Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simulation of Cloud Computing Environments with CloudSim

Abstract Cloud computing is a recent advancement wherein IT infrastructure and applications are provided as ‘services’ to end-users under a usage-based payment model. The aim of this paper is to describe and evaluate CloudSim: a new generalized and extensible simulation framework that enables seamless simulation, and experimentation of emerging cloud computing infrastructures and management services.
In Older Adults, Intervention Impacts the Association Between the Cortisol Awak- ening Response and Three Measures of Wellbeing: Meaningful Activities, Life Satisfaction and Perceived Control

Studies report associations between the cortisol awakening response (CAR) and measures of psychological stress and wellbeing suggesting the possibility that individual differences in the CAR might influence which individuals respond to intervention programs aimed at promoting healthier lifestyle. This issue is studied in a randomized control trial in a large (N =460) ethnically diverse community sample of elder adults (M age 74.9; 66% female) using a cross-over design. Three key measures of wellbeing (i.e., meaningful activity, perceived control, and life satisfaction) were taken before and six months later. Some participants (N = 232) did not receive intervention the first six months, they acted as a control group, but after six months they received intervention and were measured again six months later. The intervention was a lifestyle-oriented occupational therapy program. Results revealed that prior to intervention, no associations were found between the CAR and the wellbeing measures. However, after intervention, associations between the CAR and wellbeing were pronounced. After intervention, as CAR increases, typical MAPA, PC and LSIZ scores tend to decrease. For PC and LSIZ, this is particularly true for positive CAR values; for negative CAR values there is a relatively small change in PC and LSIZ scores. The CAR, measured after intervention, is also associated with the extent MAPA and PC scores improve compared to baseline measures. Findings are among the first to document the nature of the effects of intervention on the association between activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and key measures of wellbeing. Implications for future investigations are discussed.
UK Public Health Responsibility Deals – can they nudge consumers towards healthier diets?

The UK Government’s Responsibility Deals (Food Network) seeks to promote healthier dietary choices by consumers through food industry-led product reformulation initiatives enhancing the availability of healthier foods. Such public-private partnerships based on voluntary action from the food industry are part of the “nudge” agenda and are seen as preferred alternatives to more intrusive regulatory and fiscal interventions in food product markets. This paper develops a framework to assess the potential effectiveness of Responsibility Deals in influencing the population level intakes of energy and nutrients. Our analysis finds that Responsibility Deals, even if wholeheartedly adopted by the food industry, may not necessarily lead to significant reductions in population level energy and nutrient intakes. This is because the effect of product reformulation initiatives is mediated by consumer response to these initiatives both within and across major food product groups. Our results suggest that the major role for Responsibility Deals lies not in “nudging” consumers towards healthier dietary choices, but rather in reversing or halting the trends in food product nutrient composition changes over the last two decades that have rendered adherence to recommended dietary guidelines more difficult for consumers. Discussion paper presented at the 89th Annual Conference of the Agricultural Economics Society, University of Warwick, United Kingdom. April 13-15, 2015 Draft discussion paper: Corresponding author: c.s. srinivasan@reading.ac. uk , School of Agriculture, Policy and Development,
Heavy Precipitation at the Alpine South Side and Saharan Dust over Central Europe: A Predictability Study Using TIGGE

Around 26 May 2008 a pronounced potential vorticity (PV) streamer penetrated from the North Atlantic into the western Mediterranean Sea followed by widespread dust mobilization over the Maghreb region of northwest Africa and a subsequent northward transport into central Europe. At the same time, strong southerly flow over the Mediterranean Sea caused heavy precipitation and flooding at the windward side of the European Alps. Using continuous and feature-based error measures, as well as ensemble correlation techniques, this study investigates the forecast quality and predictability of synoptic and mesoscale aspects of this high-impact event in operational ensemble predictions from nine meteorological centers participating in The Observing System Research and Predictability Experiment (THORPEX) Interactive Grand Global Ensemble (TIGGE) project. TIGGE is a recently established program providing ensemble forecasts in a standardized format, which allows for an exciting new multimodel approach to investigating the predictability of, for example, high-impact weather and its dynamics. The main conclusions from this study are that 1) the quality of the PV streamer forecasts degrades with lead time showing a general tendency toward too weak Rossby wave; 2) when focusing on the region around the streamer, most models show root-meansquare errors of the same magnitude or larger than the ensemble spread (underdispersive behavior); 3) errors are reduced by about 50% if the comparison is made to each center’s own analysis instead of the ECMWF analysis; 4) peak wind speeds over the Sahara tend to be underpredicted, with differences in model formulation dominating over differences in the representation of the PV streamer; and 5) ensemble-mean multimodel forecasts of 4-day accumulated precipitation appear accurate enough for a successful severe-weather warning.
Design of Ultraviolet photodetector based on Quantum Well Optically Pumped Lasers

