Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Repetition time-switched transmit diversity as an alternative to Alamouti space-time coding for wireless communication systems

We present a simple transmit diversity technique, called repetition time-switched transmit diversity (R-TSTD), which is a modified version of the well-known time-switched transmit diversity (TSTD) algorithm. Throughout the paper, we focus on the scenario of a transmitter with nT = 2 antennas. The idea behind R-TSTD is to use only one antenna at a time while still ensuring that all constellation symbols are transmitted via both antennas. Thus, unlike the classical TSTD technique, R-TSTD does provide a transmit diversity effect similar to that achieved with space-time coding (STC) algorithms. The error performance of the proposed R-TSTD system is compared to that of the Alamouti STC scheme via Monte Carlo computer simulations. It is shown that, in the absence of any outer error-correcting code, Alamouti STC slightly outperforms R-TSTD. However, when a near-capacity channel code is employed as an outer code, the error performance achieved using R-TSTD is significantly better than that obtained with Alamouti STC, provided that the desired spectral efficiency is sufficiently low.
Identifying Alternative Hyper-Splicing Signatures in MG-Thymoma by Exon Arrays

Background The vast majority of human genes (>70%) are alternatively spliced. Although alternative pre-mRNA processing is modified in multiple tumors, alternative hyper-splicing signatures specific to particular tumor types are still lacking. Here, we report the use of Affymetrix Human Exon Arrays to spot hyper-splicing events characteristic of myasthenia gravis (MG)-thymoma, thymic tumors which develop in patients with MG and discriminate them from colon cancer changes. Methodology/Principal Findings We combined GO term to parent threshold-based and threshold-independent ad-hoc functional statistics with in-depth analysis of key modified transcripts to highlight various exon-specific changes. These denote alternative splicing in MG-thymoma tumors compared to healthy human thymus and to in-house and Affymetrix datasets from colon cancer and healthy tissues. By using both global and specific, term-to-parent Gene Ontology (GO) statistical comparisons, our functional integrative ad-hoc method allowed the detection of disease-relevant splicing events. Conclusions/Significance Hyper-spliced transcripts spanned several categories, including the tumorogenic ERBB4 tyrosine kinase receptor and the connective tissue growth factor CTGF, as well as the immune function-related histocompatability gene HLA-DRB1 and interleukin (IL)19, two muscle-specific collagens and one myosin heavy chain gene; intriguingly, a putative new exon was discovered in the MG-involved acetylcholinesterase ACHE gene. Corresponding changes in spliceosome composition were indicated by co-decreases in the splicing factors ASF/SF2 and SC35. Parallel tumor-associated changes occurred in colon cancer as well, but the majority of the apparent hyper-splicing events were particular to MG-thymoma and could be validated by Fluorescent In-Situ Hybridization (FISH), Reverse Transcription–Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and mass spectrometry (MS) followed by peptide sequencing. Our findings demonstrate a particular alternative hyper-splicing signature for transcripts over-expressed in MG-thymoma, supporting the hypothesis that alternative hyper-splicing contributes to shaping the biological functions of these and other specialized tumors and opening new venues for the development of diagnosis and treatment approaches.
AN END-USER PERSPECTIVE OF ERP FLEXIBILITY

This research identifies the major dimensions of ERP flexibility from the perspective of end-users. To explore the concept of ERP flexibility, on-site interviews were conducted with twenty members of a leading European clothing manufacturer, with such members ranging from functional employees to the CEO. Results of analyzing the interview data using content analysis highlights that end-users view ERP flexibility in terms of five major dimensions, or ways to be flexible, specifically systems connectivity, process integration, hierarchical integration, user customizability, and consistency.
CNT Incorporated Polyacrilonitrile/Polypyrrole Nanofibers as Keratinocytes Scaffold

