Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
InterDataNet: An Infrastructural Approach to Data Interoperability to Enable Computer Supported Collaborative Applications

Distributed information interoperability is crucial for the development of computer supported collaborative applications. We recognize two main factors inhibiting extensive data interoperability: one is the lack of "Web of Data" solutions allowing greater granular addressability and management of elementary data; another is the lack of suitable "Web of Data" infrastructural solutions providing the basis for the development of specific applications. We present InterDataNet (IDN) layered middleware architecture. IDN is based on the adoption of a shared Information Model (IDN-IM) and the management of such model operated by a Service Architecture (IDN- SA) providing collaboration-support functions. The InterDataNet name aims to put to evidence the goal of achieving interoperability among networks of data (interdataworking). IDN proposes itself to act as an interoperability application-independent middleware, supporting distributed information management to enhance interoperation and collaboration. Basic concepts and specifications which are grounding development of an IDN demonstrator are reported and discussed.
Anthrax Lethal Factor Cleavage of Nlrp1 Is Required for Activation of the Inflammasome

NOD-like receptor (NLR) proteins (Nlrps) are cytosolic sensors responsible for detection of pathogen and danger-associated molecular patterns through unknown mechanisms. Their activation in response to a wide range of intracellular danger signals leads to formation of the inflammasome, caspase-1 activation, rapid programmed cell death (pyroptosis) and maturation of IL-1β and IL-18. Anthrax lethal toxin (LT) induces the caspase-1-dependent pyroptosis of mouse and rat macrophages isolated from certain inbred rodent strains through activation of the NOD-like receptor (NLR) Nlrp1 inflammasome. Here we show that LT cleaves rat Nlrp1 and this cleavage is required for toxin-induced inflammasome activation, IL-1 β release, and macrophage pyroptosis. These results identify both a previously unrecognized mechanism of activation of an NLR and a new, physiologically relevant protein substrate of LT.
The Polyhedral Off-line Robust Model Predictive Control Strategy for Uncertain Polytopic Discrete-time Systems

In this paper, an off-line synthesis approach to robust constrained model predictive control is presented. Most of the computational burdens are reduced by computing off-line a sequence of state feedback control laws that corresponds to a sequence of polyhedral invariant sets. At each sampling time, the smallest polyhedral invariant set containing the currently measured state is determined and the corresponding state feedback control law is implemented to the process. The proposed algorithm is compared with an ellipsoidal off-line robust model predictive control algorithm. The results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better control performance. Moreover, a significantly larger feasible region is obtained. The controller design is illustrated with an example of continuous stirred-tank reactor.
Bimanual motor coordination controlled by cooperative interactions in intrinsic and extrinsic coordinates

Although strong motor coordination in intrinsic muscle coordinates has frequently been reported for bimanual movements, coordination in extrinsic visual coordinates is also crucial in various bimanual tasks. To explore the bimanual coordination mechanisms in terms of the frame of reference, here we characterized implicit bilateral interactions in visuomotor tasks. Visual perturbations (finger‐cursor gain change) were applied while participants performed a rhythmic tracking task with both index fingers under an in‐phase or anti‐phase relationship in extrinsic coordinates. When they corrected the right finger's amplitude, the left finger's amplitude unintentionally also changed [motor interference (MI)], despite the instruction to keep its amplitude constant. Notably, we observed two specificities: one was large MI and low relative‐phase variability (PV) under the intrinsic in‐phase condition, and the other was large MI and high PV under the extrinsic in‐phase condition. Additionally, using a multiple‐interaction model, we successfully decomposed MI into intrinsic components caused by motor correction and extrinsic components caused by visual‐cursor mismatch of the right finger's movements. This analysis revealed that the central nervous system facilitates MI by combining intrinsic and extrinsic components in the condition with in‐phases in both intrinsic and extrinsic coordinates, and that under‐additivity of the effects is explained by the brain's preference for the intrinsic interaction over extrinsic interaction. In contrast, the PV was significantly correlated with the intrinsic component, suggesting that the intrinsic interaction dominantly contributed to bimanual movement stabilization. The inconsistent features of MI and PV suggest that the central nervous system regulates multiple levels of bilateral interactions for various bimanual tasks.
A 65 nm standard cell library for ultra low-power applications

