Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimization of HW/SW Co-Design: Relevance to Configurable Processor and FPGA Technology

This paper presents a methodology for optimization of HW/SW co-design based on emerging configurable processor and FPGA technologies. This methodology is illustrated by the optimization of a discrete cosine transform (DCT) for image compression based on Tensilica's Xtensa LX core and Xilinx Virtex-II Pro device. The various optimization processes of a 2-D DCT transform, including adding different processor instruction sets onto the base processor to speedup software execution, are described. The results show a 26.76 times speed increase by adding a 4-way SIMD (single instruction multiple data) instruction with moderate hardware cost for a simple 2-D DCT implementation. The optimized 4-way SIMD processor is implemented on the FPGA board to verify the design, and shows a further significant speedup for on-board calculation compared to instruction-set simulation results. The HW vs. SW optimization strategy, speed and HW cost trade-offs, etc. are presented.
Distinctive Properties of the 5′-Untranslated Region of Human Hsp70 mRNA*

A relaxed cap-dependence of translation of the mRNA-encoding mammalian heat shock protein Hsp70 may suggest that its 5′-untranslated region (UTR) possesses an internal ribosome entry site (IRES). In this study, this possibility has been tested in transfected cells using plasmids that express dicistronic mRNAs. Using a reporter gene construct, Renilla luciferase/Photinus pyralis luciferase, we show that the 216-nt long 5′-UTR of Hsp70 mRNA acts as an IRES that directs ribosomes to the downstream start codon by a cap-independent mechanism. The relative activity of this IRES (100-fold over the empty vector) is similar to that of the classical picornaviral IRESs. Additional controls indicate that this high expression of the downstream reporter is not due to readthrough from the upstream cistron, nor is it due to translation of cryptic monocistronic transcripts. The effect of small deletions within the 5′-UTR of Hsp70 mRNA on the IRES activity varies in dependence on their position within the 5′-UTR sequence. With the exception of deletion of nt 33–50, it is small for the 5′-terminal half of the 5′-UTR and rather strong for the 3′-terminal section. However, neither of these small deletions abolishes the IRES activity completely. Excision of larger sections (>50 nt) by truncation of the 5′-UTR from the 5′-end or by internal deleting results in a dramatic impairment of the IRES function. Taken together, these data suggest that the IRES activity of the 5′-UTR of Hsp70 mRNA requires integrity of almost the entire sequence of the 5′-UTR. The data are discussed in terms of a model that allows a three-dimensional rather than linear mode of selection of the initiation region surrounding the start codon of Hsp70 mRNA.
Effect of Addition of Taurine on the Liquid Storage (5°C) of Mithun (Bos frontalis) Semen

The present study was undertaken to assess the effect of taurine on sperm motility, viability, total sperm abnormalities, acrosomal and plasma membrane integrity, enzymatic profiles such as reduced glutathione (GSH), glutathione peroxidase (GPX), superoxide dismutase (SOD), and catalase (CAT), and biochemical profiles such as cholesterol efflux and malondialdehyde (MDA) production. A total of 50 ejaculates were collected twice a week from 8 mithun bulls, and semen was split into 4 equal aliquots and diluted with the TEYC extender. Group 1: semen was without additives (control); groups 2 to 4: semen was diluted with 25 mM, 50 mM, and 100 mM of taurine, respectively. Seminal parameters and enzymatic and biochemical profiles were assessed at 5°C. Inclusion of taurine into diluent resulted in significant (P < 0.05) decreases in percentages of dead spermatozoa, abnormal spermatozoa, and acrosomal abnormalities after liquid storage compared with the control group. Additionally, taurine at 50 mM has significant improvement in quality of mithun semen than taurine at 25 or 100 mM stored in in vitro at 5°C. It was concluded that the possible protective effects of taurine on sperm parameters are from enhancing the function of antioxidant enzymes, preventing efflux of cholesterol from cell membranes and decreased MDA production.
An Investigation of Clearly Spoken Speech and Possibilities of Intelligibility Enhancement by Redistribution of Energy by Kenneth

