Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ADR-Miner: An ant-based data reduction algorithm for classification

Classification is a central problem in the fields of data mining and machine learning. Using a training set of labelled instances, the task is to build a model (classifier) that can be used to predict the class of new unlabelled instances. Data preparation is crucial to the data mining process, and its focus is to improve the fitness of the training data for the learning algorithms to produce more effective classifiers. Two widely applied data preparation methods are feature selection and instance selection, which fall under the umbrella of data reduction. In this paper, we introduce ADR-Miner, a novel data reduction algorithm that utilizes ant colony optimization (ACO). ADR-Miner is designed to perform instance selection to improve the predictive effectiveness of the constructed classification models. Empirical evaluations on 20 benchmark data sets with three well-known classification algorithms show that ADR-Miner improves the predictive quality of the produced classifiers. The non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-ranks test is employed to determine statistical significance.
Arginine and Citrulline Catabolic Pathways Encoded by the arc Gene Cluster of Lactobacillus brevis ATCC 367

ABSTRACT High concentrations of l-arginine or l-citrulline in the growth medium provided the wine bacterium Lactobacillus brevis with a significant growth advantage. The arginine deiminase pathway (ADI) arc gene cluster of Lactobacillus brevis contains three genes—arcD, arcE1, and arcE2—encoding putative l-arginine/l-ornithine exchangers. Uptake experiments with Lactococcus lactis cells expressing the genes showed that all three transported l-ornithine with affinities in the micromolar range. Similarly, ArcD and ArcE2 transported l-arginine, while ArcE1 transported l-citrulline, an intermediate of the ADI pathway. Chase experiments showed very efficient exchange of l-arginine and l-ornithine by ArcD and ArcE2 and of l-citrulline and l-ornithine by ArcE1. Low affinities (millimolar range) combined with low translocation rates were found for ArcD and ArcE2 with l-citrulline and for ArcE1 with l-arginine. Resting cells of Lactobacillus brevis grown in the presence of l-arginine and l-citrulline rapidly consumed l-arginine and l-citrulline, respectively, while producing ammonia and l-ornithine. About 10% of l-arginine degraded was excreted by the cells as l-citrulline. Degradation of l-arginine and l-citrulline was not subject to carbon catabolite repression by glucose in the medium. At a high medium pH, l-citrulline in the medium was required for induction of the l-citrulline degradation pathway. Pathways are proposed for the catabolic breakdown of l-arginine and l-citrulline that merge at the level of ornithine transcarbamylase in the ADI pathway. l-Arginine uptake is catalyzed by ArcD and/or ArcE2, l-citrulline by ArcE1. l-Citrulline excretion during l-arginine breakdown is proposed to be catalyzed by ArcD and/or ArcE2 through l-arginine/l-citrulline exchange. IMPORTANCE Lactobacillus brevis, a bacterium isolated from wine, as well as other food environments, expresses a catabolic pathway for the breakdown of l-citrulline in the medium that consists of the l-citrulline/l-ornithine exchanger ArcE1 and part of the catabolic arginine deiminase (ADI) pathway enzymes. The proposed pathways for l-arginine and l-citrulline breakdown provide a mechanism for l-citrulline accumulation in fermented food products that is the precursor of the carcinogen ethyl carbamate.
Cross-Layer Designs of Multicarrier NC-PRMA Systems over Powerlines

We study the performance of non-collision packet reservation multiple access (NC-PRMA) scheme as a MAC protocol for powerline communication networks. A PHY-MAC cross layer design is considered in order to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees for integrated voice, data and video services. System performance is evaluated via simulations in terms of packet dropping probability and mean access delay.
Crystal structure of the P2 C-repressor: a binder of non-palindromic direct DNA repeats

As opposed to the vast majority of prokaryotic repressors, the immunity repressor of temperate Escherichia coli phage P2 (C) recognizes non-palindromic direct repeats of DNA rather than inverted repeats. We have determined the crystal structure of P2 C at 1.8 Å. This constitutes the first structure solved from the family of C proteins from P2-like bacteriophages. The structure reveals that the P2 C protein forms a symmetric dimer oriented to bind the major groove of two consecutive turns of the DNA. Surprisingly, P2 C has great similarities to binders of palindromic sequences. Nevertheless, the two identical DNA-binding helixes of the symmetric P2 C dimer have to bind different DNA sequences. Helix 3 is identified as the DNA-recognition motif in P2 C by alanine scanning and the importance for the individual residues in DNA recognition is defined. A truncation mutant shows that the disordered C-terminus is dispensable for repressor function. The short distance between the DNA-binding helices together with a possible interaction between two P2 C dimers are proposed to be responsible for extensive bending of the DNA. The structure provides insight into the mechanisms behind the mutants of P2 C causing dimer disruption, temperature sensitivity and insensitivity to the P4 antirepressor.
Study of Senone-Based Deep Neural Network Approaches for Spoken Language Recognition