This paper describes the development of a 65nm standard cell library designed for building highly energy-efficient digital circuits. In total 43 logic cells and 19 special cells for clock-tree synthesis and place and route purposes are implemented using a commercial 65 nm bulk technology. As a result full-chip implementation of low-power systems operating at ultra-low voltage is feasible. The benefits of this subthreshold cell design are demonstrated by synthesis and analysis of a sample circuit for supply voltages from 250 mV to 1.2 V. Power analysis at gate-level shows an improvement in energy consumption by a factor of 9.25 with a total energy consumption of 11.7pJ per clock cycle in the subthreshold domain.
Levels of Tannins and Flavonoids in Medicinal Plants: Evaluating Bioprospecting Strategies

There are several species of plants used by traditional communities in the Brazilian semiarid. An approach used in the search for natural substances that possess therapeutic value is ethnobotany or ethnopharmacology. Active substances that have phenolic groups in their structure have great pharmacological potential. To establish a quantitative relationship between the species popularly considered to be antimicrobial, antidiabetic, and antidiarrheal, the contents of tannins and flavonoids were determined. The plant selection was based on an ethnobotanical survey conducted in a community located in the municipality of Altinho, northeastern Brazil. For determination of tannin content was utilized the technique of radial diffusion, and for flavonoids, an assay based on the complexation of aluminum chloride. The group of plants with antimicrobial indications showed a higher content of tannins compared to the control groups. The results evidence suggests a possible relationship between these compounds and the observed activity.
Extensive cryptic species diversity and fine-scale endemism in the marine red alga Portieria in the Philippines

We investigated species diversity and distribution patterns of the marine red alga Portieria in the Philippine archipelago. Species boundaries were tested based on mitochondrial, plastid and nuclear encoded loci, using a general mixed Yule-coalescent (GMYC) model-based approach and a Bayesian multilocus species delimitation method. The outcome of the GMYC analysis of the mitochondrial encoded cox2-3 dataset was highly congruent with the multilocus analysis. In stark contrast with the current morphology-based assumption that the genus includes a single, widely distributed species in the Indo-West Pacific (Portieria hornemannii), DNA-based species delimitation resulted in the recognition of 21 species within the Philippines. Species distributions were found to be highly structured with most species restricted to island groups within the archipelago. These extremely narrow species ranges and high levels of intra-archipelagic endemism contrast with the wide-held belief that marine organisms generally have large geographical ranges and that endemism is at most restricted to the archipelagic level. Our results indicate that speciation in the marine environment may occur at spatial scales smaller than 100 km, comparable with some terrestrial systems. Our finding of fine-scale endemism has important consequences for marine conservation and management.
Strategic Investment Under Uncertainty: A Synthesis

Investment is a central theme in economics, finance, and operational research. Traditionally, the focus of analysis has been either on assessing the value of flexibility (investment under uncertainty) or on describing commitment effects in competitive settings (industrial organization). Research contributions addressing the intersection of investment under uncertainty and industrial organization have become numerous in recent years. In this paper, we provide an overview aimed at categorizing and relating these research streams. We highlight managerial insights concerning the nature of competitive advantage (first- versus second-mover advantage), the manner in which information is revealed, firm heterogeneity, capital increment size, and the number of competing firms.
On the Impact of Quantized Channel Feedback in Guaranteeing Secrecy with Artificial Noise: The Noise Leakage Problem

