Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
KStreams: Kernel Support for Efficient End-to-End Data Streaming

Technology advances are enabling increasingly dataintensive applications, ranging from peer-to-peer file sharing, to multimedia, to remote graphics and data visualization. One outcome is the considerable memory pressure imposed on the machines involved, caused by application-specific data movements and by repeated crossings of user/kernel boundaries. We address this problem with a novel system service, termed KStreams, a general facility for manipulating data without using intermediate buffers when it moves across multiple kernel objects, like files or sockets. KStreams may be used to implement kernel-level services that range from applicationspecific implementations of sendfile commands, to data mirroring or proxy functions, to fast path data conversions and transformations for data streaming. The KStreams API permits individual applications to define fast path operations, which will then execute at kernel level and if desired, without further application involvement. By placing applicationspecific data manipulations into data movement fast paths, user/kernel boundary crossings are avoided. By operating on data streams ‘in-flight’, data buffering is made unnecessary, thereby further reducing the memory pressure imposed on machines. KStreams is implemented on Linux kernel version 2.4. 22. Its evaluation uses data-intensive tasks performed in conjunction with modern web services, such as proxy functions, remote media streaming, data visualization, etc. Initial experiences with the KStreams implementation are encouraging. Fast path data transformation via KStreams results in increased throughput of 20-50% compared to user-level data manipulations. Future work with KStreams uses it with complex multi-machine web services, evaluated with representative user loads and applications.
SAR tomography from sparse samples

Three dimensional (3-D) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image formation provides the scene reflectivity estimation along azimuth, range and elevation co-ordinates. For 3-D image focusing multiple signals, acquired along different orbits, are required. The practical application of the focusing methods requires that non-uniformly spaced acquisition orbits have to be considered. In this paper we propose a technique exploiting the Compressive Sampling theory, and assuming that the image to be focused has a sparse representation along the elevation directions, which amounts to suppose that only few point-like scatterers with different elevation are present in the same range-azimuth resolution cell. Numerical results on simulated data show the good performance of the method.
SIMOP-A fast tool for generating optimum dilutions of microfluidic samples using simulation

The technology of digital microfluidic (DMF) biochips now offers viable replacement of expensive healthcare and bio-, chemical laboratory procedures with low-cost, fully-automated, miniaturized integrated systems. Preparing dilution of a fluid sample that optimizes various parameters such as reagent-cost, mixing time, waste production, is a basic problem in the domain of algorithmic microfluidics. Most of the existing dilution algorithms used in droplet-based microfluidic systems deploy a sequence of (1 : 1) mix-split steps, where two unit-volume droplets of different concentrations are mixed, followed by a balanced split operation to obtain two equal-sized droplets. In this paper, we introduce a simulation-guided optimization procedure (SIMOP) for achieving the target concentrations with a sequence of (1 : 1) mix-split steps while optimizing multiple factors according to user-specified priority levels. The SIMOP-algorithm produces a given concentration while optimizing each criterion as desired. Experimental results favorably demonstrate the performance of the proposed method compared to BS and DMRW algorithms. The proposed procedure may find many potential applications to microfluidics such as in' biomedical engineering and healthcare services.
Prediction and characterization of novel epitopes of serotype A foot-and-mouth disease viruses circulating in East Africa using site-directed mutagenesis

Epitopes on the surface of the foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) capsid have been identified by monoclonal antibody (mAb) escape mutant studies leading to the designation of four antigenic sites in serotype A FMDV. Previous work focused on viruses isolated mainly from Asia, Europe and Latin America. In this study we report on the prediction of epitopes in African serotype A FMDVs and testing of selected epitopes using reverse genetics. Twenty-four capsid amino acid residues were predicted to be of antigenic significance by analysing the capsid sequences (n = 56) using in silico methods, and six residues by correlating capsid sequence with serum–virus neutralization data. The predicted residues were distributed on the surface-exposed capsid regions, VP1–VP3. The significance of residue changes at eight of the predicted epitopes was tested by site-directed mutagenesis using a cDNA clone resulting in the generation of 12 mutant viruses involving seven sites. The effect of the amino acid substitutions on the antigenic nature of the virus was assessed by virus neutralization (VN) test. Mutations at four different positions, namely VP1-43, VP1-45, VP2-191 and VP3-132, led to significant reduction in VN titre (P value = 0.05, 0.05, 0.001 and 0.05, respectively). This is the first time, to our knowledge, that the antigenic regions encompassing amino acids VP1-43 to -45 (equivalent to antigenic site 3 in serotype O), VP2-191 and VP3-132 have been predicted as epitopes and evaluated serologically for serotype A FMDVs. This identifies novel capsid epitopes of recently circulating serotype A FMDVs in East Africa.
Manufacturing strategies in action: the case of electro-electronic domestic appliances (EDA)