Polypyrrole (PPy) is an attractive scaffold material for tissue engineering with its non-toxic and electrically conductive properties. There has not been enough information about PPy usage in skin tissue engineering. The aim of this study is to investigate biocompatibility of polyacrilonitrile (PAN)/PPy nanofibrous scaffold for human keratinocytes. PAN/PPy bicomponent nanofibers were prepared by electrospinning, in various PPy concentrations and with carbon nanotube (CNT) incorporation. The average diameter of electrospun nanofibers decreased with increasing PPy concentration. Further, agglomerated CNTs caused beads and disordered parts on the surface of nanofibers. Biocompatibility of these PAN/PPy and PAN/PPy/CNT scaffolds were analyzed in vitro. Both scaffolds provided adhesion and proliferation of keratinocytes. Nanofiber diameter did not significantly influence the morphology of cells. However, with increasing number of cells, cells stayed among nanofibers and this affected their shape and size. In this study, we demonstrated that PAN/PPy and PAN/PPy/CNT scaffolds enabled the growth of keratinocytes, showing their biocompatibility.
Over-encryption: Management of Access Control Evolution on Outsourced Data

Data outsourcing is emerging today as a successful paradigm allowing users and organizations to exploit external services for the distribution of resources. A crucial problem to be addressed in this context concerns the enforcement of selective authorization policies and the support of policy updates in dynamic scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel solution to the enforcement of access control and the management of its evolution. Our proposal is based on the application of selective encryption as a means to enforce authorizations. Two layers of encryption are imposed on data: the inner layer is imposed by the owner for providing initial protection, the outer layer is imposed by the server to reflect policy modifications. The combination of the two layers provides an efficient and robust solution. The paper presents a model, an algorithm for the management of the two layers, and an analysis to identify and therefore counteract possible information exposure risks.
Turds, traitors and tossers: the abuse of UK MPs via Twitter

ABSTRACT There has been growing public attention around the abuse of MPs online including criminal convictions for violent threats, regular coverage of racist and misogynistic language directed at representatives. Yet, the extent of the problem and patterns of abuse remain relatively under-researched. So far, much of coverage of the problem is anecdotal or based on self-reporting from MPs. This research sets out to provide a more rigorous benchmark measure of abuse. It also examines targets and triggers for social media abuse – how far is abuse connected to contentious debates such as Brexit or targeted at specific groups of MPs (e.g. female representatives)? Our results indicate that whilst the overall volume of abuse appears low, social media abuse has become ubiquitous and is highly public. Furthermore, whilst some abuse is undoubtedly targeted and gendered, the biggest proportion of abuse follows a reactive response to political discussions and public interventions of MPs.
Contiguity in prosodic words: Evidence from Spanish

Abstract Spanish dialects show substantial variation in coda s weakening. Yet, to provide a comprehensive treatment of this phenomenon, a bigger prosodic constituent than just the coda position should be analysed. Crucially, two aspirating varieties of Spanish are considered. The Granada dialect weakens s to [h] inside words, at word edges and at prefix edges. The process may be either transparent (esto [éh.to] ‘this’, des-calzar [deh.kal.sáɾ] ‘to unshoe’, las cosas [lah.kó.sah] ‘the things’) or opaque (des-hecho [de.hé.tʃo] ‘undone’, las aguas [la.há.ɣwah] ‘the waters’). Chilean Spanish, on the other hand, presents transparent (esto [éh.to] ‘this’, des-calzar [deh.kal.sáɾ] ‘to unshoe’) and opaque (las aguas [la.há.ɣwa] ‘the waters’) aspiration, as well as deletion (las cosas [la.kó.sa] ‘the things’), and no aspiration across a prefix boundary (des-hecho [de.sé.tʃo] ‘undone’). The reported variable behaviour calls for an integrated approach to segmental weakening across all prosodic constituents, and for a revision of the present understanding of contiguity. The boundary between the prefix and the stem is protected by the grammar despite the weak coda position of the prefix-final s, therefore the domain of application of the CONTIGUITY constraint should be extended to the supramorphemic level.
Bioprospecting for Trichothecene 3-O-Acetyltransferases in the Fungal Genus Fusarium Yields Functional Enzymes with Different Abilities To Modify the Mycotoxin Deoxynivalenol

