Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Composable Message Semantics for Distributed Computing

Most object-oriented languages offer a limited number of invocation semantics. At best, they define a default mode of synchronous invocation, plus some keywords to express additional semantic attributes, e.g. synchronization. The very few approaches that offer rich libraries of invocation abstractions introduce significant overhead and do not support the composition of those abstractions. This paper describes a pragmatic approach for abstracting invocation semantics with emphasize on remote invocations. Invocation semantics, such as synchronous, asynchronous, remote, transactional or replicated, are all considered first class citizens. Using an interesting combination of the Strategy and Decorator design patterns, we suggest an effective way to compose various invocation semantics. We completely separate the class definition from the invocation semantics of its methods and we go a step further towards full polymorphism: the invocation of the same method can have different semantics on two objects of the same class. The very same invocation on a given object may even vary according to the client performing the invocation.
Distributed multimedia plays with QoS guarantees over IP

Musical collaboration over telecommunication networks has marvellous possibilities when it comes to musical education, practise and performance. The deployment and use of high-capacity digital networks makes it possible to obtain end-to-end audio and video latency of 5-20 milliseconds, which is similar to the audio time delay typically experienced between musicians on a stage. The main challenge of reaching this latency budget over digital packet switched network such as the Internet, is how to control the queuing delay of the IP packet experienced at each router on the network paths between each participating musician. Other important aspects are video and audio codec latency, and error resilient tools needed to cope with situations where IP packets arrive too late or have been lost in the network. We give an overview of resent research (work-in-progress) in this field, including network simulations, conducted at the NTNU, and suggest how these techniques can be utilized under live concert performances.
Heat Shock Protein 70 Prevents Hyperoxia-Induced Disruption of Lung Endothelial Barrier via Caspase-Dependent and AIF-Dependent Pathways

Exposure of pulmonary artery endothelial cells (PAECs) to hyperoxia results in a compromise in endothelial monolayer integrity, an increase in caspase-3 activity, and nuclear translocation of apoptosis-inducing factor (AIF), a marker of caspase-independent apoptosis. In an endeavor to identify proteins involved in hyperoxic endothelial injury, we found that the protein expression of heat-shock protein 70 (Hsp70) was increased in hyperoxic PAECs. The hyperoxia-induced Hsp70 protein expression is from hspA1B gene. Neither inhibition nor overexpression of Hsp70 affected the first phase barrier disruption of endothelial monolayer. Nevertheless, inhibition of Hsp70 by using the Hsp70 inhibitor KNK437 or knock down Hsp70 using siRNA exaggerated and overexpression of Hsp70 prevented the second phase disruption of lung endothelial integrity. Moreover, inhibition of Hsp70 exacerbated and overexpression of Hsp70 prevented hyperoxia-induced apoptosis, caspase-3 activation, and increase in nuclear AIF protein level in PAECs. Furthermore, we found that Hsp70 interacted with AIF in the cytosol in hyperoxic PAECs. Inhibition of Hsp70/AIF association by KNK437 correlated with increased nuclear AIF level and apoptosis in KNK437-treated PAECs. Finally, the ROS scavenger NAC prevented the hyperoxia-induced increase in Hsp70 expression and reduced the interaction of Hsp70 with AIF in hyperoxic PAECs. Together, these data indicate that increased expression of Hsp70 plays a protective role against hyperoxia-induced lung endothelial barrier disruption through caspase-dependent and AIF-dependent apoptotic pathways. Association of Hsp70 with AIF prevents AIF nuclear translocation, contributing to the protective effect of Hsp70 on hyperoxia-induced endothelial apoptosis. The hyperoxia-induced increase in Hsp70 expression and Hsp70/AIF interaction is contributed to ROS formation.
Networks as Barriers to Innovators -the Case of Car Distribution in the European Union

Both from inside the industry and from outside actors, there is a high pressure for major innovations in the Sales & Distribution system for cars. But so far only minor changes can be found. Why? In our analysis of the European situation we have found that OEMs, importers and dealers traditionally co-operate for maintaining status quo. IT-based middlemen started an innovative process in 1999. The IT crisis came while they were attacking the barriers of entry. They lost their financial power and had to partly withdraw from the marketplace. Another important issue is that customers obviously are not yet ready for changing their behaviour they prefer to kick the tires instead of clicking the (Internet) button. For the incumbents, the trade-off between the possible benefits from a more cost efficient S&D system and the risks of changing something that works but is costly is negative. In our opinion, future innovations will therefore take place stepwise or evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
ReferralWeb--a resource location system guided by personal relations

