Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
State of the Art on: Towards a unifying model for data-intensive applications

In recent years, the need for software applications that can handle large amounts of rapidly varying and heterogeneous data has become greater and greater. We refer to these applications as data-intensive. They require a distributed software system to store and process the large amount of data, in order to exploit the resources of many interconnected computers. The research areas involved in this topic are mainly the database research area and the distributed systems and algorithms one. The former is the area that deals with storing and managing data developing databases and database management systems (DBMS), while the latter has the main focus on the creation of distributed platforms and algorithms to process and analyze large quantity of data. Among the most relevant journals1 and conferences2 related to the research topic, there are: • ACM SIGMOD Conference • ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems • ACM Transactions on Computer Systems • EuroSys the European Systems Conference • IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering • IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems • USENIX Annual Technical Conference • USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation • The VLDB Journal • VLDB Conference
PROGNOSTIC VALUE OF COGNITIVE TESTS AND THEIR COMBINATION IN PATIENTS WITH CHRONIC HEART FAILURE AND REDUCED LEFT VENTRICULAR EJECTION FRACTION

Impaired cognitive function (CF) is common among patients with CHF and is an additional factor impairing the quality of life, adherence to treatment, and hence the clinical prognosis in this category of patients. The aim of this work was to study the prognostic significance of individual cognitive tests, as well as their combination in patients with CHF with a reduced left ventricular ejection fraction (LV EF). Materials and methods. The study was conducted in the Department of Heart Failure of National Scientific Center "M.D. Strazhesko Institute of Cardiology" National Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine, in the period from 01/01/2016 to 04/27/2018. A total of 124 patients with CHF between the ages of 18 and 75 years, II-IV functional classes by NYHA were examined. The cognitive function was assessed using the Schulte test, Mini-Mental State Examination scale (MMSE); HADS scale. Cognitive dysfunction (CD) was considered as MMSE ≤26 points. To construct the survival curves and the onset of the combined critical event (death or hospitalization), the Kaplan – Meier method was used, the significance of the differences between the curves was determined using the log-rank criterion. Differences were considered statistically significant at p <0.05. Results. The MMSE scale was highly informative regarding the prediction of survival and the onset of a combined critical event (death or hospitalization) in patients with CHF and reduced LVEF even after correction of the compared groups by age and functional class according to NYHA (p=0.025 and p=0.049, respectively). Using the same sample, Schulte showed low prognostic significance regarding survival and reliable informativeness regarding the onset of the combined critical event, which, however, was leveled after correcting the compared samples by age and functional class NYHA (p=0.798 and p=0.240, respectively). The inclusion in the prognostic algorithm of estimating the sum of points on the HADS depression scale allowed increasing the degree of reliability of differences between the compared groups of patients with CD and without CD in terms of both long-term survival and the onset of a combined critical event (death or hospitalization) (p=0.006 and p=0.001 respectively). Conclusions. The MMSE scale is informative regarding the prediction of survival and the onset of a combined critical event in patients with CHF and reduced LVEF. Schulte's test does not have the prognostic information indicated above, however, the inclusion in the algorithm of the sum of points on the HADS depression scale allows to increase the degree of statistical confidence in the compared groups.
dt : A High-level Assembler for RISC-V

The RISC-V instruction set is a modern RISC instruction set speciﬁcation that has gained attention from academics, hobbyists and even major industry players due to its open-source license. Anyone can build simulation tools, and even full hardware designs, targeting the RISC-V instruction set. During the early development stages of these tools and designs, it is important to be able to exercise speciﬁc instruction sequences (micro-kernels) for testing corner-cases, to expose difﬁcult-to-reproduce bugs, or to characterize and verify performance estimates. This paper describes a new programming language intended to make it easier to write micro-kernels for the RISC-V instruction set. The programming model is strictly at the assembly level, however there are high-level language constructs that are available to ease the programming burden. The language is called DuctTape, or simply dt for short. This style of programming enables the programmer to have complete control over the emitted instructions and memory values without the burden of writing code entirely in assembly. The output of the dt high-level assembler is either 1) a ﬂat memory space ﬁle that can easily be integrated into processor simulators or FPGA designs, or 2) the ELF64 format, suitable for executing on a RISC-V Linux development platform.
On the Robustness of the 2Sum and Fast2Sum Algorithms

