Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Logarithmic-Barrier Decomposition Interior-Point Methods for Stochastic Linear Optimization in a Hilbert Space

Abstract Several logarithmic-barrier interiors-point methods are now available for solving two-stage stochastic optimization problems with recourse in the finite-dimensional setting. However, despite the genuine need for studying such methods in general spaces, there are no infinite-dimensional analogs of these methods. Inspired by this evident gap in the literature, in this paper, we propose logarithmic-barrier decomposition-based interior-point algorithms for two-stage stochastic linear optimization problems with recourse in a Hilbert space. We study the fundamental properties of the logarithmic barrier associated with the recourse function of our problem setting. The novelty of our algorithms is that their iteration complexity results are independent on the choice of the underlying Hilbert space. In other words, after applying the obtained fundamental properties to our problem setting, the iteration complexity results obtained for the short- and long-step algorithms coincide with the best-known estimates in the finite-dimensional case.
Range Image Segmentation Using a LEGION Network

This paper presents a neural network approach for range image segmentation. We use a locally excitatory globally inhibitory oscillator network (LEGION) as the framework for range image segmentation. Each oscillator in the LEGION network has excitatory lateral connections to the oscillators in its neighborhood as well as a connection with a global inhibitor. The feature detector associated with each oscillator estimates the surface normal and curvature at its corresponding pixel location. The lateral connection between two oscillators is established based on a similarity measure of their feature vectors. The emergent behavior of the LEGION network gives rise to the segmentation result. Unlike other methods, our scheme needs no assumption about the underlying structures in image data and no prior knowledge regarding the number of regions. Experimental results using real range images are presented.
The Infectiousness of Tuberculosis Patients Coinfected with HIV

Background The current understanding of airborne tuberculosis (TB) transmission is based on classic 1950s studies in which guinea pigs were exposed to air from a tuberculosis ward. Recently we recreated this model in Lima, Perú, and in this paper we report the use of molecular fingerprinting to investigate patient infectiousness in the current era of HIV infection and multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB. Methods and Findings All air from a mechanically ventilated negative-pressure HIV-TB ward was exhausted over guinea pigs housed in an airborne transmission study facility on the roof. Animals had monthly tuberculin skin tests, and positive reactors were removed for autopsy and organ culture for M. tuberculosis. Temporal exposure patterns, drug susceptibility testing, and DNA fingerprinting of patient and animal TB strains defined infectious TB patients. Relative patient infectiousness was calculated using the Wells-Riley model of airborne infection. Over 505 study days there were 118 ward admissions of 97 HIV-positive pulmonary TB patients. Of 292 exposed guinea pigs, 144 had evidence of TB disease; a further 30 were tuberculin skin test positive only. There was marked variability in patient infectiousness; only 8.5% of 118 ward admissions by TB patients were shown by DNA fingerprinting to have caused 98% of the 125 characterised cases of secondary animal TB. 90% of TB transmission occurred from inadequately treated MDR TB patients. Three highly infectious MDR TB patients produced 226, 52, and 40 airborne infectious units (quanta) per hour. Conclusions A small number of inadequately treated MDR TB patients coinfected with HIV were responsible for almost all TB transmission, and some patients were highly infectious. This result highlights the importance of rapid TB drug-susceptibility testing to allow prompt initiation of effective treatment, and environmental control measures to reduce ongoing TB transmission in crowded health care settings. TB infection control must be prioritized in order to prevent health care facilities from disseminating the drug-resistant TB that they are attempting to treat.
Institutional quality and foreign aid

This paper investigates the impact of foreign aid on the quality of institutions in recipient countries. Our identification strategy exploits the shift in US foreign policy due the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001 as a quasi-natural experiment. The associated change in strategic importance of certain countries is resembled in the pattern of foreign aid flows. We estimate the impact of US foreign aid on different measures of institutional quality in a cross-country panel data set of developing countries. Our results indicate that foreign aid impacts different dimension of a country's institutions: When focusing on the rule of law aid seems to have a detrimental effect. However, the tax burden imposed on the citizens in recipient countries seems to be reduced by aid payments. When looking at the general level of democratization, we cannot find any conclusive results.
NGL02-2: Ethernet Adaptive Link Rate (ALR): Analysis of a Buffer Threshold Policy

Rapidly increasing energy use by computing and communications equipment is a significant problem that needs to be addressed. Ethernet network interface controllers (NICs) consume hundreds of millions of US$ in electricity per year. Most Ethernet links are underutilized and link power consumption can be reduced by operating at lower data rates. An output buffer threshold policy to change link data rate in response to utilization is investigated. Analytical and simulation models are developed to evaluate the performance of Adaptive Link Rate (ALR) with respect to mean packet delay and time spent in low data rate with Poisson traffic and 100 Mb/s network traces as inputs. A Markov model of a state-dependent service rate queue with rate transitions only at service completion is developed. For the traffic traces, it is found that a link can operate at 10 Mb/s for over 99% of the time yielding energy savings with no user-perceivable increase in packet delay.
Chapter 25 Inertial Microfluidics : mechanisms and applications

