Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An activity-sensitive contention delay model for highly efficient deterministic full-system simulations

As modern systems are integrating exceeding number of components for better performance and functionality, early full-system simulation tools have become essential for validating complex concurrent system interaction activities. In the past decades, many useful timing-accurate system simulation tools have been developed; however, we find that even for the most efficient techniques, more than 90% of overhead occurs when simulating shared devices, such as buses. Instead of adopting the constant-delay model that compromises accuracy or using the time-consuming precise scheduling approach, we propose in this paper an effective system activity-sensitive contention delay model that can dynamically capture runtime contention situations and system configuration changes. To verify the idea, we construct an analytical bus delay model and integrate that into a system simulation tool. The experimental results show 20 to 80 times performance improvement over the scheduling-based bus model on full-system simulations and the estimated timing difference is less than 3%.
AUX1 Promotes Lateral Root Formation by Facilitating Indole-3-Acetic Acid Distribution between Sink and Source Tissues in the Arabidopsis Seedling

Arabidopsis root architecture is regulated by shoot-derived signals such as nitrate and auxin. We report that mutations in the putative auxin influx carrier AUX1 modify root architecture as a result of the disruption in hormone transport between indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) source and sink tissues. Gas chromatography–selected reaction monitoring–mass spectrometry measurements revealed that the aux1 mutant exhibited altered IAA distribution in young leaf and root tissues, the major IAA source and sink organs, respectively, in the developing seedling. Expression studies using the auxin-inducible reporter IAA2::uidA revealed that AUX1 facilitates IAA loading into the leaf vascular transport system. AUX1 also facilitates IAA unloading in the primary root apex and developing lateral root primordium. Exogenous application of the synthetic auxin 1-naphthylacetic acid is able to rescue the aux1 lateral root phenotype, implying that root auxin levels are suboptimal for lateral root primordium initiation in the mutant.
Deletion of TRPC6 Attenuates NMDA Receptor-Mediated Ca2+ Entry and Ca2+-Induced Neurotoxicity Following Cerebral Ischemia and Oxygen-Glucose Deprivation

Transient receptor potential canonical 6 (TRPC6) channels are permeable to Na+ and Ca2+ and are widely expressed in the brain. In this study, the role of TRPC6 was investigated following ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) and oxygen-glucose deprivation (OGD). We found that TRPC6 expression was increased in wild-type (WT) mice cortical neurons following I/R and in primary neurons with OGD, and that deletion of TRPC6 reduced the I/R-induced brain infarct in mice and the OGD- /neurotoxin-induced neuronal death. Using live-cell imaging to examine intracellular Ca2+ levels ([Ca2+]i), we found that OGD induced a significant higher increase in glutamate-evoked Ca2+ influx compared to untreated control and such an increase was reduced by TRPC6 deletion. Enhancement of TRPC6 expression using AdCMV-TRPC6-GFP infection in WT neurons increased [Ca2+]i in response to glutamate application compared to AdCMV-GFP control. Inhibition of N-methyl-d-aspartic acid receptor (NMDAR) with MK801 decreased TRPC6-dependent increase of [Ca2+]i in TRPC6 infected cells, indicating that such a Ca2+ influx was NMDAR dependent. Furthermore, TRPC6-dependent Ca2+ influx was blunted by blockade of Na+ entry in TRPC6 infected cells. Finally, OGD-enhanced Ca2+ influx was reduced, but not completely blocked, in the presence of voltage-dependent Na+ channel blocker tetrodotoxin (TTX) and dl-α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole propionic acid (AMPA) blocker CNQX. Altogether, we concluded that I/R-induced brain damage was, in part, due to upregulation of TRPC6 in cortical neurons. We postulate that overexpression of TRPC6 following I/R may induce neuronal death partially through TRPC6-dependent Na+ entry which activated NMDAR, thus leading to a damaging Ca2+ overload. These findings may provide a potential target for future intervention in stroke-induced brain damage.
Spatially Navigating the Semantic Web for User Adapted Presentations of Cultural Heritage Information in Mobile Environments

The integration of local and global information is an essential requirement for future location-based services. The development of two technologies for mobile devices, namely positioning devices like GPS and wireless communication networks, is encouraging the development of new kinds of spatial-and context-aware applications. The CHI project investigates the applicability of these technologies for context-aware mobile computing applications that take advantage of new metadata-standards to enable semantic, user and device adapted services in the field of Tourism and Cultural Heritage management and presentation.
Relationship between Pregnancy Stress and Anxiety in High-Risk Pregnant Women: The Mediating Effects of Sense of Mastery