The impact of quantized channel direction information (CDI) on the achievable secrecy rate is studied for multiple antenna wiretap channels. By assuming that the eavesdropper's channel is unknown at the transmitter, we adopt the transmission scheme where artificial noise (AN) is imposed in the null space of the legitimate receiver's channel to disrupt the eavesdropper's reception. It has been shown that, in the ideal case where perfect CDI is available at the transmitter, the achievable secrecy rate can be made arbitrarily large by increasing the transmission power. However, when only quantized CDI is available, the AN that was originally intended to jam the eavesdropper may now leak into the legitimate receiver's channel, causing significant secrecy rate loss. For a given number of feedback bits B and transmission power P, we derive the optimal power allocation among the message-bearing signal and the AN to maximize the secrecy rate under AN leakage. We show that, when B is sufficiently large, one should allocate power evenly among the message-bearing signal and the AN; whereas when B is small, one should be more conservative in allocating power to the AN. Moreover, by showing that the achievable secrecy rate under quantized CDI is bounded by a constant, we derive a scaling law between B and P that is necessary to maintain a constant secrecy rate loss compared to the perfect CDI case. The scaling of B is shown to be logarithmic of P. These results are first derived for the multiple-input single-output single-antenna-eavesdropper scenario and are later extended to the multiple-input multiple-output multiple-antenna-eavesdropper case. Numerical simulations are provided to verify our theoretical claims.
What is a representative language sample for word and sound acquisition?

Abstract Naturalistic data are a useful source for language acquisition research. Recently, the emphasis has been placed on using denser corpora, in order to capture a more accurate picture of child language development. However, working with large amounts of data raises resource issues, since it is time-consuming to record and to transcribe. In this article, I focus on what would be the ideal duration of a naturalistic recording for it to be considered a representative enough sample of children's linguistic behaviours to observe the acquisition of words and sounds. Some of the results suggest that 30 minutes of recording may be enough to capture these specific developments, but these results are discussed in the perspective of what an ideal session could be. Résumé Les données naturalistes sont une ressource utile pour la recherche en acquisition du langage. Récemment, l'emphase a été mise sur l'importance de corpus plus denses afin de rendre compte de façon précise du développement du langage chez l'enfant. Cependant, travailler avec de grandes quantités de données soulève des problèmes de ressources, étant donné le coût en temps de l'enregistrement et de la transcription. Dans cet article, je traite de la durée idéale d'un enregistrement naturaliste, pour que ce dernier soit considéré comme un échantillon représentatif des comportements linguistiques des enfants quand on veut observer l'acquisition des mots et des sons. Certains des résultats suggèrent que 30 minutes d'enregistrement peuvent suffire pour rendre compte de ces développements spécifiques, mais ces résultats sont discutés par rapport à ce que pourrait être une session idéale.
The Effect of Different Types of Peer Feedback Provision on EFL Students’ Writing Performance

Writing in English is often claimed as the most complex skills compared to the other three skills. Due to its complexity, feedback is seen to be an important part in writing process since it can lead to the students’ better writing performance. It has been a consensus that teacher feedback is not practical to be given in a class with a big number of students; thus, this challenges peer feedback to be implemented in the writing classroom. While there are studies showing that peer feedback is effective to enhance the students’ writing performance, how peer feedback should be conducted has been overlooked and limited. In this study, we investigated the effect of two types of peer feedback provision on the students’ writing performance. This study involved 55 EFL students of the English Department of a state university in Indonesia. The study revealed that both in-class peer feedback provision and small group peer feedback provisiom led to the students’ better writing performance. Nonetheless, neither of these two was more effective than the other. This indicates that regardless of the types of peer feedback provision, the results will be the same.
Adaptive switching supervisory control of nonlinear systems with no prior knowledge of noise bounds

The problem of controlling nonlinear uncertain noisy systems is approached via the introduction of a supervisor which, whenever needed, switches on, in feedback to the plant, a controller selected from a finite set of predesigned controllers. A Lyapunov-based falsification criterion allows one to ensure robust stability in the presence of uncertain constant parameters and exogenous bounded disturbances.
FOR STREAMING VIDEO IN WIRELESS NETWORKS