The companies’ manufacturing strategies are frequently conceived at business strategic levels and put into practice along their value chains. Based on a company’s position, mission, values and vision, strategic planning defines a trajectory, as well as the requirements for the company’s organizational and management processes. Often, there is a gap between the highest hierarchical level and the operational levels with respect to the implementation of strategies. Based upon a literature review, this paper proposes a model that integrates the production processes to the strategic management levels. This model is implemented as a Strategic Manufacturing Management System (SMMS), which establishes a coherent set of strategic management processes for the manufacture function. SMMS is fundamentally structured as a multileveled Balanced Scorecard (BSC) that creates rationalities to plan, implement and control strategies. The decision-making, communication and learning processes are carried out by means of the strategic management system. The management system is monitored and evolves according to a selected set of measurements that gives the final form to the strategic management system. The SMMS was tested in an electro-electronic appliances company and the results from the first year since its implementation are presented. The proposed model is guided by the BSC architecture, but it also uses specific techniques, procedures and tools that were customized for the company at issue. The final result is a guiding framework for the integration, design, implementation and management of a manufacturing strategy.
Comparative genomic analysis of unicellular to seed plants by using gene functions of A . thaliana

Availability of the genome sequences of more plants makes it possible to address some of the major questions regarding plants by comparative genomic analysis [1, 2]. A lot of genome sequencing projects are ongoing and one of the projects is for the lycophyte Selaginella moellendorfii, which is considered to be ancestral or primitive for vascular plants and have the impact for unraveling several questions in plant evolution [3]. In this study, we have developed a gene classification system, in which gene functions of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana have been manually curated based on references. By using this system, we performed the comparative genomic analyses of five genome sequences of the plants, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, Physcomitrella patens, S. moellendorfii, A. thaliana, and Oryza sativa.
Is Value Sufficient? Empirical Research on the Impact of Value and Trust on Intention

Online shopping is said to be easy, fun, and time saving. Yet, the real experience is often different from that predicted. What is the reason for this? What are the obstacles to online applications? We develop scenarios about the relative importance of value and trust in online shopping. Empirical analysis of a survey of 220 consumers shows that both value and trust are vital to consumers’ intentions with respect to online shopping. In particular, security is the key factor to trust, while playfulness plays a relatively important role in consumer perceived usefulness of online shopping. These findings imply that a website should implement a set of comprehensive security mechanisms and, at the same time, continually improve the consumer’s experience of playfulness.
Cyclic LTI systems and the paraunitary interpolation problem

Cyclic signal processing refers to situations where all the time indices are interpreted modulo some integer L. Since the frequency domain is a uniform discrete grid, there is more freedom in theoretical and design aspects. The basics of cyclic (L) multirate systems and filter banks have already appeared in the literature, and important differences between the cyclic and noncyclic cases are known. Since there is a strong connection between paraunitary filter banks and orthonormal wavelets, some deeper questions pertaining to cyclic (L) paraunitary matrices are addressed in this paper. It is shown that cyclic (L) paraunitary matrices do not in general have noncyclic paraunitary FIR interpolants, though IIR interpolants can always be constructed. It is shown, as a consequence, that cyclic paraunitary systems cannot in general be factored into degree one nonrecursive paraunitary building blocks. The connection to unitariness of the cyclic state space realization is also addressed.
Could Regulation of Alternative Types of E-Money Reduce Systemic Risks and Costs?

This paper considers criteria for regulators to accept non-official currencies that could make a contribution in reducing systemic risks and costs. Cell phone technology has made practical the re-introduction of negative interest rate/cost carrying money widely introduced privately in Europe and the US during the Great Depression. Fisher and Keynes supported the private issue of cost carrying notes and in this century Buiter has described the benefits of negative interest rate money. Four options for regulators to accept it are considered: (1) a government issue redeemable into legal tender as proposed by the US Bankhead-Pettengill Bill of 1933; (2) private issues redeemable into official money as occurred during the Great Depression that has remerged in Germany; (3) private issues convertible into specified commodities as occurred in Europe in the 1920’s; and (4) a unit of value defined by the retail value of electricity generated from benign sustainable resources of the host bio-region. Arguments for regulators to accommodate the emergence of bio-regional Sustainable Energy Dollars are: (i) establish a stable unit of value not directly affected by governments, their central banks or alien markets; (ii) protect regional financial systems from contagion and improve their resilience; (iii) reduce the cost of finance and democratise its availability; (iv) improve the efficiency and equity of the financial system; (v) allow the creation of money to be controlled in each bio-region by mutually owned and controlled organisations rather than by governments or alien for-profit technology firms; (vi) establish market values, prices and costs to distribute the global population according to the carrying capacity of each bio-region; (vii) reduce market failure in allocating sustainable resources and mitigate the need for carbon taxing and/or trading.
A novel Ray-Space interpolation method based on hierarchical prediction