This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between pregnancy stress and anxiety in high-risk, pregnant Korean women and the mediating effect of the sense of mastery. The participants in this study were 118 high-risk pregnant women. They were diagnosed with high-risk pregnancy during the 20th–38th weeks of gestation at university hospitals between March 3 rd , 2015, and March 30th, 2015, and they either visited obstetrics and gynecology outpatient clinics for prenatal examinations or entered delivery rooms. Collected data were analyzed with IBM SPSS Statistics 22 program. Participants’ general and obstetric characteristics were analyzed using descriptive statistics, such as frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation. The relationship between the participants’ pregnancy stress, anxiety, and sense of mastery was investigated using the Pearson's correlation coefficient. In order to investigate the mediating effect of the sense of mastery on the relationship between the participants' pregnancy stress and anxiety, a multiple regression analysis was conducted. To investigate the significance of the mediating effect, the Sobel test was conducted. We confirmed that the sense of mastery exerted a significant partial mediating effect on the influence of the participants' pregnancy stress on anxiety. This study is significant since it empirically verified that the anxiety of high-risk pregnant women decreased as the pregnancy stress decreased and as the sense of mastery increased. Based on the findings of the present study, future studies should focus on developing prenatal intervention programs aimed at the prevention and management of high-risk pregnant women's anxiety and on investigating the effectiveness of such programs.
Neural networks and SVM for heartbeat classification

The diagnosis of cardiac dysfunctions requires the analysis of long-term ECG signal recordings, often containing hundreds to thousands of heartbeats. The purpose of this work is to propose a diagnostic system for modelling and classification of heartbeat, by use of time features and Support vector machines (SVM) classification algorithm. Neural Networks learning allow us to select a features of each heart beat on the basis of Generalized Orthogonal Forward Regression (GOFR) algorithm and a library of 132 Gaussians with different standard deviations and different means, each beat is represented by five Gaussians with different amplitudes. The parameters of this system are determined and its performance is evaluated for the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. For a database of 364 normal heartbeats and 1148 abnormal heartbeats, we apply the SVM algorithm with Radial Basis Function kernel. Our results demonstrate that the testing performance of the neural network and SVM diagnostic system is found to be very satisfactory with a recognition rate of 99.67%.
FPGA implementation of a low-complexity fading filter for multipath Rayleigh fading simulator

A low-complexity high performance Rayleigh fading simulator and its Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation are presented. This proposed method is a variant of the method of filtering of the white Gaussian noise where the filter design is accomplished in the analog domain and transferred into digital domain. The proposed method outperforms AR(20) filter and modified Jakes' generators in performance. Although IDFT method achieves the best performance, it brings a significant cost in storage. The proposed method achieves high performance with the lowest complexity, and its performance has been verified on commercially available FPGA platforms.
Finding the smallest image of a set

We describe an algorithm for finding a canonical image of a set of points under the action of a permutation group. Specifically if we order images by sorting them and ordering the resulting sequences lexicographically, we find the first image. This has applications to combinatorial and other search problems, allowing isomorphic results to be eliminated more efficiently.We give worst-case asymptotic running time estimates and practical results obtained with a GAP implementation.
Staphylococcus aureus Shifts toward Commensalism in Response to Corynebacterium Species

Staphylococcus aureus–human interactions result in a continuum of outcomes from commensalism to pathogenesis. S. aureus is a clinically important pathogen that asymptomatically colonizes ~25% of humans as a member of the nostril and skin microbiota, where it resides with other bacteria including commensal Corynebacterium species. Commensal Corynebacterium spp. are also positively correlated with S. aureus in chronic polymicrobial diabetic foot infections, distinct from acute monomicrobial S. aureus infections. Recent work by our lab and others indicates that microbe–microbe interactions between S. aureus and human skin/nasal commensals, including Corynebacterium species, affect S. aureus behavior and fitness. Thus, we hypothesized that S. aureus interactions with Corynebacterium spp. diminish S. aureus virulence. We tested this by assaying for changes in S. aureus gene expression during in vitro mono- versus coculture with Corynebacterium striatum, a common skin and nasal commensal. We observed a broad shift in S. aureus gene transcription during in vitro growth with C. striatum, including increased transcription of genes known to exhibit increased expression during human nasal colonization and decreased transcription of virulence genes. S. aureus uses several regulatory pathways to transition between commensal and pathogenic states. One of these, the quorum signal accessory gene regulator (agr) system, was strongly inhibited in response to Corynebacterium spp. Phenotypically, S. aureus exposed to C. striatum exhibited increased adhesion to epithelial cells, reflecting a commensal state, and decreased hemolysin activity, reflecting an attenuation of virulence. Consistent with this, S. aureus displayed diminished fitness in experimental in vivo coinfection with C. striatum when compared to monoinfection. These data support a model in which S. aureus shifts from virulence toward a commensal state when exposed to commensal Corynebacterium species.
Iowa Gambling Task (IGT): twenty years after – gambling disorder and IGT

