Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
BSArc: blacksmith streaming architecture for HPC accelerators

The current trend in high performance computing (HPC) systems is to deploy parallel computers equipped with general purpose multi-core processors and possibly multi-core streaming accelerators. However, the performance of these multi-cores is often constrained by the limited external bandwidth or by badly matching data access patterns. The latter reduces the size of useful data during memory transactions. A change in the application algorithm can improve the memory accesses but a hardware support mechanism for an application specific data arrangement in the memory hierarchy can significantly boost the performance for many application domains. In this work, we present a conceptual computing architecture named BSArc (Blacksmith Streaming Architecture). BSArc introduces a forging front-end to efficiently distribute data to a large set of simple streaming processors in the back-end. We apply this concept to a SIMT execution model and present a design space exploration in the context of a GPU-like streaming architecture with a reconfigurable application specific front-end. These design space explorations are carried out on a streaming architectural simulator that models BSArc. We evaluate the performance advantages for the BSArc design against a standard L2 cache in a GPU-like device. In our evaluations we use three application kernels: 2D-FFT, Matrix-Matrix Multiplication and 3D-Stencil. The results show that employing an application specific arrangement of data on these kernels achieves an average speedup of 2.3× compared to a standard cache for a GPU-like streaming device.
Implementing the 2:1 student placement model in occupational therapy: Strategies for practice.

BACKGROUND/AIM Health industry changes, including a growing demand for health professionals, have led to a greater need for clinical placements for occupational therapy and other health discipline students. As we develop programmes to accommodate larger numbers of student placements, there is a need to ensure that we understand the challenges and opportunities new models of supervision present and how any difficulties might be overcome. A large occupational therapy department in metropolitan Melbourne introduced a new 2:1 (two students to one supervisor) supervision model, moving away from the traditional 1:1 (one student to one supervisor) supervision model. This exploratory study examines supervisor experience in a trial of the new model. METHODS The study adopted a social constructivist theoretical perspective and an exploratory qualitative design. Data were collected in two focus groups involving eight supervisors; one focus group was held prior to implementation of the 2:1 supervision model, and one post. A thematic analysis approach was used to identify, analyse and report patterns within the data. FINDINGS The 2:1 placement model presented challenges particularly in relation to ensuring a quality placement and managing two students while acknowledging there were also opportunities for peer learning. Supervisors developed a number of strategies to minimise difficulties and maximise benefits, including taking an evidence-based approach, being prepared, mobilising organisational support and being positive but also pragmatic. CONCLUSIONS The 2:1 student placement model is likely to be a model of choice in the future. There are challenges and opportunities associated with its use. This study identifies these as well as strategies for maximising opportunities and mitigating challenges.
Unknown Malicious Executables Detection Based on Immune Principles

Detecting unknown malicious executables is a challenging task. Traditional anti-virus systems use signatures to detect malicious executables. However, the method cannot detect unseen instances or variants. Inspired by biological immune systems, an immune-based approach for detection of unknown malicious executables is proposed in this paper, which is referred to MEDMI. The approach can use the benign executables to be the training set for building the profile of the system and then generates detectors to detect malicious executables. The experiments comparing with different detection methods show that the approach provides an effective novel solution to detect malicious executables.
An analytical ray casting of volume data

When volume data is visualized by the ray casting method, the color value of each pixel in the image is obtained by composing the color contributions of the sample points that lie on the ray cast from the pixel point. In most ray tracing methods, including M. Levoy's (1988; 1990) classical method, the color composition is formulated as a summation of the color contributions of the discrete sample points. However the more precise color composition is formulated as differential equations over the color contributions of the continuous sample points. The discrete formulation is used, because analytical solutions to the continuous formulation are hard to find. However we have discovered a semi-analytical solution to the continuous formulation of a typical ray tracing of volume data. We have applied both Levoy's method and ours to the same set of data, and compared the visual quality of both results. The comparison shows that our method produces a more fine grained visualization of volume data.
Banff 07 Classification of Renal Allograft Pathology : Updates and Future Directions

K. Soleza,∗, R. B. Colvinb, L. C. Racusenc, M. Haasc, B. Sisa,d, M. Mengeld, P. F. Hallorand, W. Baldwinc, G. Banfie, A. B. Collinsb, F. Cosiof, D. S. R. Davidg, C. Drachenbergh, G. Einecked, A. B. Fogoi, I. W. Gibsonj, D. Glotzk, S. S. Iskandarl, E. Krausm, E. Lerutn, R. B. Mannono, M. Mihatschp, B. J. Nankivellq, V. Nickeleitr, J. C. Papadimitriouh, P. Randhawas, H. Regelet, K. Renaudinu, I. Robertsv, D. Seronw, R. N. Smithb and M. Valentex
Quality and Safety in Health Care, Part XVIII: Improving Outcomes in Colorectal Surgery

