Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A semantic-driven integer programming approach for QoS-aware dynamic service composition

Service-oriented specifications aim at effectively supporting run-time service discovery, composition and brokering. QoS-aware dynamic service composition relies on algorithms that synthesize the target functional work plans, while also taking into account non-functional properties (QoS) in order to satisfy end users' requirements. In this paper, we propose a semantic-driven QoS-aware dynamic composition framework leveraging on an Integer Linear Programming technique (ILP). The proposed approach exploits the expressiveness of an ontology-based service profile model, representing structural and semantic properties of service descriptions. According to the ILP model, the service composition problem is expressed as a set of functional and non-functional constraints and an objective function built on top of a reference domain representing functional, structural and semantic properties of registered service profiles. We describe a proof-of-concept implementation of the proposed approach and discuss testing results.
THE COSTS OF HIPAA: TO PATIENTS, TO PROGRESS, AND TO THE NATION’S HEALTH

Recent studies including a 2009 Institute of Medicine report have highlighted how the HIPAA Privacy Rule fails to protect privacy and has created significant barriers to research. The purpose of this article is to outline the impact of the HIPAA Privacy Rule on patients and its cost to the research enterprise in terms of time, dollars, and lost opportunities. During this review, we found that HIPAA burdens the research process by deterring patients from participating in research, creating an enrollment bias and translating into research that is not applicable to all populations, perpetuating treatment disparities. Biospecimen data is difficult to re-use, limiting personalized medicine, which directly impacts cancer patients’ and their ability to quickly find a treatment that will benefit them and minimize side effects. The limited utility of de-identified data and perceived restrictions on data mining also limit other forms of research including comparative effectiveness research. Further, the protocols required to meet HIPAA privacy standards have subjected clinical trial enrollees to burdensome paperwork and added thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the time and costs of individual studies, taking limited resources away from clinical cancer research. In some trials, insufficient resources to manage these protocols have led to the abandonment of studies all together, undermining the trust that clinical researchers have worked to establish with clinical trial participants. We conclude that actions must be taken to exempt research from the HIPAA Privacy Rule to improve patient privacy protection and improve the economy and efficiency of lifesaving research. THE COSTS OF HIPAA TO PATIENTS, PROGRESS, AND THE NATION’S HEALTH 2
Please Scroll down for Article International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics an Adaptive Wavelet-collocation Method for Shock Computations an Adaptive Wavelet-collocation Method for Shock Computations

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. A simple and robust method for solving hyperbolic conservation equations based on the adaptive wavelet-collocation method, which uses a dynamically adaptive grid, are presented. The method utilises natural ability of wavelet analysis to sense localised structures and is based on analysis of wavelet coefficients on the finest level of resolution to create a discontinuity locator function F. Using this function, an artificial viscous term is explicitly added in the needed regions using a localised numerical viscosity that ensures the positivity and TVD non-linear stability conditions. Once the wavelet coefficients on the finest level of resolution are below the error threshold parameter E, the artificial viscosity is shut off and any remaining physical waves are free to propagate undamped. Multiple examples in one and two dimensions are presented to demonstrate the method's robustness, simplicity and ease of extending to more complex problems. 1. Introduction Although computer technology continues to grow at a rapid rate, computer processor speeds continue to be a limiting factor in numerical modelling of science and engineering applications. Various approaches have been developed to remedy this problem, however they do not come without a cost. If a uniform grid is used, it is not unusual to find that expensive and complicated flux calculations are required to increase the efficiency. Traditionally with non-uniform or unstructured grids, a mesh generator is required or ad-hoc rules and assumptions are needed for adaptive mesh refinement (Babuska et al. 1984, Flaherty 1989). The numerical solution of hyperbolic conservation laws presents an added level of difficulty because of their inherent nature to form jump discontinuities. The number of techniques and algorithms available to address these problems are abundant in the literature. However, there exists a major commonality among most …
A COMPUTATIONAL FRAMEWORK TO SIMULATE HUMAN AND SOCIAL BEHAVIORS DURING EMERGENCY EVACUATIONS