We describe the design and implementation of ReferralWeb, a system for identifying experts on keyword queries and generating a path of social relations by which to contact them. This system models and extracts existing social and professional relationships in the computer science community by mining publicly available documents on the internet. Using similar techniques, experts are also isolated from indexed web documents. A user interface combines the reconstructed social network and search engines to allow exploration and visualization of one’s local personal network. We describe interviews and experiments which indicate that the current prototype fulfills a need not addressed by other public services. Finally, possible solutions for improved robustness and further evolution are proposed. Thesis Supervisor: David R. Karger Title: Assistant Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Policy and network-based intrusion detection system for IPv6-enabled wireless sensor networks

The recent years realize a progressive transition where fixed computing reached maturity and the mobility age started to thrive. Nowadays, another transition from the mobility age to the “Internet of Everything” (IoE) is taking place. In the IoE vision, several types of quotidian objects will be able to communicate over the Internet. As a result, it is expected that within a decade, IoE will have an economic value of $14.4 trillion, as the number of devices connected to the Internet continues to increase exponentially. The support for security services in these emerging resource-constrained devices is considered a challenge but needs to take into account from the very early stages of the wireless network inception. This paper proposes a network-based intrusion detection system (IDS) for IPv6-enabled wireless sensor networks. The proposed IDS is used to detect security attacks based on traffic signatures and abnormal behaviors.
Quercetin Suppresses Cyclooxygenase-2 Expression and Angiogenesis through Inactivation of P300 Signaling

Quercetin, a polyphenolic bioflavonoid, possesses multiple pharmacological actions including anti-inflammatory and antitumor properties. However, the precise action mechanisms of quercetin remain unclear. Here, we reported the regulatory actions of quercetin on cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), an important mediator in inflammation and tumor promotion, and revealed the underlying mechanisms. Quercetin significantly suppressed COX-2 mRNA and protein expression and prostaglandin (PG) E(2) production, as well as COX-2 promoter activation in breast cancer cells. Quercetin also significantly inhibited COX-2-mediated angiogenesis in human endothelial cells in a dose-dependent manner. The in vitro streptavidin-agarose pulldown assay and in vivo chromatin immunoprecipitation assay showed that quercetin considerably inhibited the binding of the transactivators CREB2, C-Jun, C/EBPβ and NF-κB and blocked the recruitment of the coactivator p300 to COX-2 promoter. Moreover, quercetin effectively inhibited p300 histone acetyltransferase (HAT) activity, thereby attenuating the p300-mediated acetylation of NF-κB. Treatment of cells with p300 HAT inhibitor roscovitine was as effective as quercetin at inhibiting p300 HAT activity. Addition of quercetin to roscovitine-treated cells did not change the roscovitine-induced inhibition of p300 HAT activity. Conversely, gene delivery of constitutively active p300 significantly reversed the quercetin-mediated inhibition of endogenous HAT activity. These results indicate that quercetin suppresses COX-2 expression by inhibiting the p300 signaling and blocking the binding of multiple transactivators to COX-2 promoter. Our findings therefore reveal a novel mechanism of action of quercetin and suggest a potential use for quercetin in the treatment of COX-2-mediated diseases such as breast cancers.
DOPE: Distributed Optimization for Pairwise Energies

We formulate an Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) that systematically distributes the computations of any technique for optimizing pairwise functions, including non-submodular potentials. Such discrete functions are very useful in segmentation and a breadth of other vision problems. Our method decomposes the problem into a large set of small sub-problems, each involving a sub-region of the image domain, which can be solved in parallel. We achieve consistency between the sub-problems through a novel constraint that can be used for a large class of pairwise functions. We give an iterative numerical solution that alternates between solving the sub-problems and updating consistency variables, until convergence. We report comprehensive experiments, which demonstrate the benefit of our general distributed solution in the case of the popular serial algorithm of Boykov and Kolmogorov (BK algorithm) and, also, in the context of non-submodular functions.
GTPase-1, Is Inducible by IFNs A Giant GTPase, Very Large Inducible

The complex, partially overlapping, cellular responses to IFN type I (IFN- (cid:1) and - (cid:2) ) and IFN type II (IFN- (cid:3) ) involve several hundred genes that can be largely classiﬁed in terms of speciﬁc cellular programs functional in innate and adaptive immunity. Among these programs are previously unconsidered mechanisms of cell-autonomous resistance against various pathogens mediated by dedicated, largely novel families of GTPases. We report here the identiﬁcation and characterization of a new GTPase family that contributes to the cellular response to both type I and type II IFNs. We name this family the very large inducible GTPases (VLIGs). The prototype VLIG, VLIG-1, is a strongly IFN-inducible, soluble, cytosolic and nuclear protein of 280 kDa. The open reading frame of VLIG-1 is encoded on a single very large exon, and outside the canonical GTP-binding motifs, sequence and structural prediction suggest a unique family without signiﬁcant relationship to other known protein families. Within the GTPase superfamily the VLIG family is more closely related to IFN-inducible GTPases mediating cell-autonomous resistance than to other GTPase families. In addition, we provide evidence that VLIG-1 is polymorphic in mice of different genetic backgrounds and is a member of a small gene family on mouse chromosome 7 with a conserved homologue located on human chromosome 11. The Journal of Immunology, 2003, 171: 1255–1265.
A Genome-Scale Investigation of Incongruence in Culicidae Mosquitoes