Ray-Space Interpolation is one of the key technologies in the free viewpoint television system. In this paper, a novel Ray-Space interpolation method based on hierarchical prediction is proposed. Firstly, disparity is estimated and optimized by our proposed bi-direction PDE method, then hierarchical prediction structure is proposed to interpolate the virtual views. Experimental results show that both the performance and the robustness of the proposed algorithm are much higher than the traditional block matching based interpolation (BMI) and the inter-slice correlation based method.
New Approach to Mixed H2/H∞ Filtering for Polytopic Continuous-time Systems

This paper discusses the problem of mixed H2/H∞ filtering for continuous-time systems. In the case where the state-space matrices of the system depend affinely on the uncertain parameters, it is known that recently developed extended or dilated linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) are effective to assess the robust performance in a less conservative fashion. In this paper, the filter is designed by using different Lyapunov matrices to the mixed performances. These ideas are realized by introducing additional slack variables to the well-established performance conditions and by employing new bounding techniques, which results in a much less conservative filter design method. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the effectiveness and advantage of the developed filter design method
Real-time rotation invariant face detection based on cost-sensitive AdaBoost

This paper presents a novel method of detecting faces at any degree of rotation in the image plane based on cost-sensitive AdaBoost (CS-AdaBoost) algorithm. The method first employs a cascade of very simple classifiers trained by CS-AdaBoost to determine the possible orientation of each input window and then uses an upright face detector also trained by CS-AdaBoost to verify the derotated face candidate. The training procedures for both classifiers are also given in the paper. Experimental results show that the proposed method gives higher detection ratio and real-time detection speed compared to the conventional ones.
MAPK SIGNALING PATHWAY ANALYSIS ESD . 342 FINAL PROJECT REPORT – MAY 16 , 2006

Various biological systems have been represented as networks, and a significant subset of such representations is seen in cellular biology. Three distinct sets of network studies can be made in this topic, namely metabolic pathway networks, protein interaction networks, and genetic regulatory networks. Our study looks at a protein interaction networks and metabolic pathways. We have analyzed protein datasets for three different species from two different data sources. We have attempted to quantify regularities and trends, in the form of basic statistics and community structures. Comparisons are made across the pathways of the three species, as well as their equivalent random networks. A topic of core interest in this study was the application of a motifs analysis to the protein network.
Stability Analysis Of Adaptive Blind Source Separation

Recently a number of adaptive learning algorithms have been proposed for blind source separation. Although the underlying principles and approaches are dierent, most of them have very similar forms. Two important issues have remained to be elucidated further: the statistical eciency and the stability of learning algorithms. The present letter analyzes a general form of statistically ecient algorithm and give a necessary and sucient condition for the separating solution to be a stable equilibrium of a general learning algorithm. Moreover, when the separating solution is unstable, a simple method is given for stabilizing the separating solution by modifying the algorithm.
The Generalization of Prior Uncertainty during Reaching

Bayesian statistics defines how new information, given by a likelihood, should be combined with previously acquired information, given by a prior distribution. Many experiments have shown that humans make use of such priors in cognitive, perceptual, and motor tasks, but where do priors come from? As people never experience the same situation twice, they can only construct priors by generalizing from similar past experiences. Here we examine the generalization of priors over stochastic visuomotor perturbations in reaching experiments. In particular, we look into how the first two moments of the prior—the mean and variance (uncertainty)—generalize. We find that uncertainty appears to generalize differently from the mean of the prior, and an interesting asymmetry arises when the mean and the uncertainty are manipulated simultaneously.
Prevention of calcification in bioprosthetic heart valves: challenges and perspectives

