Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
GPU‐Based Nonlinear Ray Tracing

In this paper, we present a mapping of nonlinear ray tracing to the GPU which avoids any data transfer back to main memory. The rendering process consists of the following parts: ray setup according to the camera parameters, ray integration, ray‐object intersection, and local illumination. Bent rays are approximated by polygonal lines that are represented by textures. Ray integration is based on an iterative numerical solution of ordinary differential equations whose initial values are determined during ray setup. To improve the rendering performance, we propose acceleration techniques such as early ray termination and adaptive ray integration. Finally, we discuss a variety of applications that range from the visualization of dynamical systems to the general relativistic visualization in astrophysics and the rendering of the continuous refraction in media with varying density.
Optimizing MAP in Joint Multi-Relational Models for Recommendations in the Academic Network ∗

In this paper, we target at four specific recommendation tasks in the academic environment: the recommendation for author coauthorships, paper citation recommendation for authors, paper citation recommendation for papers, and publishing venue recommendation for author-paper pairs. Different from previous work which tackles each of these tasks separately while neglecting their mutual effect and connection, we propose a joint multirelational model that can exploit the latent correlation between relations and solve several tasks in a unified way. Moreover, for better ranking purpose, we extend the work maximizing MAP over one single tensor, and make it applicable to maximize MAP over multiple matrices and tensors. Experiments conducted over two real world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model: 1) improved performance can be achieved with joint modeling over multiple relations; 2) our model can outperform three state-of-the art algorithms for several tasks.
Immediate-early MEK-1-dependent Stabilization of Rat Smooth Muscle Cell Cyclooxygenase-2 mRNA by Gαq-coupled Receptor Signaling*

Activation of Gαq-coupled P2Y nucleotide receptors strongly (>100-fold) induces the rat vascular smooth muscle cell cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) mRNA, yet transcription is induced only ∼3-fold over 1 h. Intact cell decay analysis of tetracycline-suppressible luciferase chimera mRNAs shows that regulated stabilization of the intrinsically unstable mRNA contributes to this response. Deletion mapping of the 2468-base COX-2 mRNA 3′-untranslated region (UTR) shows that a distal, 130-base AU-rich region functions as a cis-acting regulated stabilization response element, which under basal conditions serves as the dominant instability determinant for the 3′-UTR. Regulation of this response is through the p42/44 MAP kinases, whereas the p38 MAP kinases are not involved. The stabilization response element binds avidly and specifically to a prominent nuclear-enriched ∼90-kDa factor and several less abundantly labeled mRNA binding proteins that are unaffected by P2Y receptor signaling. Although other instability determinants are located throughout the rat COX-2 mRNA 3′-UTR, mitogen signaling only interferes with rapid decay mediated by its most distal 130 bases. A complex of nuclear factors that bind this mRNA region specifically may include candidate targets for regulatory modulation. These observations support the general notion that the rapid induction of immediate-early gene expression through mitogenic receptors involves simultaneous activation of transcriptional and post-transcriptional mechanisms.
A Computational Logic Approach to Syllogisms in Human Reasoning

Abstract. Psychological experiments on syllogistic reasoning have shown that participants did not always deduce the classical logically valid conclusions. In particular, the results show that they had di culties to reason with syllogistic statements that contradicted their own beliefs. This paper discusses syllogisms in human reasoning and proposes a formalization under the weak completion semantics.
XLSearch: A Search Engine for Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are end-user programs and domain models that are heavily employed in administration, financial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, flexible, and direct approach to computation. As a result, institutions are swamped by millions of spreadsheets that are becoming increasingly difficult to manage, access, and control. This note presents the XLSearch system, a novel search engine for spreadsheets. It indexes spreadsheet formulae and efficiently answers formula queries via unification (a complex query language that allows metavariables in both the query as well as the index). But a web-based search engine is only one application of the underlying technology: Spreadsheet formula export to web standards like MathML combined with formula indexing can be used to find similar spreadsheets or common formula errors.
Dynamics of bistable initially curved shallow microbeams: Effects of the electrostatic fringing fields

Effects of fringing electrostatic fields on the behavior of a double clamped initially curved microbeam are investigated. Galerkin's decomposition method is applied on the governing Euler-Bernoulli equation with distributed electrostatic force to obtain the lumped-parameter model of the system. The resulting single degree of freedom model is obtained with the Palmer's formula as a model for the fringing field effects. To derive an applied form of the fringing field effect in lumped model, we have used Genetic Algorithms as an optimization method. Then using the lumped model, we have investigated the system nonlinear dynamics. Comparison of the obtained bifurcation diagrams with the experimental results confirms that neglecting the fringing field effects results in a significant error which should be avoided for accurate molding purposes.
SAT-Based Parallel Planning Using a Split Representation of Actions