The 2Sum and Fast2Sum algorithms are important building blocks in numerical computing. They are used (implicitely or explicitely) in many compensated algorithms (such as compensated summation or compensated polynomial evaluation). They are also used for manipulating floating-point expansions. We show that these algorithms are much more robust than it is usually believed: The returned result makes sense even when the rounding function is not round-to-nearest, and they are almost immune to overflow.
A Constrained Solver for Optical Absorption Tomography

1School of Engineering, Institute for Digital Communications, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. 2Department of Electronics and Informatics, Vrije University Brussels, Brussels, Belgium. 3School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. 4Department of Engineering, Photonics, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK. *Corresponding author: n.polydorides@ed.ac. uk
A Survey of Sentiment Analysis on Social Media

: Opinions and sentiments are only attributes that leaps out at the mention of sentiment analysis. This paper attempts to offer a broader definition of sentiment analysis that describes its features in various areas of big data. The enormous growth of internet users and social media led to the generation of sentiments, evaluation, attitude, emotions towards entities such as products, services, organizations, events, topics and their attributes. This survey paper documents the basic concept relating to sentiment analysis. The primary focus of this paper is on various sentiment algorithms, sentiment applications, sentiment techniques and its related fields
How good is your puppet? An empirically defined and validated quality model for puppet

Puppet is a declarative language for configuration management that has rapidly gained popularity in recent years. Numerous organizations now rely on Puppet code for deploying their software systems onto cloud infrastructures. In this paper we provide a definition of code quality for Puppet code and an automated technique for measuring and rating Puppet code quality. To this end, we first explore the notion of code quality as it applies to Puppet code by performing a survey among Puppet developers. Second, we develop a measurement model for the maintainability aspect of Puppet code quality. To arrive at this measurement model, we derive appropriate quality metrics from our survey results and from existing software quality models. We implemented the Puppet code quality model in a software analysis tool. We validate our definition of Puppet code quality and the measurement model by a structured interview with Puppet experts and by comparing the tool results with quality judgments of those experts. The validation shows that the measurement model and tool provide quality judgments of Puppet code that closely match the judgments of experts. Also, the experts deem the model appropriate and usable in practice. The Software Improvement Group (SIG) has started using the model in its consultancy practice.
16x125 Gb/s Quasi-Nyquist DAC-Generated PM-16QAM Transmission over 3,590 km of PSCF

—We report on a transmission experiment over high-performance pure-silica core ﬁber (PSCF) of 16 Nyquist wavelength-division-multiplexed (Nyquist-WDM) channels at a symbol rate of 15.625 GBaud, using polarization-multiplexed (PM) 16-symbols quadrature-amplitude-modulation (16QAM), resulting in a per-channel raw bit-rate of 125 Gb/s. The channel spacing was 16 GHz, corresponding to 1.024 times the symbol rate. The interchannel crosstalk penalty was drastically reduced through the conﬁnement of the signal spectrum within a near- Nyquist bandwidth, achieved with digital ﬁltering and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) operating at 1.5 samples/symbol. The optical line was a recirculating loop composed of two spans of high-performance PSCF with erbium-doped ﬁber ampliﬁers (EDFA) only. The transmission distance of 3,590 km at a target line bit-error rate (BER) of 1.5 · 10 − 2 was achieved at a raw spectral efﬁciency (SE) of 7.81 b/s/Hz. Assuming a commercial hard FEC with 20.5% redundancy, capable of handling the target BER, the net SE was 6.48 b/s/Hz, the highest so far reported for multi-thousand km transmission of PM-16QAM at ≥ 100 Gb/s per channel. These results demonstrate the feasibility of very high spectral-efﬁciency DAC-enabled ultra-long-haul quasi-Nyquist-WDM transmission using PM-16QAM with today’s available technologies and manageable DSP complexity.
Implementation of Student Monitoring System using Machine Learning Algorithms

: The ability to predict a student’s performance on a given concept is an important tool for the Education industry; it allows for understanding what types of students there are and what are key concepts that help shape the understanding of another. These are important factors for educators to know in order to constantly modify and improve educating tools. In this paper, a model is proposed to predict the performance of students in an academic organization. This paper aims to build an easier and automated system to get the students mark details, by fetching the student’s marks from a centralized database that is accessible to all the class coordinators as well the SPMC staff members. This system will ensure an easier and less time consuming process of generating the students’ list and for faster scheduling of the classes. The system discussed in this paper will make use of a webpage that will be accessible to the SPMC coordinators as well as the concerned class advisors and faculty members who can access it through the college Intranet Network.
Bringing Computer Vision to the Edge: An Overview of Real-Time Image Analytics with SAS ®