ABSTRACT The trichothecene mycotoxin deoxynivalenol (DON) is a common contaminant of small grains, such as wheat and barley, in the United States. New strategies to mitigate the threat of DON need to be developed and implemented. TRI101 and TRI201 are trichothecene 3-O-acetyltransferases that are able to modify DON and reduce its toxicity. Recent work has highlighted differences in the activities of TRI101 from two different species of Fusarium (F. graminearum and F. sporotrichioides), but little is known about the relative activities of TRI101/TRI201 enzymes produced by other species of Fusarium. We cloned TRI101 or TRI201 genes from seven different species of Fusarium and found genetic identity between sequences ranging from 66% to 98%. In vitro feeding studies using transformed yeast showed that all of the TRI101/TRI201 enzymes tested were able to acetylate DON; conversion of DON to 3-acetyl-deoxynivalenol (3ADON) ranged from 50.5% to 100.0%, depending on the Fusarium species from which the gene originated. A time course assay showed that the rate of acetylation varied from species to species, with the gene from F. sporotrichioides having the lowest rate. Steady-state kinetic assays using seven purified enzymes produced catalytic efficiencies for DON acetylation ranging from 6.8 × 104 M−1·s−1 to 4.7 × 106 M−1·s−1. Thermostability measurements for the seven orthologs ranged from 37.1°C to 43.2°C. Extended sequence analysis of portions of TRI101/TRI201 from 31 species of Fusarium (including known trichothecene producers and nonproducers) suggested that other members of the genus may contain functional TRI101/TRI201 genes, some with the potential to outperform those evaluated in the present study.
Multi Hop Routing in Wireless Mobile Networks using Ant Colony Optimization

Quality of Service is an indispensable parameter to evaluate the performance of any network, so research engrosseson valuing some important QoS parameters for mobile Adhoc network using AntHocNet routing algorithm. MATLAB software version R2011b is used for simulations due to its ease of node deployment and network set up. Simulation is done while varying the number of packets sent as 10, 30, 50, 70 and 90in a network scenario. It is analyzed that AntHocNet provides excellent performance for fewer hops 1, 2 and 3 whereas for increased number of hops9 and 10, it reveals from the routing metrics that use of AntHocNet is more advantageous over the other routing protocols like DSDV, AODV, DSR and TORA.The simulation enactment graphs shows better performance in terms of End-to-end delay, Delay jitter and superlative performance in terms of SINR with extended number of hops when the payload on the source node increases.
THE SOFTWARE PROCESS : MODELLING , EVALUATION AND IMPROVEMENT

Departamento de Informática Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero Avenida Belgrano (S) 1912 4200 Santiago del Estero Argentina silvac@unse.edu. ar Facultad de Informática Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Campus de Montegancedo 28660 Boadilla del Monte Spain {angelica, xavier, jlmate}@fi.upm. es Software Engineering Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890 USA mlopez@sei.cmu. edu
Harnessing motion blur to uncover splicing

Image tampering has become rampant in today's world due to availability of sophisticated image editing tools. In this paper, we deal with the problem of image splicing which is one form of tampering. We propose a passive method to detect the presence of splicing in a given image based on inconsistencies derived from motion blur. Both planar and 3D scenes are considered. The cause of blurring in the image is restricted to translation camera motion while the scene is assumed to be static. We validate our approach on synthetic as well as real examples.
Three-dimensional reconstruction of human bronchial tree in HRCT