Abstract An important way to improve outcomes after colorectal surgery is to follow the recommendations of the enhanced recovery pathway after surgery (ERAS). The ERAS guidelines are recommendations that address certain aspects of what should be done before surgery, in the operating room, and following surgery. There is a substantial fall in complications and a decrease in the length of stay for the patient if the recommendations are followed. Elements of the ERAS program are now being adopted for other surgical procedures besides colorectal surgery.
Software-Defined Multiplexing Codes

The conventional multiplexing approaches for communication systems demand the pre-specified splitting of resources in time, frequency, space, etc. However, these existing techniques are not flexible when variable messages, such as alert or control information generated by other sources, emerges to be included for transmission during a communication session. In this paper, we propose an innovative idea, namely software-defined multiplexing coding, to efficiently accommodate emerging messages from time to time. Such a new multiplexing paradigm does not demand any additional resource and is very easy to be implemented in real time. The computational complexities of the software-defined multiplexing coding schemes are very low and the asymptotic expected code rate approaches very close to one according to our theoretical analysis.
Eurographics/acm Siggraph Symposium on Computer Animation (2007) Liquid Simulation on Lattice-based Tetrahedral Meshes

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this wor k for per sonal or classr oom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for commer cial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this wor k owned by other s than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with cr edit is permitted. To copy other wise, to republish, to post on ser ver s, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions Dept, ACM Abstract We describe a method for animating incompressible liquids with detailed free surfaces. For each time step, semi-Lagrangian contouring computes a new fluid boundary (represented as a fine surface triangulation) from the previous time step's fluid boundary and velocity field. Then a mesh generation algorithm called isosurface stuffing discretizes the region enclosed by the new fluid boundary, creating a tetrahedral mesh that grades from a fine resolution at the surface to a coarser resolution in the interior. The mesh has a structure, based on the body centered cubic lattice, that accommodates graded tetrahedron sizes but is regular enough to aid efficient point location and to save memory used to store geometric properties of identical tetrahedra. Although the mesh is warped to conform to the liquid boundary, it has a mathematical guarantee on tetrahedron quality, and is generated very rapidly. Each successive time step entails creating a new triangulated liquid surface and a new tetrahedral mesh. Semi-Lagrangian advection computes velocities at the current time step on the new mesh. We use a finite volume discretization to perform pressure projection required to enforce the fluid's incompressibility, and we solve the linear system with algebraic multigrid. A novel thickening scheme prevents thin sheets and droplets of liquid from vanishing when their thicknesses drop below the mesh resolution. Examples demonstrate that the method captures complex liquid motions and fine details on the free surfaces without suffering from excessive volume loss or artificial damping. 1. Introduction Convincingly animating the complex motion of a liquid's surface has proven challenging for both hand and computer-based methods. Currently, the most successful methods use computer simulation of the physical laws that govern real-world liquids. However, real liquids exhibit characteristics, such as fine surface detail and thin structures, that stress the capabilities of even the most …
Road Casualties and Enforcement: Distributional Assumptions of Serially Correlated Count Data

Objective. Road safety data are often in the form of counts and usually temporally correlated. The objective of this research is to investigate the distributional assumptions of road safety data in the presence of temporal correlation. Methods. Using the generalized linear model framework, four distributional assumptions are considered: normal, Poisson, quasi-Poisson and negative binomial, and appropriate models are estimated. Monthly casualty and police enforcement data from Greece for a period of six years (January 1998–December 2003) have been used. The developed models include sinusoidal latent terms to capture the temporal serial correlation of observations. Several statistical goodness-of-fit diagnostic tests have been performed for the results of the estimated models, and the predictive capabilities of the models are investigated. Results. The residuals of the quasi-Poisson and negative binomial models do not show any serial correlation. The signs of the estimated coefficients for all models are consistent and intuitive. In particular, a negative coefficient value for the number of breath alcohol controls indicates that the number of persons killed and seriously injured decreases as the intensity of breath alcohol controls increases. The Poisson model fails to capture the overdispersion in the data, thus underestimating the standard errors of the estimated coefficients. Conclusion. The results suggest that the quasi-Poisson and negative binomial outperform the normal and Poisson models in this application. The findings of this research demonstrate a clear link between the intensification of police enforcement and the reduction of traffic accident casualties. In particular, an increase in the number of breath alcohol controls in Greece after 1998 contributed to a reduction in the number of persons killed and seriously injured from traffic accidents.
Data Resource Profile: Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD)

The Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) is an ongoing primary care database of anonymised medical records from general practitioners, with coverage of over 11.3 million patients from 674 practices in the UK. With 4.4 million active (alive, currently registered) patients meeting quality criteria, approximately 6.9% of the UK population are included and patients are broadly representative of the UK general population in terms of age, sex and ethnicity. General practitioners are the gatekeepers of primary care and specialist referrals in the UK. The CPRD primary care database is therefore a rich source of health data for research, including data on demographics, symptoms, tests, diagnoses, therapies, health-related behaviours and referrals to secondary care. For over half of patients, linkage with datasets from secondary care, disease-specific cohorts and mortality records enhance the range of data available for research. The CPRD is very widely used internationally for epidemiological research and has been used to produce over 1000 research studies, published in peer-reviewed journals across a broad range of health outcomes. However, researchers must be aware of the complexity of routinely collected electronic health records, including ways to manage variable completeness, misclassification and development of disease definitions for research.
Influence of re-dispersible powder on the properties of mortars

This paper presents an experimental study on the effect of a re-dispersible powder on the properties of cement mortars in both fresh and hardened state. The effects of varying contents of re-dispersible powder on the adhesive properties and rheological behavior of mortar in fresh state and on the flexural strength of mortar in hardened state have been investigated. To determine the adhesive properties the probe tack test was used. The tack test results have been exploited to identify the adhesion strength, the cohesion strength and the support’ adherence force. The rheological behavior of the mortars was also considered. It is found that the influence of re-dispersible powder on the properties of fresh mortar is quite small. Re-dispersible powder seems to have only indirect and minor effects on the fresh properties through increase of air content. The flexural strength of mortar is determined by three-point bending test at the age of 2, 7, 14 and 28 days. The results indicate that re-dispersible powder decreases the flexural strength of mortar at early-age. However, it improves the flexural strength of hardened mortar, at which the polymer film has fully formed and spans all the materials.
Face-deidentification in images using Restricted Boltzmann Machines

In this work, we discuss utility of Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) in face-deidentification challenge. GRBM is a generative modeling technique and its unsupervised learning provides vantage of using raw faces data. Faces are deidentified by reconstructed face images from the trained GRBM model. The reconstructed image uses random information from the stochastic units which makes it hard to re-identify from the deidentified face. Experiments show the proposed technique maintain emotions in the test face, which is intrinsic to the modeling capacity of RBM.
Relationship between expression of O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase, glutathione-S-transferase π in glioblastoma and the survival of the patients treated with nimustine hydrochloride: An immunohistochemical analysis

Abstract Drug resistance is one of the important factors that determine tumor response to chemotherapy. Several candidates for resistance to various chemotherapeutic agents have been elucidated. O6-methylguanineDNA methyltransferase (MGMT) removes methylation damage induced by nitrosourea from the O6 position of DNA guanines before cell injury. Glutathione-S-transferase (GST) π is also involved in nitrosourea resistance. We examined the expression of MGMT and GST π in 18 glioblastomas (GBM) using immunohistochemistry and compared the results with patients' survival after administration of 1-(4- amino-2-methyl-5-pyrimidinyl) methyl-3-(2-chloroethyl)-3-nitrosourea hydrochloride (ACNU)-based chemotherapy. According to the Kaplan-Meier's method, although median progression free survival (PFS) of eight patients whose tumors retained high MGMT (3 +~ 2 + ), and 10 patients whose tumors showed low MGMT expression (1 +~ 0) were nine and 15 months, respectively ( p= 0.09), median overall survival (OS) of the two groups were 12 and 22 months, respectively, which were significantly different ( p= 0.01). GST π expression in GBM was not a prognostic factor. It is suggested that GBM with strong staining of MGMT activity may show more resistance to ACNU-based chemotherapy compared to that with low MGMT. The simple immunohistochemical analysis of MGMT in GBM can be a useful method to determine whether ACNU or another treatment regimen should be recommended.
Investigation of Parameters Governing the Damage and Energy Absorption Characteristics of Honeycomb Sandwich Panels