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, when large amounts of streaming data are generated continuously, it is extremely impractical and inefficient to store all these data in a data center. Furthermore, the majority of these data are irrelevant; for example, only streaming data that contain anomaly events are worth storing or transmitting for further investigation. For real-time image or video processing, moving the analytics to edge devices not only saves a device-to-cloud data round trip but also improves data privacy and governance. This paper presents the real-time image analytics solutions offered in SAS ® software for image processing, image classification, object detection, and segmentation. It also describes the general workflow of real-time image analytics, from preprocessing images, to training deep learning models by using SAS ® Viya ® , to deploying an image analytics pipeline on edge devices by using SAS ® Event Stream Processing. The paper discusses the following applications: real-time semantic segmentation analysis, with an example of autonomous driving; real-time defect detection for quality inspection in the manufacturing industry specific to surface mount technology (SMT); and loose ballast detection in railway tracks for monitoring track health in the transportation industry.
Evolution of Studies on Orthopaedic Surgery Regarding Cost Management Tools: A Systematic Literature Review

Objective: The subject of hospital management is relevant given the importance of these institutions in the social and economic sphere, as well as for their managers, considering that in the hospital context, which involves high costs, scarce resources, pressure for quality and good service, information on costs and performance is useful for efficient management. This systematic literature review (SLR) aims to extend knowledge of the evidence linking costing mechanisms to the performance results of health institutions, analysing articles written in the last 10 years dealing with surgery in the specialization of orthopaedics, filling an important gap in the literature. Methods: Rigorous criteria for selection of articles is followed by use of the PRISMA meta-analysis, which gives an important overview of the types of studies made, as well as classification according to the cost management tools, leading to mapping costing methods and performance analysis. Results: Studies were classified by measurement methods, costs of decision-making and control and elements of strategic cost management, showing that the greatest number of studies originate in the USA (69, 23%) and use the variable of statistical analysis (53, 85%) in the majority of strategic management methods. As for types of surgical procedures, arthroplasty leads the ranking, accounting for 34, 62% of studies. Conclusions: Predominance of the use of standard costing as the method of measurement, use of control methods for decision-making and a tendency towards the practice of statistical analysis as a variable of the elements of strategic cost management, with studies of replacement surgery (hip, knee and shoulder) being most prominent. This study provides managers and public policy-makers with challenges and indicators of efficiency and effectiveness for better performance in orthopaedic surgical processes.
State of the Art on: Efﬁcient Solutions for Adversarial Team Games

The research is focused on Algorithmic Game Theory, that is the area of research that lies on the boundary between Economics and Computer Science. More speciﬁcally, Algorithmic Game Theory is the area that aims at modelling algorithms in strategic environments, with the objective of ﬁnding strategies 1 that allow the involved agents to reach an equilibrium 1 . The strategic environments are modelled using mathematical tools, speciﬁcally Game Theory, while Computer Science techniques are used both to design algorithms and to evaluate problems’ complexity and their hardness 2 . In particular, to ﬁnd solutions some algorithms proper of the ﬁelds of Reinforcement Learning 3 , Artiﬁcial Intelligence and Online Convex Optimization are used, while the evaluation of difﬁculty falls under the scope of Theoretical Computer Science
Natural Selection Affects Multiple Aspects of Genetic Variation at Putatively Neutral Sites across the Human Genome

A major question in evolutionary biology is how natural selection has shaped patterns of genetic variation across the human genome. Previous work has documented a reduction in genetic diversity in regions of the genome with low recombination rates. However, it is unclear whether other summaries of genetic variation, like allele frequencies, are also correlated with recombination rate and whether these correlations can be explained solely by negative selection against deleterious mutations or whether positive selection acting on favorable alleles is also required. Here we attempt to address these questions by analyzing three different genome-wide resequencing datasets from European individuals. We document several significant correlations between different genomic features. In particular, we find that average minor allele frequency and diversity are reduced in regions of low recombination and that human diversity, human-chimp divergence, and average minor allele frequency are reduced near genes. Population genetic simulations show that either positive natural selection acting on favorable mutations or negative natural selection acting against deleterious mutations can explain these correlations. However, models with strong positive selection on nonsynonymous mutations and little negative selection predict a stronger negative correlation between neutral diversity and nonsynonymous divergence than observed in the actual data, supporting the importance of negative, rather than positive, selection throughout the genome. Further, we show that the widespread presence of weakly deleterious alleles, rather than a small number of strongly positively selected mutations, is responsible for the correlation between neutral genetic diversity and recombination rate. This work suggests that natural selection has affected multiple aspects of linked neutral variation throughout the human genome and that positive selection is not required to explain these observations.
Comparative chloroplast genomics and phylogenetic analysis of the Viburnum dilatatum complex (Adoxaceae) in Korea

