Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards High-Speed Real-Time HTTP Traffic Analysis on the Tilera Many-Core Platform

The ever-growing big-data applications have brought forth increasingly demands in understanding the traffic nature on high speed links on the Internet. Traditional traffic collection and protocol analysis systems were usually designed and implemented on the X86 computer systems, subject to the CPU capability, I/O speed constraints and other factors. In this paper, we proposed a parallel implementation of high-speed real- time HTTP traffic analyzer on the Tilera manycore processors. This system consists of 4 major components: traffic capturing, IP defragmentation, TCP stream reassembly and HTTP web page recovery. To improve the traffic analysis capability of this system, we decompose the traditional HTTP traffic analysis tasks into parallel threads, which can run on Tilera TILEPro64 processors simultaneously. Then, we proposed a scheduling model for allocating the computing capability of TILEPro64 processors efficiently given a set of inequality constraints in order to fully utilize the TILEPro64's cores for high-speed HTTP traffic analysis. We constructed a testbed to evaluate the performance of the proposed TILEPro64-based system. The experiment results show that the system can correctly analyze real-time HTTP traffic up to 2Gbps.
Effect of season on artificial insemination in Holstein dairy cows.

This Study was conducted at Sidi Mhamed Benali, in the province of Relizane in Algeria in order to analyze the effects of season on the artificial insemination in dairy “Holstein cows”. Information regarding the various biochemical profiles such as blood sugar, blood urea, serum calcium and phosphorus, as well as ambient temperature was carried on the day of artificial insemination (AI). The results show that cows with a failure of artificial insemination showed a hyperuremia and a hypoglycemia associated with a hypophosphatemia of (0.34 g / l), p <0.05, (0.27 g / l) with a p <0.05, (34,78 mg / l) with p <0.05 respectively during the cold season. While during the warm season, they presented hypocalcemia (68,01 mg / l). In conclusion, the seasonal effect on the failure of artificial insemination is mainly related to the nutritional status of dairy cows during the cold season and heat stress during the hot season.
Dynamic Movement Primitives for cooperative manipulation and synchronized motions

Cooperative manipulation, where several robots jointly manipulate an object from an initial configuration to a final configuration while preserving the robot formation, poses a great challenge in robotics. Here, we treat the problem of designing motion primitives for cooperative manipulation such that the robots move in formation and are robust with respect to external disturbances. Individual robot trajectories are generated by Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) and coupled by a formation control approach enabling the DMP-trajectories to preserve a given formation while performing the manipulation. The proposed control scheme achieves an increased adaptability under external disturbances. The approach is evaluated in a full-scale experiment with two prototypical cooperative manipulation and synchronized motion tasks.
Phylogenetic Diversity of Lactic Acid Bacteria Associated with Paddy Rice Silage as Determined by 16S Ribosomal DNA Analysis

ABSTRACT A total of 161 low-G+C-content gram-positive bacteria isolated from whole-crop paddy rice silage were classified and subjected to phenotypic and genetic analyses. Based on morphological and biochemical characters, these presumptive lactic acid bacterium (LAB) isolates were divided into 10 groups that included members of the genera Enterococcus, Lactobacillus, Lactococcus, Leuconostoc, Pediococcus, and Weissella. Analysis of the 16S ribosomal DNA (rDNA) was used to confirm the presence of the predominant groups indicated by phenotypic analysis and to determine the phylogenetic affiliation of representative strains. The virtually complete 16S rRNA gene was PCR amplified and sequenced. The sequences from the various LAB isolates showed high degrees of similarity to those of the GenBank reference strains (between 98.7 and 99.8%). Phylogenetic trees based on the 16S rDNA sequence displayed high consistency, with nodes supported by high bootstrap values. With the exception of one species, the genetic data was in agreement with the phenotypic identification. The prevalent LAB, predominantly homofermentative (66%), consisted of Lactobacillus plantarum (24%), Lactococcus lactis (22%), Leuconostoc pseudomesenteroides (20%), Pediococcus acidilactici (11%), Lactobacillus brevis (11%), Enterococcus faecalis (7%), Weissella kimchii (3%), and Pediococcus pentosaceus (2%). The present study, the first to fully document rice-associated LAB, showed a very diverse community of LAB with a relatively high number of species involved in the fermentation process of paddy rice silage. The comprehensive 16S rDNA-based approach to describing LAB community structure was valuable in revealing the large diversity of bacteria inhabiting paddy rice silage and enabling the future design of appropriate inoculants aimed at improving its fermentation quality.
NOD1 Cooperates with TLR2 to Enhance T Cell Receptor-Mediated Activation in CD8 T Cells

