Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning How to Actively Learn: A Deep Imitation Learning Approach

Heuristic-based active learning (AL) methods are limited when the data distribution of the underlying learning problems vary. We introduce a method that learns an AL “policy” using “imitation learning” (IL). Our IL-based approach makes use of an efficient and effective “algorithmic expert”, which provides the policy learner with good actions in the encountered AL situations. The AL strategy is then learned with a feedforward network, mapping situations to most informative query datapoints. We evaluate our method on two different tasks: text classification and named entity recognition. Experimental results show that our IL-based AL strategy is more effective than strong previous methods using heuristics and reinforcement learning.
MocLis: A Non-Tunneling Moving Cell Support Protocol Based on Locator/ID Split for 5G System

In the LTE/LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) system, user-plane for a user equipment (UE) is provided by tunneling which causes header overhead, processing overhead, and management overhead. In addition, the LTE-A system does not support moving cells which are composed of a mobile Relay Node (RN) and UEs attached to the mobile RN. There are several proposals for moving cells in the LTE-A system and the 5G system, however, all of them rely on tunneling for the user-plane, which means that none of them avoid the tunneling overheads. This paper proposes MocLis, a moving cell support protocol based on a Locator/ID split approach. MocLis does not use tunneling. Nested moving cells are supported. Signaling cost for handover of a moving cell is independent of the number of UEs and nested RNs in the moving cell. MocLis is implemented in Linux; user space daemons and modified kernel. The measurement results show that the attachment time and handover time are short enough for practical use. TCP throughput in MocLis is faster than that in the tunneling based approaches.
DSAC: Effective Static Analysis of Sleep-in-Atomic-Context Bugs in Kernel Modules

In a modern OS, kernel modules often use spinlocks and interrupt handlers to monopolize a CPU core to execute concurrent code in atomic context. In this situation, if the kernel module performs an operation that can sleep at runtime, a system hang may occur. We refer to this kind of concurrency bug as a sleep-in-atomic-context (SAC) bug. In practice, SAC bugs have received insufficient attention and are hard to find, as they do not always cause problems in real executions. In this paper, we propose a practical static approach named DSAC, to effectively detect SAC bugs and automatically recommend patches to help fix them. DSAC uses four key techniques: (1) a hybrid of flow-sensitive and-insensitive analysis to perform accurate and efficient code analysis; (2) a heuristics-based method to accurately extract kernel interfaces that can sleep at runtime; (3) a path-check method to effectively filter out repeated reports and false bugs; (4) a pattern-based method to automatically generate recommended patches to help fix the bugs. We evaluate DSAC on kernel modules (drivers, file systems, and network modules) of the Linux kernel, and on the FreeBSD and NetBSD kernels, and in total find 401 new real bugs. 272 of these bugs have been confirmed by the relevant kernel maintainers, and 43 patches generated by DSAC have been applied by kernel maintainers.
Collaborative View Configurations for Multi-user Interaction with a Wall-size Display

This paper explores the effects of different collaborative view conﬁguration on face-to-face collaboration using a wall-size display and the relationship between view conﬁguration and multi-user interaction. Three different view conﬁgurations (shared view, split screen, and split screen with navigation information) for multi-user collaboration with a wall-size display were introduced and evaluated in a user study. From the experiment results, several insights for designing a virtual environment with a wall-size display were discussed. The shared view conﬁguration does not disturb collaboration despite control conﬂict and can provide an effective collaboration. The split screen view conﬁguration can provide independent collaboration while it can take users’ attention. The navigation information can reduce the interaction required for the navigational task while an overall interaction performance may not increase.
Acoustic and Textual Data Augmentation for Improved ASR of Code-Switching Speech

In this paper, we describe several techniques for improving the acoustic and language model of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system operating on code-switching (CS) speech. We focus on the recognition of Frisian-Dutch radio broadcasts where one of the mixed languages, namely Frisian, is an under-resourced language. In previous work, we have proposed several automatic transcription strategies for CS speech to increase the amount of available training speech data. In this work, we explore how the acoustic modeling (AM) can benefit from monolingual speech data belonging to the high-resourced mixed language. For this purpose, we train state-of-the-art AMs, which were ineffective due to lack of training data, on a significantly increased amount of CS speech and monolingual Dutch speech. Moreover, we improve the language model (LM) by creating code-switching text, which is in practice almost non-existent, by (1) generating text using recurrent LMs trained on the transcriptions of the training CS speech data, (2) adding the transcriptions of the automatically transcribed CS speech data and (3) translating Dutch text extracted from the transcriptions of a large Dutch speech corpora. We report significantly improved CS ASR performance due to the increase in the acoustic and textual training data.
Modelling user behaviour at a stochastic road traffic bottleneck

