behavior of the queue-size distribution in terms of the service distribution for the FIFO service discipline.
Encounters with aggressive conspecifics enhance the locomotor‐activating effects of cocaine in the rat

Evidence suggests that stress enhances the behavioural actions of cocaine in the rat. Paradoxically, however, encounters with aggressive conspecifics lead to a pattern of cocaine self‐administration indicative of a reduced functional impact of the drug. Hence, we examined the effects of aggressive encounters on another behavioural measure‐locomotor activity. Encounters between Lister Hooded rats and rats of the aggressive Tryon Maze Dull strain significantly enhanced the locomotor‐activating effects of cocaine (20 mg/kg) in the Lister Hooded rats. The results suggest that the discrepant findings derived from self‐administration studies are a property of the paradigm rather than a property of the stressor.
Vehicle Routing Problem

The vehicle routing problem with simultaneous deliveries and pickups (VRPSDP) has attracted much research interest because of the potential to provide cost savings to transportation and logistics operators. Several extensions of VRPSDP exist. Of these extensions, the simultaneous deliveries and pickups with split loads problem (SDPSLP) has been proposed to eliminate vehicle capacity constraints, as well as allow the deliveries or pickups for a customer to be split into multiple visits. Although delivery and pickup activities are often constrained by time windows, few studies have considered such constraints when SDPSLP has been addressed. To fill the gap, this paper formulates the vehicle routing problem of simultaneous deliveries and pickups with split loads and time windows (VRPSDPSLTW) as a mixed-integer programming problem. A hybrid heuristic algorithm was developed to solve this problem. Solomon data sets with minor modifications were applied to test the effectiveness of the solution algorithm. The results of a computational experiment demonstrated that use of the proposed algorithms to solve VRPSDPSLTW had advantages for minimization of the total travel cost, number of vehicles, and loading rate. The proposed formulation and solution algorithm for VRPSDPSLTW may serve as a general analytical tool for the optimization of vehicle routing in practice.
Condensin Binding at Distinct and Specific Chromosomal Sites in the Saccharomyces cerevisiae Genome

ABSTRACT Mitotic chromosome condensation is chiefly driven by the condensin complex. The specific recognition (targeting) of chromosomal sites by condensin is an important component of its in vivo activity. We previously identified the rRNA gene cluster in Saccharomyces cerevisiae as an important condensin-binding site, but both genetic and cell biology data suggested that condensin also acts elsewhere. In order to characterize the genomic distribution of condensin-binding sites and to assess the specificity of condensin targeting, we analyzed condensin-bound sites using chromatin immunoprecipitation and hybridization to whole-genome microarrays. The genomic condensin-binding map shows preferential binding sites over the length of every chromosome. This analysis and quantitative PCR validation confirmed condensin-occupied sites across the genome and in the specialized chromatin regions: near centromeres and telomeres and in heterochromatic regions. Condensin sites were also enriched in the zones of converging DNA replication. Comparison of condensin binding in cells arrested in G1 and mitosis revealed a cell cycle dependence of condensin binding at some sites. In mitotic cells, condensin was depleted at some sites while enriched at rRNA gene cluster, subtelomeric, and pericentromeric regions.
Kinship Verification through Transfer Learning

Because of the inevitable impact factors such as pose, expression, lighting and aging on faces, identity verification through faces is still an unsolved problem. Research on biometrics raises an even challenging problem--is it possible to determine the kinship merely based on face images? A critical observation that faces of parents captured while they were young are more alike their children's compared with images captured when they are old has been revealed by genetics studies. This enlightens us the following research. First, a new kinship database named UB KinFace composed of child, young parent and old parent face images is collected from Internet. Second, an extended transfer subspace learning method is proposed aiming at mitigating the enormous divergence of distributions between children and old parents. The key idea is to utilize an intermediate distribution close to both the source and target distributions to bridge them and reduce the divergence. Naturally the young parent set is suitable for this task. Through this learning process, the large gap between distributions can be significantly reduced and kinship verification problem becomesmore discriminative. Experimental results show that our hypothesis on the role of young parents is valid and transfer learning is effective to enhance the verification accuracy.
Decompositions of Objects Bounded by Algebraic Curves

We present a.n algorithm to decompose the edges of planar curved object so that the carrier polygon of decomposed boundary is a simple polygon. We also present an algoritbm to compute a simple characteristic carrier polygon. By refining this decomposition further and using the chords and wedges of decomposed edges, we obtain an inner polygon (resp. an outer polygon) which is a simple polygon totally contained in (resp. totally containing) the object. We also consider various applications of these polygons to object decompositions and collision-avoidance planar robot motion planning problems.
Influence of infection route on the infectivity of baculovirus mutants lacking the apoptosis-inhibiting gene p35 and the adjacent gene p94

