Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
FROM DNA MICROARRAYS TO DISEASE CLASSIFICATION : AN UNSUPERVISED CLUSTERING

DNA micro-arrays provide thousands of genomic expressions on the same subject. A main issue is then to find the subset of genes whose degeneration is responsible of a certain type of cancer. In this paper, starting from a paradigmatic classification problem of two kinds of Leukaemia, we discuss the use of data-mining techniques in such a context. Particular attention is devoted not only to the classification methods but also to all the data analysis steps including data pre-processing and information retrieval. Copyright © 2005 IFAC
The MDS Queue: Analysing Latency Performance of Codes and Redundant Requests

In order to scale economically, data centers are increasingly evolving their data storage methods from the use of simple data replication to the use of more powerful erasure codes, which provide the same level of reliability as replication-based methods at a significantly lower storage cost. In particular, it is well known that MaximumDistance-Separable (MDS) codes, such as Reed-Solomon codes, provide the maximum storage efficiency. While the use of codes for providing improved reliability in archival storage systems, where the data is less frequently accessed (or so-called “cold data”), is well understood, the role of codes in the storage of more frequently accessed and active “hot data”, where latency is the key metric, is less clear. In this paper, we study data storage systems based on MDS codes through the lens of queueing theory, and term this the “MDS queue. ” We analytically characterize the latency performance of MDS queues, for which we present insightful scheduling policies that form upper and lower bounds to performance, and show that they are quite tight. Extensive simulations using Monte Carlo methods are also provided and used to validate our theoretical analysis. As a side note, our lower-bound analytical method based on the so-called MDS-Reservation(t) queue, represents an elegant practical scheme that requires the maintenance of considerably smaller state, depending on the parameter t, than that of the full-fledged MDS queue (which corresponds to t =∞), and may be of independent interest in practical systems. Comparisons with replication-based systems reveal that codes provide a superior latency-performance (by up to 70%) than replication. The second part of the paper considers an alternative method of (potentially) reducing latency in data centers, that of sending redundant requests. Here, a request is sent to more servers than required, and is deemed served when any requisite number of servers complete service. Several recent works provide empirical evidence of the benefits of redundant requests in various settings, and in this paper, we aim to analytically characterize the situations when can redundant requests actually help. We show that under the MDS queue model (with exponential service times and negligible costs of cancelling jobs), in a replication-based system, the average latency strictly reduces with more redundancy in the requests, and that under a general MDS code, the average latency is minimized when requests are sent to all servers. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first analytical results that prove the benefits of sending redundant requests.
Are Size Measures Better Than Expert Judgment? An Industrial Case Study on Requirements Volatility

Expert judgment is a common estimation approach in industry. However, there is very little research on the accuracy of expert judgment outside the area of effort estimation. In this paper, we present an industrial case study investigating subjective and objective measures of requirementss volatility. Data was collected in retrospect for all use cases of a medium-size software project. In addition, we determined subjective volatility by interviewing developers and managers of the project. Our data analysis show that structural measures perform better than expert judgment in estimating the total number of changes to use case based requirements. These results confirm results from a previous case study by the authors and suggest that project managers should not rely on expert judgment alone for decision making.
Not All Anxiety is the Same: How Different "Types" of Anxiety Uniquely Associate With College Students' Drinking Intentions

Abstract:Heavy drinking is a prevalent public health problem among college students. Presumed under tension reduction theory, students drink to reduce anxiety. Because rates of anxiety appear to be increasing on campuses, we investigated whether anxiety from the fear of missing out (FoMO) was associated with intentions to drink more so than other types of anxiety. From a sample of 112 students, results showed that FoMO was uniquely associated with intentions for heavy drinking over and above clinical and test anxiety as well as with past heavy drinking. This suggests a nuance to students' reported anxiety and drinking, which may offer future direction for intervention.
Corporate social responsibility in global supply chains

Purpose – The paper aims to present a conceptual framework for analysing CSR practices in global supply chains. It also seeks to demonstrate how a pioneering Swedish company, IKEA, implements and manages CSR practices at its suppliers.Design/methodology/approach – A case analysis of IKEA illustrates the implementation and management of CSR practices in supply chains. The focus is on internal and external integration of CSR practices in the supply chain. IKEA holds a leading position in its supply chain and is a global brand‐owner. Personal interviews are performed with employees from one of the company's trading areas.Findings – Practising CSR in supply chains requires that CSR is embedded within the entire organisation, including subsidiaries abroad and offshore suppliers. It includes employee training and sharing of experience, training of key personnel at the supplier level, positive incentives for suppliers in the form of long‐term contracts and enlarged purchasing orders, and regular auditing of supp.
LEARNING AND UNLEARNING V2: ON THE ROBUSTNESS OF THE TRIGGERING EXPERIENCE IN A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

