Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Replichard: Towards Tradeoff between Consistency and Performance for Metadata

Metadata scalability is critical for distributed systems as the storage scale is growing rapidly. Because of the strict consistency requirement of metadata, many existing metadata services utilize a fundamentally unscalable design for the sake of easy management, while others provide improved scalability but lead to unacceptable latency and management complexity. Without delivering scalable performance, metadata will be the bottleneck of the entire system. Based on the observation that real file dependencies are few, and there are usually more idempotent than non-idempotent operations, we propose a practical strategy, Replichard, allowing a tradeoff between metadata consistency and scalable performance. Replichard provides metadata services through a cluster of metadata servers, in which a flexible consistency scheme is adopted: strict consistency for non-idempotent operations with dynamic write-lock sharding, and relaxed consistency with accuracy estimations of return values where consistency for idempotent requests is relaxed to achieve high throughput. Write-locks are dynamically created at subtree-level and designated to independent metadata servers in an application-oriented manner. A subtree metadata update that occurs on a particular server is replicated to all metadata servers conforming to the application "start-end" semantics, resulting in an eventually consistent namespace. An asynchronous notification mechanism is also devised to enable users to deal with potential stale reads from operations of relaxed consistency. A prototype was implemented based on HDFS, and the experimental results show promising scalability and performance for both micro benchmarks and various real-world applications written in Pig, Hive and MapReduce.
Towards a Reference Corpus of Web Genres for the Evaluation of Genre Identification Systems

We present initial results from an international and multi-disciplinary research collaboration that aims at the construction of a reference corpus of web genres. The primary application scenario for which we plan to build this resource is the automatic identification of web genres. Web genres are rather difficult to capture and to describe in their entirety, but we plan for the finished reference corpus to contain multi-level tags of the respective genre or genres a web document or a website instantiates. As the construction of such a corpus is by no means a trivial task, we discuss several alternatives that are, for the time being, mostly based on existing collections. Furthermore, we discuss a shared set of genre categories and a multi-purpose tool as two additional prerequisites for a reference corpus of web genres.
Pitfalls of OWL-S: a practical semantic web use case

OWL-S is a combined effort of the Semantic Web and the Web Service community to facilitate an intelligent service provisioning on the Semantic Web. The vision of OWL-S includes automatic service discovery, invocation, composition, orchestration and monitoring of Web-Services through their semantic descriptions. In this paper, we investigate the practical applicability of the current OWL-S specification and show that, in spite of the large momentum of OWL-S, significantly more work needs to be done before the vision of truly intelligent Semantic Web Services can become true. We therefore study the case of an autonomous travel agent that helps users with online hotel arrangements. The aim of our work is twofold: on the one side, we show step-by-step how a prototypical implementation can be realized based on current semantic technologies around UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP. On the other hand, we reveal pitfalls in the current version of OWL-S that severely limit its support for mechanizing service discovery, configuration, combination and automated execution. Throughout the paper, we present practical solutions and workarounds to existing OWL-S shortcomings and hope to therewith further stimulate the ongoing work on Semantic Web Services.
Improving photometric stereo through per-pixel light vector calculation

Photometric Stereo can recover dense (at pixel-level) local surface orientation, but the subsequent reconstruction procedures used to obtain 3D shape of the scene are prone to low frequency geometric distortion. This geometric distortion is mainly due to assumption of collimated light source, to overcome the error due to collimated light source we propose a novel calibration process to dynamically calculate light vectors for each pixel with little additional computation cost. We calculate distance of object from camera using the Lambertian Diffused Maxima (LDM) region, from which the corrected light vector per-pixel is derived and the absolute dimensions of the object can subsequently be estimated. Experiments performed on synthetic as well as real data show the proposed approach offers improved performance, achieving a reduction in the estimated surface normal error of almost 2 degrees.
Quantitative Review of Ecosystem Services and Disservices Studies in the Tropics