Pattern recognition receptors (PRR), like Toll-like receptors (TLR) and NOD-like receptors (NLR), are involved in the detection of microbial infections and tissue damage by cells of the innate immune system. Recently, we and others have demonstrated that TLR2 can additionally function as a costimulatory receptor on CD8 T cells. Here, we establish that the intracytosolic receptor NOD1 is expressed and functional in CD8 T cells. We show that C12-iEDAP, a synthetic ligand for NOD1, has a direct impact on both murine and human CD8 T cells, increasing proliferation and effector functions of cells activated via their T cell receptor (TCR). This effect is dependent on the adaptor molecule RIP2 and is associated with an increased activation of the NF-κB, JNK and p38 signaling pathways. Furthermore, we demonstrate that NOD1 stimulation can cooperate with TLR2 engagement on CD8 T cells to enhance TCR-mediated activation. Altogether our results indicate that NOD1 might function as an alternative costimulatory receptor in CD8 T cells. Our study provides new insights into the function of NLR in T cells and extends to NOD1 the recent concept that PRR stimulation can directly control T cell functions.
Surface Phosphatidylserine Is Responsible for the Internalization on Microvesicles Derived from Hypoxia-Induced Human Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cells into Human Endothelial Cells

Background Previous data have proven that microvesicles derived from hypoxia-induced mesenchymal stem cells (MSC-MVs) can be internalized into endothelial cells, enhancing their proliferation and vessel structure formation and promoting in vivo angiogenesis. However, there is a paucity of information about how the MSC-MVs are up-taken by endothelial cells. Methods MVs were prepared from the supernatants of human bone marrow MSCs that had been exposed to a hypoxic and/or serum-deprivation condition. The incorporation of hypoxia-induced MSC-MVs into human umbilical cord endothelial cells (HUVECs) was observed by flow cytometry and confocal microscopy in the presence or absence of recombinant human Annexin-V (Anx-V) and antibodies against human CD29 and CD44. Further, small interfering RNA (siRNA) targeted at Anx-V and PSR was delivered into HUVECs, or HUVECs were treated with a monoclonal antibody against phosphatidylserine receptor (PSR) and the cellular internalization of MVs was re-assessed. Results The addition of exogenous Anx-V could inhibit the uptake of MVs isolated from hypoxia-induced stem cells by HUVECs in a dose- and time-dependent manner, while the anti-CD29 and CD44 antibodies had no effect on the internalization process. The suppression was neither observed in Anx-V siRNA-transfected HUVECs, however, addition of anti-PSR antibody and PSR siRNA-transfected HUVECs greatly blocked the incorporation of MVs isolated from hypoxia-induced stem cells into HUVECs. Conclusion PS on the MVs isolated from hypoxia-induced stem cells is the critical molecule in the uptake by HUVECs.
Rings of intermediate (100 A) filament bundles in the perinuclear region of vascular endothelial cells. Their mobilization by colcemid and mitosis

Vascular endothelial cells cultured from guinea pig aorta or portal vein contain naturally occurring bundles of 100 A (diameter) filaments that completely encircle the nucleus. These rings are phase lucent and birefringent when examined with the light microscope. Perinuclear bundles of 100 A filaments were also seen in endothelial cells in vivo, indicating that they are a normal cytoplasmic component. These filaments did not decorate with S-1, and were not disrupted by glyceination. With these cells, experiments were designed to answer the following questions: (a) does Colcemid have an effect on these naturally occuring bundles? And (b) do these filaments remain during cell division? Endothelial cells grown in the presence of Colcemid were followed over 24 h. The perinuclear ring coiled into a juxtanuclear cap that consisted of disorganized arrays of 100 A filaments. This "coiling" effect was not blocked by cycloheximide, an inhibitor of protein synthesis. In another experiment, dividing cells were examined. During division the bundle of filaments is passively pulled in half into the daughter cells. These bundles did not disappear during the mitosis when mitotic spindle microtubules assemble. These studies suggest that Colcemid may exert a direct effect on 100 A filaments, independent of microtubules. Since these filaments do not disappear during mitosis, it is possible that in these cells the 100 A filaments and tubulin do not share a common pool of precursor proteins.
Focalising dynamic value prediction to CPU's context

