Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Trust-Based Detecting Mechanism against Profile Injection Attacks in Recommender Systems

Recommender systems could be applied in grid environment to help grid users select more suitable services by making high quality personalized recommendations. Also, recommendation could be employed in the virtual machines managing platform to measure the performance and creditability of each virtual machine. However, such systems have been shown to be vulnerable to profile injection attacks (shilling attacks), attacks that involve the insertion of malicious profiles into the ratings database for the purpose of altering the system’s recommendation behavior. In this paper we introduce and evaluate a new trust-based detecting algorithm for protecting recommender systems against profile injection attacks. Moreover, we discuss the combination of our trust-based metrics with previous metrics such as RDMA in profile-level and item-level respectively. In the end, we show these metrics can lead to improved detecting accuracy experimentally.
A Fuzzy Cognitive Network Based Control Scheme for An Anaerobic Digestion Process

Fuzzy cognitive networks (FCN) are extensions of the well known fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) so that they operate in direct interconnection with the system they describe. This paper explores the ability of FCNs to control an anaerobic digestion process of a wastewater treatment plant. The design of the appropriate FCN to simulate the operation of the process is proposed first. Then, a control scheme for the process is proposed, which is based on the operational ability of the FCN to interact with the process. The ability of the FCN to control the process is simulated by using data from an experimental anaerobic digestion unit
Synchronization-Driven Dynamic Speed Scaling for MPSoCs

Equalizing the ratios between workloads and speeds of processing elements provides the optimal speed allocation. Based on that principle, this work describes a dynamic speed setting policy for multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) that relies on the estimation of processor idle times specifically due to the synchronization work. The policy provides two advantages: first, it does not rely on any assumption about the communication pattern of the application executed by the system. Second, it is purely architectural; it automatically detects changes in the system workload and sets processors speeds accordingly by means of a custom hardware block. Results on a parallel MPEG video decoding application show an EDP saving above 55%, averaged over several datasets, corresponding to an energy saving above 50%, and a corresponding penalty in performance below 8%
Data-based decision making put to the test

The Dutch government introduced a new educational policy in response to the supposedly declining achievement levels of Dutch students in mathematics and reading comprehension. Schools are required to work in a systematic and goal-oriented way on maximizing the achievement of all students through the use of student progress data. In this dissertation, the effects of a data-based decision making (DBDM) intervention on grade 4 teachers from 60 primary schools were reported. In the first study, the intervention effects on teachers’ teaching efficacy were reported. The results showed that the experimental group of teachers had a significantly higher gain in teacher efficacy than the control group teachers on two (the instructional strategies scale and the student engagement scale) of the three scales while no effects were found for the classroom management scale. Even a year after the intervention had ended, the positive effects on both scales persisted. The focus of the second study was on the effect of the intervention on teachers’ instructional skills, as the implementation of DBDM in the classroom was considered an important element. It was concluded that the intervention had a positive effect on the instructional skills of teachers, and that teachers with varying initial teaching skills can improve their DBDM skills if coached. In the third study, we reported to what extent the intervention impacted students’ perceptions of their teacher’s teaching quality. The intervention did not have any impact on how students perceived their teachers’ skills. The aim of DBDM is to enhance student achievement. Therefore, the effects of the intervention on student achievement was the focus of the last study. The results showed that the intervention had a significant impact on the ability scores of students in the extended instruction group after one school year, an effect size of . 19 was found for these students. Based on the findings recommendations for future research were formulated.
Flexible Dynamic Recommender System

A Recommender System now becoming decision maker for the people who lack sufficient personal experience to evaluate the items that are on website. It provides recommendation for specific items such as books, news, tourism services etc. Personalization is common term for improving online services and attract more users. The previous recommender system like Amazon, Suggest, e-bay provide suggestion for specific items but drawback that service provider can see the ratings of users. It may happen that owner can give more ratings for particular item and can increase product popularity. This results in misguiding to user and privacy is violated. In our flexible recommender system users give ratings for some product in encrypted format, so service provider does not able to decrypt it. In this recommender system users decision time is saved, because time plays vital role in recommender system. During less amount of time user should get more rated products.
Protein Isoaspartate Methyltransferase Prevents Apoptosis Induced by Oxidative Stress in Endothelial Cells: Role of Bcl-Xl Deamidation and Methylation