Introduction Recent natural and man-made disastrous events underscore the importance of emergency evacuation planning and management for buildings and facilities (Averill et al., 2005). Although building codes include provisions for egress design, their prescriptive nature poses many limitations in terms of providing effective evacuation for specific buildings, each of which is unique. Human behaviors under emergency situations have been overly simplified in developing the codes and provisions. For instance, in the “Means of Egress” section of the International Building Code (ICBO, 2000), the methods for calculating the number of exits, width of exits, and the distribution of exits are based on the assumption that occupants are spatially distributed evenly and would utilize all available exits and channels to escape in case of an emergency. Many of such assumptions are not realistic. For instance, people often tend to exit a building based on their familiarity with the surrounding, ignoring many available means in favor of the entrances they normally use. In an emergency situation, people often look for cues and support information and follow the crowds. To fully study egress system through real experiments is not feasible not only because of the cost but they also may require exposing people to dangerous environment. Computer simulations can serve as a viable alternative, under the condition that such simulations are able to capture human and social behaviors in emergency situations. Many computational tools for the simulation of emergency evacuation and design of egress are now available. However, most of current tools focus primarily on the modeling of spaces and occupancies but rarely take into consideration human and social behavior. While these computational models may be more accurately simulate evacuation than simply following codes and guidelines, they tend to rely on a priori assumptions that are difficult to evaluate, inconsistent or unrealistic (Fire Protection Engineers 2002; Santos and Aguirre, 2004). The objective of this research is to develop a computational framework that could facilitate incorporating human and social behavioral models for simulating emergency evacuation. The simulated results could potentially provide better insights into the design of egress and to assess the performance of evacuation systems. This note describes a prototype development of a dynamic, Multi-Agent based Simulation System for Egress analysis (MASSEgress) that is able to incorporate individual’s behavior and to model group interactions (such as competitive behavior, herding behavior, etc.).
On Resolution Like Proofs of Monotone Self-Dual Functions

We examine the time complexity of resolution like proofs for monotone self-dual functions. For a class of monotone boolean functions that strictly contain the class of self-dual functions we give a new characterization of self-duality. We show that an obvious implementation of a resolution like proof system has an exponential lower bound on the number of step in resolution proofs for monotone self-dual functions. We pose some questions, resolution of which would further the program on self-dual monotone boolean functions. General lower bounds on the length of resolution like proofs for self-dual monotone boolean functions is an interesting open
Flexible microstrip patch antenna using rubber substrate for WBAN applications

This paper introduces a flexible microstrip patch antenna using rubber as the substrate. The flexible antennas are gaining wide acceptance in the present scenario and these antennas play significant role in Wireless Body Area Network(WBAN) applications. The paper deals with the primary approach in using natural rubber and natural rubber with filler materials added as the substrate for patch antenna. The mechanical properties of the rubber makes the antenna flexible. The antenna operates in the ISM band(2.4-2.5) GHz. The ISM band is a candidate for WBAN operation.
Minimum description length Shape Model based on bio-inspired features

This paper proposes an enhanced MDL Shape Model to solve the point correspondence problem. The current MDL methods build models mainly based on shape information and may get bad models. Motivated by the biologically inspired features (BIF), which inspired by visual cortex, we compute the C1 response on the master node and add the cost of BIF across training set to the objective function of MDL Shape Models. Experiments show that our method can get better model and point correspondence.
Whose Absentee Votes Are Counted

Absentee voting is becoming more prevalent throughout the United States. While there has been some research focused on who votes by absentee ballot, little research has considered another important question about absentee voting: Which absentee ballots are counted, and which are not? Research following the 2000 presidential election has studied the problem of uncounted ballots for precinct voters, but not for absentee voters. To study which absentee ballots are counted we use data from Los Angeles County – the nation’s largest and most diverse voting jurisdiction – for the November 2002 general election. We develop three hypotheses regarding the likelihood that various types of ballots will be counted, which we test with our unique absentee voting dataset. We find that uniform service personnel, overseas civilians, and language minority voters have a much higher likelihood that their ballots will not be counted compared with the general absentee voting population. We conclude our paper with a discussion of the implications of our research for the current debates about absentee voting.
Competitive feedback in galaxy formation

