Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On exploiting location flexibility in data-intensive distributed systems

With the fast growth of data-intensive distributed systems today, more novel and principled approaches are needed to improve the system efficiency, ensure the service quality to satisfy the user requirements, and lower the system running cost. This dissertation studies the design issues in the data-intensive distributed systems, which are differentiated from other systems by the heavy workload of data movement and are characterized by the fact that the destination of each data flow is limited to a subset of available locations, such as those servers holding the requested data. Besides, even among the feasible subset, different locations may result in different performance. The studies in this dissertation improve the data-intensive systems by exploiting the data storage location flexibility. It addresses how to reasonably determine the data placement based on the measured request patterns, to improve a series of performance metrics, such as the data access latency, system throughput and various costs, by the proposed hypergraph models for data placement. To implement the proposal with a lower overhead, a sketch-based data placement scheme is presented, which constructs the sparsified hypergraph under a distributed and streaming-based system model, achieving a good approximation on the performance improvement. As the network can potentially become the bottleneck of distributed data-intensive systems due to the frequent data movement among storage nodes, the online data placement
Smokers' (Dis)satisfaction, Persuasive Constraint, and Influence of Expert and Non-Expert Sources

The present research tested the hypothesis that an internal motivation to change is elaborated as an external constraint and is less predictive of change when the source is expert than when it is non-expert. In two studies, smokers were categorized as either dissatisfied or moderately satisfied according to their degree of dissatisfaction with their image as smokers (i.e., internal motivation to change). They were then exposed to an antismoking argument attributed either to an expert or to a non-expert source. Compared to moderately satisfied smokers, dissatisfied smokers perceived the source as making less effort to convince them (Study 1, N = 43), and as being less disrespectful (Study 2, N = 81), but this pattern was significant only for the non-expert source. Study 2 also showed that experts had more influence on intention to quit smoking among moderately satisfied smokers, whereas non-experts had more influence among dissatisfied smokers.
The treatment of ancient Portuguese tiles

The preservation of the vast cultural heritage of tiles in Portugal requires the development of a systematic scientific and technological approach. In this communication the case of the treatment of a panel of ancient tiles iS described. The main problem was the cleaning and consolidation of the piece, followed by restoration for exhibition. The treatment was preceded by a study of the materials, consisting of analyses of the ceramic body and the glazed surface. The removal of aged waxes and resins was achieved using appropriate solvents and the consolidation of the ceramic body as carried out by an inorganic treatment. For the reconstruction of missing parts and the mounting of the panel materials were chosen which would avoid interaction with the original material.
Visualization and Layout for Personal Photo Libraries

In this paper, we present visualization and layout algorithms that can enhance informal storytelling using personal digital data such as photos in a face-to-face social setting. In order to build a more intuitive browser for retrieval, navigation and story-telling, we introduce a novel optimized layout technique for large image sets which respects (context- sensitive) mutual similarities as visualized on a shared 2-D display (a table-top). The experimental results show a more perceptually intuitive and informative visualization of traditional CBIR-based retrievals, providing not only a better understanding of the query context but also aiding the user in forming new queries. A framework for user-modeling is also introduced and tested. This allows the system to adapt to the user's preferences and relevance feedback.
Solid State Electronic Devices

D V Morgan and M J Howes London: Wykeham Publications 1972 pp xii + 190 price £225 This book aims to give a qualitative understanding of the basic principles of operation of the most important solid state devices. It is written for first year undergraduate students and has the great merit of being readable and of having plenty of figures to supplement the qualitative description of the text.
A Needs Assessment Of Knowledge, Skills, And Values For Urban Planning Professionals Based On Competencies Set Forth By Professional Planning Organizations

Continuing education and training is pivotal in today's fast-paced technology driven society. A profession is defined by the theories and techniques that competent practitioners utilize in their everyday work. Therefore, determining the competencies that practitioners must possess for any given profession is a prerequisite for a respected profession. Most professions are bounded by competencies that are dictated by professional organizations and education programs, yet the real test is how practitioners view these competencies as they relate to their job. For a profession to reach the ultimate goal of improving society the first step is to align professional organization, education, and practice. This research is a needs assessment that investigates education and training needs of planning professionals and determines the alignment between professional organizations, planning education, and planning practice. Thus the focus of this study is to conduct a needs assessment to investigate the specific knowledge, skills and values under each related outcome criteria defined by the Planning Accreditation Board as it relates to the training needs of planning practitioners, as well as specific competencies defined in the review of related literature. Using a descriptive research method three types of questions were answered: (1) How professional planners allocate their time on various professional competencies on a typical work day? (2) What professional competencies are important in their job? and (3) What professional competencies do they feel they possess for their job? The web based survey drew 270 planning practitioners from 26 states to participate in the survey. The results of this study indicate that planning professionals valued competencies defined by PAB more than the amount of time they spend on each of the competencies. In addition, the needs assessment revealed 8 out of 18 competences that had the greatest gap between the amount of time practitioners stated they spend on the competences compared to how important they felt the competencies were to their job. Finally, planning practitioners indicated that they were the most competent in verbal communication skills and problem solving skills, while, stating they were least competent in linear regression, forecasting / modeling skills, and communication using social media.
Genetic susceptibility to radiation-induced breast cancer after Hodgkin lymphoma.