Planning based on propositional SAT(isfiability) is a powerful approach to computing step-optimal plans given a parallel execution semantics. In this setting: (i) a solution plan must be minimal in the number of plan steps required, and (ii) non-conflicting actions can be executed instantaneously in parallel at a plan step. Underlying SAT-based approaches is the invocation of a decision procedure on a SAT encoding of a bounded version of the problem. A fundamental limitation of existing approaches is the size of these encodings. This problem stems from the use of a direct representation of actions — i.e. each action has a corresponding variable in the encoding. A longtime goal in planning has been to mitigate this limitation by developing a more compact split — also termed lifted — representation of actions in SAT encodings of parallel step-optimal problems. This paper describes such a representation. In particular, each action and each parallel execution of actions is represented uniquely as a conjunct of variables. Here, each variable is derived from action pre and post-conditions. Because multiple actions share conditions, our encoding of the planning constraints is factored and relatively compact. We find experimentally that our encoding yields a much more efficient and scalable planning procedure over the state-of-the-art in a large set of planning benchmarks.
Evolution and synchronization in ecological networks

Goal To investigate how evolution affects synchronization in ecological networks. Plant and animal populations seldom live in a single homogeneous area, since landscapes are often spatially fragmented into various patches. Migration between different patches may be considerable, especially when patches are not too distant from one another. Such spatially structured populations are described as metapopulations or as ecological networks, where the nodes of the network graph correspond to patches and the graph's arcs to migration flows. Each node may harbor many species and/or various morphs of the same species. If patches have similar geological and climatic characteristics , also the structure of the populations associated with each node are intrinsi-cally similar. In a great number of ecological networks with highly diversified geographical extent and taxa, changes in the abundances of the same population in different patches are highly correlated over time. This property, often called population synchrony, has been documented with reference to many taxa, including aphids and butterflies (Han-Synchrony may arise from two independent mechanisms: (a) migration (dispersal) of populations among patches and (b) dependence of all population dynamics on some common environmental noise (rainfall, water temperature, etc.). The latter mechanism is known as the Moran effect (Moran 1953). (A third mechanism that has been sometimes been mentioned under the notion of entrained synchrony, is based on trophic interactions with populations of other species that are themselves synchronous. This, however, implies the operation of one of the two aforementioned mechanisms and therefore appears to be of lesser interest.) Both mechanisms are almost always present together, and this has generated a large debate about their relative importance. For example , with regard to Canadian lynx, only a few authors believe that the Moran effect is the main one responsible for synchronization (Sinclair et al. 1993, Cazelles and Stone 2003), particularly after the discovery (Shwartz et al. 2002) of high gene flow across distances of 3000 km. By contrast, for Dungeness crabs, even though pelagic dispersal of larvae has been ascertained, Higgins et al. (1997) showed based on a stage-structured model that the Moran effect may lead to large fluctuations with multi-year cycles that seem to be locked. Ecological networks with wild but synchronized local dynamics are so ubiquitous worldwide that one is naturally brought to question whether this might be due to Dar-winian evolution. Since this question, introduced in (Rinaldi 2006), is at the moment 3 addressed only indirectly, and …
A multi-sensor approach for People Fall Detection in home environment

This paper presents a hardware and software framework for reliable fall detection in the home environment, with particular focus on the protection and assistance to the elderly. The integrated prototype includes three di®erent sensors: a 3D Time-Of-Flight range camera, a wearable MEMS accelerometer and a microphone. These devices are connected with custom interface circuits to a central PC that collects and processes the information with a multi-threading approach. For each of the three sensors, an optimized algorithm for fall-detection has been developed and benchmarked on a collected mulitimodal database. This work is expected to lead to a multi-sensory approach employing appropriate fusion techniques aiming to improve system precision and recall.
Investigation by Atomic Force Microscopy of the Structure of Ty3 Retrotransposon Particles

ABSTRACT Ty3, a member of the Metaviridiae family of long-terminal-repeat retrotransposons found in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, encodes homologs of retroviral Gag and Gag-Pol proteins, which, together with genomic RNA, assemble into virus-like particles (VLPs) that undergo processing and reverse transcription. The Ty3 structural proteins, capsid and nucleocapsid, contain major homology and nucleocapsid motifs similar to retrovirus capsid and nucleocapsid proteins, but Ty3 lacks a matrix-like structural domain amino terminal to capsid. Mass spectrometry analysis of Ty3 Gag3 processing products defined an acetylated Ser residue as the amino terminus of Gag3/p34, p27, and CA/p24 species and supported a model where p34 and p27 occur in phosphorylated forms. Using atomic force microscopy, VLPs were imaged from cells producing wild-type and protease and reverse transcriptase mutant Ty3. Wild-type VLPs were found to have a broad range of diameters, but the majority, if not all of the particles, exhibited arrangements of capsomeres on their surfaces which were consistent with icosahedral symmetry. Wild-type particles were in the range of 25 to 52 nm in diameter, with particles in the 42- to 52-nm diameter range consistent with T=7 symmetry. Both classes of mutant VLPs fell into a narrower range of 44 to 53 nm in diameter and appeared to be consistent with T=7 icosahedral symmetry. The smaller particles in the wild-type population likely correspond to VLPs that have progressed to reverse transcription or later stages, which do not occur in the protease and reverse transcriptase mutants. Ty3 VLPs did not undergo major external rearrangements during proteolytic maturation.
Sparse direct solvers with accelerators over DAG runtimes