Surgical replacement with artificial devices has revolutionised the care of patients with severe valvular diseases. Mechanical valves are very durable, but require long-term anticoagulation. Bioprosthetic heart valves (BHVs), devices manufactured from glutaraldehyde-fixed animal tissues, do not need long-term anticoagulation, but their long-term durability is limited to 15 – 20 years, mainly because of mechanical failure and tissue calcification. Although mechanisms of BHV calcification are not fully understood, major determinants are glutaraldehyde fixation, presence of devitalised cells and alteration of specific extracellular matrix components. Treatments targeted at the prevention of calcification include those that target neutralisation of the effects of glutaraldehyde, removal of cells, and modifications of matrix components. Several existing calcification-prevention treatments are in clinical use at present, and there are excellent mid-term clinical follow-up reports available. The purpose of this review is to appraise basic knowledge acquired in the field of prevention of BHV calcification, and to provide directions for future research and development.
A Puzzling Story: The Cyclical Behavior of Price-cost Margins / Eine verwirrende Geschichte: Das zyklische Verhalten von Preis-Kosten-Margen

Summary Some recent empirical studies reveal countercyclical price-cost margins. From a microeconomic point of view this is not plausible because for the overwhelming number of industries, profits are highest in boom. As indicators of profitability price-cost margins should be procyclical. However, it will be shown that a margin relying on marginal cost can behave countercyclically or remains constant even with procyclical profits. A margin based on average cost is a better indicator of the development of profits. Therefore, empirical analysts should not regard different definitions of price-cost margins as equivalent. Zusammenfassung In einigen neueren empirischen Arbeiten erwiesen sich Preis-Kosten-Margen als kontrazyklisch. Aus mikroökonomischer Sicht erscheint dies unplausibel, weil die Gewinne in den meisten Branchen in Boomzeiten am höchsten sind, und daher Preis-Kosten-Margen als Gewinnindikatoren prozyklisch sein sollten. Es wird gezeigt, daß sich Preis-Grenzkostenmargen trotz einer prozyklischen Gewinnentwicklung kontrazyklisch verhalten oder konstant bleiben können. Eine Preis-Durchschnittskostenmarge zeigt die Gewinnentwicklung dagegen besser an. Die empirische Aussagekraft unterschiedlicher Preis-Kosten-Margen kann daher keineswegs als äquivalent betrachtet werden.
Boosting Classification Accuracy Using Feature Fusion

Abstract. Improving classification accuracy for high dimensional dataset such as microarray is one of hot issues. Feature selection is general way to improve the accuracy by removing useless features from original dataset. In this paper, we propose a way to enhance classification accuracy using Feature Fusion Method (FFM) in addition to general feature selection schemes. Feature fusion means generating new features from combinations of original features by fusing them, i.e computing averages and multiplications of feature pairs. Proposed method is easy to understand and implement. It also can be merged with any kinds of feature selection and classification algorithms. To evaluate the performance of our method we have done experiments on 8 datasets and compared classification accuracies of original datasets and new datasets from FFM. The experiment results showed that FFM boosted the classification accuracy in many cases.
International Trade and American Wages in General Equilibrium, 1967 - 1995

In the last quarter century, wage inequality has increased dramatically in the United States. At the same time, the US has become more integrated into the world economy prices of final goods have changed, the capital stock has more than doubled has become steadily more educated. This paper estimates a flexible, empirical equilibrium model of wage determination in an attempt to sort out the connections between these trends. Aggregate data on prices and quantities of imports, outputs, and factor supplies are constructed from disaggregate sources. The econometric analysis concludes that wage inequality has been partly driven by changes in relative factor supplies and relative final goods prices. In contrast, imports have played a negligible direct role.
The Role of the Indonesian Throughflow in the Indo–Pacific Climate Variability in the GFDL Coupled Climate Model

Abstract The impacts of the Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) on the tropical Indo–Pacific climate, particularly on the character of interannual variability, are explored using a coupled general circulation model (CGCM). A pair of CGCM experiments—a control experiment with an open ITF and a perturbation experiment in which the ITF is artificially closed—is integrated for 200 model years, with the 1990 values of trace gases. The closure of the ITF results in changes to the mean oceanic and atmospheric conditions throughout the tropical Indo–Pacific domain as follows: surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific (Indian) Ocean warm (cool), the near-equatorial Pacific (Indian) thermocline flattens (shoals), Indo–Pacific warm-pool precipitation shifts eastward, and there are relaxed trade winds over the tropical Pacific and anomalous surface easterlies over the equatorial Indian Ocean. The character of the oceanic changes is similar to that described by ocean-only model experiments, though the amplitude of.