Value prediction (VP) is a relatively new technique that increases performance by eliminating true data dependency constraints. VP architectures allow data dependent instructions to issue and execute speculatively using the predicted value. This technique is built on the concept of value locality, which describes the likelihood of a previously seen value recurring within a storage location. The authors extend dynamic VP by introducing the concept of register-centric prediction instead of instruction-centric prediction. The value localities obtained on some registers of MIPS architecture were quite remarkable leading to the conclusion that VP might be successfully applied, at least on these favourable registers. The idea of attaching a value predictor for the processor's favourable registers is original and might involve new architectural techniques for improving performance and reducing the hardware cost of speculative micro-architectures. The register VP technique consists in predicting the registers' next values based on the previously seen values. It executes the subsequent data dependent instructions using the predicted values. The speculative execution will be validated when the correct values are known. If the value was correctly predicted the critical path is reduced, otherwise the instructions executed with wrong entries must be executed again. The authors examine different favourable register selections and different basic value predictors to capture certain type of value predictabilities from the SPEC benchmarks (1995 and 2000) to obtain higher prediction accuracies. Their results show that there is a time correlation between the names of the destination registers and the values stored in these registers. The simulations show that the hybrid predictor optimally exploits this correlation with an average prediction accuracy of 85.44%, which is quite remarkable (on some benchmarks the values are over 96%). Considering an eight-issue out-of-order superscalar processor it is shown that register-centric VP produces average speedups of 17.30% for the SPECint95 benchmarks, and of 13.58% for the SPECint2000 benchmarks.
Pricing Basket Options with Smile

This thesis will look at two models that price European basket options consistently with the observed market smile. In the setting of the FX market basket options offer protection against drops in currencies and they are considerably cheaper than the sum of individual call options. Due to the obvious benefits of basket options an accurate method of valuation is needed in order to be able to price these options. Currently there does not exist a way to accurately price a basket option and many of the available approximations assume constant volatility. This assumption which is known to be untrue is the underlying reason behind developing smile consistent models. The first model addressed in this thesis is Monte Carlo simulation with local volatility. Monte Carlo simulation is often neglected due to it being too computationally heavy thus we investigate the use of the GPU to reduce timing costs. The second model proposed in this thesis is that of an Edgeworth series expansion of the true distribution around that of an approximating distribution. The model is then calibrated to the market smile in order to capture its effects on the valuation. The suggested models appear to provide superior pricing methods over many existing methods. They are also shown to accurately recover the market volatility surface.
Swarming, schooling, milling: phase diagram of a data-driven fish school model

We determine the basic phase diagram of the fish school model derived from data by Gautrais et al (2012 PLoS Comput. Biol. 8 e1002678), exploring its parameter space beyond the parameter values determined experimentally on groups of barred flagtails (Kuhlia mugil) swimming in a shallow tank. A modified model is studied alongside the original one, in which an additional frontal preference is introduced in the stimulus/response function to account for the angular weighting of interactions. Our study, mostly limited to groups of moderate size (in the order of 100 individuals), focused not only on the transition to schooling induced by increasing the swimming speed, but also on the conditions under which a school can exhibit milling dynamics and the corresponding behavioural transitions. We show the existence of a transition region between milling and schooling, in which the school exhibits multistability and intermittence between schooling and milling for the same combination of individual parameters. We also show that milling does not occur for arbitrarily large groups, mainly due to a distance dependence interaction of the model and information propagation delays in the school, which cause conflicting reactions for large groups. We finally discuss the biological significance of our findings, especially the dependence of behavioural transitions on social interactions, which were reported by Gautrais et al to be adaptive in the experimental conditions.
Keyphrase Extraction and Grouping Based on Association Rules

Keyphrases are important in capturing the content of a document and thus useful for many natural language processing tasks such as Information Retrieval, Document Classification, and Text Summarization. Keyphrase extraction aims to identify multi-word sequences from a collection of documents that more or less correspond to keyphrases. In this paper, we propose a new method for keyphrase extraction based on association rule mining. Redundant multi-word sequences or synonymous phrases inevitably make up a big part of the keyphrases extracted. With association rules, we can also reduce the redundancy by grouping the related keyphrases that have strong co-occurrence frequencies. We further apply our keyphrase extraction and grouping solution to Information Retrieval. By both distinguishing and grouping keyphrases, we are able to achieve improved performance for Information Retrieval.
Understanding stakeholders' perceptions of current and future park management practices