Female Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) patients treated with chest radiotherapy (RT) have a very high risk of breast cancer. The contribution of genetic factors to this risk is unclear. We therefore examined 211 155 germline single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for gene-radiation interaction on breast cancer risk in a case-only analysis including 327 breast cancer patients after chest RT for HL and 4671 first primary breast cancer patients. Nine SNPs showed statistically significant interaction with RT on breast cancer risk (false discovery rate, <20%), of which 1 SNP in the PVT1 oncogene attained the Bonferroni threshold for statistical significance. A polygenic risk score (PRS) composed of these SNPs (RT-interaction-PRS) and a previously published breast cancer PRS (BC-PRS) derived in the general population were evaluated in a case-control analysis comprising the 327 chest-irradiated HL patients with breast cancer and 491 chest-irradiated HL patients without breast cancer. Patients in the highest tertile of the RT-interaction-PRS had a 1.6-fold higher breast cancer risk than those in the lowest tertile. Remarkably, we observed a fourfold increased RT-induced breast cancer risk in the highest compared with the lowest decile of the BC-PRS. On a continuous scale, breast cancer risk increased 1.4-fold per standard deviation of the BC-PRS, similar to the effect size found in the general population. This study demonstrates that genetic factors influence breast cancer risk after chest RT for HL. Given the high absolute breast cancer risk in radiation-exposed women, these results can have important implications for the management of current HL survivors and future patients.
Pulse coupled neural networks (PCNN), wavelets and radial basis functions: olfactory sensor applications

This paper focuses on novel approaches to olfactory sensor signal analysis: 1) PCNN focusing, 2) wavelet characterization and 3) radial basis function detection of anomalies. Novel decision aide approaches are developed to facilitate design of routines to automatically trigger calibration and/or analysis when transient signals indicate an anomaly. These three signal analysis steps are integrated into a decision system to separate sensor faults from targets, and then recalibrate the target detection and identification procedures.
Minimum Weight Independent Dominating Sets In Interval And Circular-Arc Graphs

Given an undirected graph G = (V,E) with n vertices and m edges, we will define N(v) to be the set of neighbours of a vertex v and N [v] = N(v)∪{v}. Moreover, we will define analogous pieces of notation for a set of vertices S ⊆ V . In particular, let N(S) = ⋃ v∈S N(v) and let N [S] = N(S)∪S. In these notes, the problem of interest will be the weighted independent dominating set problem. In particular, given a weight function ω : V → R+, we are interested in finding a set of vertices S ⊆ V of minimum weight such that S is an independent set and V ⊆ N [S]. In other words, we want to find an independent set S such that for every vertex v ∈ V , if v / ∈ S then v has a neighbour u ∈ S. Unfortunately for us, this problem is NP-complete for general graphs [3], and remains NP-complete even when we restrict the input to chordal graphs [2]. However, if we restrict ourselves to interval and circular-arc graphs, we can obtain linear time solutions to the problem [1].
Extracellular matrix : a practical approach

1: Overview of the different collagen types and approaches for the isolation and characterization of types I, III, V and VI molecules from tissues and cultured cells. 2: Approaches for isolating and characterizing the collagens in cartilage. 3: Techniques for evaluating the matrix components found in basement membranes. 4: Approaches for investigating the specialized matrix components produced by endothelial cells. 5: Techniques for the isolation and characterization of the enzymes involved in the post-translational processing of collagen. 6: Techniques for the study of fibronectin and tenascin. 7: Approaches for the study of glycosaminoglycans. 8: Approaches for the evaluation of proteoglycans. 9: Techniques for the use of the extracellular matrix and its components in cell culture. 10: Approaches for investigating elastin. 11: Techniques for evaluating the catabolism of extracellular matrix components. 12: Immunological approaches for the identification of extracellular matrix components in tissues and cultured cells. 13: Molecular biological approaches for studying extracellular matrix production
Classification and regression of spatio-temporal signals using NeuCube and its realization on SpiNNaker neuromorphic hardware