Several recent studies have examined the differences between speech spoken in a conversational manner and speech spoken in a highly intelligible manner, i.e. clear speech. If these differences can be isolated and quantified, it may be possible to design a signal processing algorithm able to increase the intelligibility of conversational speech by automatically introducing the important properties of clear speech. Specific examples of these two speaking modes are examined to precisely identify where and why intelligibility improvements occur in clear speech. It is shown that a majority of these improvements may be due to a small number of segments in clear speech. While several acoustic measurements are examined to explain why these intelligibility differences occur, the analysis concentrates on segmental energy and power levels. The intelligibility of conversational speech is shown to drastically decrease throughout the course of a sentence, and it is suggested that this is caused primarily by the speaker trailing-off in power level. Clear speech exhibits similar trends, but to much less of an extent. Also, clear speech utterances contain relatively more of their energy in keywords, thereby increasing the signal-to-noise ratio during portions of the sentence crucial to intelligibility. Several conversational utterances are modified to set segmental power levels equal to those of the corresponding segments in the clear speech utterance. Preliminary testing indicates that approximately one-third of the intelligibility gap between clear and conversational speech can be attributed to how the energy of a given sentence is distributed amongst its phonetic segments. Thesis Supervisor: Jae S. Lim Title: Professor of Electrical Engineering
A constructive spiking neural network for reinforcement learning in autonomous control

This paper presents a method that draws upon reinforcement learning to perform autonomous learning through the automatic construction of a spiking artificial neural network. Constructive neural networks have been applied previously to state and action-value function approximation but have encountered problems of excessive growth of the network, difficulty generalising across a range of problems and a lack of clarity in the operation of resultant networks. The results presented here demonstrate that rapid learning of the control of an inverted pendulum can be achieved with automatic construction of an efficient spiking neural network with internal reward-value associations. This provides a new approach to reinforcement learning and automatic neural network construction for autonomous learning.
Determination of appropriate brand entry mode for SOE telecommunication market: A neuro marketing and cross-cultural perspective

Scientist and practitioner interest has focused on branding as an approach of competitive differentiation and as the way to generate short and long-standing competitive advantage, best quality of services and customer value. Nevertheless, less consideration has been dedicated to development of the appropriate branding approach based on neuro marketing, anthropological and cross-cultural research. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate different market entry strategies in terms of branding to provide a starting point for the development of aa appropriate brand strategy in South Eastern Europe (SOE) markets. Our analysis is based on the Croatian and Serbian telecommunications market. The analysis is among others based on empirically data concerning the national cultural dimensions and the experience of the telecommunication companies in SOE. This paper describes possible causes and drivers for the successful implementation of Deutsche Telekom's telecommunications strategy in Croatia and develops, based on comparative analysis and in the scope of a potential entry of the Serbian market by foreign investors, suggestions for the appropriate branding approach which can currently be used as a backing for the branding strategy in telecommunication sector in Serbia.
A Class of Group-Structured LDPC Codes

1 This work was supported by NSF grant 99-96222 Abstract A class of graphs is designed using subgroups of the multiplicative group of a prime field GF(p). Instances where (p-1) is divisible by 3 and 5 are used to construct quasi-cyclic LDPC codes with bit degree 3 and parity degree 5, among them a [155,64,20] code. While the girth of a graph in this class cannot be greater than twelve, for many practical lengths the graphs have a relatively large girth and a lowdensity of short cycles. Simulation studies show that at short to moderate lengths these codes’ performance meets or surpasses that of randomly generated regular (3,5) LDPC codes when used with sum-product algorithm decoders.
Experimental characterization of indoor multiuser shadowing for collaborative cognitive radio