The current trend in the high performance computing shows a dramatic increase in the number of cores on the shared memory compute nodes. Algorithms, especially those related to linear algebra, need to be adapted to these new computer architectures in order to be efficient. PASTIX is a sparse parallel direct solver, that incorporates a dynamic scheduler for strongly hierarchical modern architectures. In this paper, we study the replacement of this internal highly integrated scheduling strategy by two generic runtime frameworks: DAGUE and STARPU. Those runtimes will give the opportunity to execute the factorization tasks graph on emerging computers equipped with accelerators. As for previous work done in dense linear algebra, we present the kernels used for GPU computations inspired by the MAGMA library and the DAG algorithm used with those two runtimes. A comparative study of the performances of the supernodal solver with the three different schedulers is performed on manycore architectures and the improvements obtained with accelerators are presented with the STARPU runtime. These results demonstrate that these DAG runtimes provide uniform programming interfaces to obtain high performance on different architectures on irregular problems as sparse direct factorizations.
Research Paper: A Simple and Practical Dictionary-based Approach for Identification of Proteins in Medline Abstracts

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to develop a practical and efficient protein identification system for biomedical corpora. DESIGN The developed system, called ProtScan, utilizes a carefully constructed dictionary of mammalian proteins in conjunction with a specialized tokenization algorithm to identify and tag protein name occurrences in biomedical texts and also takes advantage of Medline "Name-of-Substance" (NOS) annotation. The dictionaries for ProtScan were constructed in a semi-automatic way from various public-domain sequence databases followed by an intensive expert curation step. MEASUREMENTS The recall and precision of the system have been determined using 1000 randomly selected and hand-tagged Medline abstracts. RESULTS The developed system is capable of identifying protein occurrences in Medline abstracts with a 98% precision and 88% recall. It was also found to be capable of processing approximately 300 abstracts per second. Without utilization of NOS annotation, precision and recall were found to be 98.5% and 84%, respectively. CONCLUSION The developed system appears to be well suited for protein-based Medline indexing and can help to improve biomedical information retrieval. Further approaches to ProtScan's recall improvement also are discussed.
Isolated and Proximate Illiteracy And Why these Concepts Matter in Measuring Literacy and Designing Education Programmes

Traditionally, a society's literacy has been measured by the 'literacy rate' or the percent of the adult population that is literate. The present paper maintains that the distribution on literates across households also matters, due to the external effects of literacy - the benefits that illiterate members of a household derive from having a literate person in the family. The authors review this argument, draw out its policy implications and present some suggestive data from Bangladesh to lend substance to the hypothesis that an illiterate belonging to a household with no literates in more deprived than an illiterate belonging to a household with at least one literate member.
Local Analysis of Individual-based Viral Dynamic Models with Eigenspace and Eigenvalue Elasticity Analysis

Eigenvalue elasticity methods have been widely applied in analyzing linear and simple nonlinear systems. In this study, we applied this approach to gain insight into the leverage offered by parameter changes in individual-based viral dynamic models for studying and controlling infectious disease spread. We found that such eigenspace based methods encounter severe limitations when applied to nonlinear systems with a relatively large number of state variables. Although eigenvalue elasticity offers some insight into the short-term impact of parameter changes, eigenvalue elasticity method can be complicated and even unwieldy for understanding the impacts of parameter changes for models with a relatively large number of state variables because of eigenvalue multiplicity, co-effects of eigenvalues, eigenvectors and coefficients. In terms of disease control, while such analysis methods could be helpful for identifying policy levers with high short-term impact, it is inefficient. In addition, we found that parameter changes guided by such local techniques are usually insufficient to alter system behaviors in the long-term, such as in the phase of endemic spread in the infectious disease spread. We argue that further work should be focused on refining eigenspace techniques and developing global analysis method to understand the impact of parameter changes on long-term behavior.
The effect of glass upon the activity of the various plasma clotting factors.

