Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Application and realization of gateways between conventional automotive and IP/Ethernet-based networks

In order to fulfill the continuously rising communication demands within vehicles the usage of Ethernet as vehicle network is planned, since it is offering high bandwidth, robustness and has a high market penetration. The automotive industry has strong requirements with respect to safety and reliability; hence the introduction of new technologies is usually done in an evolutionary approach. This implies that for the introduction of Ethernet a gateway to currently existing automotive networking technologies is required for achieving a smooth migration. Within this paper a concept for such a gateway maintaining the Quality of Service (QoS) offered by the existing automotive networks is proposed. In order to support the same level of QoS the usage of Ethernet Audio Video Bridging (AVB) is suggested. The implementation of such a QoS gateway is investigated specifically for the automotive networks MOST and FlexRay. For evaluation of the proposed concepts a validation system was built up, and promising results showing the feasibility of such a QoS gateway have been achieved. Furthermore this implies that AVB has the capability to replace other automotive network technologies in the midterm.
A study of the distribution of color Doppler flows in the superficial digital flexor tendon of young Thoroughbreds during their training periods

ABSTRACT Aim of this study was to evaluate the relationships of exercise and tendon injury with Doppler flows appearing in the superficial digital flexor tendon (SDFT) of young Thoroughbreds during training periods. The forelimb SDFTs of 24 one- to two-year-old Thoroughbreds clinically free of any orthopaedic disorders were evaluated using grey-scale (GS) and color Doppler (CD) images during two training periods between December 2013 to April 2015. Twelve horses per year were examined in December, February, and April in training periods that began in September and ended in April. The SDFT was evaluated in 3 longitudinal images of equal lengths (labelled 1, 2, 3 in order from proximal to distal), and 6 transversal images separated by equal lengths (labelled 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A and 3B in order from proximal to distal) of the metacarpus using both GS and CD. The running (canter and gallop) distance for 1 month before the date of the ultrasonographic examinations was increased in December, February, and April in both of the two training periods. CD flows defined as rhythmically blinking or pulsatory colored signals were found in 56 of 864 (6.4%) transversal CD images, in 28, 12, 13, and 3 images of 1A, 1B, 2A and 2B, respectively, and in 7, 14, and 35 images captured in December, February, and April, respectively. There were no longitudinal or transversal GS images indicating injury in the SDFTs in either of the two training periods. The increase of CD flows in the proximal regions of the SDFT are possibly related to the increase of the running distance during the training periods of the one- to two-year-old Thoroughbreds. Because no injury was diagnosed in the SDFTs by GS images during the training periods, the increase of CD flows in the proximal parts of SDFT is not necessarily predictive of tendon injury in the near future during the training period of young Thoroughbreds.
Corporate Social Responsibility: Practice, Theory, and Challenges

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained considerable interest among academicians and business organizations in the past decade. More and more Indian business organizations embrace the practice of CSR under different names such as corporate sustainability, social responsibility, and corporate citizenship. These are well reflected in corporate reports on their respective websites as well as other surveys and rankings of CSR conducted by organizations such as The Times Foundation and Karmayog.
Urban Soils

Urban soil is material that has been manipulated, disturbed or transported by man’s activities in the urban environment and is used as a medium for plant growth. The physical, chemical, and biological properties are generally less favorable as a rooting medium than soil found on the natural landscape. Basic soil properties are reviewed to place urban soil properties in proper context. Further, the influence of the urban environment itself imposes stressful conditions upon vegetation grown in the urban soil. To overcome potentially stressful growing conditions, urban soil characteristics must be recognized and efforts made to provide favorable conditions for plants during the design, planning and installation processes. These characteristics are explained and implications for design and operations are provided. INTRODUCTION TO BASIC SOIL PROPERTIES The soil is formed as a porous medium in profile form at the interface of the earth’s atmosphere and lithosphere (Figure 1). It is the result of the interaction of physical disintegration and chemical decomposition of the underlying bedrock or unconsolidated sediments placed there by long-term geologic processes. The mode of development (genesis) and resultant soil is controlled by the kind of geologic material (parent material) in which the soil forms under given climatic and vegetative conditions, modified by the effects of topography all integrated over time (Brady, 1984). Thus, soil formation is a long-term process, and due to diversity of the soil-forming factors over the landscape, diverse soils are formed in different localities. They will have differences in their physical, chemical and biological properties. These properties determine the capabilities and limitations of a soil for plant growth. And once formed, the properties are relatively stable unless catastrophically disturbed by nature or man.
Stream fusion, to completeness