In this paper I consider both the acquisition and loss of V2 (verb-second) word order, discussing some historical evidence from English and present-day data from Norwegian dialects. In both cases, there is a certain word order optionality, in that there are some clause types which require V2, while others require or allow non-V2. Furthermore, within the same clause type there are certain elements (adverbs or wh-words) which display an exceptional behavior with respect to word order. Within a cue-based approach to acquisition and change, I consider the following questions: How can the word order of mixed V2 systems be learnable? And what is the critical level of robustness of the cue? Based on frequencies in some adult and child data from Norwegian, I show that very little input seems to be needed for children to acquire mixed word orders, and that the critical level for acquisition must be considerably lower than what has previously been suggested.
Rudiments for a 3D freehand sketch based human-computer interface for immersive virtual enviroments

This paper investigates the applicability of context-free grammars to recognize and interpret representative 3D freehand sketches in terms of creating objects, performing transformations, and controlling the design space with the information contained by the sketches. Dynamic gesture recognition is the foundation of a two-layered concept. The subsequent layer performs multiple gesture recognition by parsing a sequence of single gestures depending on a predefined grammar, and simultaneously extracts the required information on the fly.
Is Jobs-Housing Balance a Transportation Issue?

Jobs-housing balance has become a major planning and public policy issue. Despite its popularity and apparent acceptance among public policy makers as a solution for traffic congestion and air pollution problems, there is little consensus on what jobs-housing balance means and little evidence that a jobs-housing balance policy would have any significant effect on these problems. The jobs-housing balance policy is premised on the idea that job and housing location choices are closely linked, and that policy intervention is required to achieve a balance of housing and jobs. Existing evidence suggests that the relationship between where people choose to live and work is complex, and may have little to do with job access considerations. Further, patterns of urban growth and travel indicate that balancing occurs as part of the urban development process. It is concluded that jobs-housing balance is not an effective solution for traffic congestion and air pollution concerns. Rather, these problems are better addressed in a more direct way.
Investigando a ecolalia no autismo: há possibilidade de um novo olhar?

Regardless of the considerable ammount of theories and empirical research on language acquisition since the second half of the past century, studies focusing on individual differences in language acquisition of learning disable children are still reduced. Empirical research on the linguitics skills of autistic children usually point out the meaningless and noncommunicative character of the autistic language. Studies, which focused on echolalia emphasize its descriptive and conceptual aspects. Nevertheless, clinical activities with autistic children have shown that these children may demonstrate particular relationships with language which are not yet explained by the existing theoretical models. Based on the psychoanalytical approach and on the linguistic structuralism implicit on the Claudia Lemos conception of language acquisition the present study aimed to investigate the echolalia production of two pre-adolescent with a diagnosis of autism. It was attempted to search for explanation beyond the dichotomies of normal versus pathological, correct versus incorrect and by means of a deeper analysis capture the individual changes in echolalia which could indicate the subjects genuine position in regard to language. To attain this objective, the verbal echolalia production of two subjects with age of 11 and 12 respectively, participating of therapy sessions, was analyzed. The results obtained from the longitudinal analysis of the therapy sessions transcription revealed not only individual differences in echolalia productions of the participants of this study but also allowed the identification of structural qualitative changes in their language, opening the possibility of a dialogue between the field of language acquisition and of language pathology.
Evaluating the CREWS-L'Ecritoire Requirements Elicitation Process

the CREWS 21.903 long term research ESPRIT project has proposed several strategies to support requirements elicitation through textual scenarios analysis. In the CREWS-L’Ecritoire approach, guidelines are proposed to systematise these strategies. However these guidelines have never been evaluated so far. To evaluate the effectiveness of the CREWS-L’Ecritoire requirements elicitation guidelines, an empirical study was undertaken : several subjects were asked to apply the CREWS requirements elicitation strategies with and without guidance. The results of this experiment indicate that : (i.) subjects apply the CREWS-L’Ecritoire guiding rules with different rates of efficiency, (ii.) in average, all the guiding rules improve the subjects’ ability to elicit correct requirements, and (iii.) each of the guiding rule has a different rate of efficiency. The paper presents the protocol used to conduct the experiment, and details the evaluation of these results for each of the three CREWS scenario based requirements elicitation strategies.
Automated dental drilling system prototype