It is now well established that many galaxies have nuclear star clusters (NCs) whose total masses correlate with the velocity dispersion σ of the galaxy spheroid in a very similar way to the well-known supermassive black hole (SMBH) M−σ relation. Previous theoretical work suggested that both correlations can be explained by a momentum feedback argument. Observations further show that most known NCs have masses ≲108 M⊙, while SMBHs frequently have measured masses ≳108 M⊙, which remained unexplained in earlier treatments. We suggest here that this changeover reflects a competition between the SMBH and nuclear clusters in the feedback they produce. When one of the massive objects reaches its limiting M−σ value, it drives the gas away and hence cuts off its own mass and also the mass of the ‘competitor’. The latter is then underweight with respect to the expected M−σ mass. More specifically, we find that the bulge dynamical time-scale is a steeply rising function of velocity dispersion, and that the NC–SMBH changeover occurs where the dynamical time is about equal to the Salpeter time. We propose that SMBHs, growing on the Salpeter time-scale, are unable to reach their M−σ mass quickly enough in small bulges. The central regions of these bulges are swamped with gas which fragments into stars, creating the nuclear clusters. The latter then limit their own growth by the feedback they produce, settling on their (offset) M−σ relation. The SMBH in such bulges should be underweight as their growth is curtailed before they reach the M−σ mass. In large bulges, on the other hand, the SMBH catches up quickly enough to settle on its M−σ relation. Nuclear star clusters may also exist in such bulges but they should be underweight with respect to their M−σ sequence.
Optimal coding rate selection for 3D video using RCPC codes

Summary form only given. We study the problem of error-resilient transmission of video data at very low bit rates, using unequal error protection (UEP). In particular, we consider a theoretical framework for the selection of parameters for optimal allocation of redundancy when of the protection method is based on rate-compatible punctured convolutional (RCPC) codes, over an AWGN channel. The theoretical results were found to be similar with optimal rate allocation and quantization in traditional lossy data compression, where transmission problems are not considered
THEORETICAL AND NUMERICAL VALUATION OF CALLABLE BONDS

This paper studies the value of a callable bond and the bond issuerâ€™s optimal financial decision regarding whether to continue the investment on the market or call the bond. Assume the market investment return follows a stochastic model, the value of contract is formulated as a partial differential equation system embedded with a free boundary, defining the level of market return rate at which it is optimal for the issuer to call the bond. A fundamental solution of the partial differential equation is derived, and used to formulate the value of the bond. A bisection scheme is implemented to solve the problem numerically.
The Impact of Surface Flux Parameterizations on the Modeling of the North Atlantic Ocean

Abstract The response of an ocean general circulation model to several distinct parameterizations of the surface heat and freshwater fluxes, which differ primarily by their representation of the ocean–atmosphere feedbacks, is investigated in a realistic configuration for the North Atlantic Ocean. The impact of explicitly introducing oceanic information (climatological sea-surface temperature) into the computation of the heat flux through a Haney-type restoring boundary condition, as opposed to the case in which the flux is based on atmosphere-only climatologies and is computed with the full bulk formulation, is considered. The strong similarity between these two approaches is demonstrated, and the sources of possible differences are discussed. When restoring boundary conditions are applied to the surface salinity, however, an unphysical feedback mechanism is being introduced. The model's response to this restoring is contrasted to the response to a flux boundary condition that prescribes the freshwater fl.
A Parallel Strategy for Transitive Closure usind Double Hash-Based Clustering

We present a parallel algorithm to compute the transitive closure of a relation. The transitive closure operation has been recognized as an important extension of the relational algebra. The importance of the performance problem brought by its evaluation brings one to consider parallel execution strategies. Such strategies constitute one of the keys to efficiency in a very large data base environment. The innovative aspects of the presented algorithm concern: 1) the possibility of working with a reasonable amount of memory space without creating extra Inputs/Outputs; 2) the use of on-disk clustering accomplished by double hashing; and 3) the parallelization of the transitive closure operation. The processing time is reduced by a factor of p, where p is the number of processors allocated for the operation. Communication times remain limited; a cyclic organization eliminates the need for serialization of transfers. The evaluation in a shared nothing architecture, shows the benefits of the proposed parallel transitive algorithm. Permission to copy kbilhout VW all or par1 of thi\ material i5 oranted provided that the copies arc not maclc OIcli~trihuted ~‘oIt direct commercial advantage. the VLDH copy I-ight notice‘ and the title of the publication and it\ Jarc appmr. ;~nd notice k gi\cn that copying is hq pcmmi~sion of the Vcr! Large Data Haw Endowment. To copy othcrwisc. or IO rcpuhlish. rccttlirc\ :I fee and/or special permission from the Endowrncnt.
A quadrature switched capacitor power amplifier in 65nm CMOS

This paper presents a quadrature switched-capacitor power amplifier (SCPA) that achieves similar output power and efficiency as polar/EER based digital PAs. It combines in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) signals on a shared capacitor array in the charge domain. The SCPA utilizes a class-G dual-supply architecture to improve efficiency at backoff. This counteracts losses associated with the signal combination. Unlike polar/EER counterparts, the quadrature SCPA requires no wideband phase modulator or delay matching circuitry. The SCPA delivers a peak output power of 20.5 dBm with a peak PAE of 20%.
Semantic Video Retrieval Using High Level Context