Stream processing is mainstream (again): Widely-used stream libraries are now available for virtually all modern OO and functional languages, from Java to C# to Scala to OCaml to Haskell. Yet expressivity and performance are still lacking. For instance, the popular, well-optimized Java 8 streams do not support the zip operator and are still an order of magnitude slower than hand-written loops. We present the first approach that represents the full generality of stream processing and eliminates overheads, via the use of staging. It is based on an unusually rich semantic model of stream interaction. We support any combination of zipping, nesting (or flat-mapping), sub-ranging, filtering, mapping—of finite or infinite streams. Our model captures idiosyncrasies that a programmer uses in optimizing stream pipelines, such as rate differences and the choice of a “for” vs. “while” loops. Our approach delivers hand-written–like code, but automatically. It explicitly avoids the reliance on black-box optimizers and sufficiently-smart compilers, offering highest, guaranteed and portable performance. Our approach relies on high-level concepts that are then readily mapped into an implementation. Accordingly, we have two distinct implementations: an OCaml stream library, staged via MetaOCaml, and a Scala library for the JVM, staged via LMS. In both cases, we derive libraries richer and simultaneously many tens of times faster than past work. We greatly exceed in performance the standard stream libraries available in Java, Scala and OCaml, including the well-optimized Java 8 streams.
Chemical Interactions between Fibrosarcoma Cancer Cells and Sensory Neurons Contribute to Cancer Pain

In an experimental model of cancer pain, the hyperalgesia that occurs with osteolytic tumor growth is associated with the sensitization of nociceptors. We examined functional and molecular changes in small-diameter dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons to determine cellular mechanisms underlying this sensitization. The occurrence of a Ca2+ transient in response to either KCl (25 mm) or capsaicin (500 nm) increased in small neurons isolated from murine L3–L6 DRGs ipsilateral to fibrosarcoma cell tumors. The increased responses were associated with increased mRNA levels for the Ca2+ channel subunit α2δ1 and TRPV1 receptor. Pretreatment with gabapentin, an inhibitor of the α2δ1 subunit, blocked the increased response to KCl in vitro and the mechanical hyperalgesia in tumor-bearing mice in vivo. Similar increases in neuronal responsiveness occurred when DRG neurons from naive mice and fibrosarcoma cells were cocultured for 48 h. The CC chemokine ligand 2 (CCL2) may contribute to the tumor cell-induced sensitization because CCL2 immunoreactivity was present in tumors, high levels of CCL2 peptide were present in microperfusates from tumors, and treatment of DRG neurons in vitro with CCL2 increased the amount of mRNA for the α2δ1 subunit. Together, our data provide strong evidence that the chemical mediator CCL2 is released from tumor cells and evokes phenotypic changes in sensory neurons, including increases in voltage-gated Ca2+ channels that likely underlie the mechanical hyperalgesia in the fibrosarcoma cancer model. More broadly, this study provides a novel in vitro model to resolve the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which tumor cells drive functional changes in nociceptors.
Cell surface GRP78 and its interactions with CDNF and MANF

Cerebral dopamine neurotrophic factor (CDNF) and mesencephalic astrocyte-derived neurotrophic factor (MANF) form a novel neurotrophic factor family due to their unique structure and different mode of action when compared to classical neurotrophic factors. CDNF and MANF have shown to protect dopaminergic neurons in Parkinson’s disease animal models and therefore they are considered potential therapy agents. However, their target molecules, i.e., putative receptor(s) and signalling pathways are still unknown. 78 kDa glucose-regulated protein (GRP78) member of the heat shock protein (HSP) family is a major chaperone that under Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER) stress conditions is up-regulated and prevents protein aggregation as well as facilitates degradation of misfolded proteins. It locates mainly in the ER but location can change in different conditions. In cancer research, GRP78 has been found highly expressed on the surface of cancer cells where it regulates critical oncogenic signalling pathways. For example, it was recently shown that Par-4 (Prostate apoptosis response-4) induces apoptosis via activation of caspase-3 by binding to GRP78, expressed at the surface of cancer cells. GRP78 has been shown capable of relocating extracellularly also in neurons. Especially, it was recently shown that accumulating extracellular α-synuclein induces an increase in surface-exposed GRP78 in cultured neurons. α-synuclein interacts with cell surface GRP78 and activates a signalling cascade affecting the morphology and dynamics of actin cytoskeleton. Our group has recent, yet unpublished data suggesting that CDNF and MANF interact with GRP78 protein. The emerging role for GRP78 also in the neurodegeneration requests further investigation on its possible interaction with CDNF and MANF and on the biological meaning of that interaction. In order to test whether CDNF and MANF would interact with cell surface GRP78 and possibly compete with par-4 for the binding and in this way prevent apoptosis, we built a plasmid that would guide the expression and extracellular localization of GRP78 in the transfected cells. We transfected HEK293 cells with this plasmid and incubated them for 24h with two concentrations of par-4. We could see a trend of increasing apoptosis in PAR-4 –treated cells, but this was not enhanced in the cells expressing GRP78 extracellularly, as we had hypothesised. Thus we did not continue further with testing CDNF and MANF on this setting. Transfected HEK293 cells were incubated with alkaline phosphatase tagged MANF or CDNF (AP-MANF or AP-CDNF) and using the alkaline phosphatase substrate pNitrophenylphosphate (pNPP), we were able to study the binding between GRP78 and CDNF and MANF. Even though we could not prove the cell surface GRP78 interaction with MANF with this method, we show a high affinity binding between cell surface GRP78 and CDNF when transfected cells are incubated with different concentrations of AP-CDNF.
Efficient Actor-Critic Algorithm with Hierarchical Model Learning and Planning