Rate control is an important issue in video streaming applications for both wired and wireless networks. The widely accepted rate control method in wired networks, i.e. TCP friendly equation based rate control (TFRC) [1], is known to perform suboptimally in wireless networks. In previous work, we proposed MULTFRC as an end-to-end approach to fully utilize wireless bandwidth, modifying only application layer by opening appropriate number of TFRC connections. We have recently proposed two extensions to MULTFRC, namely, a light-weight approach AOI-TFRC, and a scalable approach Enhanced MULTFRC (E-MULTFRC). AIOTFRC not only enjoys all the advantages of MULTFRC, but also reduces implementation complexity, and the undesirable “quantization effect” associated with MULTFRC by combining multiple TFRC connections into one. E-MULTFRC not only shares all the properties of MULTFRC, but also embraces provable optimality and scalability properties. In this paper, we propose an Enhanced AIO-TFRC (EAIO-TFRC) protocol which combines benefits of both AIO-TFRC and EMULTFRC. NS-2 simulations are carried out to characterize EAIO-TFRC’s performance.
Location-based topic evolution

As the advance of mobile technologies, geographical records can be easily embedded in the data to form the location-associated documents. For example, in Twitter, the location of tweets can be identified by the GPS locations or IP addresses from smart phones. In Flickr, photos may be tagged and recorded with GPS locations. With the geographical information, it is more likely to model users' interests in different regions so as to determine the corresponding marketing strategy. Due to its potential in providing personalized and context-aware services, several pieces of work have started to explore in this area. One stream of work tries to discover users' interest topics from location-associated documents. These models work under the assumption that words close in geographical positions are likely to be clustered into the same geographical topic. However, they attain this in a static mode. That is, they do not consider the evolution of the topics. In addition, they have to specify the total number of topics for the corpus in advance. In order to utilize the geographical information and to model the change of topics, we propose a location-based topic evolution (LBTE) model to tackle the above issues. Main advantages of our model lie that it can reveal the appearance and disappearance of the topics in different regions. Moreover, topics can be automatically determined based on the location-associated documents and its total number is not restricted to a preset value. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the merits of our proposed LBTE model in capturing users' interest topics.
Outline of a database model for electronic dictionaries

The growing avaibility of dictionaries in electronic form calls for a model sophisticated enough to represent the richness of entries and enable complex information retrieval. Electronic dictionaries are a special kind of object, intermediary between a text and a database. Textual models are not powerful enough to handle complex information retrieval, and conventional database models are not flexible enough to handle the richness of their information. In this paper, we outline a scheme for representing electronic dictionaries which departs from previously proposed models. In particular, it allows for a full representation of sense nesting and defines an inheritance mechanism which enables the elimination of redundant information. The model provides flexibility which seems able to handle the varying structures of different monolingual dictionaries.
In vitro studies on the morphogenesis and differentiation of the mesoderm subjacent to the apical ectodermal ridge of the embryonic chick limb-bud.

