Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Evaluation of Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Croatia Over a Business Cycle

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the controversies of fiscal and monetary policies in defining business cycles in Croatia, i.e. to answer the question whether they can, and in what way, determine the cyclical movements. Using Hodrick-Prescott filter for extracting cycles from selected macroeconomic variables for the period 1994-2013, this paper gives a reflection on the past relationship between the characteristics of Croatian fiscal and monetary policies by testing whether these two economic pillars are in fact coordinated over a business cycle. We found that both fiscal and monetary variables exhibit counter-cyclical behaviour with relatively weak correlation to the real GDP suggesting that they are coordinated during a business cycle but their reach is ambiguous. Finally, we conclude that fiscal and monetary policies in Croatia are constrained by internal and external factors, and thus they often cannot accomplish their counter-cyclical role.
Dynamic efficient collision checking method of robot arm paths in configuration space

This article describes a method for reducing the number of collision checks during motion planning. The paper proposes a greedy distance computation that is a combination of Gilbert Johnson Keerthi (GJK) algorithm and Oriented Bounding Box(OBB). Two pre-computing steps are done: the calculation of maximum possible radius for each joint, used later to find the maximum curve length that the robot arm can travel in 3D space, as well as the calculation of the bounding boxes for all links and obstacles. Commonly, incremental planners need an expansion from configuration qA to qB. The new collision checking method detects for each sample in configuration space (C-Space), if the maximum length of the curve traveled from the robot in Cartesian space is bigger from the distance of the pair obstacle-robot. The new dynamic collision checking method detects near obstacles and computes only necessary distances, giving high performances. The algorithm is implemented in a 7 Degrees of Freedom(DoF) robot arm with revolute joints mounted in FRIEND rehabilitation system.
Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe Code Optimization and Scalability Testing of an Artificial Bee Colony Based Software for Massively Parallel Multiple Sequence Alignment on the Intel Mic Architecture

This activity with the project is aimed to investigate and to improve the performance of the multiple sequence alignment software MSA_BG on the computer system EURORA at CINECA, for the case study of the influenza virus sequences. The objective is code optimization, porting, scaling and performance evaluation of the parallel multiple sequence alignment software MSA_BG for Intel Xeon Phi (the MIC architecture). For this purpose a parallel multithreaded optimization including OpenMP has been implemented and verified. The experimental results show that the hybrid parallel implementation utilizing MPI and OpenMP provides considerably better performance than the original code.
Geometry of Interaction and linear combinatory algebras

We present an axiomatic framework for Girard's Geometry of Interaction based on the notion of linear combinatory algebra. We give a general construction on traced monoidal categories, with certain additional structure, that is sufficient to capture the exponentials of Linear Logic, which produces such algebras (and hence also ordinary combinatory algebras). We illustrate the construction on six standard examples, representing both the ‘particle-style’ as well as the ‘wave-style’ Geometry of Interaction.
Amphotericin primarily kills yeast by simply binding ergosterol

Amphotericin B (AmB) is a prototypical small molecule natural product that can form ion channels in living eukaryotic cells and has remained refractory to microbial resistance despite extensive clinical utilization in the treatment of life-threatening fungal infections for more than half a century. It is now widely accepted that AmB kills yeast primarily via channel-mediated membrane permeabilization. Enabled by the iterative cross-coupling-based synthesis of a functional group deficient derivative of this natural product, we have discovered that channel formation is not required for potent fungicidal activity. Alternatively, AmB primarily kills yeast by simply binding ergosterol, a lipid that is vital for many aspects of yeast cell physiology. Membrane permeabilization via channel formation represents a second complementary mechanism that further increases drug potency and the rate of yeast killing. Collectively, these findings (i) reveal that the binding of a physiologically important microbial lipid is a powerful and clinically validated antimicrobial strategy that may be inherently refractory to resistance, (ii) illuminate a more straightforward path to an improved therapeutic index for this clinically vital but also highly toxic antifungal agent, and (iii) suggest that the capacity for AmB to form protein-like ion channels might be separable from its cytocidal effects.
The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs iServe : a linked services publishing platform Conference Item

Despite the potential of service-orientation and the efforts devoted so far, we are still to witness a significant uptake of service technologies outside of enterprise environments. A core reason for this limited uptake is the lack of appropriate publishing platforms able to deal with the existing heterogeneity in the service technologies landscape and able to provide expressive yet simple and efficient discovery mechanisms. In this paper we describe iServe, a novel and open platform for publishing services which aims to better support their discovery and use. It exposes service descriptions as linked data expressed in terms of a simple vocabulary for describing services of different kinds with annotations in diverse formalisms. In addition to describing iServe, this paper also highlights the set of principles behind iServe, which we believe are essential for other generic repositories of semantic information notably ontology repositories.
Shape features extraction from pulmonary nodules in X-ray CT images

