Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Large-scale Document Clustering for Associative Document Search

Approximated algorithms for clustering large-scale document collection are proposed and evaluated under the context of cluster-based document retrieval (i.e., associative document search). These algorithms use a precise clustering algorithm as a subroutine to construct a strati ed structure of cluster trees. An experiment showed that more than 100 times speedup in cpu time was gained at best. Through experiments of self retrieval and topic assignment, we con rmed su cient search performance on cluster trees that are constructed by approximated algorithms. In particular, top down construction o ered over 99% accuracy of self retrieval which is comparable performance to exhaustive search. Top down construction also o ered promising performance in topic assignment, that is, better recall/precision than that obtained by exhaustive search. All of the results for cluster-based retrieval were obtained by simple and e cient binary tree search.
Use of palifermin for the prevention of high-dose methotrexate-induced oral mucositis.

BACKGROUND Oral mucositis is a frequent problem after high-dose methotrexate (HD-MTX), impairing patient's quality of life, leading to higher rates of infections and delaying subsequent chemotherapy. This report describes the effect of palifermin in patients treated within the GMALL-B-ALL 2002 protocol containing HD-MTX who developed a severe mucositis in cycle A1/B1. PATIENTS AND METHODS Ten patients, all with World Health Organization grades III-IV oral mucositis in cycles A1/B1, obtained palifermin with subsequent similar or identical cycles to reduce mucositis. Thus, patients serve as their own control for efficacy of palifermin. RESULTS All 10 patients developed grades III-IV mucositis in cycles A1/B1 without palifermin, whereas only two of 10 developed grades III-IV mucositis in corresponding cycles A2/B2 with palifermin. Only four of 10 patients showed infections in the cycles with palifermin compared with 10 of 10 patients without palifermin. The duration of mucositits in patients who acquired a higher grade mucositis despite treatment with palifermin could be reduced from 12.9 days (median) without to 11 days with palifermin. The amount of i.v. opioid analgetics could be significantly reduced. CONCLUSION Palifermin might reduce the incidence, severeness and duration of oral mucositis in HD-MTX-based chemotherapy and may influence clinical sequelae such as infection and quality of life.
An Improved Exact  $\varepsilon$-Constraint and Cut-and-Solve Combined Method for Biobjective Robust Lane Reservation

This study investigates a new biobjective lanereservation problem, which is to exclusively reserve lanes from an existing transportation network for special transport tasks with given deadlines. The objectives are to minimize the total negative impact on normal traffic due to the reduction of available lanes for general-purpose vehicles and to maximize the robustness of the lane-reservation solution against the uncertainty in link travel times. We first define the robustness for the lanereservation problem and formulate a biobjective mixed-integer linear program. Then, we develop an improved exact ε-constraint and a cut-and-solve combined method to generate its Pareto front. Computational results for an instance based on a real network topology and 220 randomly generated instances with up to 150 nodes, 600 arcs, and 50 tasks demonstrate that the proposed method is able to find the Pareto front and that the proposed cut-and-solve method is more efficient than the direct use of optimization software CPLEX.
Teaching an RDBMS about ontological constraints

In the presence of an ontology, query answers must reflect not only data explicitly present in the database, but also implicit data, which holds due to the ontology, even though it is not present in the database. A large and useful set of ontology languages enjoys FOL reducibility of query answering : answering a query can be reduced to evaluating a certain first-order logic (FOL) formula (obtained from the query and ontology) against only the explicit facts. We present a novel query optimization framework for ontology-based data access settings enjoying FOL reducibility . Our framework is based on searching within a set of alternative equivalent FOL queries, i.e., FOL reformulations, one with minimal evaluation cost when evaluated through a relational database system. We apply this framework to the DL-Lite R Description Logic underpinning the W3C's OWL2 QL ontology language, and demonstrate through experiments its performance benefits when two leading SQL systems, one open-source and one commercial, are used for evaluating the FOL query reformulations.
Enabling cross layer design: adding the MadWifi extensions to Nsclick

Simulations have always been a very useful and powerful tool to study and develop networking protocols. ns-2 is one of the most commonly used open-source network simulators and many protocols have been evaluated with this tool. In order to bridge the gap between simulation and implementation on a real testbed, Nsclick was developed. Nsclick makes it possible to entirely reuse code between the ns-2 simulator and a testbed, based on the Click Modular Router. In the quest for high performance wireless networks, researchers have found that the layered architecture networks did not perform well enough. Therefore they focused their research on cross layer design techniques. Although using Click and the MadWifi driver gives us many possibilities to design and evaluate cross layer optimizations in a testbed set up, the Nsclick platform does not support these extensions. In this paper we will introduce an extension to ns-2 which overcomes these shortcomings of the Nsclick platform. This extension makes the wireless features of the Click Modular Router available in Nsclick platform, eliminating the differences between the ns-2 simulator, within the Nsclick platform, and a real world set up.
Accelerating linked-list traversal through near-data processing