Comparison of individual gene trees in several recent phylogenomic studies from diverse lineages has revealed a surprising amount of topological conflict or incongruence, but we still know relatively little about its distribution across the tree of life. To further our understanding of incongruence, the factors that contribute to it and how it can be ameliorated, we examined its distribution in a clade of 20 Culicidae mosquito species through the reconstruction and analysis of the phylogenetic histories of 2,007 groups of orthologous genes. Levels of incongruence were generally low, the three exceptions being the internodes concerned with the branching of Anopheles christyi, with the branching of the subgenus Anopheles as well as the already reported incongruence within the Anopheles gambiae species complex. Two of these incongruence events (A. gambiae species complex and A. christyi) are likely due to biological factors, whereas the third (subgenus Anopheles) is likely due to analytical factors. Similar to previous studies, the use of genes or internodes with high bootstrap support or internode certainty values, both of which were positively correlated with gene alignment length, substantially reduced the observed incongruence. However, the clade support values of the internodes concerned with the branching of the subgenus Anopheles as well as within the A. gambiae species complex remained very low. Based on these results, we infer that the prevalence of incongruence in Culicidae mosquitoes is generally low, that it likely stems from both analytical and biological factors, and that it can be ameliorated through the selection of genes with strong phylogenetic signal. More generally, selection of genes with strong phylogenetic signal may be a general empirical solution for reducing incongruence and increasing the robustness of inference in phylogenomic studies.
INFERENCE FOR THE MULTIVARIATE NORMAL INVERSE GAUSSIAN MODEL

Multivariate Normal Inverse Gaussian model is obtained as mean-variance mixture of multivariate Normal distribution. The resulting distribution, while having heavier tails, it also accommodates skewness something not common to many multivariate distributions. In the present paper we propose Maximum likelihood estimation for the multivariate Normal Inverse Gaussian model through an EM type algorithm. Properties of the distribution are also discussed. A financial application is also given to illustrate the proposed methodology.
Different Resting State EEG Features in Children from Switzerland and Saudi Arabia

Background: Cultural neuroscience is an emerging research field concerned with studying the influences of different cultures on brain anatomy and function. In this study, we examined whether different cultural or genetic influences might influence the resting state electroencephalogram (EEG) in young children (mean age 10 years) from Switzerland and Saudi Arabia. Methods: Resting state EEG recordings were obtained from relatively large groups of healthy children (95 healthy Swiss children and 102 Saudi Arabian children). These EEG data were analyzed using group independent components analyses (gICA) and conventional analyses of spectral data, together with estimations of the underlying intracortical sources, using LORETA software. Results: We identified many similarities, but also some substantial differences with respect to the resting state EEG data. For Swiss children, we found stronger delta band power values in mesial frontal areas and stronger power values in three out of four frequency bands in occipital areas. For Saudi Arabian children, we uncovered stronger alpha band power over the sensorimotor cortex. The additionally measured theta/beta ratio (TBR) was similar for Swiss and Saudi Arabian children. Conclusions: The different EEG resting state features identified, are discussed in the context of different cultural experiences and possible genetic influences. In addition, we emphasize the importance of using appropriate EEG databases when comparing resting state EEG features between groups.
A CONSUMER ONTOLOGY ANALYSIS TOOL

Ontologies capture domain knowledge in a generic way and provide a commonly agreed upon understanding. As such, they are becoming the backbone of the Semantic Web which has as a primary role the sharing of knowledge among Internet users. Numerous ontologies are being developed and published across varying domains such as biomedical, computational linguistics, and business. Development and deployment of extensive ontology-based software solutions represent considerable challenges in terms of the amount of time and effort required to construct the ontology. These challenges can be addressed by the reuse of ontologies. In some domain areas such as e-commerce, recent research indicates that a major concern in the development and maintenance of ontologies for products and services is " the terminological dynamics in markets " [Hepp et al 2005]. Such domains would greatly benefit from research to improve the ontology maintenance process so that the acquisition of dynamic domain vocabulary could be more timely and comprehensive. Another important issue for many Semantic Web applications is the need for interoperability between interacting software agents, each having their own but different ontologies. In this case, the objective is not reuse of an existing ontology but instead one of communication between the two software agents. Establishing a level of semantic interoperability between the two could require both agents to evaluate the quality and usefulness of the other agent's ontology. An ontology analysis tool could assist in the process of ontology evaluation for re-use, facilitate monitoring the development and maintenance of ontologies, and help each agent to determine characteristics of the other agent's ontology for assessing the degree of semantic interoperability. This presentation describes the research, implementation, and evaluation undertaken in order to develop an ontology analysis tool that can help address issues related to ontology re-use, maintenance and interoperability. By examining the current ontology evaluation research literature and reviewing metrics research in other areas such as conceptual modeling, software development, information systems development, and information retrieval, suites of metrics have been identified and incorporated into an ontology analysis tool. First, an overview of related research discusses the various approaches to ontology evaluation. Ontology evaluation is a broad research area. Different frameworks have been proposed for evaluating how " good an ontology is. " Some like One-T [Bouillon et al 2002] consider evaluating the content of the ontology for completeness, consistency and correctness in terms of lack of inconsistencies, redundancy and errors. Others suggest developing …
High Performance Software in Multidimensional Reduction Methods for Image Processing with Application to Ancient Manuscripts