In this paper, we propose a new computer aided diagnosis method of pulmonary nodules in X-ray CT images to reduce false positive (FP) rate under high true positive (TP) rate conditions. An essential core of the method is to extract and combine two novel and effective features from the raw CT images: One is orientation features of nodules in a region of interest (ROI) extracted by a Gabor filter, while the other is variation of CT values of the ROI in the direction along body axis. By using the extracted features, a principal component analysis technic and any pattern recognition technics such as neural network approaches can then used to discriminate between nodule and non-nodule images. Simulation results show that discrimination performance using the proposed features is extremely improved compared to that of the conventional method.
FPGA Prototyping of Manycore Multinode Systems for Irregular Applications

Knowledge discovery applications are an emerging class of irregular applications that exploit graph-based data structures, present poor locality and analyze very big data sets that require multi-node systems for processing. Current commodity clusters, which exploit cachebased processors, usually perform poorly with these applications. To address their requirements, full-custom machines, like the Cray XMT, or software approaches, such as several distributed graph libraries have been proposed. In this paper we discuss a set of hardware and software components that makes manycore architectures, composed of off-the-shelf cores, more efficient with these applications. The components enable support for latency tolerance, scrambled global address space, finegrained synchronization, and software multi-threading with hardware scheduling. We validate our approach with a 4-node FPGA prototype that enables exploring tradeoffs among network bandwidth, number of cores per node and threads per core. The prototype has been presented in various FPGA-related venues. We employ two typical irregular kernels (pointer chasing and Breadth First Search), showing that the the proposed components allow higher utilization of the network bandwidth with finegrained transactions and better multinode scaling.
Image Denoising Based on Curvelet Transform and Continuous Threshold

Curvelet transform is more suitable than wavelet transform for planar image processing. The theory of curvelet transform is introduced. Noise-image is carried on decomposition based on curvelet transform, and distribution characteristics of noise are analyzed. Applying a quantization method of using threshold of which the function is continuous and differentiable is proposed, to remedy disadvantages of quantization methods of using traditional thresholds. Then the method of image denoising is confirmed. The experimental results show that applying the proposed approach can obtain better quality, compared with other methods.
Conference on ‘ Nutrition and health : cell to community ’ Symposium 3 ( Jointly with the British Dietetic Association ) : Nutrition management in special populations Improving the dietary intake of frail older people

As a population subgroup, older people are more vulnerable to malnutrition especially those who are institutionalised. Recognition of deteriorating or poor nutritional status is key in reversing the effects of undernutrition and reinforces the value of regular weight checks and/or the use of screening tools. Commercially produced supplements are often the first option used to address undernutrition in both acute and community settings. They can be expensive and, although regularly prescribed, have undergone only limited evaluation of their effectiveness in community settings. An alternative but less researched approach to improve the nutritional status of undernourished people is food fortification. This approach may be particularly useful for older people, given their often small appetites. The ability to eat independently has been significantly related to decreased risk of undernutrition. Assisting people who have difficulty feeding themselves independently should become a designated duty and may be crucial in optimising nutritional status. Lack of nutrition knowledge has been identified as the greatest barrier to the provision of good nutritional care. Education and training of care staff are pivotal for the success of any intervention to address undernutrition. The development of undernutrition is a multi-factorial process and a package of approaches may be required to prevent or treat undernutrition. Nutrition must be at the forefront of care if national care standards are to be met.
Evaluation of a Collagen-Chitosan Hydrogel for Potential Use as a Pro-Angiogenic Site for Islet Transplantation

Islet transplantation to treat type 1 diabetes (T1D) has shown varied long-term success, due in part to insufficient blood supply to maintain the islets. In the current study, collagen and collagen:chitosan (10:1) hydrogels, +/- circulating angiogenic cells (CACs), were compared for their ability to produce a pro-angiogenic environment in a streptozotocin-induced mouse model of T1D. Initial characterization showed that collagen-chitosan gels were mechanically stronger than the collagen gels (0.7kPa vs. 0.4kPa elastic modulus, respectively), had more cross-links (9.2 vs. 7.4/µm2), and were degraded more slowly by collagenase. After gelation with CACs, live/dead staining showed greater CAC viability in the collagen-chitosan gels after 18h compared to collagen (79% vs. 69%). In vivo, collagen-chitosan gels, subcutaneously implanted for up to 6 weeks in a T1D mouse, showed increased levels of pro-angiogenic cytokines over time. By 6 weeks, anti-islet cytokine levels were decreased in all matrix formulations ± CACs. The 6-week implants demonstrated increased expression of VCAM-1 in collagen-chitosan implants. Despite this, infiltrating vWF+ and CXCR4+ angiogenic cell numbers were not different between the implant types, which may be due to a delayed and reduced cytokine response in a T1D versus non-diabetic setting. The mechanical, degradation and cytokine data all suggest that the collagen-chitosan gel may be a suitable candidate for use as a pro-angiogenic ectopic islet transplant site.
PI3K mutations in breast cancer: prognostic and therapeutic implications