In recent times, biomedical technology has received a major boost due to advancements in electronics. Sophisticated surgical instruments and patient monitoring devices have not only eased the burden on the doctors shoulders but have also taken patient care to a whole new level. However, the field of dentistry is yet to experience a major surge of technological innovation particularly when it comes to drilling in dental surgery. This paper presents a prototype of a fully automated system which employs extreme precision in drilling operations. The software employs image processing to obtain accurate parameters from CT scan images of the patients' teeth. These parameters are then passed to the hardware unit comprising of an ARM7-based embedded system which controls the drilling mechanism. Furthermore, keeping in mind the safety of the patient, the system will have a dynamic feedback mechanism to make real time corrections to compensate for disturbances which may displace the target unpredictably.
Constraining the Search Space in Temporal Pattern Mining

Agents in dynamic environments have to deal with complex situations including various temporal interrelations of actions and events. Discovering frequent patterns in such scenes can be useful in order to create prediction rules which can be used to predict future activities or situations. We present the algorithm MiTemP which learns frequent patterns based on a time intervalbased relational representation. Additionally the problem has also been transfered to a pure relational association rule mining task which can be handled by WARMR. The two approaches are compared in a number of experiments. The experiments show the advantage of avoiding the creation of impossible or redundant patterns with MiTemP. While less patterns have to be explored on average with MiTemP more frequent patterns are found at an earlier refinement level.
Organized Representation of Spectrotemporal Features in Songbird Auditory Forebrain

Much of our understanding of the functional organization of auditory cortex is based on relatively simple stimuli, and the cortical representation of complex sounds remains poorly understood. With their rich vocal communication and learning behaviors, songbirds can offer insights into the neural processing of complex acoustic signals analogous to human speech. In the primary forebrain auditory area field L (primary auditory cortex analog) of zebra finches, previous studies identified a limited set of spectrotemporal receptive field (STRF) types, but whether these were spatially organized remained unclear. Here, we investigated the spatial organization of field L in multiple anatomical planes, using multielectrode array recordings and a stimulus that captures aspects of spectrotemporal modulations of song. Our data demonstrate two separate axes along which spectrotemporal aspects of sound are mapped: width of spectral tuning changes systematically from narrow to broad mediolaterally, whereas width of temporal tuning changes markedly, from narrow to broad, from the input to the output layers. These spatial patterns, which are evident in STRFs computed from both multiple and single units, result in a mapping of basic STRF types to subregions of field L. This highly organized representation of spectrotemporal features of sound contrasts with current views of mammalian auditory cortex, where no strong spatial organization of STRF shapes has been seen thus far. Our data identify a coherent initial cortical representation of sound features and suggest that forebrain filtering for basic perceptual qualities of sound occurs in a spatially organized and segregated manner in the songbird auditory system.
A laminar flow unit for the care of critically ill newborn infants

Introduction Medical and nursing care of newborns is predicated on the delicate control and balance of several vital parameters. Closed incubators and open radiant warmers are the most widely used devices for the care of neonates in intensive care; however, several well-known limitations of these devises have not been resolved. The use of laminar flow is widely used in many fields of medicine, and may have applications in neonatal care. Objective To describe the neonatal laminar flow unit, a new equipment we designed for care of ill newborns. Methods The idea, design, and development of this device was completed in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The unit is an open mobile bed designed with the objective of maintaining the advantages of the incubator and radiant warmer, while overcoming some of their inherent shortcomings; these shortcomings include noise, magnetic fields and acrylic barriers in incubators, and lack of isolation and water loss through skin in radiant warmers. The unit has a pump that aspirates environmental air which is warmed by electrical resistance and decontaminated with High Efficiency Particulate Air Filter (HEPA) filters (laminar flow). The flow is directed by an air flow directioner. The unit has an embedded humidifier to increase humidity in the infant’s microenvironment and a servo control mechanism for regulation of skin temperature. Results The laminar flow unit is open and facilitates access of care providers and family, which is not the case in incubators. It provides warming by convection at an air velocity of 0.45 m/s, much faster than an incubator (0.1 m/s). The system provides isolation 1000 class (less than 1,000 particles higher than 0.3 micron per cubic feet at all times). This is much more protection than an incubator provides and more than radiant warmers, which have no isolation whatsoever. Additionally, it provides humidification of the newborn’s microenvironment (about 60% relative humidity), which is impossible with a radiant warmer, which produces high water body loss. It has no mechanical barriers like acrylic walls, its magnetic field is lower than an incubator (0.25 μt versus 1.2 μt), and the noise is minimal compared to incubators. The unit is also able to provide controlled total body hypothermia, which is not possible with either of the other two units. Conclusion The laminar flow unit for neonatal care is a novel device which we recently developed. The introduction of laminar flow technology represents a real innovation in the neonatal field. We have described the various components of the unit and the potential advantages for management of ill neonates. This will hopefully lead to improved clinical outcomes and more effective neonatal management and safety.
Properties of the calcium-activated chloride current in heart