The main goal of this research is design of an ultraviolet photodetector based on intersubband transitions in III-Nitride multiple quantum well. Due to the abundance of visible light detectors, optically pumped lasers with ability of converting incident ultraviolet radiation to visible light are proposed. In this way, incident wavelength of about 352nm at ultraviolet wavelength band is converted to wavelength of 559nm at visible range using intersubband transitions in III-Nitride multiple quantum well structures.To calculate parameters of the structure, wave functions and energy levels are obtained by solving 1-D Schrodinger– Poisson equation self consistently at 300°K. Responsivity and optical gain for the designed structure are 4.623(mA/w) and 10.28 (1/cm) at 300°K respectively.
Dispersive Liquid-Liquid Microextraction in the Analysis of Milk and Dairy Products: A Review

Dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME) is an extraction technique developed within the last decade, which involves the dispersion of fine droplets of extraction solvent in an aqueous sample. Partitioning of analytes into the extraction phase is instantaneous due to the very high collective surface area of the droplets. This leads to very high enrichment factors and very low solvent consumption, relative to other liquid or solid phase extraction methods. A comprehensive review of the various modes of DLLME in the analysis of organic and inorganic analytes in dairy products (milk, cheese, infant formula, yogurt, and breast milk) is presented here. Dairy products present a complex sample matrix and the removal of interfering matrix components can prove troublesome. This review focuses on sample pretreatment prior to the appropriate DLLME procedure, the extraction and dispersive solvents chosen, derivatisation methods, and analytical figures of merit. Where possible, a critical comparison of DLLME methods has been undertaken. The overall suitability, and limitations, of DLLME as a sample preparation technique for dairy products has been assessed.
Multibranch Attention Networks for Action Recognition in Still Images

Contextual information plays an important role in visual recognition. This is especially true for action recognition as contextual information, such as the objects a person interacts with and the scene in which the action is performed, is inseparable from a predefined action class. Meanwhile, the attention mechanism of humans shows remarkable capability compared with the existing computer vision system in discovering contextual information. Inspired by this, we applied the soft attention mechanism by adding two extra branches in the original VGG16 model in which one is to apply scene-level attention whilst the other is region-level attention to capture the global and local contextual information. To make the multibranch model well converged and fully optimized, a two-step training method is proposed with an alternating optimization strategy. We call this model multibranch attention networks. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on two experimental settings: with and without the bounding box of the target person, three publicly available datasets on human action were used for evaluation. This method achieved state-of-the-art results on the PASCAL VOC action dataset and the Stanford 40 dataset on both experimental settings and performed well on humans interacting with common objects dataset.
Evaluating ray casting and two gaze-based pointing techniques for object selection in virtual reality

Selecting an object is a basic interaction task in virtual reality (VR) environments. Interaction techniques with gaze pointing have potential for this elementary task. There appears to be little empirical evidence concerning the benefits and drawbacks of these methods in VR. We ran an experiment studying three interaction techniques: ray casting, dwell time and gaze trigger, where gaze trigger was a combination of gaze pointing and controller selection. We studied user experience and interaction speed in a simple object selection task. The results indicated that ray casting outperforms both gaze-based methods while gaze trigger performs better than dwell time.
Linguistic Resources and Strategies Used In Multilingual Communication in HIV/AIDS Care Centres in Lesotho

This paper gives a description of multilingual practices in two HIV-care centres in Lesotho on the basis of interviews with both healthcare providers and some patients who make use of the services of these centres. It considers the importance of effective linguistic communication in HIV-care and the hazards posed to such communication when physicians do not share the first language of the patients and of others working in these healthcare facilities. It gives the insights gained in a recent study on the kinds of interventions developed to facilitate communication in such multilingual institutional settings. In one of the centres informal interpreters are appointed to assist in transfer of information during consultations; in the second centre interpreting is only casually available from bilingual staff members. Besides interpreting, participants reported engaging in a number of other mediating practices. Evidence gained from informal interpreting studies elsewhere suggests that more than literal translation is required to achieve the kind of communicative success that will ensure quality in the healthcare provided to a vulnerable community. This study agrees with such findings and has generated a number of suggestions for improving the management of the linguistic diversity in communication within such clinics. The paper focuses on the specific resources provided in the healthcare centres and on the strategies participants use to enhance medical communication.
A PHOTOGRAMMETRIC PIPELINE FOR THE 3D RECONSTRUCTION OF CASSIS IMAGES ON BOARD EXOMARS TGO