This paper compares different approaches for using deep neural networks (DNNs) trained to predict senone posteriors for the task of spoken language recognition (SLR). These approaches have recently been found to outperform various baseline systems on different datasets, but they have not yet been compared to each other or to a common baseline. Two of these approaches use the DNNs to generate feature vectors which are then processed in different ways to predict the score of each language given a test sample. The features are extracted either from a bottleneck layer in the DNN or from the output layer. In the third approach, the standard i-vector extraction procedure is modified to use the senones as classes and the DNN to predict the zeroth order statistics. We compare these three approaches and conclude that the approach based on bottleneck features followed by i-vector modeling outperform the other two approaches. We also show that score-level fusion of some of these approaches leads to gains over using a single approach for short-duration test samples. Finally, we demonstrate that fusing systems that use DNNs trained with several languages leads to improvements in performance over the best single system, and we propose an adaptation procedure for DNNs trained with languages with less available data. Overall, we show improvements between 40% and 70% relative to a state-of-the-art Gaussian mixture model (GMM) i-vector system on test durations from 3 seconds to 120 seconds on two significantly different tasks: the NIST 2009 language recognition evaluation task and the DARPA RATS language identification task.
Bleeker was right: Revision of the genus Cyclocheilichthys (Bleeker 1859) and resurrection of the genus Anematichthys (Bleeker 1859), based on morphological and molecular data of Southeast Asian Cyprininae (Teleostei, Cypriniformes)

The taxonomy within the order Cypriniformes is subject to frequent changes, thanks to the results coming from recent molecular phylogenies that help understand the Cypriniformes tree of life previously established through morphological characters. In this paper, we focus on species belonging to the Cyprininae – the largest sub-family among Cypriniformes – and we present both morphological and phylogenetic arguments to revise the taxonomy of the genus Cyclocheilichthys. For morphological investigations, we characterized external traits as well as the postcranial skeleton and the neurocranium. For molecular phylogenies, we used four markers, both mitochondrial and nuclear, to establish a phylogenetic tree. We studied four species currently assigned to the genus Cyclocheilichthys as well as the species Cosmochilus harmandi and Puntioplites falcifer and we show that the genus Cyclocheilichthys is non-monophyletic as Cyclocheilichthys enoplos is closer to C. harmandi and P. falcifer than Cyclocheilichthys armatus, Cyclocheilichthys apogon and Cyclocheilichthys repasson. Finally, we revise the genus Cyclocheilichthys and we propose to split this genus into two genera: genus Cyclocheilichthys with the species Cyclocheilichthys enoplos and genus Anematichthys with species Anematichthys armatus, Anematichthys apogon and Anematichthys repasson.
Slotted Beacon Scheduling Using ZigBee Cskip Mechanism

The IEEE 802.15. 4 and ZigBee protocol stack offers great potentials for ubiquitous and pervasive computing, namely for wireless sensor networks. However, there are still some open and ambiguous issues that turn its practical use a challenging task. One of those issues is the study of low power consumption of sensor device, which is the biggest issue in sensor network, still has many unresolved issues. Another issues is how to build a synchronized multi-hop cluster-tree network, which is quite suitable for QoS support in WSNs. In fact, the current IEEE 802.15. 4 and ZigBee specifications restrict the synchronization in the beacon-enabled mode to star-based networks, while it supports multi-hop networking using the peer-to-peer mesh topology, but with no synchronization. This paper, based on IEEE 802.15. 4 and ZigBee as sensor network solution, suggests slotted beacon scheduling(time division beacon scheduling approach in ZigBee tree networks) for low power consumption within a network environment which consists of hierarchical tree topology and beacon-enabled network. To perform multihop transmission, the ZigBee sensor network consists of tree topology and beacon enabled network. The purpose of such multihop beaconing network is to provide a chance to sleep for routing nodes and minimize power waste. We need beacon transmission scheduling in order to reduce power waste and prevent any collision at the time of beacon transmission.
C1C

Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STT-RAM), a promising alternative to SRAM for reducing leakage power consumption, has been widely studied to mitigate the impact of its asymmetrically long write latency. Recently, STT-RAM has been proposed for L1 caches by relaxing the data retention time to improve write performance and dynamic energy. However, as the technology scales down from 65nm to 22nm, the performance of the read operation scales poorly due to reduced sense margins and sense amplifier delays. In this article, we leverage a dual-mode STT memory cell to design a configurable L1 cache architecture termed C1C to mitigate read performance barriers with technology scaling. Guided by application access characteristics discovered through novel compiler analyses, the proposed cache adaptively switches between a high performance and a low-power access mode. Our evaluation demonstrates that the proposed cache with compiler guidance outperforms a state-of-the-art STT-RAM cache design by 9% with high dynamic energy efficiency, leading to significant performance/watt improvements over several competing approaches.
Regularities in the Long Term Optical Light Curve of the Black Hole Candidate Binary A0620-00 (V616 Mon)