The infectivity of Autographa californica nuclear polyhedrosis virus mutants lacking the apoptosis-inhibiting gene p35 is decreased 1,000-fold or more in larvae of the insect Spodoptera frugiperda if the budded form of the virus is administered by hemocoelic injection; this decrease is correlated with the antiviral effects of apoptosis (R. J. Clem and L. K. Miller, J. Virol. 67:3730-3738, 1993). We have extended this correlation by showing that the infectivity of p35 mutant budded virus is restored to wild-type levels by expression of an unrelated baculovirus apoptosis-inhibiting gene, Cp-iap. We have also examined the oral infectivity of the occluded form of mutants lacking p35, the neighboring p94 gene, or both genes by feeding insects occluded virus. The oral infectivity of the p35 mutant was significantly reduced in S. frugiperda larvae, but this reduction (25-fold) was less than that observed for the hemocoelic route of infection (1,000-fold). The disruption of p94 alone had no apparent effect on infectivity by either route. Unexpectedly, however, the disruption of both p35 and p94 restored oral infectivity to nearly wild-type levels but did not exert this compensatory effect on infectivity by hemocoelic injection. Thus, the infectivity of the double p35/p94 mutant is affected in a route-specific manner in S. frugiperda larvae, suggesting a tissue-specific response to p35 and/or p94. Infectivity in a different host, Trichoplusia ni, was unaffected by all the mutants tested, consistent with previous studies indicating a lack of sensitivity to apoptosis in this species. However, T. ni and S. frugiperda larvae infected with p35 mutants failed to exhibit the symptom of morphological disintegration ("melting") typical of a wild-type infection, suggesting that p35 is required for the infection of some tissues in both species.
Continuous multi-way joins over distributed hash tables

This paper studies the problem of evaluating continuous multi-way joins on top of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs). We present a novel algorithm, called recursive join (RJoin), that takes into account various parameters crucial in a distributed setting i.e., network traffic, query processing load distribution, storage load distribution etc. The key idea of RJoin is incremental evaluation: as relevant tuples arrive continuously, a given multi-way join is rewritten continuously into a join with fewer join operators, and is assigned continuously to different nodes of the network. In this way, RJoin distributes the responsibility of evaluating a continuous multi-way join to many network nodes by assigning parts of the evaluation of each binary join to a different node depending on the values of the join attributes. The actual nodes to be involved are decided by RJoin dynamically after taking into account the rate of incoming tuples with values equal to the values of the joined attributes. RJoin also supports sliding window joins which is a crucial feature, especially for long join paths, since it provides a mechanism to reduce the query processing state and thus keep the cost of handling incoming tuples stable. In addition, RJoin is able to handle message delays due to heavy network traffic. We present a detailed mathematical and experimental analysis of RJoin and study the performance tradeoffs that occur.
Repeated Lobbying by Commercial Lobbyists and Special Interests

Using a model of repeated agency, we explain previously unexplained features of the real-world lobbying industry. Lobbying is divided between direct representation by special interests to policymakers, and indirect representation where special interests employ professional intermediaries called commercial lobbyists to lobby policymakers on their behalf. Our analytical structure allows us to explain several trends in lobbying. For example, using the observation that in the U.S. over the last 20 years policymakers have spent an increasing amount of their time fundraising as opposed to legislating, we are able to explain why the share of commercial lobbyist activity in total lobbying has risen dramatically and now constitutes over 60% of the total. The key scarce resource in our analysis is policymakers’ time. They allocate this resource via implicit repeated agency contracts which are used to incent special interests and commercial lobbyists to provide a mix of financial contributions and information on policy proposals. These implicit agency contracts solve both an information problem in the presence of unverifiable policy information and a contracting problem in the absence of legal enforcement. These repeated relationship, that are often described using the pejorative term cronyism in the popular press, may in certain circumstances be welfare improving.
Engineering a fast online persistent suffix tree construction

Online persistent suffix tree construction has been considered impractical due to its excessive I/O costs. However, these prior studies have not taken into account the effects of the buffer management policy and the internal node structure of the suffix tree on I/O behavior of construction and subsequent retrievals over the tree. We study these two issues in detail in the context of large genomic DNA and protein sequences. In particular, we make the following contributions: (i) a novel, low-overhead buffering policy called TOP-Q which improves the on-disk behavior of suffix tree construction and subsequent retrievals, and (ii) empirical evidence that the space efficient linked-list representation of suffix tree nodes provides significantly inferior performance when compared to the array representation. These results demonstrate that a careful choice of implementation strategies can make online persistent suffix tree construction considerably more scalable - in terms of length of sequences indexed with a fixed memory budget, than currently perceived.
Dynamic branch prediction with perceptrons

This paper presents a new method for branch prediction. The key idea is to use one of the simplest possible neural networks, the perceptron, as an alternative to the commonly used two-bit counters. Our predictor achieves increased accuracy by making use of long branch histories, which are possible becasue the hardware resources for our method scale linearly with the history length. By contrast, other purely dynamic schemes require exponential resources. We describe our design and evaluate it with respect to two well known predictors. We show that for a 4K byte hardware budget our method improves misprediction rates for the SPEC 2000 benchmarks by 10.1% over the gshare predictor. Our experiments also provide a better understanding of the situations in which traditional predictors do and do not perform well. Finally, we describe techniques that allow our complex predictor to operate in one cycle.
6.6-hour inhalation of ozone concentrations from 60 to 87 parts per billion in healthy humans.