Congestion in road traffic has received substantial attention in the research literature. One popular approach to modelling congesting and user response is the seminal bottleneck model introduced by Vickrey [25]. Here traffic is modelled as a fluid, and all travellers are subject to cost for waiting, early departure, and late departure. The travellers' response to the congestion is captured by assuming that they arrive at the bottleneck according to a Wardrop equilibrium, meaning that no traveller can decrease its costs by shifting its arrival time. This model and its extensions have been extensively studied in the research literature, but ignore the fact that road traffic consists of individual travellers with uncertain arrival time and speed. While the fluid approach used in the Vickrey model may be correct when the number of travellers is large, it fails to yield accurate predictions for a small number of travellers. In the present paper we propose a stochastic version of the bottleneck model, that can also handle smaller number of travellers. We discuss the error made by the fluid approximation, and show that the Wardrop equilibrium results in highly varying costs when applied in the more realistic setting with stochasticity. We then discuss an algorithm for numerically computing the equilibrium arrival rate for the stochastic bottleneck model, and propose a closed-form estimation for this equilibrium. This can be used for future studies into the effect of stochasticity in these bottleneck models.
Morphogenesis and Molecular Phylogeny of a Soil Ciliate Uroleptoides longiseries (Foissner, Agatha and Berger, 2002) Berger 2008 (Ciliophora, Hypotrichia)

Morphogenesis of the hypotrich ciliate Uroleptoides longiseries, isolated from sandy soil beside the Yellow River, Suide, Yulin, Shaanxi Province, China, was investigated using protargol staining. The main events during binary fission are as follows: (1) the long frontoventral row is formed by a single anlage; (2) five frontoventral‐transverse cirral anlagen are formed in primary mode; (3) only the posterior part of the parental adoral zone of the membranelles is renewed; and (4) the oral primordium of the opisthe is formed intrakinetally. This is the first detailed record of all stages of morphogenesis for Uroleptoides. We also provide the first record of the small subunit ribosomal DNA (SSU rDNA) sequences for U. longiseries. Phylogenetic analyses based on the SSU rDNA sequences data show that Uroleptoides longiseries clusters with U. magnigranulosa with moderate to high support which together form a clade with Orthoamphisiella breviseries. These three species share the morphogenetic feature of the long frontoventral row being formed by a single anlage.
Large-scale spectral clustering using diffusion coordinates on landmark-based bipartite graphs

Spectral clustering has received a lot of attention due to its ability to separate nonconvex, non-intersecting manifolds, but its high computational complexity has significantly limited its applicability. Motivated by the document-term co-clustering framework by Dhillon (2001), we propose a landmark-based scalable spectral clustering approach in which we first use the selected landmark set and the given data to form a bipartite graph and then run a diffusion process on it to obtain a family of diffusion coordinates for clustering. We show that our proposed algorithm can be implemented based on very efficient operations on the affinity matrix between the given data and selected landmarks, thus capable of handling large data. Finally, we demonstrate the excellent performance of our method by comparing with the state-of-the-art scalable algorithms on several benchmark data sets.
Characterization of Two EF‐hand Domain‐containing Proteins from Toxoplasma gondii

The universal role of calcium (Ca2+) as a second messenger in cells depends on a large number of Ca2+‐binding proteins (CBP), which are able to bind Ca2+ through specific domains. Many CBPs share a type of Ca2+‐binding domain known as the EF‐hand. The EF‐hand motif has been well studied and consists of a helix‐loop‐helix structural domain with specific amino acids in the loop region that interact with Ca2+. In Toxoplasma gondii a large number of genes (approximately 68) are predicted to have at least one EF‐hand motif. The majority of these genes have not been characterized. We report the characterization of two EF‐hand motif‐containing proteins, TgGT1_216620 and TgGT1_280480, which localize to the plasma membrane and to the rhoptry bulb, respectively. Genetic disruption of these genes by CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/Cas9 (CRISPR‐associated protein 9) resulted in mutant parasite clones (Δtg216620 and Δtg280480) that grew at a slower rate than control cells. Ca2+ measurements showed that Δtg216620 cells did not respond to extracellular Ca2+ as the parental controls while Δtg280480 cells appeared to respond as the parental cells. Our hypothesis is that TgGT1_216620 is important for Ca2+ influx while TgGT1_280480 may be playing a different role in the rhoptries.
False Positive Reduction by Actively Mining Negative Samples for Pulmonary Nodule Detection in Chest Radiographs