This paper addresses the issue of 3-D human bronchial tree reconstruction from 2-D segmented slices. The 2-D gray-level slices to be segmented are reconstructed from volumetric data acquired by using a high resolution computerized tomography (HRCT) system operating in spiral mode. The proposed 3-D reconstruction technique consists in three major steps: (1) a fully-automated 2-D segmentation of bronchi performed on each slice and based on mathematical morphology theory; (2) a 3-D oriented and multivalued structure construction characterizing the 3-D topology of the segmented volume and a 3-D oriented propagation based on this structure; and (3) the 3-D reconstruction by using a 3-D mesh technique. Results are presented and discussed.
Formative Evaluation of a Pilot Study of a University Exercise Class for Female Muslims

Young adult Muslim women in western societies encounter barriers to exercise participation due in part to a lack of gyms offering women-only classes. Among university students, exercise might be further compromised by competing demands on time due to academics/work. We piloted a women-only exercise program (Sisters Exercising Together) for Muslims at one university in the southwest United States during the 2016-2017 academic year. We used attendance rosters (n = 6 participants), and focus group interview (n = 3) and informal interview (n = 47) techniques to assess the feasibility of and satisfaction with the program and to determine reasons for (low) attendance. Although conceptually well-received, intrapersonal factors related to perception of time, personal preferences, and motivation were most responsible for non-attendance. Potential courses of action for improving attendance should focus on improving self-regulation skills and enhancing social support.
FPGA Implementation of Camus Correlation Optical Flow Algorithm for Real Time Images

This document describes a FPGA implementation of an optical flow correlation based detection method which is very fast (with low accuracy) and allows near real time applications (6 frames/second) on standard computing hardware. It manages the motion estimation problem with a speed restriction, obtained from an image down sample process, that yields image speeds less than one pixel per frame. Then a patch correlation image method is applied and a temporal search can be made at a lineal time versus the spatial search at a quadratic time of other classic matching methods. The method fulfils all the requirements of a robotic vision system, being robust, fast and accurate enough for real time applications like time to contact detection and robot navigation tasks and like the global active vision system that is being developed, which operates from the two dimensional images coming from a CCD camera and a frame buffer, makes the logarithm-polar transform, the optical flow calculation and the image invariants extraction The objective of this job is to evaluate the skills of this algorithm for obtaining optical flow at high speed, to allow real time image processing. The result is a realisation on a FPGA of ALTERA that allows the processing of the optical flow on 100x100 pixels images in real time (25 images/ second).
A landmark-model based system for mining frequent patterns from uncertain data streams

Huge volumes of streaming data have been generated by sensors for applications such as environment surveillance. Partially due to the inherited limitation of sensors, these continuous streaming data can be uncertain. Over the past few years, algorithms have been proposed to apply the sliding window or time-fading window model to mine frequent patterns from streams of uncertain data. However, there are also other models to process data streams. In this paper, we propose a landmark-model based system for mining frequent patterns from streams of uncertain data.
Efficient support for in‐place metadata in Java software transactional memory

Software transactional memory (STM) algorithms associate metadata with the memory locations accessed during a transaction's lifetime. This metadata may be stored in an external table by resorting to a mapping function that associates the address of a memory cell with the table entry containing the corresponding metadata (out‐place or external strategy). Alternatively, the metadata may be stored adjacent to the associated memory cell by wrapping the cell and metadata together (in‐place strategy). The implementation techniques to support these two approaches are very different and each STM framework is usually biased towards one of them, only allowing the efficient implementation of STM algorithms which suit one of the approaches and inhibiting a fair comparison with STM algorithms suiting the other. In this paper, we introduce a technique to implement in‐place metadata that does not wrap memory cells, thus overcoming the bias and allowing STM algorithms to directly access the transactional metadata. The proposed technique is available as an extension to Deuce and enables the efficient implementation of a wide range of STM algorithms and their fair (unbiased) comparison in a common STM framework. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by analyzing its impact in two popular transactional memory algorithms with several transactional workloads, TL2 and multiversioning, each befitting out‐place and in‐place, respectively. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Institutional Investors and Foreign Exchange Risk