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) involves probabilistic learning via monetary rewards and punishments, where advantageous task performance requires subjects to forego potential large immediate rewards for small longer-term rewards to avoid larger losses. Pathological gamblers (PG) perform worse on the IGT compared to controls, relating to their persistent preference toward high, immediate, and uncertain rewards despite experiencing larger losses. In this contribution, we review studies that investigated processes associated with poor IGT performance in PG. Findings from these studies seem to fit with recent neurocognitive models of addiction, which argue that the diminished ability of addicted individuals to ponder short-term against long-term consequences of a choice may be the product of an hyperactive automatic attentional and memory system for signaling the presence of addiction-related cues (e.g., high uncertain rewards associated with disadvantageous decks selection during the IGT) and for attributing to such cues pleasure and excitement. This incentive-salience associated with gambling-related choice in PG may be so high that it could literally “hijack” resources [“hot” executive functions (EFs)] involved in emotional self-regulation and necessary to allow the enactment of further elaborate decontextualized problem-solving abilities (“cool” EFs). A framework for future research is also proposed, which highlights the need for studies examining how these processes contribute specifically to the aberrant choice profile displayed by PG on the IGT.
Question recommendation for collaborative question answering systems with RankSLDA

Collaborative question answering (CQA) communities rely on user participation for their success. This paper presents a supervised Bayesian approach to model expertise in on-line CQA communities with application to question recommendation, aimed at reducing waiting times for responses and avoiding question starvation. We propose a novel algorithm called RankSLDA which extends the supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation model by considering a learning-to-rank paradigm. This allows us to exploit the inherent collaborative effects that are present in CQA communities where users tend to answer questions in their topics of expertise. Users can thus be modeled on the basis of the topics in which they demonstrate expertise. In the supervised stage of the method we model the pairwise order of expertise of users on a given question. We compare RankSLDA against several alternative methods on data from the Cross Validate community, part of the Stack Exchange network. RankSLDA outperforms all alternative methods by a significant margin.
Vertical edge-based mapping using range-augmented omnidirectional vision sensor

Laser range finder and omnidirectional cameras are becoming a promising combination of sensors to extract rich environmental information. This information includes textured plane extraction, vanishing points, catadioptric projection of vertical and horizontal lines, or invariant image features. However, many indoor scenes do not have enough texture information to describe the environment. In these situations, vertical edges could be used instead. This study presents a sensor model that is able to extract three-dimensional position of vertical edges from a range-augmented omnidirectional vision sensor. Using the unified spherical model for central catadioptric sensors and the proposed sensor model, the vertical edges are locally projected, improving the data association for mapping and localisation. The proposed sensor model was tested using the FastSLAM algorithm to solve the simultaneous localisation and mapping problem in indoor environments. Real-world qualitative and quantitative experiments are presented to validate the proposed approach using a Pioneer-3DX mobile robot equipped with a URG-04LX laser range finder and an omnidirectional camera with parabolic mirror.
Performance and Quality of Random Number Generators

Random number generation continues to be a critical component in much of computational science and the tradeoff between quality and computational performance is a key issue for many numerical simulations. We review the performance and statistical quality of some well known algorithms for generating pseudo random numbers. Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are a powerful platform for accelerating computational performance of simulations and random numbers can be generated directly within GPU code or from hosting CPU code. We consider an alternative approach using high quality and genuinely “random” deviates generated using a Quantum device and we report on how such a PCI bus device can be linked to a CPU program. We discuss computational performance and statistical quality tradeoffs of this architectural model for Monte Carlo simulations such as the Ising system.
DNA damage response induces structural alterations in histone H3–H4

Synchrotron-radiation circular-dichroism spectroscopy was used to reveal that the DNA damage response induces a decrement of α-helix and an increment of β-strand contents of histone H3–H4 extracted from X-ray–irradiated human HeLa cells. The trend of the structural alteration was qualitatively opposite to that of our previously reported results for histone H2A–H2B. These results strongly suggest that histones share roles in DNA damage responses, particularly in DNA repair processes and chromatin remodeling, via a specific structural alteration of each histone.
Analysis of simulation factorial experiments by EDF resample statistics

The output from simulation factorial experiments can be complex and may not be amenable to standard methods of estimation like ANOVA. We consider the situation where the simulation output may not satisfy normality assumptions, but more importantly, where there may be differences in output at different factor combinations, but these are not simply differences in means. We show that EDF statistics can provide a similar but potentially more sensitive analysis to that provided by ANOVA. Moreover, we show that with the use of resampling, we can generate accurate critical values for tests of hypothesis under much weaker conditions than those required for ANOVA tests. The method is illustrated with an example based on an actual simulation experiment comparing two methods of operating a production facility under different production levels.
A Lookahead Planner Guided by Relational Decision Trees