Generating large quantities of quality labeled data in medical imaging is very time consuming and expensive. The performance of supervised algorithms for various tasks on imaging has improved drastically over the years, however the availability of data to train these algorithms have become one of the main bottlenecks for implementation. To address this, we propose a semi-supervised learning method where pseudo-negative labels from unlabeled data are used to further refine the performance of a pulmonary nodule detection network in chest radiographs. After training with the proposed network, the false positive rate was reduced to 0.1266 from 0.4864 while maintaining sensitivity at 0.89.
KAP1 regulates endogenous retroviruses in adult human cells and contributes to innate immune control

Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) have accumulated in vertebrate genomes and contribute to the complexity of gene regulation. KAP1 represses ERVs during development by its recruitment to their repetitive sequences through KRAB zinc‐finger proteins (KZNFs), but little is known about the regulation of ERVs in adult tissues. We observed that KAP1 repression of HERVK14C was conserved in differentiated human cells and performed KAP1 knockout to obtain an overview of KAP1 function. Our results show that KAP1 represses ERVs (including HERV‐T and HERV‐S) and ZNF genes, both of which overlap with KAP1 binding sites and H3K9me3 in multiple cell types. Furthermore, this pathway is functionally conserved in adult human peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Cytosine methylation that acts on KAP1 regulated loci is necessary to prevent an interferon response, and KAP1‐depletion leads to activation of some interferon‐stimulated genes. Finally, loss of KAP1 leads to a decrease in H3K9me3 enrichment at ERVs and ZNF genes and an RNA‐sensing response mediated through MAVS signaling. These data indicate that the KAP1‐KZNF pathway contributes to genome stability and innate immune control in adult human cells.
Natural Language Inference with Definition Embedding Considering Context On the Fly

Natural language inference (NLI) is one of the most important tasks in NLP. In this study, we propose a novel method using word dictionaries, which are pairs of a word and its definition, as external knowledge. Our neural definition embedding mechanism encodes input sentences with the definitions of each word of the sentences on the fly. It can encode the definition of words considering the context of input sentences by using an attention mechanism. We evaluated our method using WordNet as a dictionary and confirmed that our method performed better than baseline models when using the full or a subset of 100d GloVe as word embeddings.
Experimental Demonstration of a Low-Complexity Phase Noise Compensation for CO-OFDM Systems

In this letter, a low-complexity phase noise compensation scheme based on Kalman filtering theory is experimentally demonstrated for coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) transmissions. The proposed scheme can operate in two modes, pilot-aided mode and blind mode, resulting in a variety of phase noise tracking configurations upon particular transmission scenario. At a bit error rate of $3.8\times 10^{-3}$ and for 40 GBaud 16-QAM 64 subcarriers CO-OFDM systems, the proposed method operating in the pilot-aided mode reduces the pilot overhead by a factor of 2 in comparison with the conventional pilot-aided scheme, while in the blind mode, our scheme’s complexity is far superior to one of the state-of-the-art computational efficient decision-direct-free blind approach by a factor of 20.
DROM: Enabling Efficient and Effortless Malleability for Resource Managers

In the design of future HPC systems, research in resource management is showing an increasing interest in a more dynamic control of the available resources. It has been proven that enabling the jobs to change the number of computing resources at run time, i.e. their malleability, can significantly improve HPC system performance. However, job schedulers and applications typically do not support malleability due to the common belief that it introduces additional programming complexity and performance impact. This paper presents DROM, an interface that provides efficient malleability with no effort for program developers. The running application is enabled to adapt the number of threads to the number of assigned computing resources in a completely transparent way to the user through the integration of DROM with standard programming models, such as OpenMP/OmpSs, and MPI. We designed the APIs to be easily used by any programming model, application and job scheduler or resource manager. Our experimental results from two realistic use cases analysis, based on malleability by reducing the number of cores a job is using per node and jobs co-allocation, show the potential of DROM for improving the performance of HPC systems. In particular, the workload of two MPI+OpenMP neuro-simulators are tested, reporting improvement in system metrics, such as total run time and average response time, up to 8% and 48%, respectively.
Defect spectroscopy from electrical measurements: a simulation based technique

We present in this paper a novel defect spectroscopy technique for extracting defect and material properties of gate oxides and dielectrics used for memory devices (e.g. DRAM, RRAM). The method is based on the correlate simulation of electrical characteristics (IV, CV, GV, BTI), to allow the determination of the energy distribution and depth profile of atomic defects within the material bandgap. This novel defect spectroscopy technique is applied to MOSFET gate stacks with Si and InGaAs, and to DRAM capacitors.
A Trust-Grained Personalized Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Big Social Data