In microfluidics, the typical sample volume is in the order of nL, which is incompatible with the common biosample volume in biochemistry and clinical diagnostics (usually ranging from 1 μL to approximately 1 mL). The recently emerged inertial microfluidic technology offers the possibility to process large volume (∼mL) of biosample by well-defined micro-structures. In contrast to conventional microfluidic technologies, where fluid inertia is negligible and flow remains almost within Stokes flow region with very low Reynolds number Re≪1 (Re=ρf Uf H/μ, where ρ f, Ū f and μ are fluid density, average velocity and dynamic viscosity, respectively, and H is channel hydraulic diameter), inertial microfluidic devices work within an intermediate Reynolds number range (∼1 < Re < ∼100) between Stokes and turbulent regimes. In this intermediate range, both inertia and fluid viscosity are finite, and several intriguing effects appear and form the basis of inertial microfluidics, including (i) inertial migration and (ii) secondary flow. Due to the superior features of highthroughput, simplicity, precise manipulation and low-cost, inertial microfluidics has attracted significant attention from the microfluidic community. Meanwhile, a number of channel designs that focus, concentrate and separate particles and fluids have been explored and demonstrated. In this chapter, we discuss this fascinating technology from three crucial aspects: (1) fundamental mechanism, (2) microchannel designs and (3) applications. From this chapter, we hope that readers can have a clear understanding on the concept of inertial microfluidics, its working mechanism and potential applications.
Position Estimation of Autonomous Underwater Sensors Using the Virtual Long Baseline Method

This article contains a description of a mathematical model of an acoustic system for positioning autonomous underwater sensors using the virtual long base method, which can be used during the vessel’s collection of information over the deployed underwater network of autonomous sensors (underwater wireless sensors network), during the initial determination of the geographical position of the bottom long baseline elements or search, including cooperative, with the use of a swarm of autonomous surface vehicles (UASV) of emergency submerged objects equipped with an emergency beacon (for example, aircraft and ships); The article provides a scheme of an experimental set of equipment, as well as a description of the conducted field experiments and their results.
VEHICLE CLASS RECOGNITION USING 3 D CG MODELS

This paper describes a robust method for recognizing vehicle classes. In our previous work, we have developed a vehicle recognition system based on local-feature configuration, which is a generalization of the eigen-window method. This system could recognize one vehicle class very accurately, but there have been limitations in recognizing several classes, when they are quite similar to each other. In this paper, we describe the improvements of our recognition system to distinguish four classes, namely sedan, wagon, mini-van and hatchback. The system requires training images of all target vehicle classes. These training images are easily created using a 3-dimentional computer graphic (3D-CG) tool. Using CG training images dispenses with much of the trouble of collecting real training images, and causes no effect on accuracy. Outdoor experimental results have shown that this recognition system can classify vehicles in real images with an accuracy of more than 80%.
FIRST RESULTS OF THE PROTOTYPE C 0 2 – He Ne INTERFEROMETER FOR ELECTRON DENSITY MEASUREMENTS IN THE TJ-II STELLARATOR

Laser heterodyne interferometry is a proven method for measuring electron density in fusion plasmas. CO2 (10.6 μm) and He-Ne (633 nm) lasers have typically been used [1], though recently the use of shorter wavelengths have been reported (Nd:YAG, 1.064 μm) [2]. Though mainly used in Tokamaks, the idea of having a low cost, reliable diagnostic for electron density in Stellarators [3] and small machines [4] using these sources has recently been under study.
A SCHUR COMPLEMENT METHOD FOR EIGENVALUE PROBLEMS

Domain decomposition algorithms have received much attention in the last decade [2]. The domain in which a differential equation is defined is partitioned in several subdomains, and the equation is solved in these domains. The local results are integrated to form the solution in the entire domain. Since the subdomains can be solved in parallel, domain decomposition has become very popular on parallel computers.
A Formalization of the Church-Turing Thesis

Our goal is to formalize the Church-Turing Thesis for a very large class of computational models. Specifically, the notion of an “effective model of computation” over an arbitrary countable domain is axiomatized. This is accomplished by modifying Gurevich’s “Abstract State Machine” postulates for state-transition models. A proof is provided that all models satisfying these axioms, regardless of underlying data structure—and including all standard models—are equivalent to (up to isomorphism), or weaker than, Turing machines. To allow the comparison of arbitrary models operating over arbitrary domains, we employ a quasi-ordering on computational models, based on their extensionality.
Binary Lambda Calculus and Combinatory Logic