Video retrieval – searching and retrieving videos relevant to a user defined query – is one of the most popular topics in both real life applications and multimedia research. This thesis employs concepts from Natural Language Understanding in solving the video retrieval problem. Our main contribution is the utilization of the semantic word similarity measures for video retrieval through the trained concept detectors, and the visual co-occurrence relations between such concepts. We propose two methods for content-based retrieval of videos: (1) A method for retrieving a new concept(a concept which is not known to the system, and no annotation is available) using semantic word similarity and visual co-occurrence, which is an unsupervised method. (2) A method for retrieval of videos based on their relevance to a user defined text query using the semantic word similarity and visual content of videos. For evaluation purposes, we mainly used the automatic search and the high level feature extraction test set of TRECVID’06 and TRECVID’07 benchmarks. These two data sets consist of 250 hours of multilingual news video captured from American, Arabic, German and Chinese TV channels. Although our method for retrieving a new concept is an unsupervised method, it outperforms the trained concept detectors (which are supervised) on 7 out of 20 test concepts, and overall it performs very close to the trained detectors. On the other hand, our visual content based semantic retrieval method performs more than 100%
The capacity of the multi-MMSE constrained Gaussian channel

We examine codes, over the additive Gaussian noise channel, designed for reliable communication at some specific signal-to-noise ratio (snr) and constrained by the permitted MMSE at K lower snrs. Extending the result of the single MMSE constrained code, we show that K-layers superposition codes attain the constrained capacity. Moreover, we prove that given a reliable code attaining the multi-MMSE constrained capacity, its MMSE and mutual information, as functions of snr, are completely defined. Thus, no other multi-MMSE constrained capacity achieving code attains better MMSE performance at unconstrained snrs.
Addressing Vocal Register Discrepancies: An Alternative, Science-Based Theory Of Register Phenomena

This paper analyzes and evaluates several explicit and implicit assumptions that are embedded in the concepts, terminologies, and practices related to vocal registers. A reconciliation of the varied and conflicting register concepts, terminologies, and practices is proposed, including: 1. a brief historical context of vocal registers, 2. a documented science-based theory that accounts for vocal register phenomena from perceptual, physiological, and acoustical perspectives, 3. criteria for selection of science-based categorical word labels for register phenomena and suggested colloquial English terms that meet the criteria, 4. how the theory can be beneficially applied to the learning of efficient, skilled singing and speaking when guided by music educators, choral conductors, singing teachers, speech teachers, theatre directors, and when applied to therapeutic clinical settings.
Multi-level annotation of linguistic data with MMAX 2

This paper describes how richly annotated corpora can be created with the annotation tool MMAX2. The description is from the point of view of Computational Linguistics, a discipline where annotated corpora are often used as resources for software development. The paper outlines the important steps in the life cycle of an annotation and details how the tool MMAX2 can be employed in each of them.
Grouping and Segregation of Sensory Events by Actions in Temporal Audio-Visual Recalibration

Perception in multi-sensory environments involves both grouping and segregation of events across sensory modalities. Temporal coincidence between events is considered a strong cue to resolve multisensory perception. However, differences in physical transmission and neural processing times amongst modalities complicate this picture. This is illustrated by cross-modal recalibration, whereby adaptation to audio-visual asynchrony produces shifts in perceived simultaneity. Here, we examined whether voluntary actions might serve as a temporal anchor to cross-modal recalibration in time. Participants were tested on an audio-visual simultaneity judgment task after an adaptation phase where they had to synchronize voluntary actions with audio-visual pairs presented at a fixed asynchrony (vision leading or vision lagging). Our analysis focused on the magnitude of cross-modal recalibration to the adapted audio-visual asynchrony as a function of the nature of the actions during adaptation, putatively fostering cross-modal grouping or, segregation. We found larger temporal adjustments when actions promoted grouping than segregation of sensory events. However, a control experiment suggested that additional factors, such as attention to planning/execution of actions, could have an impact on recalibration effects. Contrary to the view that cross-modal temporal organization is mainly driven by external factors related to the stimulus or environment, our findings add supporting evidence for the idea that perceptual adjustments strongly depend on the observer's inner states induced by motor and cognitive demands.