CaSSIS (Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System) is the stereo imaging system onboard the European Space Agency and ROSCOSMOS ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) that has been launched on 14 March 2016 and entered a Mars elliptical orbit on 19 October 2016. During the first bounded orbits, CaSSIS returned its first multiband images taken on 22 and 26 November 2016. The telescope acquired 11 images, each composed by 30 framelets, of the Martian surface near Hebes Chasma and Noctis Labyrithus regions reaching at closest approach at a distance of 250 km from the surface. Despite of the eccentricity of this first orbit, CaSSIS has provided one stereo pair with a mean ground resolution of 6 m from a mean distance of 520 km. The team at the Astronomical Observatory of Padova (OAPD-INAF) is involved into different stereo oriented missions and it is realizing a software for the generation of Digital Terrain Models from the CaSSIS images. The SW will be then adapted also for other projects involving stereo camera systems. To compute accurate 3D models, several sequential methods and tools have been developed. The preliminary pipeline provides: the generation of rectified images from the CaSSIS framelets, a matching core and post-processing methods. The software includes in particular: an automatic tie points detection by the Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) operator, an initial search for the correspondences through Normalize Cross Correlation (NCC) algorithm and the Adaptive Least Square Matching (LSM) algorithm in a hierarchical approach. This work will show a preliminary DTM generated by the first CaSSIS stereo images.
A Conceptual Urban Quality Space-Place Framework: Linking Geo-Information and Quality of Life

Space and place are key concepts for understanding the functionality of social and environmental interactions. Cities are complex social-ecological systems where space–place interactions can be interpreted by means of quality of life. Firstly, we present several quality-of-life concepts that can be linked to space and place concepts. Secondly, we develop an analysis about space and place interactions, and how the social aspects, such as the sense of place, and physical aspects, such as urban spaces, are associated with quality of life and inclusive places. Thirdly, we state how the quality of life definitions of livability and life-ability are linked to the space and place concepts, and how this link can support the understanding of quality of life in cities, considering spatial thinking. Fourthly, we expand geo-information theories to a space–place approach of urban quality of life. Finally, we discuss how the developed conceptual framework can be applied to interpret the smart city. This paper contributes to the construction of new epistemologies that could support a more holistic understanding of the cities and a more social and humanistic use of geo-information and technology.
Functionalization of GaN Surfaces for Biosensing 29 Selective Functionalization of GaInN Quantum Well Surfaces for Applications in Biosensing

In this work, chemical functionalization of the surface of gallium indium nitride (GaInN) quantum well structures is performed aiming to study biosensing of the iron-storage molecule ferritin. In order to enable local investigations of ferritin molecules, a local functionalization of the group III-nitride surface with silane molecules is performed. Our studies demonstrate a preferred attachment of ferritin molecules on the functionalized quantum well surface.
Trends in Large-Scale Graph Processing

Graphs represent an excellent data-structure for representing objects and relations among them. With the emergence of social networks, efficient mining of large graphs has turned these structures into an important analytics problem. The irregular structure of graphs make them hard to parallelize and solving this problem has become an interesting systems research area. The different approaches to this problem cover in-memory processing in both distributed as well as single machine systems and out-of-core systems storing the graphs on secondary storage. In this work we provide an overview of the state of the art in each of these categories. Galois is a generic parallel processing system with a recent modification allowing for efficient shared-memory graph processing. Being a general programming model it allows greater flexibility and adaptability to certain problems then restricted DSL systems. PowerGraph represents the state of the art for in-memory distributed graph processing systems introducing a different approach to graph partitioning leading to reduced communication and memory overheads. Unlike the previous systems, X-Stream adapts its programming model to maximize the achieved bandwidth to secondary storage using the fact that sequential access to any type of storage always outperforms random access. Finally we briefly present our own work and future directions in this area.
Obstacle Avoidance Approaches for Autonomous Navigation of Unmanned Surface Vehicles

The adoption of a robust collision avoidance module is required to realise fully autonomous Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). In this work, collision detection and path planning methods for USVs are presented. Attention is focused on the difference between local and global path planners, describing the most common techniques derived from classical graph search theory. In addition, a dedicated section is reserved for intelligent methods, such as artificial neural networks and evolutionary algorithms. Born as optimisation methods, they can learn a close-to-optimal solution without requiring large computation effort under certain constraints. Finally, the deficiencies of the existing methods are highlighted and discussed. It has been concluded that almost all the existing method do not address sea or weather conditions, or do not involve the dynamics of the vessel while defining the path. Therefore, this research area is still far from being considered fully explored.
Plant functional shifts in the invaded range: a test with reciprocal forest invaders of Europe and North America