Recent technology advances in memory system design, along with 3D stacking, have made near-data processing (NDP) more feasible to accelerate different workloads. In this work, we explore near-data processing for a fundamental operation - linked-list traversal (LLT). We propose a new NDP architecture that does not change the existing sequential programming model and does not require any modification to the processor microarchitecture. Instead, we exploit the packetized interface between the core and the memory modules to off-load LLT for NDP. We leverage a system with multiple memory modules (e.g., hybrid memory cube (HMC) modules) interconnected with a memory network and our initial evaluation shows that simply off-loading LLT computation to near-memory can actually reduce performance because of the additional off-chip memory network channel traversals. Thus, we first propose NDP-aware data localization to exploit locality - including locality within a single memory module and memory vault - to minimize latency and improve energy efficiency. In order to improve overall throughput and maximize parallelism, we propose batching multiple LLT operations together to amortize the cost of NDP by utilizing the highly parallel execution of NDP processing units and the high bandwidth of 3D stacked DRAM. The combination of NDP-aware data localization and batching can provide significant improvement in performance and energy efficiency compared to host-processing.
Apprenticeship learning based on inconsistent demonstrations

Apprenticeship learning based on inconsistent demonstrations is presented in this paper. We address a problem where given demonstrations are not directly applicable to reward function estimation due to the non-stationarity of an environment or the difference between the dynamics of a robot and a demonstrator. A basic idea of the proposed method is to use a subset of the trajectories sampled from the baseline policy as training data for inverse reinforcement learning. All consistent sample trajectories and inconsistent demonstrations are abstracted by an affine transformation invariant feature. Using the feature, the importance of each sample trajectory is estimated. Rating the sample trajectories based on importance, the training data for inverse reinforcement learning are identified. The validity of our approach is verified through simulation in two scenarios: inconsistency caused by variation of an environment and performance of a robot.
Human-Computer Interaction using Natural Language . An Application in the Medical Treatment Domain

The effective information retrieval, along with the comprehensive dialogue systems response, happen to be of great importance in medical applications domain, where the precision of information is critical and users are usually inexperienced and unwilling to participate in long, tiring interactions. The use of natural language is a promising idea because it is direct, natural for the humans and does not need any special training. Our work presents a natural language interaction system, developed by Hellenic partners and utilized with success in the medical domain. Experimental results and comparisons with other methods tabulate improvement in time response as well as in the correctness of the answer. The evaluation of the model was done using a group of 20 persons of different specialties (medical stuff-doctors-computer users-students) which were already trained about how to use the system and each one supplied 25 different questions.
Technology Requirement to Implement Improved Situation Awareness: Machine Perception

1. ABSTRACT Situation awareness is the ability of an unmanned vehicle intelligent control system to model the world. A world model is an intelligent system’s current internal estimate of the state of the world, plus its prior knowledge of the history of the world, plus knowledge about the rules of physics and mathematics, plus rules of behavior, task skills, and basic values. World modeling is the ability of the intelligent system to maintain and use a world model to predict and filter sensory experience, to understand the past, and to simulate the future. Perception is the functional transformation of data from sensors into situational awareness.
Framework for collecting social network events

Online Social Networks became a relevant part of daily digital interactions for more than half a billion users around the world. The various personal information sharing practices that social network providers promote have led to their success as innovative social interaction platforms. At the same time, these practices have risen much critique and concerns with respect to privacy and security from different stakeholders. In fact, the massive use of online social networks has risen the attention of hackers and attackers that want to propagate malware and viruses for obtaining sensitive data. In this way, every social network user should be able to easily access, control and analyse the information he shares on his profile in order to efficiently detect any usage deviation. The possibility of detecting different sources of shared information in the same account lead us to design a system based not on information itself but on the timestamps associated to it. The proposed event collector framework can collect all posted information and store it in a relational database for further analysis. Using a friendly graphical interface, users can access all stored information in a comprehensible manner, according to the type of event, thus facilitating the analysis of the user behaviour. Since each event is stored with its corresponding timestamp, it is possible to perform an efficient analysis of all posted contents, compute statistics over collected data, infer/establish the so called "normal" or "typical" usage profile and, thus, be able to detect possible deviations that may correspond to a compromised user account.
On the impact of correlated shadowing on the performance of user-in-the-loop for mobility