Objective. The objective of this work is to use the capability of spiking neural networks to capture the spatio-temporal information encoded in time-series signals and decode them without the use of hand-crafted features and vector-based learning and the realization of the spiking model on low-power neuromorphic hardware. Approach. The NeuCube spiking model was used to classify different grasp movements directly from raw surface electromyography signals (sEMG), the estimations of the applied finger forces as well as the classification of two motor imagery movements from raw electroencephalography (EEG). In a parallel investigation, the designed spiking decoder was implemented on SpiNNaker neuromorphic hardware, which allows low-energy real-time processing. Main results. Experimental results reveal a better classification accuracy using the NeuCube model compared to traditional machine learning methods. For sEMG classification, we reached a training accuracy of 85% and a test accuracy of 84.8%, as well as less than 19% of relative root mean square error (rRMSE) when estimating finger forces from six subjects. For the EEG classification, a mean accuracy of 75% was obtained when tested on raw EEG data from nine subjects from the existing 2b dataset from ‘BCI competition IV’. Significance. This work provides a proof of concept for a successful implementation of the NeuCube spiking model on the SpiNNaker neuromorphic platform for raw sEMG and EEG decoding, which could chart a route ahead for a new generation of portable closed-loop and low-power neuroprostheses.
Efficient parallel HEVC intra-prediction on many-core processor

High-efficiency video coding (HEVC) is the state-of-the-art video coding standard, which adopts more complicated and time-consuming intra-prediction (IP) modes. Many-core processors are good candidates for speeding up HEVC IP in the case that HEVC IP can provide sufficient parallelism. Proposed is an efficient parallel framework for HEVC IP. Experiments show that the proposed method dramatically accelerates more than the state-of-the-art parallel method.
Ocr Quality Improvement Using Image Preprocessing

Optical character recognition (OCR) remains a difficult problem for noisy documents or documents scanned at low resolution. Many current approaches rely on stored font models that are vulnerable to cases in which the document is noisy or is written in a font dissimilar to the stored fonts. In this paper we test two approaches for preprocessing, or correcting the input images. The focus is on noise reduction, lightness correction and binarization, all relative to found letters with a slow but more accurate method and a fast and less accurate method. We then compare the results and see if the extra time spent in developing more complex letter deduction technique offers significant improvements.
An Analysis of Graph Properties for Detecting Sybil Nodes in Social Networks

This research concerns the analysis of social networks using graph theory to find properties that can be used to determine Sybil nodes. This research also investigated the mixing time, which is one of the properties that many existing methods use for detecting Sybil attacks. The results showed that the mixing time does not reflect the difference between honest graphs and Sybil graphs. In addition, the properties of social graphs were studied and it was found that the average node distance is different in graphs containing Sybil nodes than in graphs with only honest nodes. Furthermore, the eigenvector centrality and the degree of Sybil nodes are correlated, while in honest nodes they are not.
Malignant Transformation in Mediastinal Teratoma

The case of a 25-year-old man with a mediastinal teratoma with sarcomatous transformation is presented. Teratomas occasionally undergo transformation into somatic malignancies such as sarcoma, carcinoma, leukemia, and neuroectodermal tumors. The pathogenesis for the transformation is debatable. Such transformation may cause diagnostic pitfalls and therapeutic dilemma because these malignancies usually are resistant to the chemotherapeutic regimes designed for germ cell tumors.
Who Is Responsible for Your Health: You, Your Doctor or New Technologies?

The aim of the paper is to disentangle the roles that patients, physicians and technology can have on patient health outcomes using a large and detailed dataset of Italian patients collected by the Italian College of General Practitioners (SIMG) over the period 2001–2006. As our data show the existence of heterogeneity in the time needed to reach an optimal level of health stock, we study this measure of health outcome rather than simply the level of health stock. Limiting our analysis to patients suffering from hypercholesterolemia, the empirical work is based on two different analyses. We first explore whether patients recovering faster exhibit lower hospitalization rates and then we study the determinants of the speed of recovery to a good health status. The results confirm that a 10% increase in the speed of recovery can reduce hospitalization rates by about 1.0%. Furthermore, we show that recovering to a good health status is a multifaceted phenomenon, with technology explaining at best 62% of the combined effect, while patient and physician behaviors share the residual effect. These results are then discussed in terms of policy.
Associations between age at school entry and academic performance: Using data from a nationally representative, longitudinal sample