To improve the convergence rate and the sample efficiency, two efficient learning methods AC-HMLP and RAC-HMLP (AC-HMLP with ℓ 2-regularization) are proposed by combining actor-critic algorithm with hierarchical model learning and planning. The hierarchical models consisting of the local and the global models, which are learned at the same time during learning of the value function and the policy, are approximated by local linear regression (LLR) and linear function approximation (LFA), respectively. Both the local model and the global model are applied to generate samples for planning; the former is used only if the state-prediction error does not surpass the threshold at each time step, while the latter is utilized at the end of each episode. The purpose of taking both models is to improve the sample efficiency and accelerate the convergence rate of the whole algorithm through fully utilizing the local and global information. Experimentally, AC-HMLP and RAC-HMLP are compared with three representative algorithms on two Reinforcement Learning (RL) benchmark problems. The results demonstrate that they perform best in terms of convergence rate and sample efficiency.
Age and Arts Participation: A Case against Demographic Destiny

Abstract The author used the National Endowment for the Arts' 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and previous versions of the survey to examine changes in the role of age and cohort in arts participation since 1982. The study concluded that age and cohort had a relatively minor effect on arts participation ranging from live attendance at events to personal participation as well as literary reading and media-based participation. In short, despite concern about the graying of arts audiences, the findings suggest that age is not destiny. The ability of established or emerging arts groups to attract audiences will have less to do with the age distribution of the population than with their ability to connect to the creative aspirations of potential participants.
Increasing stability and interpretability of gene expression signatures

Motivation : Molecular signatures for diagnosis or prognosis estimated from large-scale gene expression data often lack robustness and stability, rendering their biological interpretation challenging. Increasing the signature's interpretability and stability across perturbations of a given dataset and, if possible, across datasets, is urgently needed to ease the discovery of important biological processes and, eventually, new drug targets. Results : We propose a new method to construct signatures with increased stability and easier interpretability. The method uses a gene network as side interpretation and enforces a large connectivity among the genes in the signature, leading to signatures typically made of genes clustered in a few subnetworks. It combines the recently proposed graph Lasso procedure with a stability selection procedure. We evaluate its relevance for the estimation of a prognostic signature in breast cancer, and highlight in particular the increase in interpretability and stability of the signature.
The Bellman Function Technique in Harmonic Analysis

The Bellman function, a powerful tool originating in control theory, can be used successfully in a large class of difficult harmonic analysis problems and has produced some notable results over the last thirty years. This book by two leading experts is the first devoted to the Bellman function method and its applications to various topics in probability and harmonic analysis. Beginning with basic concepts, the theory is introduced step-by-step starting with many examples of gradually increasing sophistication, culminating with Calderon–Zygmund operators and end-point estimates. All necessary techniques are explained in generality, making this book accessible to readers without specialized training in non-linear PDEs or stochastic optimal control. Graduate students and researchers in harmonic analysis, PDEs, functional analysis, and probability will find this to be an incisive reference, and can use it as the basis of a graduate course.
Entity-Centric Coreference Resolution of Person Entities for Open Information Extraction

on abierta Abstract: This work presents a coreference resolution system of person entities based on a multi-pass architecture which sequentially applies a set of independent modules, using an entity-centric approach. Several evaluations show that the system obtains promising results in dierent scenarios ( 71% and 81% F1 CoNLL). Furthermore, the impact of coreference resolution in information extraction was analyzed, by applying an open information extraction system after the coreference resolution tool. The results of this test indicate that information extraction gives better both recall and precision results. The evaluations were carried out in Spanish, Portuguese and Galician, and all the resources and tools are freely distributed.
Indoor Localization Service Based on the Data Fusion of Wi-Fi and RFID