We study institutional appetite for stocks with FX exposure, and find variation among institution types. Institutions that are by their nature more likely to engage in active management of foreign exchange risk in their portfolio, namely mutual funds and hedge funds seek stocks with foreign exchange exposure. Institutions that are constrained by regulation tend to avoid foreign exchange exposure.
A hybrid brain–computer interface based on the fusion of electroencephalographic and electromyographic activities

Hybrid brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) are representing a recent approach to develop practical BCIs. In such a system disabled users are able to use all their remaining functionalities as control possibilities in parallel with the BCI. Sometimes these people have residual activity of their muscles. Therefore, in the presented hybrid BCI framework we want to explore the parallel usage of electroencephalographic (EEG) and electromyographic (EMG) activity, whereby the control abilities of both channels are fused. Results showed that the participants could achieve a good control of their hybrid BCI independently of their level of muscular fatigue. Thereby the multimodal fusion approach of muscular and brain activity yielded better and more stable performance compared to the single conditions. Even in the case of an increasing muscular fatigue a good control (moderate and graceful degradation of the performance compared to the non-fatigued case) and a smooth handover could be achieved. Therefore, such systems allow the users a very reliable hybrid BCI control although they are getting more and more exhausted or fatigued during the day.
Network member support marshaling in response to another’s relational transgression experience

Relational transgressions are emotionally difficult for those who directly experience the transgression. Less is known about how transgressions affect those located within the personal network of a relational transgression victim. This study explored how network members engaged in support marshaling in response to another’s transgression experience. Results indicate that some participants marshaled support, citing four reasons for their actions: perceived insufficiency, camaraderie, personal ramifications, and personal values. We explore these reasons for marshaling support and discuss them within the broader context of support marshaling and relational transgressions.
A parallel hierarchical algorithm for module placement based on sparse linear equations [VLSI layout]

We present a fast and effective module placement algorithm which is based on the PROUD algorithm. The PROUD algorithm uses a hierarchical decomposition technique and the solution of sparse linear systems of equations based on a resistive network analogy. It has been shown that the PROUD algorithm is suitable for solving the placement problem for very large circuits, and obtains placement qualities that are comparable to the best placement algorithms based on simulated annealing, but is several orders of magnitude faster. In this paper, we first report on an improved hierarchical placement algorithm which is based on perturbing the matrices in the matrix equation solution stage of the PROUD algorithm. The new modified PROUD algorithm performs much faster that the original PROUD algorithm. We subsequently propose parallel versions of the original and modified algorithms that combine both fine grain and coarse grain parallelism to obtain another order of magnitude improvement in the runtime without loss of the quality of the layout. Results are reported using MPI on various multiprocessor systems for a variety of large layout benchmark circuits.
Covariance matrix computations with federated databases

We present an approach to computing the covariance matrix with federated databases. This is a useful tool in principal components analysis and other pattern recognition methodologies. The databases are implicitly joined by a set of arbitrary shared attributes. We compute the covariance matrix exactly rather than an approximation. We show the correctness of the approach with minimal data exchanged. Each node shares the composition of the global result. We assume that the values for shared attributes are allowed to be shared. Each node is allowed to ask for information and it will be truthfully given the summary it requests. We provide no proof of theorems or lemmas due to lack of space.
Automatic emotion recognition in video

Automatic recognition of emotion is becoming increasingly important component in Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) systems. Recognizing human facial emotion by computer is interesting and challenging problem. Emotions are the key semantic component of human communication. This paper presents the system for recognizing emotions through facial expression displayed in the video. Audio-visual emotion recognition can be carried out with the video sequence. The video sequence is a mixture of both the audio and video information. But in this paper, we are dealing only with the video information to recognize the emotion of a character. This process is carried out by the selection of the target frame followed by the segmentation of the video sequence. Facial feature tracking is performed to extract features. The face is classified in to different Action Units. Face emotions are recognized by using Dynamic Bayesian Network. The results so far shows the approach to have a promising success rate.