In the age of big data, the rapid development of social networking applications has become an improtant data source, while the massive collection of personal data leads to significant privacy concerns. Differential privacy emerged as an effective tool to get access to useful information while provide strong privacy guarantees. However, most the current proposed solutions suppose that all individuals across the network require a uniform level of privacy protection, which rules out of individuals' personalized requirements. Aiming at solving this problem, in this paper, we propose a trust-grained personalized differential privacy mechanism, called TGDP, by combining the notion of trust. Specifically, whenever a user wants to get another user's personal information, the proposed mechanism returns a corresponding private response in which the privacy level selected for each individual depend on the trust value between them in the network. Compared with traditional methods, the scheme can provide a fine-grained differential privacy protection method, while guarantee the utility of social networks. Finally, the scheme is evaluated analytically, and demonstrated experimentally on the real- world data, which reflects its effectiveness and utility.
CMH: compression management for improving capacity in the hybrid memory cube

The Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) is a novel 3D memory architecture that efficiently improves bandwidth and saves energy. However, due to limitations in scalability and power density of a DRAM bit cell, the physical data capacity of an individual HMC is relatively modest and unlikely to grow significantly and it is likely to be a challenge in adopting the HMC for big data in high-performance computing. In this paper, we propose a new strategy to increase the effective data capacity of the HMC, called Compression Management for HMC (CMH). CMH is incorporated in the logic layer of the HMC. By selectively compressing data during transmission and storing the selectively compressed data in the 3D memory stack, CMH increases data capacity while also improving effective bandwidth. For several memory-intensive benchmarks, our results show that CMH reduces pressure on memory capacity by 64.4%, and improves bandwidth by 42.4%. Similarly good results are observed for multi-programmed workloads, reducing capacity 66.2% and improving bandwidth 47.8%. Although compression has latency overhead, by introducing a small cache in the HMC logic layer to store metadata for compression, CMH mitigates any increase in transaction latency. The overhead in instructions per cycle is a minimal 1.2% and 1.5%, respectively, for single-core and multi-core workloads. The IPC is stable and is not harmed by the inclusion of compression.
Performance Evaluation of LoRaWAN Communication Scalability in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

The LoRaWAN communication protocol can be used for the implementation of the IoT (Internet of Things) concept. Currently, most of the information regarding the scalability of the LoRa technology is commercial and deals with the best-case scenario. Thus, we need realistic models, enabling the proper assessment of the performance level. Most of the time, the IoT concept entails a large number of nodes distributed over a wide geographical area, therefore forming a high density, large-scale architecture. It is important to determine the number of collisions so that we can assess the network performance. The present paper aims at assessing the performance level of the LoRaWAN technology by analyzing the number of packet collisions that can occur. Thus, this paper determines the maximum number of LoRa nodes that can communicate with a Gateway considering the LoRaWAN protocol specifications. Furthermore, we have proposed a series of solutions for reducing the number of collisions and increasing the capacity of the communication channel.
Robust-Seed: seed-based segmentation improvement by optimisation

Abstract Many medical image segmentation methods require the selection of seed points inside the target structure. Often times, the location of these seed points determines the accuracy of the resulting target structure delineation and may lead to undesirably high delineation variability. We present Robust-Seed, a new method for automatically reducing the variability of manual and semi-automatic seed-based segmentation methods with respect to the seed point location without compromising the target structure segmentation accuracy. The inputs are a volumetric image, a seed point inside the target structure, and a seed-based segmentation method. The output is a new seed point that optimises the target structure segmentation result. The algorithm iteratively computes a new seed point location that improves the expected target structure segmentation for the given method. Experimental evaluation of seed-based fast-marching level-set and adaptive region growing segmentation of the kidney and the liver on 32 CT scans with ground-truth delineations shows that Robust-Seed yields a perfect robustness score with no significant compromise on the segmentation quality (paired t-test, p < 0.05). The key advantages of Robust-Seed are that it is automatic, that it is independent of target structure and segmentation method used, and that it applies to a wide class of anatomical structures and clinical tasks.
Policy of prevention: Medical utilization under a wellness plan

Wellness programs constitute central components of disease prevention efforts under the Affordable Care Act and are likely to remain a component of employer provided health insurance. This paper evaluates the impact of such programs on medical utilization 4 to 7 years after enrollment in the plan. Using a unique suited data provided by a large private employer, I analyze medical expenditure and utilization for individuals enrolled in a wellness plan. The analysis compares expenditures and visits between wellness members and nonmembers who are matched through propensity score methods. The results show that although the wellness program increases utilization of preventive and outpatient care, by as much as 1.57 visits per year, there is no comparable decline in emergency or inpatient care, resulting in an overall increase in medical expenditure of around $507 per person per year. The increase in medical expenditure persists even 6 to 7 years of continued enrollment in wellness. I find some evidence of improved health, as diagnoses of diabetes decline 0.8 percentage points among wellness members. The results suggest that employer savings stemming from improved health and more judicious use of medical services are not likely to materialize in this wellness program.