We used the whole cell patch clamp technique to study transient outward currents of single rabbit atrial cells. A large transient current, IA, was blocked by 4-aminopyridine (4AP) and/or by depolarized holding potentials. After block of IA, a smaller transient current remained. It was completely blocked by nisoldipine, cadmium, ryanodine, or caffeine, which indicates that all of the 4AP-resistant current is activated by the calcium transient that causes contraction. Neither calcium- activated potassium current nor calcium-activated nonspecific cation current appeared to contribute to the 4AP-resistant transient current. The transient current disappeared when ECl was made equal to the pulse potential; it was present in potassium-free internal and external solutions. It was blocked by the anion transport blockers SITS and DIDS, and the reversal potential of instantaneous current-voltage relations varied with extracellular chloride as predicted for a chloride-selective conductance. We concluded that the 4AP-resistant transient outward current of atrial cells is produced by a calcium- activated chloride current like the current ICl(Ca) of ventricular cells (1991. Circulation Research. 68:424-437). ICl(Ca) in atrial cells demonstrated outward rectification, even when intracellular chloride concentration was higher than extracellular. When ICa was inactivated or allowed to recover from inactivation, amplitudes of ICl(Ca) and ICa were closely correlated. The results were consistent with the view that ICl(Ca) does not undergo independent inactivation. Tentatively, we propose that ICl(Ca) is transient because it is activated by an intracellular calcium transient. Lowering extracellular sodium increased the peak outward transient current. The current was insensitive to the choice of sodium substitute. Because a recently identified time-independent, adrenergically activated chloride current in heart is reduced in low sodium, these data suggest that the two chloride currents are produced by different populations of channels.
Proposal of a compact and efficient SAT encoding using a numeral system of any base

This paper describes a new SAT encoding method, named compact order encoding, applicable to finite domain CSP. It is a generalization of log encoding (compact encoding) and order encoding which is adopted by an award-winning SAT-based CSP solver. The basic idea of the compact order encoding is the use of a numeral system of some base. Each integer variable is divided into some digits and each digit is encoded by using the order encoding. It generates much smaller SAT instances than the order encoding and more efficient SAT instances than the log encoding in general because it requires fewer carry propagations when using larger base than two. We confirmed these observations through the experimental results on some benchmarks, such as Open-Shop Scheduling problems. Especially for very large instances, our solver with MiniSat engine outperformed other encodings and the state-of-the-art CSP solvers choco and Mistral.
A Structure of the Subgraph Induced at a Labeling of a Graph by the Subset of Vertices with an Interval Spectrum

The sets of vertices and edges of an undirected, simple, finite, connected graph G are denoted by V (G) and E(G), respectively. An arbitrary nonempty finite subset of consecutive integers is called an interval. An injective mapping φ : E(G) → {1, 2, . , |E(G)|} is called a labeling of the graph G. If G is a graph, x is its arbitrary vertex, and φ is its arbitrary labeling, then the set SG(x, φ) ≡ {φ(e)/e ∈ E(G), e is incident with x} is called a spectrum of the vertex x of the graph G at its labeling φ. For any graph G and its arbitrary labeling φ, a structure of the subgraph of G, induced by the subset of vertices of G with an interval spectrum, is described. Mathematics Subject Classification: 05C15, 05C78 8636 Narine N. Davtyan et al.
Leveraging Kullback–Leibler Divergence Measures and Information-Rich Cues for Speech Summarization

Imperfect speech recognition often leads to degraded performance when exploiting conventional text-based methods for speech summarization. To alleviate this problem, this paper investigates various ways to robustly represent the recognition hypotheses of spoken documents beyond the top scoring ones. Moreover, a summarization framework, building on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence measure and exploring both the relevance and topical information cues of spoken documents and sentences, is presented to work with such robust representations. Experiments on broadcast news speech summarization tasks appear to demonstrate the utility of the presented approaches.