Summary Comparative trait analyses of native and invasive plant species have enriched our understanding of the strategies that make plants successful in particular contexts. However, it is generally unknown whether traits associated with invasiveness arise de novo in the introduced range or represent a case of ‘pre-adaptation’ of some species to become invasive. We compared the functional strategies of two invasive species, Prunus serotina, a tree native to Eastern North America (ENA) and invasive in European forests, and Rhamnus cathartica, a shrub native to Europe and invasive in ENA, in both their native and invasive ranges. We measured leaf functional traits related to plant carbon and nitrogen economics in populations across northeastern ENA (New York) and northern France. This reciprocal field approach is unique, comparing in situ physiology within and between each species' shared ranges. For both species, we found striking differences in leaf economic traits and intraspecific trait scaling relationships. Prunus serotina exhibited similar photosynthetic rates in New York (native range) and France (invasive range), but French populations had significantly greater leaf carbon investments in the form of increased leaf respiration, construction costs, and carbon concentrations. Rhamnus cathartica exhibited 50–60% higher photosynthetic rates in New York (invasive range) than France (native range), along with increased leaf nitrogen costs. New York populations also had significantly lower nitrogen resorption efficiency, with autumn leaf nitrogen concentrations 69% lower in France. Intraspecific trait differences between native and invasive ranges indicate shifts in resource-use strategies between the native and invasive range are possible in invasive species. While further investigations with additional species would be needed to determine the role of phenotypic plasticity and prevalence of post-introduction trait shifts, our results question the assumption that functional strategies of invasive species are conserved from the native range and highlight the utility of measuring in situ functional strategies of reciprocal invaders to provide mechanistic understanding of invasions.
NOHOST : A New Storage Architecture for Distributed Storage Systems by Chanwoo Chung

This thesis introduces a new NAND flash-based storage architecture, NOHOST, for distributed storage systems. A conventional flash-based storage system is composed of a number of high-performance x86 Xeon servers, and each server hosts 10 to 30 solid state drives (SSDs) that use NAND flash memory. This setup not only consumes considerable power due to the nature of Xeon processors, but it also occupies a huge physical space compared to small flash drives. By eliminating costly host servers, the suggested architecture uses NOHOST nodes instead, each of which is a low-power embedded system that forms a cluster of distributed key-value store. This is done by refactoring deep I/O layers in the current design so that refactored layers are light-weight enough to run seamlessly on resource constrained environments. The NOHOST node is a full-fledged storage node, composed of a distributed service frontend, key-value store engine, device driver, hardware flash translation layer, flash controller and NAND flash chips. To prove the concept of this idea, a prototype of two NOHOST nodes has been implemented on Xilinx Zynq ZC706 boards and custom flash boards in this work. NOHOST is expected to use half the power and one-third the physical space as compared to a Xeon-based system. NOHOST is expected to support the through of 2.8 GB/s which is comparable to contemporary storage architectures. Thesis Supervisor: Arvind Title: Johnson Professor in Computer Science and Engineering
Cloning and characterisation of a CTR1-like gene in Cucurbita pepo 1

A homologue of CTR1, one of the key genes in the regulation of ethylene response pathway of Arabidopsis, has been cloned and characterised in Cucurbita pepo. The Cup-CTR1 gene is predicted to encode for a protein containing the structural features of Map kinase kinase kinases (MAPKKKs) and shares 58-85 % identity with CTR1-like proteins in Arabidopsis and other plant species. Phylogenetic analysis indicates that Cup-CTR1 is more related to Arabidopsis CTR1 and related proteins in tomato, rose and Delphinium, than to other plant MAPKKKs. The gene is expressed at various levels in all the tissues examined. During flower development, Cup-CTR1 is up-regulated in male flowers but not in female flowers. Given that the expression of the gene is only induced by ethylene in male flowers, it appears that the higher levels of Cup-CTR1 transcript in male flowers are required to maintain inhibition of the response to ethylene, and to prevent the development of carpels in these flowers.
Temporal Changes of Subsurface Velocities during Strong Shaking

The deconvolved waveforms reflect the subsurface velocity structure, and their horizontal and vertical components correspond to Sand P-wave, respectively, traveling from the borehole to the ground surface. The strong motion records with smaller values of peak acceleration do not include significant non-linear effects, so the deconvolved waveforms of the observed accelerations can be well simulated by the program SHAKE91.