Cross-correlation of multiuser shadowing in an indoor environment at 2.55 GHz is presented, indicating that shadowing is mostly uncorrelated after 2–4 m in the indoor environment. Similar shadowing correlation was obtained for autocorrelation measurements, moving primary (versus moving secondaries), as well as near and far primary measurements.
31P MRS Data Diagnosis of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Based on Support Vector Machine

SVM (Support Vector Machine) is a new machinelearning technique which is developed based on statistical theory and it is applied in the various fields in recent years. We use SVM model based on P MRS (Phosphorus magnetic resonance spectroscopy) data to distinguish three categories of hepatocellular carcinoma, hepatic cirrhosis and normal hepatic tissue. The recognition accuracy of the three categories was obtained, and the classification accuracy of SVM based on polynomial and radial basis function kernel is compared. The result of experiments shows that SVM model based on P MRS data provides diagnostic prediction of liver in vivo, and the performance based on polynomial is better than based on radial basis function kernel. KeywordsSVM; 31P MRS; Kernel Function; Hepatocellular Carcinoma
Modeling Coral Reef Fish Home Range Movements in Dry Tortugas, Florida

Underestimation of reef fish space use may result in marine reserves that are too small to effectively buffer a portion of the stock from fishing mortality. Commonly used statistical home range models, such as minimum convex polygon (MCP) or 95% kernel density (95% KD) methods, require the exclusion of individuals who move beyond the bounds of the tracking study. Spatially explicit individual-based models of fish home range movements parameterized from multiple years of acoustic tracking data were developed for three exploited coral reef fishes (red grouper Epinephelus morio, black grouper Mycteroperca bonaci, and mutton snapper Lutjanus analis) in Dry Tortugas, Florida. Movements were characterized as a combination of probability of movement, distance moved, and turning angle. Simulations suggested that the limited temporal and geographic scope of most movement studies may underestimate home range size, especially for fish with home range centers near the edges of the array. Simulations provided useful upper bounds for home range size (red grouper: 2.28 ± 0.81 km2 MCP, 3.60 ± 0.89 km2 KD; black grouper: 2.06 ± 0.84 km2 MCP, 3.93 ± 1.22 km2 KD; mutton snapper: 7.72 ± 2.23 km2 MCP, 6.16 ± 1.11 km2 KD). Simulations also suggested that MCP home ranges are more robust to artifacts of passive array acoustic detection patterns than 95% KD methods.
Physical, chemical, and biological impacts of intensive forest management on streams draining watersheds in the coastal plain of Alabama

Five watersheds drained by first-order streams and containing timber that was 80+ years old were selected to study the impacts of clearcutting and planting site preparation on water quality in the presence and absence of streamside management zones (SMZs). One watershed was maintained as a reference with no treatment while the remaining 4 were clear cut harvested. Two of the harvested watersheds were clearcut to the stream banks and two maintained 10 m SMZs on each side of the stream. Site preparation included mechanical (shearing, root-raking and windrowing) or chemical, each in the presence and absence of SMZs. Chemical site preparation was accomplished by the aerial application of a mixture of imazapyr plus glyphosate (1.12 plus 3.36 kg ai/ha). Water temperature, sediment yield, periphyton biomass, macroinvertebrate population dynamics, and herbicide off-site movement into streams were measured and differences identified as a function of the treatments versus the reference channel using Randomized Intervention Analysis (RIA). RIA identified differences in water quality among the various treatments at all stages (i.e. harvest and site preparation) of the study. In general, mechanical site preparation resulted in greater impacts on the physical, chemical and biological aspects of water quality than chemical site preparation.
An Improved Genetically Encoded Red Fluorescent Ca2+ Indicator for Detecting Optically Evoked Action Potentials