The PI3K pathway is the most frequently enhanced oncogenic pathway in breast cancer. Among mechanisms of PI3K enhancement, PIK3CA mutations are most frequently (∼30%) observed, along with protein loss of PTEN. Since the first discovery of PIK3CA mutations in solid malignancies in 2004, numerous studies have revealed the prognostic and therapeutic implications of these mutations. Although many issues remain unconfirmed, some have been carved in stone by the level of consistency they have shown among studies: 1) PIK3CA mutations are most likely to be observed in ER-positive/HER2-negative tumors, and are associated with other good prognostic characters; 2) PIK3CA mutations can coexist with other PI3K-enhancing mechanisms, such as HER2 amplification and PTEN protein loss; 3) PIK3CA mutations are potentially a good prognostic marker; 4) PIK3CA may predict a poorer tumor response to trastuzumab-based therapies, but its impact on disease-free survival and overall survival is uncertain; and 5) based on reports of early clinical trials, PIK3CA mutations do not guarantee a dramatic response to PI3K inhibitors. Collectively, there is currently no sufficient evidence to recommend routine genotyping of PIK3CA in clinical practice. Given that PIK3CA-mutant breast cancer appears to have a distinct tumor biology, development of more individualized targeted therapies based on the PIK3CA genotype is awaited.
SMCC: Self-Managing Congestion Control Algorithm

— Transmission control protocol (TCP) Vegas detects network congestion in the early stage and successfully prevents periodic packet loss that usually occurs in TCP Reno. It has been demonstrated that TCP Vegas outperforms TCP Reno in many aspects. However, TCP Vegas suffers several problems that affect its congestion avoidance mechanism. One of the most important weaknesses in TCP Vegas is that alpha and beta depend on a good expected throughput estimate, which as we have seen, depends on a good minimum RTT estimate. In order to make the system more robust alpha and beta must be made responsive to network conditions (they are currently chosen statically). This paper proposes a modified Vegas algorithm, which can be adjusted to present good performance compared to other transmission control protocols (TCPs). In order to do this, we use PSO algorithm to tune alpha and beta. The simulation results validate the advantages of the proposed algorithm in term of performance.
A Review of the Use of Health Status Measures in Economic Evaluation

Objective: To review the use of measures of health status in the assessment of benefits in economic evaluation, whether or not the measures were designed for this purpose. Methods: The review was based on a systematic search of the literature. It provides a comprehensive assessment of the evidence where it exists and a balanced overview of opinion otherwise. Results: Over 3000 papers were identified, of which 632 were found to be relevant. The review provides a set of recommendations. These include: a checklist of questions for selecting a measure for use in economic evaluation; a list of circumstances in which non-preference-based measures can be used; and recommendations surrounding the use of health state valuation techniques and multi-attribute utility scales. Conclusion: These recommendations should help to identify poor economic evaluations and hence guard against inefficient conclusions being drawn regarding the provision of health services.
Leucothoe eltoni sp. n., a new species of commensal leucothoid amphipod from coral reefs in Raja Ampat, Indonesia (Crustacea, Amphipoda)

Abstract A new species of leucothoid amphipod, Leucothoe eltoni sp. n. , is described from coral reefs in Raja Ampat, Indonesia where it inhabits the branchial chambers of solitary tunicates. With an inflated first gnathopod superficially resembling the genus Paraleucothoe, this new species has a two-articulate maxilla 1 palp characteristic of the genus Leucothoe. While described from coral reef environments in tropical Indonesia and the Philippines, it is an established invasive species in the Hawaiian Islands. The most likely mode of introduction was a US Navy dry dock transported to Pearl Harbor in 1992 from Subic Bay, Philippines.
77GHz Low-Cost Single-Chip Radar Sensor for Automotive Ground Speed Detection

A new 77 GHz single-chip radar sensor has been developed, which encapsulates a GaAs p-HEMT transceiver MMIC with an on-chip patch antenna in a resin-molded package integrated with a resin collimating lens on the top to achieve an EIRP of 13.5 dBm and a receiving gain of 8 dB. The packaged sensor, measuring 6.5times4. 4times6.0 mm3 with only DC and baseband- frequency leads, offers ease of handling with an extreme low-cost potential for a variety of applications. When adopted to an automotive ground speedometer integrated with an signal processing unit, the sensor demonstrated accurate and reliable detections of vehicle speed with a standard deviation of 1.5% under normal driving conditions.
Discovery and Characterization of a Novel Cyclic Peptide That Effectively Inhibits Ephrin Binding to the EphA4 Receptor and Displays Anti-Angiogenesis Activity