It has been suggested that one of the major functions of the apical ectodermal ridge (AER) of the embryonic chick limb-bud is to maintain mesenchymal cells directly subjacent to it (i.e. cells extending 0.4-- 0.5 mm from the AER) in a labile, undifferentiated condition. We have attempted to directly test this hypothesis by subjecting the undiffertiated subridge mesoderm of stage-25 embryonic chick wing-buds to organ culture in the presence and absence of the AER and the ectoderm that normally surrounds the mesoderm dorsally and ventrally. During the period of culture, control explants comprised of the subridge mesoderm capped by the AER and surrounded by the dorsal/ventral ectoderm undergo progressive morphogenesis characterized by polarized proximal to distal outgrowth and changes in the contour of the developing explant, and ultimately form a structure grossly resembling a normal distal wing-bud tip. In contrast, explants from which the AER and dorsal/ventral ectoderm have been removed (minus ectoderm explants) or from which just the AER has been removed (minus AER explants) form compact, rounded masses exhibiting no signs of morphogenesis. During the polarized proximal to distal outgrowth control explants undergo during the first 3 days of culture, as cells of the explant become located greater than 0.4--0.5 mm from the AER, they concomitantly undergo a sequence of changes indicative of their differentiation into cartilage. However, those cells which remain 0.4--0.5 mm from the AER during this period retain the characteristics of non-specialized mesenchymal cells. In marked contrast to control explants, virtually all of the cells of minus ectoderm explants initiate chondrogenic differentiation during the first day of culture. Cells comprising the central core of minus AER explants also initiate chondrogenic differentiation during the first day of culture, but in contrast to minus ecotderm explants, non-chondrogenic tissue types form along the periphery of the explants subjacent to the dorsal/ventral ectoderm. These results indicate that the AER maintains cells directly subjacent to it in a labile, undifferentiated condition, and that when mesenchymal cells are freed from the AER's influence either artificially or as a result of normal polarized outgrowth, they are freed to commence cytodifferentiation. The results further suggest that the dorsal/ventral ectoderm may have an influence on the differentiation of the mesenchymal cells directly subjacent to it, once the cells have been removed from the influence of the AER.
Intracellular Recordings Reveal Novel Features of Neurons That Code Interaural Intensity Disparities in the Inferior Colliculus

Many cells in the inferior colliculus (IC) are excited by contralateral and inhibited by ipsilateral stimulation and are thought to be important for sound localization. These excitatory–inhibitory (EI) cells comprise a diverse group, even though they exhibit a common binaural response property. Previous extracellular studies showed the diversity results from different circuits that generate the same EI property among the IC population, where some inherit the property from a lower nucleus, some are formed de novo in the IC, and others inherit EI features that are modified by inhibitory circuits. Here we evaluated the differential circuitry by recording inputs (postsynaptic potentials) and outputs (spikes) with in vivo whole-cell recordings from the IC of awake Mexican free-tailed bats. We show that in a minority of EI cells, either they inherited their binaural property from a lower binaural nucleus or the EI property was created in the IC via inhibitory projections from the ipsilateral ear, features consistent with those observed in extracellular studies. However, in a majority of EI cells, ipsilateral signals evoked subthreshold EPSPs that behaved paradoxically in that EPSP amplitudes increased with intensity, even though binaural signals with the same ipsilateral intensities generated progressively greater spike suppressions. We propose circuitry that can account for the responses we observed and suggest that the ipsilaterally evoked EPSPs could influence the responsiveness of IC cells to dynamic signals with interaural intensity disparities that change over time, such as moving sound sources or multiple sounds that occur in complex acoustic environments.
FCRA: Femtocell Cluster-Based Resource Allocation Scheme for OFDMA Networks

Recently, operators have resorted to femtocell networks in order to enhance indoor coverage and quality of service since macro-antennas fail to reach these objectives. Nevertheless, they are confronted to many challenges to make a success of femtocells deployment. In this paper, we address the issue of resources allocation in femtocell networks using OFDMA technology (e.g., WiMAX, LTE). Specifically, we propose a hybrid centralized/distributed resource allocation strategy namely \textit{Femtocell Cluster-based Resource Allocation} (\texttt{FCRA}). Firstly, \texttt{FCRA} builds interference-free femtocell clusters. Then, within a cluster the optimal resource allocation for each femtocell is performed by its cluster-head. Finally, the contingent collisions among different clusters are fixed. To achieve this, we formulate the problem mathematically as Min-Max optimization problem. Performance analysis shows that \texttt{FCRA} converges to the optimal solution in small-sized networks and outperforms two prominent related schemes (\texttt{C-DFP} and \texttt{DRA}) in large-sized ones. The results concern the throughput satisfaction rate, the spectrum spatial reuse, and the convergence time metrics.