Complete chloroplast genome sequences provide detailed information about any structural changes of the genome, instances of phylogenetic reconstruction, and molecular markers for fine-scale analyses. Recent developments of next-generation sequencing (NGS) tools have led to the rapid accumulation of genomic data, especially data pertaining to chloroplasts. Short reads deposited in public databases such as the Sequence Read Archive of the NCBI are open resources, and the corresponding chloroplast genomes are yet to be completed. The V. dilatatum complex in Korea consists of four morphologically similar species: V. dilatatum, V. erosum, V. japonicum, and V. wrightii. Previous molecular phylogenetic analyses based on several DNA regions did not resolve the relationship at the species level. In order to examine the level of variation of the chloroplast genome in the V. dilatatum complex, raw reads of V. dilatatum deposited in the NCBI database were used to reconstruct the whole chloroplast genome, with these results compared to the genomes of V. erosum, V. japonicum, and three other species in Viburnum. These comparative genomics results found no significant structural changes in Viburnum. The degree of interspecific variation among the species in the V. dilatatum complex is very low, suggesting that the species of the complex may have been differentiated recently. The species of the V. dilatatum complex share large unique deletions, providing evidence of close relationships among the species. A phylogenetic analysis of the entire genome of the Viburnum showed that V. dilatatum is a sister to one of two accessions of V. erosum, making V. erosum paraphyletic. Given that the overall degree of variation among the species in the V. dilatatum complex is low, the chloroplast genome may not provide a phylogenetic signal pertaining to relationships among the species.
Phytochemical analysis, antimicrobial and antioxidant activities of Aidia borneensis leaf extracts

Zulhamizan Awang-Jamil1, Aida Maryam Basri2, Norhayati Ahmad1,3, Hussein Taha1* 1Environmental and Life Sciences Programme, Faculty of Science, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Gadong, Brunei 2Food Science and Technology Department, School of Applied Sciences and Mathematics, Universiti Teknologi Brunei, Gadong, Brunei 3Institute for Biodiversity and Environmental Research, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Gadong, Brunei
Hybrid Solar and Wind Energy System-Review

This paper focuses on alternative/renewable energy sources. There are so many issues and challenges facing in this field. Issues based on intermittent climatic conditions and the technology used to overcome these issues. This paper specifically focuses on hybrid solar/wind standalone system in remote area where grid connection is impossible. System configurations, control scenario, storage, energy management are discussed. Energy management with advanced fuzzy logic are highlighted.
Recent Advancement in Biometric Fingerprint Template Security by

One of the most important issues in a biometric system is the leakage of biometric template information. In this paper, we have discussed on biometric template security. Most of the template protection techniques fail to meet all the desired requirements of a biometric system like revocability, security, privacy, and accuracy, so protecting a fingerprint template is a big issue. In this paper, we begin by introducing about biometric after which we will describe attacks on a biometric system which targeting the biometric templates in a biometric system. Thereafter we will explore the existing biometric template protection scheme and techniques and include their strength and weaknesses. In the end, we will discuss the summary of this paper in the conclusion section. Keywords—Biometric, fingerprint, template, security, protection, techniques, approaches.
Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-Based Development: The Contributor's Perspective

The pull-based development model is an emerging way of contributing to distributed software projects that is gaining enormous popularity within the open source software (OSS) world. Previous work has examined this model by focusing on projects and their owners—we complement it by examining the work practices of project contributors and the challenges they face.We conducted a survey with 645 top contributors to active OSS projects using the pull-based model on GitHub, the prevalent social coding site. We also analyzed traces extracted from corresponding GitHub repositories. Our research shows that: contributors have a strong interest in maintaining awareness of project status to get inspiration and avoid duplicating work, but they do not actively propagate information; communication within pull requests is reportedly limited to low-level concerns and contributors often use communication channels external to pull requests; challenges are mostly social in nature, with most reporting poor responsiveness from integrators; and the increased transparency of this setting is a confirmed motivation to contribute. Based on these findings, we present recommendations for practitioners to streamline the contribution process and discuss potential future research directions.