The cellular network users are demanding more traffic and expecting a ubiquitous high data rate. Several techniques are investigated to cope with this massive demand. All the current solutions are focusing on improving this issue from the supply side. However it is expected that a significant improvement on the system performance can be gained if the end users become a part of the system and not just consumers. The user-in-the-loop (UIL) spatial approach provides a solution to fulfil the increasing traffic demand by convincing users to move to locations with higher SINR values. The previous results of the UIL are promising and a higher cell spectral efficiency is achieved only by the involvement of the users and without any investment on the supply side. UIL is a user-centric approach that offers an incentive to influence users' behavior to participate in the system improvement process. In this paper, the previous ideal environment of UIL is extended by integrating the important effect of correlated shadowing to the analysis of UIL performance. The obtained results in this paper confirm the previous results and promise significant performance improvements. Results show that the achieved higher spectral efficiency and the required moving distance depend on the correlation parameters.
An iterative two-step algorithm for energy efficient resource allocation in multi-cell OFDMA networks

In this paper, a novel joint resource allocation including sub-channel scheduling and power control is proposed for downlink multi-cell orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) networks. We provide a utility function consisting of energy efficiency and interference pricing, in which power and sub-channel resources have been jointly considered. To reduce the complexity of the joint resource allocation, a novel iterative two-step algorithm is presented. First, we utilize a non-cooperative supermodular game in power control given the sub-channel scheduling. Then we schedule sub-channels to maximize the utility function given the power allocation. Because power control and sub-channel scheduling share the same utility function, the iterative algorithm can be proved to converge to the best response pair which achieves the higher throughput and better utility. The numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and show that both throughput and energy efficiency can be improved compared with traditional methods.
A source-level transformation framework for RPC-based distributed programs

The remote procedure call (RPC) paradigm has been a favorite of programmers who write distributed programs because RPC uses a familiar procedure call abstraction as the sole mechanism of remote operation. The abstraction helps to simplify programming tasks, but this does not mean that the resulting program's RPC-based flow of control will be anything close to ideal for high performance. The purpose of our research is to provide a source-level transformation framework as an alternative way to implement an RPC-based distributed program, so that the code can be optimized through program analysis techniques.
Test of a stand-off laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy sensor for the detection of explosive residues on solid surfaces

The detection and characterization of energetic materials at distances up to 45 m using stand-off laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) has been demonstrated. A field-portable open-path LIB spectrometer working under a coaxial configuration was used. A preliminary study allowed choosing a single-pulse laser source over a double-pulse system as the most suitable source for the stand-off analysis of organic samples. The C2 Swan system, as well as the hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen emission intensity ratios were the necessary parameters to identify the analyte as an organic explosive, organic non-explosive and non-organic samples. O/N intensity ratios of 2.9 and 2.16 with relative standard deviations of 4.03% and 8.36% were obtained for 2,4-dinitrotoluene and aluminium samples, respectively. A field test with known samples and a blind test were carried out at a distance of 30 m from the sample. Identification of energetic compounds in such conditions resulted in 19 correct results out of 21 samples.
Newton methods for the steady state solution of nonlinear electric networks

In this contribution Newton techniques based on Numerical Differentiation (ND), Direct Approach (DA) and Difference Matrix (DM) procedures are applied for the computation of the periodic steady state solution of single phase nonlinear electric networks containing magnetizing branches of transformers and alternating current arc furnaces. The results obtained with the Newton methods are compared in terms of computational effort required to obtain the steady state solution and their related reliability towards convergence.
Improving the Accessibility of a Thesaurus-Based Catalog by Web Content Mining

In this work we focus on the improvement of the accessibility of a catalog of radio and television productions. As productions can only be searched using the annotated meta-data, the use of a controlled vocabulary plays an important role in the retrieval. However, users can not be expected to have detailed knowledge on the terms defined within the vocabulary. In this work, we present a method that assists users to find appropriate keywords for their queries, making the archive better accessible both for professional users and for the general public. The experimental results show that the algorithm developed can be of assistance for those working with the thesaurus.
The work of the teacher-educator in Australia: Reconstructing the “superhero” performer/academic in an audit culture