Genetically encoded Ca2+ indicators (GECIs) are powerful tools to image activities of defined cell populations. Here, we developed an improved red fluorescent GECI, termed R-CaMP1.07, by mutagenizing R-GECO1. In HeLa cell assays, R-CaMP1.07 exhibited a 1.5–2-fold greater fluorescence response compared to R-GECO1. In hippocampal pyramidal neurons, R-CaMP1.07 detected Ca2+ transients triggered by single action potentials (APs) with a probability of 95% and a signal-to-noise ratio >7 at a frame rate of 50 Hz. The amplitudes of Ca2+ transients linearly correlated with the number of APs. The expression of R-CaMP1.07 did not significantly alter the electrophysiological properties or synaptic activity patterns. The co-expression of R-CaMP1.07 and channelrhodpsin-2 (ChR2), a photosensitive cation channel, in pyramidal neurons demonstrated that R-CaMP1.07 was applicable for the monitoring of Ca2+ transients in response to optically evoked APs, because the excitation light for R-CaMP1.07 hardly activated ChR2. These technical advancements provide a novel strategy for monitoring and manipulating neuronal activity with single cell resolution.
Effect of negation in sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is the process to study of people opinion, emotion and way of considering a matter and take decision into different categorizes like positive, negative and neutral in data mining. The sentiment analysis is used to find out negation within the text using Natural Language Processing rules. Our aim is to detect negation affect on consumer reviews which looks like positive but exactly negative in sense. A number of different approaches have been used, but these approaches do not provide efficient and appropriate way of calculating negation sense in sentiment analysis. The proposed modified negation approach presents a way of calculating negation identification and is helpful to improve classification accuracy. Main achievement of this approach is that it is helpful for calculating the negation in sentiment analysis without the words not, no, n't, never etc. This method produced a significant result for review classification by accuracy, precision and recall.
Dynamics of the Condominium Market in Singapore

This study examines economic and market factors that drive the demand, supply, and pricing of condominiums in Singapore using a 2-stage least squares regression methodology. This empirical study covers a sample period of 12 years from 1988 to 2000. The condominium housing demand model showed that GDP growth and the inflation rate had positive relationships with condominium demand one quarter ahead. However, demand for condominiums was negatively related to one-quarter lagged stock price change, two-quarter lagged condominium housing price change, lagged demand in the previous two quarters, and one-quarter lagged household formation. On the supply side, changes in last-quarter condominium housing stock, condominium commencement, the prime lending rate, and current and lagged-quarter labor costs would adversely affect developers? decisions to commence new condominium projects. In the condominium price model, the dummy variable used to test the effects of the government’s anti-speculation policies in May 1996, which increased the supply of residential lands and restricted the loan quantum to a limit of 80% of the housing price, was significant and positive. It implied that the policies were effective in dampening condominium prices by 0.32% per quarter for two consecutive quarters in 4Q1996 and 1Q1997.
Supporting Consumers in Providing Meaningful Multi-Criteria Judgments

The huge amount of products and services that are available online, makes it dicult for consumers to identify oers which are of interest to them. Semantic retrieval techniques for Web Services address this issue, but make the unrealistic assumption that oer descriptions describe a service’s capabilities correctly and that service requests reect a consumer’s actual requirements. As a consequence, they might produce inaccurate results. Alternative retrieval techniques such as collaborative ltering (CF) mitigate those problems, but perform not well in situations where consumer feedback is scarce. As a solution, we propose to combine both techniques. However, we argue that the multi-faceted nature Web Services imposes special requirements on the underlying feedback mechanism, that are only partially met by existing CF solutions. The focus of this paper is on how to elicit consumer feedback that can be eectively used in the context of Web Service retrieval and how to support users in that process. Our main contribution is an algorithm that suggests which service aspects should be judged by a consumer. The approach eectively adjusts to user’s ability and willingness to provide judgments and ensures that the provided feedback is meaningful and appropriate in the context of a certain service interaction.
A design of a drug driver system for controlling an insulin pump and microcontroller hardware implementation using two-point calibration algorithm