Multispectral imaging is an important technique for improving the readability of written or printed text where the letters have faded, either due to deliberate erasing or simply due to the ravages of time. Often the text can be read simply by looking at individual wavelengths, but in some cases the images need further enhancement to maximise the chances of reading the text. There are many possible enhancement techniques and this paper assesses and compares an extended set of dimensionality reduction methods for image processing. We assess 15 dimensionality reduction methods in two different manuscripts. This assessment was performed both subjectively by asking the opinions of scholars who were experts in the languages used in the manuscripts which of the techniques they preferred and also by using the Davies-Bouldin and Dunn indexes for assessing the quality of the resulted image clusters. We found that the Canonical Variates Analysis (CVA) method which was using a Matlab implementation and we have used previously to enhance multispectral images, it was indeed superior to all the other tested methods. However it is very likely that other approaches will be more suitable in specific circumstance so we would still recommend that a range of these techniques are tried. In particular, CVA is a supervised clustering technique so it requires considerably more user time and effort than a non-supervised technique such as the much more commonly used Principle Component Analysis Approach (PCA). If the results from PCA are adequate to allow a text to be read then the added effort required for CVA may not be justified. For the purposes of comparing the computational times and the image results, a CVA method is also implemented in C programming language and using the GNU (GNUs Not Unix) Scientific Library (GSL) and the OpenCV (OPEN source Computer Vision) computer vision programming library.
Reconstitution of human RNA interference in budding yeast

Although RNA-mediated interference (RNAi) is a widely conserved process among eukaryotes, including many fungi, it is absent from the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Three human proteins, Ago2, Dicer and TRBP, are sufficient for reconstituting the RISC complex in vitro. To examine whether the introduction of human RNAi genes can reconstitute RNAi in S. cerevisiae, genes encoding these three human proteins were introduced into S. cerevisiae. We observed both siRNA and siRNA- and RISC-dependent silencing of the target gene GFP. Thus, human Ago2, Dicer and TRBP can functionally reconstitute human RNAi in S. cerevisiae, in vivo, enabling the study and use of the human RNAi pathway in a facile genetic model organism.
Effects of psychological contract fulfillment, perceived organizational support, leader-member exchange, and work outcomes : a test of mediating model

Drawing on social exchange theory and the norm of reciprocity, this study proposed and tested how perceived organizational support (POS) and leader-member exchanges (LMX) mediated the effects of psychological contract fulfillment on the work attitudes and behavioral outcomes of employees. Three hundred and fifty-four supervisor-subordinate dyads working in a Chinese manufacturing firm participated in the study. The findings suggest that the extent of psychological contract fulfillment is positively related to employee attitudinal (affective commitment and attachment to supervisor) and behavioral outcomes (task and contextual performances). Both POS and LMX were found to fully mediate the relationship between perceived contract fulfillment and task performances. Besides, POS and LMX were reported to partially mediate the effects between perceived contract fulfillment and affective commitment as well as on attachment to supervisor. Turnover intentions were fully mediated by LMX but not mediated by POS. The implications of the results for theory and practice were discussed.
How to use the Web's information flood for teaching

In this paper we concentrate on the question how we can retrieve reliable information from the Web as source for knowledge in teaching and learning: The use of search engines has a number of dangers which together with potential remedies we will point out. Another approach to find useful information is to use “classical” resources of information like specialized dictionaries, lexica or encyclopaedias in electronic form. Some do suffer from what we will call the “wishy-washy” syndrome. It is interesting to note that Wikipedia which is also larger than all other encyclopaedias (at least the English version) is less afflicted by this syndrome, yet has some other drawbacks. We discuss how those could be avoided and present a prototype of a system that does take care of many of the problems mentioned, hence may be a model for further undertakings.