The tropics host about 80% of the planet’s terrestrial species and over 95% of its corals. A well-known tropical forest ecosystem to provide significant global regulating services has declined at a rate of 5.5 M ha per year from 1990-2015, while another region noted an increase per year. There is evidence that tropical region ecosystem services and disservices are the least studied in the world. This study quantified peer-review papers in the tropics, then explored the neglected ecosystem type, service category, assessment mode, applied techniques and choice dependence between ecosystem type, service category, assessment mode and applied techniques. The Google Scholar and Web of Science database were used to collect all ES & ED studies available online from 1960 to December 2017. This review covered 102 countries with 578 articles. The study showed dramatic articles increase in the last three years as more than 50% of articles were published after the year of 2014. The top countries in high articles were Mexico (n = 53), India (n = 43), and Brazil (n = 35). The ES & ED assessment tools/techniques are barely applied in tropics as only social based techniques such as interviews and questionnaire take over 45%, while biophysical tools like remote sensing and GIS appeared only in 20%, InVEST only in 3% while the rest tools are less than 1% even none such as ARIES model. Urban and marine ecosystem types, disservices category and trade-off assessment mode were the least studied. The review concluded that policy analysis ES & ED studies do not reflect the trade-offs and synergy analysis between different services which hinder the development of pragmatic policy and decisions toward ES sustainable management in the tropics. The rampant urbanization in the tropics is subjected to destroy existing ES. Thus, this review highly suggested a high concern of urbanization ecosystem. This study also calls for great academic research to give attention to the tropical rainforest region as most African countries to host such forest have not even a single article on ES & ED.
Revisiting a Criminological Classic: The Cycle of Violence

There is a growing “replication crisis” in the social and behavioral sciences, where original research across a wide array of substantive areas has failed to replicate when conducted by others. This problem highlights the importance of carefully revisiting original research—particularly studies that have exerted a significant influence over the field. Accordingly, in the present study, we subject Widom’s classic work, “The Cycle of Violence,” to a rigorous empirical reproduction and extension. We subjected her original data to alternative analytic techniques and to different measurement strategies and model specifications. Our results indicated that although we were able to replicate her original results, the link between childhood physical abuse and violence in adulthood failed to survive the robustness checks we conducted. Instead, childhood neglect emerged as the most robust predictor of adult violence.
One story, one flow: Hidden Markov Story Models for multilingual multidocument summarization

This article presents a multidocument, multilingual, theme-based summarization system based on modeling text cohesion (story flow). Conventional extractive summarization systems which pick out salient sentences to include in a summary often disregard any flow or sequence that might exist between these sentences. We argue that such inherent text cohesion exists and is (1) specific to a particular story and (2) specific to a particular language. Documents within the same story, and in the same language, share a common story flow, and this flow differs across stories, and across languages. We propose using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) as story models. An unsupervised segmental K-means method is used to iteratively cluster multiple documents into different topics (stories) and learn the parameters of parallel Hidden Markov Story Models (HMSM), one for each story. We compare story models within and across stories and within and across languages (English and Chinese). The experimental results support our “one story, one flow” and “one language, one flow” hypotheses. We also propose a Naïve Bayes classifier for document summarization. The performance of our summarizer is superior to conventional methods that do not incorporate text cohesion information. Our HMSM method also provides a simple way to compile a single metasummary for multiple documents from individual summaries via state labeled sentences.
Complexity of Reasoning in Entity Relationship Models

We investigate the complexity of reasoning over various fragments of the Extended Entity-Relationship (EER) language, which include different combinations of the constructors for isa between concepts and relationships, disjointness, covering, cardinality constraints and their refinement. Specifically, we show that reasoning over EER diagrams with isa between relationships is ExpTime-complete even when we drop both covering and disjointness for relationships. Surprisingly, when we also drop isa between relations, reasoning becomes NP-complete. If we further remove the possibility to express covering between entities, reasoning becomes polynomial. Our lower bound results are established by direct reductions, while the upper bounds follow from correspondences with expressive variants of the description logic DL-Lite. The established correspondence shows also the usefulness of DL-Lite as a language for reasoning over conceptual models and ontologies.
Simplified Relative Citation Ratio for Static Paper Ranking: UFMG/LATIN at WSDM Cup 2016

Static rankings of papers play a key role in the academic search setting. Many features are commonly used in the literature to produce such rankings, some examples are citation-based metrics, distinct applications of PageRank, among others. More recently, learning to rank techniques have been successfully applied to combine sets of features producing effective results. In this work, we propose the metric S-RCR, which is a simplified version of a metric called Relative Citation Ratio --- both based on the idea of a co-citation network. When compared to the classical version, our simplification S-RCR leads to improved efficiency with a reasonable effectiveness. We use S-RCR to rank over 120 million papers in the Microsoft Academic Graph dataset. By using this single feature, which has no parameters and does not need to be tuned, our team was able to reach the 3rd position in the first phase of the WSDM Cup 2016.
Argon: Performance Insulation for Shared Storage Servers