ABSTRACT What is it that teacher-educators “do”? This paper draws on interview data with Deans/Heads of Schools of Education in the Australian context to explore this question by asking: How is the teacher-educator produced as a category of academic worker? Using critical approaches to discourse analysis, the paper presents two interlocked storylines woven with varying emphasis through the interviews. First, the teacher-educator is produced as a superhero researcher and teacher, elevated by the expectations of the Excellence in Research for Australia audit/surveillance tools. Second, there is a concomitant struggle to reconcile pressure to research with commitment to meeting the needs of schooling systems, and to addressing the work of the teacher-educator in ethical terms. It is suggested that teacher-educators’ work reflects a desire to legitimate various performances of teacher education within current dynamics of audit culture pressures, set against the less visible ethical project of education more broadly conceived.
Survey of childhood blindness and visual impairment in Botswana

Background/aims In terms of blind-person years, the worldwide burden of childhood blindness is second only to cataracts. In many developing countries, 30–72% of childhood blindness is avoidable. The authors conducted this study to determine the causes of childhood blindness and visual impairment (VI) in Botswana, a middle-income country with limited access to ophthalmic care. Methods This study was conducted over 4 weeks in eight cities and villages in Botswana. Children were recruited through a radio advertisement and local outreach programmes. Those ≤15 years of age with visual acuity <6/18 in either eye were enrolled. The WHO/Prevention of Blindness Eye Examination Record for Children with Blindness and Low Vision was used to record data. Results The authors enrolled 241 children, 79 with unilateral and 162 with bilateral VI. Of unilateral cases, 89% were avoidable: 23% preventable (83% trauma-related) and 66% treatable (40% refractive error and 31% amblyopia). Of bilateral cases, 63% were avoidable: 5% preventable and 58% treatable (33% refractive error and 31% congenital cataracts). Conclusion Refractive error, which is easily correctable with glasses, is the most common cause of bilateral VI, with cataracts a close second. A nationwide intervention is currently being planned to reduce the burden of avoidable childhood VI in Botswana.
WHUSUM Participation at TAC 2011 Guided Summarization Track

In this report, we present details about the participation of WHUSUM in the guided summarization track at TAC 2011. Guided summarization task requires participants to produce short, coherent summaries of news articles with the guidance of predefined categories and aspects for each category. This year, we extended our query-focused update summarization system with aspect related information. In our system, a graph-based ranking approach was adopted to facilitate the extraction of aspect-related sentences with diversity and novelty.
Towards acceptable key escrow systems

Escrowed Key Cryptosystems hold the promise of faithfully realizing legal guarantees of privacy for users under normal circumstances while at the same time insuring that privacy can be breached by authorities in special circumstances under appropriate legal safeguards. The most attractive feature of these schemes is that it is possible to ensure that the interests of each of the parties—the users, the law enforcement or national security agencies, the court or other monitoring entities and the escrow agents—can all be guaranteed up to the level of integrity of the protocol or cryptosystem. Unfortunately, the first scheme to attempt this, the Clipper protocol as adopted by the U.S., completely fails to do so for either the user(s) or for the monitoring entities. In this paper a new escrowed key protocol and new devices are described that verifiable protect the interests of all parties by positively implementing legal guarantees of privacy and access.
Glutamate‐mediated excitotoxicity in neonatal hippocampal neurons is mediated by mGluR‐induced release of Ca++ from intracellular stores and is prevented by estradiol

Hypoxic/ischemic (HI) brain injury in newborn full‐term and premature infants is a common and pervasive source of life time disabilities in cognitive and locomotor function. In the adult, HI induces glutamate release and excitotoxic cell death dependent on NMDA receptor activation. In animal models of the premature human infant, glutamate is also released following HI, but neurons are largely insensitive to NMDA or AMPA/kainic acid (KA) receptor‐mediated damage. Using primary cultured hippocampal neurons we have determined that glutamate increases intracellular calcium much more than kainic acid. Moreover, glutamate induces cell death by activating Type I metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs). Pretreatment of neurons with the gonadal steroid estradiol reduces the level of the Type I metabotropic glutamate receptors and completely prevents cell death, suggesting a novel therapeutic approach to excitotoxic brain damage in the neonate.
Note on B-splines, wavelet scaling functions, and Gabor frames

Let g be a continuous, compactly supported function on such that the integer translates of g constitute a partition of unity. We show that the Gabor system (g,a,b), with window g and time-shift and frequency-shift parameters a,b>0 has no lower frame bound larger than 0 if b=2,3,. and a>0. In particular, (g,a,b) is not a Gabor frame if g is a continuous, compactly supported wavelet scaling function and if b=2,3,. and a>0. We give an example for our result for the case that g=B/sub 1/, the triangle function supported by [-1,1], by showing pictures of the canonical dual corresponding to (g,a,b) where ab=1/4 and b crosses the lines N=2,3,.