With more and more requirements of navigation for complex indoor environments, the indoor location service has become the hotspot in the field of mobile computing. However, with only one single type of wireless signal, it is difficult to achieve ideal accuracy of positioning in the indoor environments full of indoor noises. In order to improve the performance of indoor location service, we propose a novel indoor localization mechanism, which realizes an effective data fusion of Wi-Fi and RFID signals via on-demand deployment of Wi-Fi access points and RFID tags. This mechanism can eliminate the blind areas of location so as to realize the low-cost and high-accurate indoor localization. In order to further improve the location performance, we put forward the Kalman filter algorithm based on singular value judgment (KFASVJ) and KFASVJ-based indoor localization algorithm (KILA). The KILA is adopted to judge the maximum singular value of Wi-Fi signal wave, so as to optimize the wireless signal wave. KILA can reduce the indoor noise interference with Wi-Fi signals, so to realize a high accuracy of positioning and real-time positioning stability in complex indoor environments. The experimental results and the performance analysis show that KILA achieves a better accuracy of positioning than typical Kalman-filter-based localization algorithm (KFLA), about 13% to 28% accuracy of positioning improvement in the indoor environments with the [35dB, 65dB] indoor noise. KILA has the lower time complexity, the higher location speed and the better stability, and it can maintain a good localization performance even in the indoor environment with the indoor noises changing dynamicly.
Communications in Mathematical Physics Uniqueness of Diffeomorphism Invariant States on Holonomy – Flux Algebras

Loop quantum gravity is an approach to quantum gravity that starts from the Hamiltonian formulation in terms of a connection and its canonical conjugate. Quantization proceeds in the spirit of Dirac: First one defines an algebra of basic kinematical observables and represents it through operators on a suitable Hilbert space. In a second step, one implements the constraints. The main result of the paper concerns the representation theory of the kinematical algebra: We show that there is only one cyclic representation invariant under spatial diffeomorphisms. While this result is particularly important for loop quantum gravity, we are rather general: The precise definition of the abstract ∗-algebra of the basic kinematical observables we give could be used for any theory in which the configuration variable is a connection with a compact structure group. The variables are constructed from the holonomy map and from the fluxes of the momentum conjugate to the connection. The uniqueness result is relevant for any such theory invariant under spatial diffeomorphisms or being a part of a diffeomorphism invariant theory.
Not all experiences of precarious work lead to precarity: the case study of young people at university and their welfare mixes

ABSTRACT The concept of precarity has gained momentum and challenges social scientists to consider the effects of labour-market insecurity across classes and welfare arrangements. This article discusses the varieties of experiences of precarious work by young people in university and identifies in which cases they are also experiences precarity. It is one of the first studies of its kind to investigate the material triggers of inequality by comparing young people’s experiences across countries (England, Italy and Sweden) and by looking at the welfare mixes available to young people who are working at university. Through a comparative qualitative research involving young people from different socio-economic backgrounds and ‘welfare mixes’, the article shows that experiences of precarity concern a minority of young people who have an absolute necessity to rely on labour-market sources, due to the lack or insufficiency of state support and family sources. It also identifies: a group of young people who feel pressure to get precarious jobs to fill a decline in family resources; and a convenient use of precarious jobs suiting the circumstances of young people with abundant family resources. Overall, the research found that precarity is deeply connected to young people’s welfare mixes.
A framework for designing and implementing the Ada standard container library

An open issue of the Ada language is the definition of a standard container library. Containers in this library (e.g., sets, maps and lists) shall offer some core functionalities that characterise their behaviour (i.e., different strategies for managing the elements stored therein) as well as other general functionalities. Among these general functionalities, we are interested in alternative ways for accessing the containers, namely direct access by position and traversals using iterators. In this paper, we present the Shortcut-Based Framework (SBF), a framework aimed at providing suitable, uniform, accurate and secure access by position and iterators, while keeping other nice properties such as comprehensibility and changeability. The SBF should be considered as a baseline upon which the Ada standard container library can be built. We assess the feasibility of our proposal defining a quality model for container libraries and evaluating the SBF using some metrics defined with the Goal-Question-Metric approach.
A personalized framework for trust assessment

The number of computational trust models has been increasing quickly in recent years yet their applications for automating trust evaluation are still limited. The main obstacle is the difficulties in selecting a suitable trust model and adapting it for particular trust modeling requirements, which varies greatly due to the subjectivity of human trust. The Personalized Trust Framework (PTF) presented in this paper aims to address this problem by providing a mechanism for human users to capture their trust evaluation process in order for it to be replicated by computers. In more details, a user can specify how he selects a trust model based on information about the subject whose trustworthiness he needs to evaluate and how that trust model is configured. This trust evaluation process is then automated by the PTF making use of the trust models flexibly plugged into the PTF by the user. By so doing, the PTF enable users reuse and personalize existing trust models to suit their requirements without having to reprogram those models.