ABSTRACT We have monitored the R and I magnitude of the black hole candidate system A0620-00 (V616 Mon) in the years 1991-1995 at the Wise Observatory. Combining our datawith some additional measurements, we analyze a sparsely covered 7 year light curveof the star. We ﬁnd that the average R-band magnitude is varying on a time scale ofa few hundreds days, with a peak to peak amplitude of 0.3 mag.The two maxima in the well known double hump binary cycle, as well as one of theminima between them, vary by a few percent relative to one another, in a seeminglyrandom way. One maximum is on the average higher by 0.05 mag. than the other.The depth of the second minimum is varying with signiﬁcantly higher amplitude, inclear correlation with the long term variability of the mean magnitude of the system.It is shallower than the other minimum at times of maximum light. It deepens whenthe system brightness declines, and it becomes the deeper among the two minima attimes of minimum system light.According to the commonly acceptable phasing of the binary cycle, the system-atically varying minimum corresponds to inferior conjunction of the red dwarf. Wecannot suggest any simple geometrical model for explaining the regularities that weﬁnd in the long term photometric behaviour of the V616 Mon binary system.Key words: binaries: close - stars: individuals: A0620-00 - X-ray: stars
Evidence on the Employer Size-Wage Premium from Worker-Establishment Matched Data

In spite of the large and growing importance of the employer size-wage premium, previous attempts to account for this premium using observable worker or employer characteristics have had limited success. The problem is that, while most theoretical explanations for the size-wage premium are based on the matching of employers and employees, previous empirical work has relied on either worker surveys with little information about the employer, or establishment surveys with little information about the workers. In contrast, this study uses the newly created Worker-Establishment Characteristic Database, which contains linked employer-employee data for a large sample of U.S. manufacturing workers and establishments, to examine seven explanations for the employer size-wage premium. A number of the explanations can account for some of the observed cross-sectional variation in worker wages. However, none of the explanations can fully account for the employer size-wage premium. In the end there remains a large, significant, and unexplained premium paid to workers of large employers.
Three theorems regarding testing graph properties

Property testing is a relaxation of decision problems in which it is required to distinguish YES-instances (i.e., objects having a predetermined property) from instances that are far from any YES-instance. We present three theorems regarding testing graph properties in the adjacency matrix representation. More specifically, these theorems relate to the project of characterizing graph properties according to the complexity of testing them (in the adjacency matrix representation). The first theorem is that there exist monotone graph properties in /spl Nscr//spl Pscr/ for which testing is very hard (i.e., requires one to examine a constant fraction of the entries in the matrix). The second theorem is that every graph property that can be tested making a number of queries that is independent of the size of the graph, can be so tested by uniformly selecting a set of vertices and accepting iff the induced subgraph has some fixed graph property (which is not necessarily the same as the one being tested). The third theorem refers to the framework of graph partition problems, and is a characterization of the subclass of properties that can be tested using a one-sided error tester, making a number of queries that is independent of the size of the graph.
Systemic Compensatory Response to Neonatal Estradiol Exposure Does Not Prevent Depletion of the Oocyte Pool in the Rat

The formation of ovarian follicles is a finely tuned process that takes place within a narrow time-window in rodents. Multiple factors and pathways have been proposed to contribute to the mechanisms triggering this process but the role of endocrine factors, especially estrogens, remains elusive. It is currently hypothesized that removal from the maternal hormonal environment permits follicle formation at birth. However, experimentally-induced maintenance of high 17β-estradiol (E2) levels leads to subtle, distinct, immediate effects on follicle formation and oocyte survival depending on the species and dose. In this study, we examined the immediate effects of neonatal E2 exposure from post-natal day (PND) 0 to PND2 on the whole organism and on ovarian follicle formation in rats. Measurements of plasma E2, estrone and their sulfate conjugates after E2 exposure showed that neonatal female rats rapidly acquire the capability to metabolize and clear excessive E2 levels. Concomitant modifications to the mRNA content of genes encoding selected E2 metabolism enzymes in the liver and the ovary in response to E2 exposure indicate that E2 may modify the neonatal maturation of these organs. In the liver, E2 treatment was associated with lower acquisition of the capability to metabolize E2. In the ovary, E2 depleted the oocyte pool in a dose dependent manner by PND3. In 10 µg/day E2-treated ovaries, apoptotic oocytes were observed in newly formed follicles in addition to areas of ovarian cord remodeling. At PND6, follicles without any visible oocyte were present and multi-oocyte follicles were not observed. Our study reveals a major species-difference. Indeed, neonatal exposure to E2 depletes the oocyte pool in the rat ovary, whereas in the mouse it is well known to increase oocyte survival.
The Limits of Career Concerns in Federalism: Evidence from China