The EphA4 receptor tyrosine kinase regulates a variety of physiological and pathological processes during neural development and the formation of tumor blood vessels; thus, it represents a new and promising therapeutic target. We used a combination of phage peptide display and computer modeling/docking approaches and discovered a novel cyclic nonapeptide, now designated TYY. This peptide selectively inhibits the binding of the ephrinA5 ligand with EphA4 and significantly blocks angiogenesis in a 3D matrigel culture system. Molecular docking reveals that TYY recognizes the same binding pocket on EphA4 that the natural ephrin ligand binds to and that the Tyr3 and Tyr4 side chains of TYY are both critical for the TYY/EphA4 interaction. The discovery of TYY introduces a valuable probe of EphA4 function and a new lead for EphA4-targeted therapeutic development.
Feature Selection with Interactions for Continuous Attributes and Discrete Class

Nowadays there exist diverse feature selection ranking methods and metrics for databases with pure discrete data (attributes and class), or pure continuous data. However, little work has been done for the case of continuous attributes with discrete class, and at the same time evaluating attribute subsets considering its inter- dependencies or interactions. Normally what we can do is perform discretization, and then apply some traditional feature selection method; nevertheless the results vary depending on the discretization method that we utilized. Additionally, if we only evaluate isolated attributes, we probably obtain poor results, because we are not considering attribute inter-dependencies. We propose a metric and method for feature selection on continuous data with discrete class, inspired in the Shannon's entropy and the Information Gain, which overcomes the above problems. In the experiments that we realized, with synthetic and real databases, the proposed method has shown to be fast and produce near optimum solutions, selecting few attributes.
On Iterative Receivers for Non-Coherent Channels

It is well-known that optimal receivers for many wireless communication systems employ joint channel estimation and decoding. Since this is almost always too computationally complex, we consider iterative receivers that approximate joint estimation and decoding by iterative algorithms. Continuous-valued variables such as the channel phase response are often difficult to handle in these algorithms. We present a systematic approach, canonical distributions, for solving this problem and apply it to the design of iterative receivers for block non-coherent Rayleigh fading channels.
Continuous monitoring of nearest trajectories

Analyzing tracking data of various types of moving objects is an interesting research problem with numerous real-world applications. Several works have focused on continuously monitoring the nearest neighbors of a moving object, while others have proposed similarity measures for finding similar trajectories in databases containing historical tracking data. In this work, we introduce the problem of continuously monitoring nearest trajectories. In contrast to other similar approaches, we are interested in monitoring moving objects taking into account at each timestamp not only their current positions but their recent trajectory in a defined time window. We first describe a generic baseline algorithm for this problem, which applies for any aggregate function used to compute trajectory distances between objects, and without any restrictions on the movement of the objects. Using this as a framework, we continue to derive an optimized algorithm for the cases where the distance between two moving objects in a time window is determined by their maximum or minimum distance in all contained timestamps. Furthermore, we propose additional optimizations for the case that an upper bound on the velocities of the objects exists. Finally, we evaluate the efficiency of our proposed algorithms by conducting experiments on three real-world datasets.
INRIA-WILLOW at TRECVID 2010 : Surveillance Event Detection

This paper presents a system evaluated in the Surveillance Event De- tection (SED) task of TRECVid 2010 campaign. We investigate a generic sta- tistical approach applied to seven event classes defined by the SED task. Our video representation is based on local space-time descriptors which are vector- quantized and aggregated into histograms within short temporal windows and spatial regions defined by the prior. We use priors on the spatial localization of actions estimated from the spatio-temporal annotation of actions in the training data. To recognize actions, we learn one-against-all action classifiers using non- linear SVMs. Each classifier is applied independently to localize temporal inter- vals of actions using window-scanning approach. We present results of six runs with variations in the two parameters: (i) classifier threshold and (ii) temporal extent of the scanning window.
A primal-dual framework for real-time dense RGB-D scene flow

This paper presents the first method to compute dense scene flow in real-time for RGB-D cameras. It is based on a variational formulation where brightness constancy and geometric consistency are imposed. Accounting for the depth data provided by RGB-D cameras, regularization of the flow field is imposed on the 3D surface (or set of surfaces) of the observed scene instead of on the image plane, leading to more geometrically consistent results. The minimization problem is efficiently solved by a primal-dual algorithm which is implemented on a GPU, achieving a previously unseen temporal performance. Several tests have been conducted to compare our approach with a state-of-the-art work (RGB-D flow) where quantitative and qualitative results are evaluated. Moreover, an additional set of experiments have been carried out to show the applicability of our work to estimate motion in real-time. Results demonstrate the accuracy of our approach, which outperforms the RGB-D flow, and which is able to estimate heterogeneous and non-rigid motions at a high frame rate.