The study covered a drug driver system that can be used for continuous glucose monitoring system intended to drive a pump that will administer insulin for the purpose of combating diabetes. The system begins with a microcontroller unit having an analog voltage input that is derived from a calibrated linearity curve relative to that of glucose concentration, the microcontroller algorithm processes the data and determines whether an output of insulin or glucagon is needed. The output of the microcontroller unit is a time variable pulse which is dependent on the glucose concentration reading. Separately, a full custom IC design is conducted for an actual drug driver circuit for the purpose of miniaturization to make the system viable for implantation. The hardware test for the microcontroller unit indicates that the algorithm can be used to properly read glucose concentrations and provide an output accordingly. However, there are delays within the microcontroller which affect the response of the output. For the full custom IC design of the drug driver circuit, it is observed that the parasitic capacitances and resistances affect the propagation delay and power dissipation of the circuit but can still be used in a drug driver system.
Send Orders of Reprints at Reprints@benthamscience.org Use of an Injectable Complex of !-tricalcium Phosphate Granules, Hyaluronate, and Fibroblast Growth Factor-2 on Repair of Unstable Intertrochanteric Fractures

We evaluated effects of an injectable complex of ! -tricalcium phosphate (! -TCP) granules, hyaluronate, and recombinant human fibroblast growth factor-2 (rhFGF-2) on repair of unstable intertrochanteric fractures in elderly patients. Twenty-five patients (range, 76-91 years) having 31.A2 fractures (AO classification) were treated with injection of the complex followed by intramedullary nails. Bone regeneration and ! -TCP resorption, unions of intertrochanteric fractures and displaced lesser trochanters to the shaft, and varus deformity of the femoral neck were assessed by X-ray and CT scans. Fracture union occurred in all cases and union of the displaced lesser trochanter to the shaft was obtained in 24 cases by 12 weeks. It is of interest that ! -TCP granules were completely replaced by bone and marked new bone formation around the lesser trochanter was observed in all cases compared to cases not treated with the complex. This complex is a paste-like material that is easy to handle, and it may be of considerable use in treatment of both unstable intertrochanteric fractures and other cortical bone defects with minimal surgical invasion.
Does an Acquiring Firm's Cash Reserve Have a Negative Wealth Effect in the U.K.? † Shortened title: Cash Reserve Effects for Bidders in the U.K.

Using a sample of U.K. bidder companies from 1984 through 2007, we find that announcement returns are better for bidders of higher excess cash reserve. This suggests that acquisitions by high excess cash reserve bidders are not necessarily value-decreasing as is suggested by the agency theory and found in the U.S. market. Managers may need cash to ensure that all potential good investment opportunities are financed internally if not externally due to high costs of external funds. Moreover, a company of higher excess cash reserve is more likely to be a bidder, and a bidder of higher excess cash reserve has better operating performance than a low-excess-cash-reserve bidder in postacquisition years. Overall, our results suggest that, in the U.K., growth opportunities dominate agency conflicts as the underlying mechanism that drives the wealth effects of corporate cash reserve in acquisitions. This possibly can be explained by the fact that the U.K. regulation of takeovers attempts to ensure that actions taken by managements should be preceded by close shareholder scrutiny.
Combining Myopic Optimization and Tree Search: Application to MineSweeper

Many reactive planning tasks are tackled by optimization combined with shrinking horizon at each time step: the problem is sim- pliﬁed to a non-reactive (myopic) optimization problem, based on the available information at the current time step and an estimate of future behavior, then it is solved; and the simpliﬁed problem is updated at each time step thanks to new information. This is in particular suitable when fast oﬀ-the-shelf components are available for the simpliﬁed problem - optimality stricto sensu is not possible, but good results are obtained at a reasonnable computational cost for highly untractable problems. As machines get more powerful, it makes sense however to go beyond the inherent limitations of this approach. Yet, a brute-force solving of the complete problem is often impossible; we here propose a methodology for embedding a solver inside a consistent reactive planning solver. Our methodology consists in embedding the solver in an Upper- Conﬁdence-Tree algorithm, both in the nodes and as a Monte-Carlo simulator. We show the mathematical consistency of the approach, and then we apply it to a classical success of the myopic approach: the MineSweeper game.