We introduce binary representations of both lambda calculus and combinatory logic terms, and demonstrate their simplicity by providing very compact parser-interpreters for these binary languages. We demonstrate their application to Algorithmic Information Theory with several concrete upper bounds on program-size complexity, including an elegant self-delimiting code for binary strings.
Extending On-chip Interconnects for rack-level remote resource access

The need to perform data analytics on exploding data volumes coupled with the rapidly changing workloads in cloud computing places great pressure on data-center servers. To improve hardware resource utilization across servers within a rack, we propose Direct Extension of On-chip Interconnects (DEOI), a high-performance and efficient architecture for remote resource access among server nodes. DEOI extends an SoC server node's on-chip interconnect to access resources in adjacent nodes with no protocol changes, allowing remote memory and network resources to be used as if they were local. Our results on a four-node FPGA prototype show that the latency of user-level, cross-node, random reads to DEOI-connected remote memory is as low as 1. 16μs, which beats current commercial technologies. We exploit DEOI remote access to improve performance of the Redis in-memory key-value framework by 47%. When using DEOI to access remote network resources, we observe an 8.4% average performance degradation and only a 2. 52μs ping-pong latency disparity compared to using local assets. These results suggest that DEOI can be a promising mechanism for increasing both performance and efficiency in next-generation data-center servers.
Variants of the Constrained Bottleneck LAN Edge Link in Household Networks

-------------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACT ------------------------------------------------------------- Competition among adaptive video streaming players severely reduces user-QoE. This occurs as resource allocation becomes unfair. We refer to this as the bottleneck link problem. The resource imbalance creates severe user annoyance such as screen flickering and video freezes. However, there are numerous conditions that amplifies the problems. Some of these are well documented in the literature but we intend to highlight the major conditions at a bottleneck link in household LANs. These are time-varying bandwidth, TCP long-lived flows, players pausing, starting/re-starting and stopping and increases in player numbers. We explore these conditions and evaluate the performance of heuristic adaptive video players. ELASTIC and PANDA players are evaluated. Experimental setup includes the TAPAS player and emulated network conditions. The results show that players are well suited to specific conditions.
Distributed relay selection strategy based on source-relay channel

Recent results on cooperative networks have shown great potential in their ability to improve the system performance in the presence of fading channels by using different users' antennas. However, traditional centralized relays selection needs considerable overhead and signaling to exchange the channel state information. In this paper, we propose a simple “ Amplify and Forward” distributed method to find the best source-relay path from a set of possible cooperating relays. The method requires no communication among the relays, assumes no prior knowledge of network geometry and is based only on instantaneous source-relay wireless channel measurements. Each relay compares its source-relay SNR with a threshold and decides to participate or not to the communication independently of other relays decisions. The threshold is chosen by maximizing the probability to select only one relay. Through simulations we show that the proposed threshold method achieves high capacity gains while keeping the outage probability at a reasonable level.
Physically-Induced Cytoskeleton Remodeling of Cells in Three-Dimensional Culture

Characterizing how cells in three-dimensional (3D) environments or natural tissues respond to biophysical stimuli is a longstanding challenge in biology and tissue engineering. We demonstrate a strategy to monitor morphological and mechanical responses of contractile fibroblasts in a 3D environment. Cells responded to stretch through specific, cell-wide mechanisms involving staged retraction and reinforcement. Retraction responses occurred for all orientations of stress fibers and cellular protrusions relative to the stretch direction, while reinforcement responses, including extension of cellular processes and stress fiber formation, occurred predominantly in the stretch direction. A previously unreported role of F-actin clumps was observed, with clumps possibly acting as F-actin reservoirs for retraction and reinforcement responses during stretch. Responses were consistent with a model of cellular sensitivity to local physical cues. These findings suggest mechanisms for global actin cytoskeleton remodeling in non-muscle cells and provide insight into cellular responses important in pathologies such as fibrosis and hypertension.
iREX: efficient automation architecture for the deployment of inter-domain QoS policy

The inter-domain resource exchange (iREX) architecture uses economic market mechanisms to automate the ad-hoc negotiation and deployment of end to end inter-domain quality of service policy among resource consumer and resource provider . In this paper, we explore iREX's network load distribution by comparing its performance to a lower bound for network congestion in two ways. We first present an analytical model of iREX in terms of an online algorithm and analyze its efficiency via competitive analysis. Our main result shows that the efficiency loss of iREX with respect to monetary cost is upper-bounded by a factor of 8 K/2 K+1, where K s the number of deployments, provided affine linear price functions are used. When the price functions are used to model congestion in the network, this result implies upper bounds on the efficiency loss of iREX with respect to network congestion. We then complement the analytical model with a numerical study using simulations.with optimal solutions derived from unsplittable and splittable multi-commodity flow optimization models. Our numerical results show that for nominal to high traffic loads of 40% or more, iREX deviates a maximum of about 20% from the lower bound, while the current method deviates a maximum of 300%.
Impaired Glucose Tolerance in Childhood Obesity Contribution of Glucagon , GLP-1 and Inflammation