Background Natural proteins undergo in vivo spontaneous post-biosynthetic deamidation of specific asparagine residues with isoaspartyl formation. Deamidated-isomerized molecules are both structurally and functionally altered. The enzyme isoaspartyl protein carboxyl-O-methyltransferase (PCMT; EC 2.1.1.77) has peculiar substrate specificity towards these deamidated proteins. It catalyzes methyl esterification of the free α-carboxyl group at the isoaspartyl site, thus initiating the repair of these abnormal proteins through the conversion of the isopeptide bond into a normal α-peptide bond. Deamidation occurs slowly during cellular and molecular aging, being accelerated by physical-chemical stresses brought to the living cells. Previous evidence supports a role of protein deamidation in the acquisition of susceptibility to apoptosis. Aim of this work was to shed a light on the role of PCMT in apoptosis clarifying the relevant mechanism(s). Methodology/Principal Findings Endothelial cells transiently transfected with various constructs of PCMT, i.e. overexpressing wild type PCMT or negative dominants, were used to investigate the role of protein methylation during apoptosis induced by oxidative stress (H2O2; 0.1–0.5 mM range). Results show that A) Cells overexpressing “wild type” human PCMT were resistant to apoptosis, whereas overexpression of antisense PCMT induces high sensitivity to apoptosis even at low H2O2 concentrations. B) PCMT protective effect is specifically due to its methyltransferase activity rather than to any other non-enzymatic interactions. In fact negative dominants, overexpressing PCMT mutants devoid of catalytic activity do not prevent apoptosis. C) Cells transfected with antisense PCMT, or overexpressing a PCMT mutant, accumulate isoaspartyl-containing damaged proteins upon H2O2 treatment. Proteomics allowed the identification of proteins, which are both PCMT substrates and apoptosis effectors, whose deamidation occurs under oxidative stress conditions leading to programmed cell death. These proteins, including Hsp70, Hsp90, actin, and Bcl-xL, are recognized and methylated by PCMT, according to the general repair mechanism of this methyltransferase. Conclusion/Significance Apoptosis can be modulated by “on/off” switch partitioning the amount of specific protein effectors, which are either in their active (native) or inactive (deamidated) molecular forms. Deamidated proteins can also be functionally restored through methylation. Bcl-xL provides a case for the role of PCMT in the maintenance of functional stability of this antiapoptotic protein.
Scholarship before Technology: Re-thinking the Relationship between Technology and Scholars

This study provides a review of the literature concerned with some of the underlying implications of technology used by academic researchers. This is a growing area of academic research as a result of the fact that the increasing use of network technologies is rapidly changing many aspects of research activities. Among these changes, it is the qualitative (rather than quantitative) change that merits careful thought and investigation. The article maps the main themes of research on the scholarly use of technology using 106 articles, reports and books across varied disciplines. The review concludes that the current literature has been overshadowed by research with a strong technical emphasis, focusing on large-scale collaboration, and takes a quantitative approach to studying the quantitative impact of technology use in the distributed research of sciences. Empirical research into the qualitative implications of technology use in real-world interdisciplinary research settings (particularly in the social sciences and the humanities) is urgently needed to add conceptual depth to the current analysis of technology use in academia.
Escala de Avaliação das Estratégias Sociais: um estudo de validação com crianças em idade pré-escolar

A Escala de Avaliacao das Estrategias Sociais (EAES; Aguiar, 2007) destina-se a avaliar as estrategias sociais especificas que as criancas em idade pre-escolar utilizam nas tarefas sociais de entrada no grupo de pares, manutencao do jogo e resolucao de conflitos. Neste estudo, avaliamos as caracteristicas psicometricas dos dados obtidos com a EAES e com o Sistema de Avaliacao das Competencias Sociais (SSRS; Gresham & Elliott, 1990) em 349 criancas Portuguesas em idade pre-escolar. Internamente consistentes, correlacionadas com uma medida estabelecida de competencia social, e com algumas variacoes em funcao do sexo e idade das criancas, as estrategias sociais de Manutencao do jogo, Iniciacao harmoniosa, Iniciacao ativa e Resolucao de conflitos poderao relevar-se uteis para a investigacao sobre relacoes entre pares.
Mood and Memory: An Association Between Pattern Separation and Depression

Mood and Memory: An Association Between Pattern Separation and Depression Don J. Shelton Department of Psychology, BYU Master of Science Depression is associated with reduced declarative memory performance and decreased hippocampal volume. Depression has also been associated with decreased levels of adult neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus. Computational models propose that neurogenesis is critical for the computational process of pattern separation, whereby distinct memory representations are created for very similar stimuli and events. It has been proposed that depression negatively impacts pattern separation abilities; however, a link between depression and performance in pattern separation memory tasks has yet to be investigated. Accordingly, we designed a study to investigate the relationship between pattern separation performance and the severity of depression symptoms. Participants completed a recognition memory test with high pattern separation demands as well as a set of questionnaires to gauge their level of depression. We found a negative relationship between depression scores and pattern separation scores in support of the theory that depression is negatively related to pattern separation performance.
Content Based Hierarchical Fast Coding Unit Decision Algorithm for HEVC