Performance-based promotion schemes in administrative hierarchies have limitations. Chinese provincial leaders, despite facing strong career concerns, make different policy decisions depending on their career backgrounds. Provincial party secretaries who have risen from low to high positions within the province they govern (“locals”) spend a higher share of budgetary resources on education and health care and invest less in construction infrastructure than party secretaries who have made their most significant career advancements in other provinces (“outsiders”). Identification comes from variation in central leadership and term limits. As the promotion mechanism rewards infrastructure investments, locals are less likely to be promoted at the end of the term. We explore various mechanisms and provide evidence that the difference between locals and outsiders is not driven by knowledge or experience. Several pieces of evidence suggest that locals cater to low-level provincial elites, who helped them rise to power. Thus, local career trajectories limit the power of career concerns by fostering competing allegiances.
How environment and self‐motion combine in neural representations of space

Estimates of location or orientation can be constructed solely from sensory information representing environmental cues. In unfamiliar or sensory‐poor environments, these estimates can also be maintained and updated by integrating self‐motion information. However, the accumulation of error dictates that updated representations of heading direction and location become progressively less reliable over time, and must be corrected by environmental sensory inputs when available. Anatomical, electrophysiological and behavioural evidence indicates that angular and translational path integration contributes to the firing of head direction cells and grid cells. We discuss how sensory inputs may be combined with self‐motion information in the firing patterns of these cells. For head direction cells, direct projections from egocentric sensory representations of distal cues can help to correct cumulative errors. Grid cells may benefit from sensory inputs via boundary vector cells and place cells. However, the allocentric code of boundary vector cells and place cells requires consistent head‐direction information in order to translate the sensory signal of egocentric boundary distance into allocentric boundary vector cell firing, suggesting that the different spatial representations found in and around the hippocampal formation are interdependent. We conclude that, rather than representing pure path integration, the firing of head‐direction cells and grid cells reflects the interface between self‐motion and environmental sensory information. Together with place cells and boundary vector cells they can support a coherent unitary representation of space based on both environmental sensory inputs and path integration signals.
The Noisy Channel and the Braying Donkey

Several Corpus Linguistics research groups have gone beyond collation of 'raw' text, to syntactic annotation of the text. However, linguists developing these linguistic resources have used quite different wordtagging and parse-tree labelling schemes in each of these annotated corpora. This restricts the accessibility of each corpus, making it impossible for speech and handwriting researchers to collate them into a single very large training set. This is particularly problematic as there is evidence that one of these parsed corpora on its own is too small for a general statistical model of grammatical structure, but the combined size of all the above annotated corpora should deliver a much more reliable model. We are developing a set of mapping algorithms to map between the main tagsets and phrase structure grammar schemes used in the above corpora. We plan to develop a Multi-tagged Corpus and a MultiTreebank, a single text-set annotated with all the above tagging and parsing schemes. The text-set is the Spoken English Corpus: this is a half-way house between formal written text and colloquial conversational speech. However, the main deliverable to the computational linguistics research community is not the SEC-based MultiTreebank, but the mapping suite used to produce it - this can be used to combine currently-incompatible syntactic training sets into a large unified multicorpus. Our architecture combines standard statistical language modelling and a rule-base derived from linguists' analyses of tagset-mappings, in a novel yet intuitive way. Our development of the mapping algorithms aims to distinguish notational from substantive differences in the annotation schemes, and we will be able to evaluate tagging schemes in terms of how well they fit standard statistical language models such as n-pos (Markov) models.
Latch-Based Performance Optimization for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

We explore using pulsed latches for timing optimization in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Pulsed latches are transparent latches driven by a clock with a nonstandard (i.e., not 50%) duty cycle. As latches are already present on commercial FPGAs, their use for timing optimization can avoid the power or area drawbacks associated with other techniques such as clock skew and retiming. We propose algorithms that automatically replace certain flip-flops with latches for performance gains. Under conservative short path or minimum delay assumptions, our latch-based optimization, operating on already routed designs, provides all the benefit of clock skew in most cases and increases performance by 9%, on average, without area penalties or significant netlist changes. We show that short paths greatly hinder the ability of using pulsed latches, and that further improvements in performance are possible by increasing the delay of certain short paths.