Manell, H. 2019. Impaired Glucose Tolerance in Childhood Obesity. Contribution of Glucagon, GLP-1 and Inflammation. Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Medicine 1560. 49 pp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-91-513-0618-6. In the wake of increased obesity prevalence, impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) and type 2 diabetes (T2D) in childhood and adolescence is increasingly common. Given the negative impacts these conditions have on health over time, understanding the pathophysiology in those affected early in life is important. Both the proglucagon-derived peptides and low-grade inflammation have been implicated in the development of obesity-related complications. The aim of this thesis was to study across the glucose tolerance spectrum in children and adolescents with obesity 1) proglucagon-derived peptides glucagon, GLP-1 and glicentin, 2) dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) and its degradation of GLP-1 and 3) novel inflammatory markers. To this end, children and adolescents of the Uppsala Longitudinal Study of Childhood Obesity were studied. Children and adolescents with obesity had higher fasting plasma glucagon concentrations than lean controls. In particular visceral adiposity, hyperinsulinemia, triglycerides and free fatty acids (FFAs) were associated with high plasma glucagon concentrations. In isolated islets elevated FFAs caused hypersecretion of glucagon. In children and adolescents with IGT or T2D, fasting plasma glucagon was further elevated and the GLP-1 and glicentin response to an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) was decreased. In T2D plasma glucagon increased during the first 15 minutes of OGTT. Plasma DPP-4 concentrations were elevated in obesity and associated with lower proportion of intact GLP-1 but not with IGT. Several pro-inflammatory markers were elevated in children and adolescents with obesity but not further elevated in IGT or T2D with the exception of low plasma Tumor necrosis factor-related weak inducer of apoptosis (TWEAK) levels, which were associated with IGT, hyperinsulinemia and hyperglucagonemia. High plasma hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) concentration was associated with increased risk of further weight gain in children and adolescents with obesity. In conclusion, elevated glucagon concentration at fasting, a hyperglucagonemic response to OGTT and reduced GLP-1 and glicentin are characteristics of IGT and T2D development in childhood obesity reflecting altered usage of the proglucagon gene. DPP-4 concentrations are elevated in childhood obesity but not associated with IGT. Reduced circulating TWEAK was identified as a novel marker of IGT early in life. Children with obesity and high HGF are less likely to respond well to lifestyle intervention.
A SHORTEST ANTECEDENT SET ALGORITHM FOR MINING ASSOCIATION RULES*

Aiming at the redundancy problem of association rules in the mining process of mining association rules, a kind of shortest antecedent set algorithm (SASA) for mining association rules is proposed in this paper, and the algorithm is supported by the set-enumeration tree structure. The proposed algorithm is able to record a kind of subset for association rules without any information loss, and this kind of subset contains the entire generated association rule nondestructive. Experimental results show that the algorithm can significantly reduce the number of association rules, and it also improves the efficiency of analyzing the association rules for users.
Introducing Automated Regression Testing in Open Source Projects

To learn how to introduce automated regression testing to existing medium scale Open Source projects, a long-term field experiment was performed with the Open Source project FreeCol. Results indicate that (1) introducing testing is both beneficial for the project and feasible for an outside innovator, (2) testing can enhance communication between developers, (3) signaling is important for engaging the project participants to fill a newly vacant position left by a withdrawal of the innovator. Five prescriptive strategies are extracted for the innovator and two conjectures offered about the ability of an Open Source project to learn about innovations.
Resonance clustering in wave turbulent regimes: Integrable dynamics

Two fundamental facts of the modern wave turbulence theory are 1) existence of power energy spectra in $k$-space, and 2) existence of "gaps" in this spectra corresponding to the resonance clustering. Accordingly, three wave turbulent regimes are singled out: \emph{kinetic}, described by wave kinetic equations and power energy spectra; \emph{discrete}, characterized by resonance clustering; and \emph{mesoscopic}, where both types of wave field time evolution coexist. In this paper we study integrable dynamics of resonance clusters appearing in discrete and mesoscopic wave turbulent regimes. Using a novel method based on the notion of dynamical invariant we establish that some of the frequently met clusters are integrable in quadratures for arbitrary initial conditions and some others -- only for particular initial conditions. We also identify chaotic behaviour in some cases. Physical implications of the results obtained are discussed.