In this paper we describe the version of the planner ROLLER submitted to the learning track of the International Planning Competition. This version, learns domain dependent general policies with the aim of improving a lookahead strategy for forward search planning. ROLLER performs the policy learning in a two-step classification process with the relational classifier TILDE. At the first step the classifier captures the preferred operator to be applied in the different planning contexts. At the second step the classifier captures the preferred bindings for each operator in the different planning contexts. In this version of ROLLER a planning context is specified by the helpful actions of the current state, the problem goals, the static predicates of the problem and the last action applied.
Engaged Cohorts: Can Gamification Engage All College Students in Class?

Many gamification designs in education do effectively mobilize students to some extent. Yet, there is still very little research to account for the specific influence on each student. It is essential to determine whether the students can be engaged by gamification in terms of various psychological factors. In this paper, the game element point was chosen to design the experiment. The experiments were used to engage students to ask more questions in class. The results indicated that gamified designs were effective in engaging people who were bashful or distracted. In addition, students were engaged more easily in social circumstances through a comparison of individual and social interactions. This research provides fertile ground for further gamification designs in education.
Optimizing TCP forwarder performance

A TCP forwarder is a network node that establishes and forwards data between a pair of TCP connections. An example of a TCP forwarder is a firewall that places a proxy between a TCP connection to an external host and a TCP connection to an internal host, controlling access to a resource on the internal host. Once the proxy approves the access, it simply forwards data from one connection to the other. We use the term TCP forwarding to describe indirect TCP communication via a proxy in general. This paper characterizes the behavior of TCP forwarding, and illustrates the role TCP forwarding plays in common network services like firewalls and HTTP proxies. We then introduce an optimization technique, called connection splicing, that can be applied to a TCP forwarder, and report the results of a performance study designed to evaluate its impact. Connection splicing improves TCP forwarding performance by a factor of two to four, making it competitive with IP router performance on the same hardware.
Prediction of prosodic phrase boundaries considering variable speaking rate

The paper proposes a model for predicting the prosodic phrase boundaries of speech with variable speaking rates. Speakers can produce a sentence in several ways without altering its meaning or naturalness, i.e., a sequence of words can have a number of prosodic phrase boundaries. There are many factors which influence the variability of prosodic phrasing, such as syntactic structure, focus, speaker differences, speaking rate and the need to breathe. We adopt dependency grammar, similar to link grammar, to efficiently combine speaking rates. The proposed model reduced prosodic phrase boundary prediction error by 20% compared to the model using only syntactic information. We show a potential way to make use of a read speech corpus in the training of prosodic phrasing for spontaneous speech. The proposed model is expected to make synthesized speech more natural and improve the robustness of spontaneous speech recognition.
Control of probabilistic systems under dynamic, partially known environments with temporal logic specifications

We consider the synthesis of control policies for probabilistic systems, modeled by Markov decision processes, operating in partially known environments with temporal logic specifications. The environment is modeled by a set of Markov chains. Each Markov chain describes the behavior of the environment in each mode. The mode of the environment, however, is not known to the system. Two control objectives are considered: maximizing the expected probability and maximizing the worst-case probability that the system satisfies a given specification.
UniDrive: Synergize Multiple Consumer Cloud Storage Services

Consumer cloud storage (CCS) services have become popular among users for storing and synchronizing files via apps installed on their devices. A single CCS, however, has intrinsic limitations on networking performance, service reliability, and data security. To overcome these limitations, we present UniDrive, a CCS app that synergizes multiple CCSs (multi-cloud) by using only few simple public RESTful Web APIs. UniDrive follows a server-less, client-centric design, in which synchronization logic is purely implemented at client devices and all communication is conveyed through file upload and download operations. Strong consistency of the metadata is guaranteed via a quorum-based distributed mutual-exclusive lock mechanism. UniDrive improves reliability and security by judiciously distributing erasure coded files across multiple CCSs. To boost networking performance, UniDrive leverages all available clouds to maximize parallel transfer opportunities, but the key insight behind is the concept of data block over-provisioning and dynamic scheduling. This suite of techniques masks the diversified and varying network conditions of the underlying clouds, and exploits more the faster clouds via a simple yet effective in-channel probing scheme. Extensive experimental results on the global Amazon EC2 platform and a real-world trial by 272 users confirmed significantly superior and consistent sync performance of UniDrive over any single CCS.