Services that share a storage system should realize the same efficiency, within their share of time, as when they have the system to themselves. The Argon storage server explicitly manages its resources to bound the inefficiency arising from inter-service disk and cache interference in traditional systems. The goal is to provide each service with at least a configured fraction (e.g., 0.9) of the throughput it achieves when it has the storage server to itself, within its share of the server--a service allocated 1/nth of a server should get nearly 1/nth (or more) of the throughput it would get alone. Argon uses automaticallyconfigured prefetch/write-back sizes to insulate streaming efficiency from disk seeks introduced by competing workloads. It uses explicit disk time quanta to do the same for non-streaming workloads with internal locality. It partitions the cache among services, based on their observed access patterns, to insulate the hit rate each achieves from the access patterns of others. Experiments show that, combined, these mechanisms and Argon's automatic configuration of each achieve the insulation goal.
ICCAD-2014 CAD contest in incremental timing-driven placement and benchmark suite: Special session paper: CAD contest

Circuit performance is greatly affected by the quality and optimization metrics of placement algorithms. At modern technology nodes, improving routability and reducing total wirelength are no longer sufficient to close timing, as nets may require specialized attention to reduce negative slack. To this end, incremental timing-driven placement (TDP) seeks to address these imposed timing constraints by leveraging timing information during optimization while respecting relative density and displacement thresholds with respect to the original placement. The goal of the ICCAD-2014 Contest is to encourage research in incremental TDP by providing (i) a flexible timing-oriented placement framework, including a publicly-available academic timer, (ii) a set of benchmarks and the associated cell library with timing information and (iii) an evaluation metric that objectively defines the quality of newly-developed algorithms.
SUPPORT VECTOR REGRESSION VIA MATHEMATICA

In this tutorial type paper a Mathematica function for Support Vector Regression has been developed. Summarizing the main definitions and theorems of SVR, the detailed implementation steps of this function are presented and its application is illustrated by solving three 2D function approximation test problems, employing a stronger regularized universal Fourier and a wavelet kernel. In addition, a real world regression problem, forecasting of the peak of flood-wave is also solved. The %numeric and symbolic results show how easily and effectively Mathematica can be used for solving SVR problems.
Genetic Algorithm-Based RBF Neural Network Load Forecasting Model

To overcome the limitation of the traditional load forecasting method, a new load forecasting system basing on radial basis Gaussian kernel function (RBF) neural network is proposed in this paper. Genetic algorithm adopting the real coding, crossover probability and mutation probability was applied to optimize the parameters of the neural network, and a faster convergence rate was reached. Theoretical analysis and simulations prove that this load forecasting model is more practical and has more precision than the traditional one.
Segmentation of nonstationary signals

A very useful and not too restrictive class of models of nonstationary signals is based upon the assumptions that the signals are composed of independent and stationary segments that can be represented by autoregressive models. A usual task is then to find the number of segments of the observed signal, their boundaries, and the best model for each segment. A Bayesian solution to this task is proposed which does not require setting of any thresholds. The technical implementation of the solution is carried out via dynamic programming. The Monte Carlo simulations show excellent results. <<ETX>>
Molecular Targets of Dietary Polyphenols with Anti-inflammatory Properties

There is persuasive epidemiological and experimental evidence that dietary polyphenols have anti-inflammatory activity. Aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) have long been used to combat inflammation. Recently, cyclooxygenase (COX) inhibitors have been developed and recommended for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and osteoarthritis (OA). However, two COX inhibitors have been withdrawn from the market due to unexpected side effects. Because conventional therapeutic and surgical approaches have not been able to fully control the incidence and outcome of many inflammatory diseases, there is an urgent need to find safer compounds and to develop mechanism-based approaches for the management of these diseases. Polyphenols are found in many dietary plant products, including fruits, vegetables, beverages, herbs, and spices. Several of these compounds have been found to inhibit the inflammation process as well as tumorigenesis in experimental animals; they can also exhibit potent biological properties. In addition, epidemiological studies have indicated that populations who consume foods rich in specific polyphenols have lower incidences of inflammatory disease. This paper provides an overview of the research approaches that can be used to unravel the biology and health effects of polyphenols. Polyphenols have diverse biological effects, however, this review will focus on some of the pivotal molecular targets that directly affect the inflammation process.
A Parallel Method for Solving Laplace Equations with Dirichlet Data Using Local Boundary Integral Equations and Random Walks