The purpose of this study was to examine the associations between age at school entry and academic performance in kindergarten through the fifth grade. The study utilized the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (ECLS-K) dataset that includes a nationally representative sample that was collected over a six-year period and compiled by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES). Even when controlling for the variables of gender, race, socioeconomic status, and disability, the analyses revealed that the youngest students did not perform as well in reading and math as their school entry peers through the fifth grade. A separate analysis indicated that the youngest students were also less likely than their school entry peers to be in the expected grade (fifth) during the fifth grade collection. The findings are strengthened because the youngest students in the study were found to not be “at-risk’ in other identified areas (gender, socioeconomic status, parents’ education level). Although the youngest group did not have the identified “at-risk” characteristics, they still performed less well than their school entry peers in both reading and math. Based on the research findings of this study, implications for policy, curriculum, and assessment are discussed.
Immediate effect of self-myofascial release on hamstring flexibility

Corresponding author: Seungwon Lee Department of Physical Therapy, College of Health Science and Social Welfare, Sahmyook University, 815 Hwarang-ro, Nowon-gu, Seoul 01795, Republic of Korea Tel: 82-2-3399-1630 Fax: 82-2-3399-1639 E-mail: swlee@syu.ac. kr This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licens es/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Copyright © 2017 Korean Academy of Physical Therapy Rehabilitation Science https://doi.org/10.14474/ptrs.2017. 6.1. 45 pISSN 2287-7576 eISSN 2287-7584 Phys Ther Rehabil Sci 2017, 6 (1), 45-51 www.jptrs. org
Networked and Distributed Convex Optimization for Design, Estimation, and Verification

Abstract : The core research conducted over the period of this grant focused on distributed and networked optimization in a variety of practical settings, including design (such as, for circuits), parameter estimation and fault identification (for integrated vehicle health management), network flow control, control of wireless and sensor networks, methods for general purpose control, and power optimization in processors. The research explored a variety of applications of distributed optimization in which local decisions are coordinated to produce a good overall solution. These problems arise in many areas, such as monitoring the health of a complex system, coordinating the design of a complex system, or fusing together information from disparate sources. The researchers exploited mathematical properties of the underlying problems to be solved (specifically, convexity) to develop effective methods. Following a brief description of the core research conducted during this grant, the report presents a bibliography of 56 archival publications in which Stephen Boyd is a co-author and other achievements realized during the course of the grant: 8 student doctoral dissertations, 4 software programs, honors and awards, and 7 plenary/keynote talks.
Rewind and replay? Television and play in the 1950s/1960s and 2010s

In this paper, we consider the way in which television's impact on children's play has changed over the past 60 years. The UK has unique collections of children's playground games and rhymes. The folklorists Iona and Peter Opie collected children's playground games and rhymes in the 1950s–1980s and their collection is deposited at the Bodleian Library. A recent study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Beyond Text programme, ‘Children's playground games and songs in the new media age’ involved an ethnographic study of two primary school playgrounds in England over a 2-year period (2009–2011). This was followed by a project which involved interviewing some of the Opies' child contributors, now adults aged 50–70, and their contemporaries, about their memories of play and its relationship to media and commercial markets. In this paper, data from both projects are compared in order to trace changes over time in the influence of media and the market on children's play. This paper considers the data on television and play and outlines the way in which there are both continuities and discontinuities in this play. Key continuities relate to the way in which television is drawn upon in children's imaginative play, as children today continue to draw on characters, narratives and language from television in their play episodes in ways that were similar to those of the past. Differences include the way in which new genres of television programmes now inform play, such as reality television.
Apex as an ―Approximate‖ Communication System in Wireless Network for video transmission

Communication systems are prone to error weather wired or wireless. The error in wireless communication system has well defined structure. The receiver decode this erroneous symbol in such a way that the erroneous symbol is good approximation of the transmitted symbol as compare to a randomly chosen symbol among all possible transmitted symbols . This a "approximation property" which is used in proposed paper to remove the error structure and to exploit the error structure to natively provide unequal error protection to data bit. In contrast to this the traditional methods of unequal error protection consume additional network and spectrum resources to encode redundant data, the approximate communication technique achieves this property at the PHY layer without consuming any additional network or spectrum resources (apart from a minimal signaling overhead). This method provides unequal error protection at the PHY layer without the need of any additional network or spectrum resources. It is use for the media delivery applications It can improve video quality by 5-20 dB (peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR)) across a diverse set of wireless conditions when compared to traditional approaches.