Honeycomb sandwich panels of various skin thicknesses and core densities have been investigated under quasi-static loading in bending and indentation with both hemispherical (HS) and flat-ended (FE) indenters. Core crushing, top skin delamination, and top skin fracture are identified as major damage mechanisms. Their characteristics and energy-absorbing capabilities are established using load—displacement and load—strain curves and inspections of cross-sectioned specimens. The effects of varying skin thickness, core density and type, indenter nose shape, and boundary conditions on the damage and energy-absorbing characteristics are examined. The variation of the indenter nose shape is shown to induce a change in the damage mechanisms and have the most significant effect on energy absorption, especially for panels with relatively thicker skins. Increasing the skin thickness significantly increases not only the initial threshold and ultimate loads but also the absorbed energy (AE) of the panels. Increasing the core density has a very small effect on either the ultimate loads or the energy-absorbing capacity, while the effect of the support conditions on the damage and energy-absorbing characteristics is small. The larger 220 mm diameter panels absorb significantly more energy than the 100 mm diameter panels because of the much greater ultimate displacement. Different core materials with a similar density show little difference in either the damage or the energy-absorbing characteristics due to the limited contribution of transverse shear resistance. Panels with a delaminated top skin have lower threshold loads under both indenters and lower ultimate load for the HS indenter.
Performance Evaluation of the Grade-of-Service-Based Routing Strategies for Optical Networks

The paper is focused on an optical network in which the network operator needs to achieve differentiated connection blocking probability between different classes of lightpath requests. We propose and investigate several routing strategies, which may be used for that purpose, i.e., to maintain the blocking probability of the high priority requests below an assumed value in a broad range of network loads. Simulation results show that all proposed strategies achieve the stated goal, but their performance varies considerably. The paper presents differences in performance of individual strategies.
Audio metadata extraction: The case for Hindustani classical music

To make the vast digital archives of music more easily accessible, it is necessary to have searchable music descriptors, or metadata, that are meaningful and robust. While metadata conventionally covers factual information that accompanies the music on a CD such as genre, composer, artist, it could also include community-contributed semantic labels such as mood or other culture-specific tags. On the other hand, signal processing methods can be used to extract specific musical knowledge from audio signals such as descriptors related to the melody or rhythm which, in turn, depend to a great extent upon the particular music tradition. In this paper, we consider such acoustic metadata in the context of Hindustani classical music. Audio signal processing methods and data representations are discussed for specific retrieval tasks within the musicological basis of the tradition.
Low-Cost Alternatives for Urban Noise Nuisance Monitoring Using Wireless Sensor Networks

Noise pollution caused by vehicular traffic is a common problem in urban environments that has been shown to affect people's health and children's cognition. In the last decade, several studies have been conducted to assess this noise, by measuring the equivalent noise pressure level (called Leq) to acquire an accurate sound map using wireless networks with acoustic sensors. However, even with similar values of Leq, people can feel the noise differently according to its frequency characteristics. Thus, indexes, which can express people's feelings by subjective measures, are required. In this paper, we analyze the suitability of using the psychoacoustic metrics given by the Zwicker's model, instead of just only considering Leq. The goal is to evaluate the hardware limitations of a low-cost wireless acoustic sensor network that is used to measure the annoyance, using two types of commercial and off-the-shelf sensor nodes, Tmote-Invent nodes and Raspberry Pi platforms. Moreover, to calculate the parameters using these platforms, different simplifications to the Zwicker's model based on the specific features of road traffic noise are proposed. To validate the different alternatives, the aforementioned nodes are tested in a traffic congested area of Valencia City in a vertical and horizontal network deployment. Based on the results, it is observed that the Raspberry Pi platforms are a feasible low-cost alternative to increase the spatial-temporal resolution, whereas Tmote-Invent nodes do not confirm their suitability due to their limited memory and calibration issues.
Primary Cutaneous B-Cell Lymphoma: Role of Surgery

PURPOSE To evaluate the role of surgery in patients diagnosed with primary cutaneous B-cell lymphoma (PCBCL) – a rare disease entity. The authors offer a rationale for the use of primary surgical excision in the treatment of isolated cutaneous lymphomas. METHODS A literature review examining the use of primary surgical excision in the treatment of PCBCL was conducted. The lymphoma database at the Juravinski Cancer Centre (Hamilton, Ontario) was searched from January 1995 to July 2008, generating a list of 4924 patients. A simulated computer program was subsequently designed to search for all possible PCBCLs. A retrospective chart review was then conducted on the new list of 1325 patients, identifying 25 patients diagnosed with PCBCL. RESULTS The mean age of the 25 patients with PCBCL was 59.9 years; nine (36%) were treated with surgery, and sixteen (64%) with radiation. The average follow-up period for patients was 3.6 years. Twenty-four of the 25 patients were completely cured, with only one patient recurring in the radiation subgroup. There were no complications in the surgery subgroup. There were two local complications in the radiation subgroup consisting of chronic ulcerations. CONCLUSIONS Primary surgical excision is an effective management option in the treatment of PCBCL, particularly the marginal zone and follicle centre subtypes.