Large coding unit which is also known as super macroblock, has already been adopted in the test model of next generation coding standard called high efficiency video coding. The coding unit which is larger than 16x16 and less than or equal to 64x64 provides great bit rate saving while the coding complexity increases dramatically. In this paper, we propose a fast coding unit decision algorithm in either frame level or coding unit level to accelerate encoding procedure. In frame level, by analyzing the utilization rate of coding unit in all depth, we skip several rarely used coding units in specified depth. In coding unit level, the neighbor and co-located coding unit information are referred for further skipping coding unit in unnecessary depth. Results show our proposed algorithm provides averagely 45% total encoding time reduction and negligible drop of rate distortion performance.
Classification de séquences bidirectionnelles pour des tâches d’étiquetage par apprentissage guidé (Bidirectional Sequence Classification for Tagging Tasks with Guided Learning)

Dans cet article nous présentons une série d’adaptations de l’algorithme du “cadre d’apprenstissage guidé” pour résoudre différentes tâches d’étiquetage. La spécificité du système proposé réside dans sa capacité à apprendre l’ordre de l’inférence avec les paramètres du classifieur local au lieu de la forcer dans un ordre pré-défini (de gauche à droite). L’algorithme d’entraînement est basé sur l’algorithme du “perceptron”. Nous appliquons le système à différents types de tâches d’étiquetage pour atteindre des résultats au niveau de l’état de l’art en un court temps d’exécution.
Towards Distributed and Dynamic Task Reallocation

Distributed and dynamic task reallocation in multi-robot organization is motivated by the fact that most critical information for organizational performance must be obtained during problem solving and static techniques for task allocation cannot take the dynamic information into account. This paper presents Distributed Organizational Task Network (DOTN) as a representation for the problem, and proposes two local search techniques: trading tasks and trading responsibilities among robots, for searching the best DOTN based on global feedback. Experiments of an implemented algorithm called SOLO show a number of advantages of this approach, and illustrate some promising future research directions.
Bedside Lung Ultrasound During Acute Chest Syndrome in Sickle Cell Disease

AbstractLung ultrasound (LU) is increasingly used to assess pleural and lung disease in intensive care unit (ICU) and emergency unit at the bedside. We assessed the performance of bedside chest radiograph (CR) and LU during severe acute chest syndrome (ACS), using computed tomography (CT) as the reference standard.We prospectively explored 44 ACS episodes (in 41 patients) admitted to the medical ICU. Three imaging findings were evaluated (consolidation, ground-glass opacities, and pleural effusion). A score was used to quantify and compare loss of lung aeration with each technique and assess its association with outcome.A total number of 496, 507, and 519 lung regions could be assessed by CT scan, bedside CR, and bedside LU, respectively. Consolidations were the most common pattern and prevailed in lung bases (especially postero-inferior regions). The agreement with CT scan patterns was significantly higher for LU as compared to CR (&kgr; coefficients of 0.45 ± 0.03 vs 0.30 ± 0.03, P < 0.01 for the parenchyma, and 0.73 ± 0.08 vs 0.06 ± 0.09, P < 0.001 for pleural effusion). The Bland and Altman analysis showed a nonfixed bias of −1.0 (P = 0.12) between LU score and CT score whereas CR score underestimated CT score with a fixed bias of −5.8 (P < 0.001). The specificity for the detection of consolidated regions or pleural effusion (using CT scan as the reference standard) was high for LU and CR, whereas the sensitivity was high for LU but low for CR. As compared to others, ACS patients with an LU score above the median value of 11 had a larger volume of transfused and exsanguinated blood, greater oxygen requirements, more need for mechanical ventilation, and a longer ICU length of stay.LU outperformed CR for the diagnosis of consolidations and pleural effusion during ACS. Higher values of LU score identified patients at risk of worse outcome.
The Binning of Metagenomic Contigs for Microbial Physiology of Mixed Cultures