Today, there is increasing recognition of the importance of urban green space for our health and wellbeing. However, funding and budgets to manage urban parks are under threat in the UK and subject to significant reductions. These difficulties are being addressed through innovative practices which include community food growing, urban park plantings and income generation models, among others. Such practices reflect a shift in responsibility for park management involving multiple stakeholders who share responsibility. However, we know little about the perceptions of stakeholders, users and residents in relation to these different landscape management practices. How acceptable and feasible are such innovative practices in urban parks? What effect might their introduction have on users and their propensity to spend time in urban parks? The aim of this research is therefore to understand stakeholders’ perceptions of current and future park management practices by focusing on six urban parks in the city of Sheffield to explore their acceptability. This research explores different landscape management practices by examining stakeholders’ perceptions via semi-structured interviews (local authority stakeholders, Friends/ community groups, consultants and academics), focus group (park officers and managers) and household questionnaires (users and local residents). The sites are selected according to indicators of deprivation, urban park type and size, involvement of Friends of Parks groups or community groups, and geographical spread across the city. The findings suggest that socio-economic neighbourhood characteristics affect residents’ perceptions of acceptability and feasibility of park management practices. Funding pressures and a lack of workforce to manage parks are significant factors for community groups and professionals, among other factors. This research proposes that the place-keeping normative concept could be used to better understand park management contexts, allowing recommendations to be made for better park management in the city of Sheffield and the study sites. This research contributes valuable knowledge to our existing understanding of park management practices in an era of austerity. It is hoped that this will provide the foundation for further research focused on cities and urban parks in the future.
THE ACCURACY OF COMPUTER-ASSISTED FEEDBACK AND STUDENTS' RESPONSES TO IT

Elizabeth Lavolette, Gettysburg College Charlene Polio, Michigan State University Jimin Kahng, Northeastern Illinois University Various researchers in second language acquisition have argued for the effectiveness of immediate rather than delayed feedback. In writing, truly immediate feedback is impractical, but computer-assisted feedback provides a quick way of providing feedback that also reduces the teacher’s workload. We explored the accuracy of feedback from Criterion®, a program developed by Educational Testing Service, and students’ responses to it. Thirty-two students received feedback from Criterion on four essays throughout a semester, with 16 receiving the feedback immediately and 16 receiving it several days after writing their essays. Results indicated that 75% of the error codes were correct, but that Criterion missed many language errors. Students responded to the correct error codes 73% of the time and responded to more of the codes over the course of the semester, while the condition—delayed versus immediate—did not affect their response rates nor their accuracy on the first drafts. Although we cannot support claims that immediate feedback may be more helpful, we believe that, with proper training, Criterion can help students correct certain aspects of language.
Surflet-pair-relation histograms: a statistical 3D-shape representation for rapid classification

A statistical representation of three-dimensional shapes is introduced, based on a novel four-dimensional feature. The feature parameterizes the intrinsic geometrical relation of an oriented surface-point pair. The set of all such features represents both local and global characteristics of the surface. We compress this set into a histogram. A database of histograms, one per object, is sampled in a training phase. During recognition, sensed surface data, as may be acquired by stereo vision, a laser range-scanner, etc., are processed and compared to the stored histograms. We evaluate the match quality by six different criteria that are commonly used in statistical settings. Experiments with artificial data containing varying levels of noise and occlusion of the objects show that Kullback-Leibler and likelihood matching yield robust recognition rates. We propose histograms of the geometric relation between two oriented surface points (surflets) as a compact yet distinctive representation of arbitrary three-dimensional shapes.
Our love/hate relationship with meetings: Relating good and bad meeting behaviors to meeting outcomes, engagement, and exhaustion

Purpose Employees at all organizational levels spend large portions of their work lives in meetings, many of which are not effective. Previous process-analytical research has identified counterproductive communication patterns to help explain why many meetings go wrong. This study aims to illustrate the ways in which counterproductive – and productive – meeting behaviors are related to individual work engagement and emotional exhaustion. Design/methodology/approach The authors built a new research-based survey tool for measuring counterproductive meeting behaviors. An online sample of working adults (N = 440) was recruited to test the factor structure of this new survey and to examine the relationships between both good and bad meeting behaviors and employee attitudes beyond the meeting context. Findings Using structural equation modeling, this study found that counterproductive meeting behaviors were linked to decreased employee engagement and increased emotional exhaustion, whereas good meeting behaviors were linked to increased engagement and decreased emotional exhaustion. These relationships were mediated via individual meeting satisfaction and perceived meeting effectiveness. Research limitations/implications The study findings provide a nuanced view of meeting outcomes by showing that the behaviors that people observe in their meetings connect not only to meeting satisfaction and effectiveness but also to important workplace attitudes (i.e. employee engagement and emotional exhaustion). In other words, managers and meeting leaders need to be mindful of behavior in meetings, seek ways to mitigate poor behavior and seek opportunities to reward and encourage citizenship behavior. Originality/value This study shows how good and bad meeting behaviors relate to employee perceptions of meeting effectiveness and individual job attitudes. The authors develop a science-based, practitioner-friendly new survey tool for observing counterproductive meeting behavior and offer a juxtaposition of good and bad meeting behaviors in a single model.