In this paper, we will present a new approach for solving Laplace equations in general 3-D domains. The approach is based on a local computation method for the DtN mapping of the Laplace equation by combining a deterministic (local) boundary integral equation method and the probabilistic Feynman-Kac formula of PDE solutions. This hybridization produces a parallel algorithm where the bulk of the computation has no need for data communications. Given the Dirichlet data of the solution on a domain boundary, a local boundary integral equation (BIE) will be established over the boundary of a local region formed by a hemisphere superimposed on the domain boundary. By using a homogeneous Dirichlet Green's function for the whole sphere, the resulting BIE will involve only Dirichlet data (solution value) over the hemisphere surface, but over the patch of the domain boundary intersected by the hemisphere, both Dirichlet and Neumann data will be used. Then, firstly, the solution value on the hemisphere surface is computed by the Feynman-Kac formula, which will be implemented by a Monte Carlo walk on spheres (WOS) algorithm. Secondly, a boundary collocation method is applied to solve the integral equation on the aforementioned local patch of the domain boundary to yield the required Neumann data there. As a result, a local method of finding the DtN mapping is obtained, which can be used to find all the Neumann data on the whole domain boundary in a parallel manner. Finally, the potential solution in the whole space can be computed by an integral representation using both the Dirichlet and Neumann data over the domain boundary.
Sliding Mode Based Controller for Magnetostrictive Actuator

Magnetostrictive actuator, for its merits of relatively low voltage and high force, has been increasingly applied in many applications, such as vibration control, aviation, positioner, etc. At low drive level, magnetostrictive actuator presents linear relation between strain or displacement and input voltage or input current, while non-linear appears when applied moderate or high drive level. To achieve accurate control for high drive level, non-linear, including saturation and hysteresis, must be compensated. Sliding mode control, a robust control scheme, can handle these non-linear. As magnetostrictive actuator modelled in Jiles-Atherton model, the relation of magnetic field H and bulk magnetization M, hysteresis, is divided into anhysteresis and deviation from anhysteresis. Saturation can be compensated by inversion of anhysteresis (free-hysteresis) and then, hysteresis, represented as the deviation from anhysteresis, is compensated with sliding mode control. In section I, introduction of magnetostrictive actuator characters and compensation methods for its non-linear is presented. Then, Jiles-Atherton model based on domain wall theory is introduced in section II. Next, the design procedures of sliding-mode controller are given. Control law for GMA position tracking is derived as well. Simulation and its results are shown in Section IV. And the conclusion is made at Section V.
Replacement of the phospholipid-anchor in the contact site A glycoprotein of D. discoideum by a transmembrane region does not impede cell adhesion but reduces residence time on the cell surface

The contact site A (csA) glycoprotein of Dictyostelium discoideum, a cell adhesion molecule expressed in aggregating cells, is inserted into the plasma membrane by a ceramide-based phospholipid (PL) anchor. A carboxyterminal sequence of 25 amino acids of the primary csA translation product proved to contain the signal required for PL modification. CsA is known to be responsible for rapid, EDTA-resistant cohesion of cells in agitated suspensions. To investigate the role of the PL modification of this protein, the anchor was replaced by the transmembrane region and short cytoplasmic tail of another plasma membrane protein of D. discoideum. In cells transformed with appropriate vectors, PL-anchored or transmembrane csA was expressed under the control of an actin promoter during growth and development. The transmembrane form enabled the cells to agglutinate in the presence of shear forces, similar to the PL-anchored wild-type form. However, the transmembrane form was much more rapidly internalized and degraded. In comparison to other cell-surface glycoproteins of D. discoideum the internalization rate of the PL-anchored csA was extremely slow, most likely because of its exclusion from the clathrin-mediated pathway of pinocytosis. Thus, our results indicate that the phospholipid modification is not essential for the csA-mediated fast type of cell adhesion but guarantees long persistence of the protein on the cell surface.
Astrometry of Galactic Star-Forming Region G48.61+0.02 with VERA

We performed the astrometry of H2O masers in the Galactic star-forming region G48.61+0.02 with the VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry (VERA). We derived a trigonometric parallax of 199+/-7 micro as, which corresponds to a distance of 5.03+/-0.19 kpc. The distance to G48.61+0.02 is about a half of its far kinematic distance, which was often assumed previously. This distance places G48.61+0.02 in the Sagittarius-Carina arm and near the active star forming region and the supernova remnant W51. We also obtained the three dimensional motion of G48.61+0.02, and found that it has a large peculiar motion of 40+/-5 km/s. This peculiar motion would be originated with the multiple supernovae explosions in W51, or the streaming motion across the Sagittarius-Carina arm.
Seed based plant propagation algorithm for multiple travelling salesman problem

Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem is a complex problem in which route for a salesman is assigned to visit a city that has various hurdles such as congested road, damaged road, etc. In recent years biologically inspired algorithms are most widely used to solve many optimization problems. Here seed based plant propagation algorithm is applied for the multiple travelling salesman problem that is also a optimization problem, and the result is compared with a short-cut routing algorithm. The result shows that Seed based Propagation Algorithm is easy to implement since it has few parameters to be utilized and also time complexity is reduced when implemented in multiple travelling salesman problem.