So far, microbial physiology has dedicated itself mainly to pure cultures. In nature, cross feeding and competition are important aspects of microbial physiology and these can only be addressed by studying complete communities such as enrichment cultures. Metagenomic sequencing is a powerful tool to characterize such mixed cultures. In the analysis of metagenomic data, well established algorithms exist for the assembly of short reads into contigs and for the annotation of predicted genes. However, the binning of the assembled contigs or unassembled reads is still a major bottleneck and required to understand how the overall metabolism is partitioned over different community members. Binning consists of the clustering of contigs or reads that apparently originate from the same source population. In the present study eight metagenomic samples from the same habitat, a laboratory enrichment culture, were sequenced. Each sample contained 13–23 Mb of assembled contigs and up to eight abundant populations. Binning was attempted with existing methods but they were found to produce poor results, were slow, dependent on non-standard platforms or produced errors. A new binning procedure was developed based on multivariate statistics of tetranucleotide frequencies combined with the use of interpolated Markov models. Its performance was evaluated by comparison of the results between samples with BLAST and in comparison to existing algorithms for four publicly available metagenomes and one previously published artificial metagenome. The accuracy of the new approach was comparable or higher than existing methods. Further, it was up to a 100 times faster. It was implemented in Java Swing as a complete open source graphical binning application available for download and further development (http://sourceforge.net/projects/metawatt).
Is Integration the Best Way to Acculturate? A Reexamination of the Bicultural-Adaptation Relationship in the “ICSEY Dataset” Using the Bilineal Method

The present study reexamined the relationship between biculturalism and adaptation in the ICSEY1 data. The sample consisted of 5,365 immigrants, aged between 13 and 18 years (M = 15.35, SD = 1.56) who were living in 13 different countries. We measured biculturalism bilineally using a range of ICSEY variables akin to acculturation. The study findings revealed that biculturalism was the most preferred acculturation mode across countries and within most of the countries. Biculturalism was positively related to two out of three psychological adaptation measures and one out of two sociocultural adaptation measures across and within most participating countries. The pattern of relationship remained true after controlling for perceived discrimination in the analyses.
Testing the moderating effect of the perceived importance of the coach on the relationship between perceived coaching feedback and athletes’ perceptions of competence

The purpose of this study was to explore whether the importance athletes place on behaviors of their coach moderates the relationship between athletes’ perceptions of their coach’s feedback and their own perceptions of competence. Adult female softball players participating in a competitive league completed questionnaires assessing (a) their perceptions of competence, (b) their perceptions of feedback they typically receive from their coach, and (c) the importance they place on what their coach says and does. Overall, results of various regression analyses provided general support for the hypothesis that a stronger effect of coach feedback on athletes’ perceptions of competence would emerge for those athletes placing greater importance on their coach. This effect was primarily a function of variations in the interpretation of positive and informational feedback. Results are discussed relative to theory and research on coaching behavior and self-perceptions.
Augmenting the novice-expert overlay model in an intelligent tutoring system: Using confidence-weighted linear classifiers

In BioWorld, a medical intelligent tutoring system, novice physicians are tasked with solving virtual patient cases. Whilst the importance of modeling and predicting clinical reasoning is recognized, an important aspect of the learner contribution remains unexplored - the written case summary prepared by the learner. The premise of investigating the case summaries is that it captures the thought and process of the learners in solving the cases; since, the case summaries hold important reasoning information, it makes sense to incorporate it as part of the novice-expert overlay model. In this paper, case summaries written by novices and experts were considered as an addendum to the existing novice-expert overlay model in the BioWorld system. Toward this goal, using a promising new classification method called confidence-weighted linear classifiers, this paper proposes a way to augment the novice-expert overlay model in BioWorld.
Initiation of Biofilm Formation byPseudomonas aeruginosa 57RP Correlates with Emergence of Hyperpiliated and Highly Adherent Phenotypic Variants Deficient in Swimming, Swarming, and Twitching Motilities

ABSTRACT Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a ubiquitous environmental bacterium capable of forming biofilms on surfaces as a survival strategy. It exhibits a large variety of competition/virulence factors, such as three types of motilities: flagellum-mediated swimming, flagellum-mediated swarming, and type IV pilus-mediated twitching. A strategy frequently used by bacteria to survive changing environmental conditions is to create a phenotypically heterogeneous population by a mechanism called phase variation. In this report, we describe the characterization of phenotypic variants forming small, rough colonies that spontaneously emerged when P. aeruginosa 57RP was cultivated as a biofilm or in static liquid cultures. These small-colony (S) variants produced abundant type IV fimbriae, displayed defective swimming, swarming, and twitching motilities, and were impaired in chemotaxis. They also autoaggregated in liquid cultures and rapidly initiated the formation of strongly adherent biofilms. In contrast, the large-colony variant (parent form) was poorly adherent, homogeneously dispersed in liquid cultures, and produced scant polar fimbriae. Further analysis of the S variants demonstrated differences in a variety of other phenotypic traits, including increased production of pyocyanin and pyoverdine and reduced elastase activity. Under appropriate growth conditions, cells of each phenotype switched to the other phenotype at a fairly high frequency. We conclude that these S variants resulted from phase variation and were selectively enriched when P. aeruginosa 57RP was grown as a biofilm or in static liquid cultures. We propose that phase variation ensures the prior presence of phenotypic forms well adapted to initiate the formation of a biofilm as soon as environmental conditions are favorable.