RATIONALE Identification of the minimal ozone (O(3)) concentration and/or dose that induces measurable lung function decrements in humans is considered in the risk assessment leading to establishing an appropriate National Ambient Air Quality Standard for O(3) that protects public health. OBJECTIVES To identify and/or predict the minimal mean O(3) concentration that produces a decrement in FEV(1) and symptoms in healthy individuals completing 6.6-hour exposure protocols. METHODS Pulmonary function and subjective symptoms were measured in 31 healthy adults (18-25 yr, male and female, nonsmokers) who completed five 6.6-hour chamber exposures: filtered air and four variable hourly patterns with mean O(3) concentrations of 60, 70, 80, and 87 parts per billion (ppb). MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS Compared with filtered air, statistically significant decrements in FEV(1) and increases in total subjective symptoms scores (P < 0.05) were measured after exposure to mean concentrations of 70, 80, and 87 ppb O(3). The mean percent change in FEV(1) (+/-standard error) at the end of each protocol was 0.80 +/- 0.90, -2.72 +/- 1.48, -5.34 +/- 1.42, -7.02 +/- 1.60, and -11.42 +/- 2.20% for exposure to filtered air and 60, 70, 80, and 87 ppb O(3), respectively. CONCLUSIONS Inhalation of 70 ppb O(3) for 6.6 hours, a concentration below the current 8-hour National Ambient Air Quality Standard of 75 ppb, is sufficient to induce statistically significant decrements in FEV(1) in healthy young adults.
Grounding grammatical categories: attention bias in hand space influences grammatical congruency judgment of Chinese nominal classifiers

Embodied cognitive theories predict that linguistic conceptual representations are grounded and continually represented in real world, sensorimotor experiences. However, there is an on-going debate on whether this also holds for abstract concepts. Grammar is the archetype of abstract knowledge, and therefore constitutes a test case against embodied theories of language representation. Former studies have largely focussed on lexical-level embodied representations. In the present study we take the grounding-by-modality idea a step further by using reaction time (RT) data from the linguistic processing of nominal classifiers in Chinese. We take advantage of an independent body of research, which shows that attention in hand space is biased. Specifically, objects near the hand consistently yield shorter RTs as a function of readiness for action on graspable objects within reaching space, and the same biased attention inhibits attentional disengagement. We predicted that this attention bias would equally apply to the graspable object classifier but not to the big object classifier. Chinese speakers (N = 22) judged grammatical congruency of classifier-noun combinations in two conditions: graspable object classifier and big object classifier. We found that RTs for the graspable object classifier were significantly faster in congruent combinations, and significantly slower in incongruent combinations, than the big object classifier. There was no main effect on grammatical violations, but rather an interaction effect of classifier type. Thus, we demonstrate here grammatical category-specific effects pertaining to the semantic content and by extension the visual and tactile modality of acquisition underlying the acquisition of these categories. We conclude that abstract grammatical categories are subjected to the same mechanisms as general cognitive and neurophysiological processes and may therefore be grounded.
Transverse momentum broadening of heavy quark and gluon energy loss in Sakai-Sugimoto model

In this paper, we calculate the transverse momentum diffusion coefficient κT of heavy quark and gluon penetration length in the deconfinement phase of Sakai-Sugimoto model, which is known as a holographic dual of large Nc QCD. We find that for the heavy quark moving through the thermal plasma with a constant velocity v < 1, the transverse momentum diffusion coefficient κT ∝ λγ1/3T4/Td, and the gluon penetration length x ∝ E2/5. These results are different from those calculated in = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory, which are κT ∝ λγ1/2T3 and x ∝ E1/3, respectively. In the high energy limit, the difference between the two pairs of results should be evident, so we hope that the future LHC experiments can tell us which model is more closely related to the realistic strongly coupled QCD at finite temperature.
Multiresolution channel normalization for ASR in reverberant environments

To overcome the problems related with the long impulse responses produced by reverberation, we use a long time window (high frequency resolution) analysis during the channel normalization steps of the feature extraction process in automatic speech recognition (ASR). After nor-malization, a trade between frequency and time resolution is used to increase the rate at which the time information is sampled (short-time domain), yielding an appropriate domain to derive ASR features. Experiments on data with reverberation times of about 0:5 s show that the new technique achieves signiicant performance improvement of a speech recognizer under reverberation, with only some performance degradation on clean speech.
Brief announcement: view transactions: transactional model with relaxed consistency checks

We present view transactions, a model for relaxed consistency checks in software transactional memory (STM). View transactions always operate on a consistent snapshot of memory but may commit in a different snapshot. They are therefore simpler to reason about, provide opacity and maintain composability. In addition, view transactions avoid many of the overheads associated with previous approaches for relaxing consistency checks. As a result, view transactions outperform the prior approaches by 1.13x to 2x on various benchmarks.