Contact of the blood with a foreign surface such as glass initiates clotting not only by disruption of platelets but by the activation of plasma clotting factors. Many explanations have been advanced for the increased coagulability of the plasma. Contact with glass has been said to remove a lipid anti-thromboplastin (anti-cephalin) (1-3), to remove a protein inhibitor of prothrombin (4-6), to activate a plasma thromboplastin precursor (7-10), more specifically, the antihemophilic B factor (Christmas factor') (11), and to convert an in-There is no standard nomenclature for the newer clotting factors. The following terms are used in this paper. Blood thromboplastin is used in its classic meaning of an activity which arises during clotting and which is equivalent in effect to the clotting activity of aqueous tissue extracts. Antihemophilic A factor is the name used for the plasma thromboplastin precursor present in Seitz filtered or barium carbonate absorbed fresh normal plasma, absent from the plasma of most patients with hemophilia and not found in aged normal serum; synonyms are anti-hemophilic globulin and thromboplastino-gen. Antihemophilic B factor is the name used for a different plasma thromboplastin precursor which is found in aged normal serum, is absent from the plasma of an occasional patient with otherwise classical hemophilia and is not found in Seitz filtered or barium carbonate adsorbed fresh normal plasma. Synonyms are plasma thromboplastin component (PTC), plasma thrombo-plastin factor-B (PTF-B), Christmas factor. Procon-vertin is the name given to a stable prothrombin converting substance which can be demopstrated in normal plasma and serum. The terms used to describe procon-vertin activity and the relation of proconvertin to con-vertin are discussed in detail in the body of this paper. Synonyms for proconvertin or for mixtures of procon-vertin and convertin are SPCA, Factor VII, and Stable Factor. Proaccelerin is the name used for the labile accelerator of thrombin formation found in Seitz filtered or barium carbonate adsorbed fresh plasma but not found in aged serum; synonyms are plasma AC globulin and Labile Factor. Accelerin is the name used for the in. -creased accelerator activity which is produced by adding a small amount of thrombin to adsorbed plasma; synonym is serum AC globulin. active precursor of prothrombin (prothrombino-gen) to active prothrombin (12). Furthermore, the effect of glass has been attributed to minute amounts of thrombin adsorbed onto the glass (13). In a preliminary note (14), we said that contact of plasma with glass increases the activity of …
Building Anthropometry-Based Virtual Human Models

Creating realistic virtual humans requires models that resemble real humans both visually and behaviorally. Physical and behavioral fidelity in human modeling is the focus of research and development work at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Human Modeling and Simulation. In this article, we briefly describe the Center's human modeling paradigm, Jack®, and our research activities, including Jack's Spreadsheet Anthropometric Scaling System (SASS) and its Free-Form Deformation model.
Camera assisted multimodal user interaction

Since more processing power, new sensing and display technologies are already available in mobile devices, there has been increased interest in building systems to communicate via different modalities such as speech, gesture, expression, and touch. In context identification based user interfaces, these independent modalities are combined to create new ways how the users interact with hand-helds. While these are unlikely to completely replace traditional interfaces, they will considerably enrich and improve the user experience and task performance. We demonstrate a set of novel user interface concepts that rely on built-in multiple sensors of modern mobile devices for recognizing the context and sequences of actions. In particular, we use the camera to detect whether the user is watching the device, for instance, to make the decision to turn on the display backlight. In our approach the motion sensors are first employed for detecting the handling of the device. Then, based on ambient illumination information provided by a light sensor, the cameras are turned on. The frontal camera is used for face detection, while the back camera provides for supplemental contextual information. The subsequent applications triggered by the context can be, for example, image capturing, or bar code reading.
Enhancing E-learning through data mining in the context of education data

In 21 century, medium of learning has been changed. Electronic learning is becoming a part of everyday usage and everyone is participating in this with full zest to learn and is not very much apart from E-learning. Learning do not comes with any age; learning is now dependent on how much we want to learn from the heaps of abundant knowledge that is being buried under the aegis of E-learning. E-learning is yet to develop, but now to build up the technology for E-learning we have to collect the data and manage in such a way that everyone can take advantage of this, be him a learner, educationist, businessman, socialist or any novice. To overcome the challenges to using data mining in E-learning [18] we have to correlate the situation with the fact. In this paper we will do the perfect research on data mining for educational contents to learn about trends and changes in E-learning. In this synopsis, I will try to make a model which helps us to overcome the challenges to using data mining in E-learning [24]. This model will works on preprocessing and post processing of educational data. The value of this research not only lies within the contemporary research findings, but also on the author's personal experience as a teacher engaged in this form of E-learning [25]. According to research of the researcher after applying review and recommendation techniques in E-learning model we can remove challenges and maintain data in such a manner that every learner will get appropriate data.