Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparing interfaces based on what users watch and do

With the development of novel interfaces controlled through multiple modalities, new approaches are needed to analyze the process of interaction with such interfaces and evaluate them at a fine grain of detail. In order to evaluate the usability and usefulness of such interfaces, one needs tools to collect and analyze richly detailed data pertaining to both the process and outcomes of user interaction. Eye tracking is a technology that can provide detailed data on the allocation and shifts of users' visual attention across interface entities. Eye movement data, when combined with data from other input modalities (such as spoken commands, haptic actions with the keyboard and the mouse, etc.), results in just such a rich data on set. However, integrating, analyzing and visualizing multimodal data on user interactions remains a difficult task. In this paper we report on a first step toward developing a suite of tools to facilitate this task. We designed and implemented an Eye Tracking Analysis System that generates combined gaze and action visualizations from eye movement data and interaction logs. This new visualization allows an experimenter to see the visual attention shifts of users interleaved with their actions on each screen of a multi-screen interface. A pilot experiment on comparing two interfaces — a traditional interface and a speech-controlled one — to an educational multimedia application was carried out to test the utility of our tool.
Iterative-Equalization for Single-Carrier Transmission over Adaptive Multiuser Receivers Scheme for MIMO OFDM

Adaptive multiuser receivers scheme for MIMO OFDM over IterativeEqualization for Single-Carrier Transmission, which we refer to as Iterative AMUD MIMO OFDM. It involves the joint iteration of the adaptive minimum mean square error multiuser detection and decoding algorithm with prior information of the channel and interference cancelation in the spatial domain. A partially filtered gradient LMS (Adaptive) algorithm is also applied to improve the convergence speed and tracking ability of the adaptive detectors with slight increase in complexity. The proposed technique is analyzed in slow and fast Rayleigh fading channels in MIMO OFDM systems. The Adaptive Multiuser Detection for MIMO OFDM system (AMUD MIMO OFDM) performs as well as the iterative equalization for single-carrier for higher modulation scheme. The LMS algorithm and maximum a posterior (MAP) algorithm are utilized in the receiver structures. The results of the higher modulation schemes shows that as the modulation order increases, a higher SNR is required to obtain the same BER performance at a lower order. The iterative gain is greater for higher modulation orders as compared with lower modulation
Role of Agrobacterium VirB11 ATPase in T-Pilus Assembly and Substrate Selection

ABSTRACT The VirB11 ATPase is a subunit of the Agrobacterium tumefaciens transfer DNA (T-DNA) transfer system, a type IV secretion pathway required for delivery of T-DNA and effector proteins to plant cells during infection. In this study, we examined the effects of virB11 mutations on VirB protein accumulation, T-pilus production, and substrate translocation. Strains synthesizing VirB11 derivatives with mutations in the nucleoside triphosphate binding site (Walker A motif) accumulated wild-type levels of VirB proteins but failed to produce the T-pilus or export substrates at detectable levels, establishing the importance of nucleoside triphosphate binding or hydrolysis for T-pilus biogenesis. Similar findings were obtained for VirB4, a second ATPase of this transfer system. Analyses of strains expressing virB11 dominant alleles in general showed that T-pilus production is correlated with substrate translocation. Notably, strains expressing dominant alleles previously designated class II (dominant and nonfunctional) neither transferred T-DNA nor elaborated detectable levels of the T-pilus. By contrast, strains expressing most dominant alleles designated class III (dominant and functional) efficiently translocated T-DNA and synthesized abundant levels of T pilus. We did, however, identify four types of virB11mutations or strain genotypes that selectively disrupted substrate translocation or T-pilus production: (i) virB11/virB11∗ merodiploid strains expressing all class II and III dominant alleles were strongly suppressed for T-DNA translocation but efficiently mobilized an IncQ plasmid to agrobacterial recipients and also elaborated abundant levels of T pilus; (ii) strains synthesizing two class III mutant proteins, VirB11, V258G and VirB11.I265T, efficiently transferred both DNA substrates but produced low and undetectable levels of T pilus, respectively; (iii) a strain synthesizing the class II mutant protein VirB11.I103T/M301L efficiently exported VirE2 but produced undetectable levels of T pilus; (iv) strains synthesizing three VirB11 derivatives with a four-residue (HMVD) insertion (L75.i4, C168.i4, and L302.i4) neither transferred T-DNA nor produced detectable levels of T pilus but efficiently transferred VirE2 to plants and the IncQ plasmid to agrobacterial recipient cells. Together, our findings support a model in which the VirB11 ATPase contributes at two levels to type IV secretion, T-pilus morphogenesis, and substrate selection. Furthermore, the contributions of VirB11 to machine assembly and substrate transfer can be uncoupled by mutagenesis.
Measuring Protein Mobility by Photobleaching GFP Chimeras in Living Cells

This unit describes fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) and fluorescence loss in photobleaching (FLIP) using commercially available confocal scanning laser microscopy (CSLM). Photobleaching is the photo‐induced change in a fluorphore that abolishes that molecule's fluorescence. The different characteristics of green fluorescent protein (GFP) chimeras in a cell can be studied by FRAP, in which a selected region of the cell is photobleached with intense light. The movement of unbleached molecules into a photobleached region is quantified by imaging with an attenuated light source. The movement of molecules between cellular compartments can be determined by FLIP, in which the same region of a cell expressing a GFP chimera is repeatedly photobleached. The loss of fluorescence from regions outside the photobleached region is monitored to characterize the movement of a protein. Together these two techniques are providing fundamentally new insights into the kinetic properties of proteins in cells.
Démonstration: ArcheoTUI

We designed ArcheoTUI on the demand of archeaologists and in a direct collaboration with them. Cultural objects of archeological findings are often broken and fractured into a large amount of fragments, and the archeologists are confronted by 3D puzzles when reassembling the fractured objects. We revealed that the tangible interface was accepted, and that all the users managed to solve simple assembly tasks.
Fine structure in sunspots. II. Intensity variations and proper motions of umbral dots

Temporal intensity variations of umbral dots (UDs) and dark nuclei (DNs), and proper motions of UDs, were analyzed in a 4 1/2 hour time series of high resolution white light images of the umbra in a medium-size sunspot (NOAA 7519). The observationsweremade on 5 June 1993 at the SwedishVacuum Solar Telescope, La Palma. An identification and tracking algorithm was applied to UDs observed in a destretched movie of 360 frames. In total, 662 UDs were tracked, and their intensities, positions, and proper motions were measured. Power spectra of temporal intensity variations of UDs and DNs were computed, and several typical periods were found. The histogram of time-averaged intensities of UDs has two maxima; the UDs belonging to the brighter part of the population are located mostly at or near the umbral-penumbral boundary. The number of UDs decreases with increasing magnitude of the proper motion velocity. Speeds of UDs are grouped at 100 and 400 m/s. The observed spatial distribution of UDs with different proper motion velocities is found to be in contradiction to the generally accepted idea of moving “peripheral” and stationary “central” UDs. Both “fast” and “slow” UDs are present in all parts of the umbra. Thus velocity does not appear to be a good criterion for separating UDs into “peripheral” and “central” ones.
Modeling and MPPT control of squirrel-cage induction generator wind power generation system via VisSim

Based on the mathematical model of the SCIG wind power generation system, a model of the system for maximum energy capture was established using MPPT in VisSim. In the double loop of control system, a PI speed controller is adopted in the speed loop, and a vector controller is used in the current loop. The validity is testified by the simulation results, and other control strategies can be applied to the system to testify their rationality, and the VisSim supplies a new method for the simulation of SCIG wind power generation system.
A scalable instruction queue design using dependence chains

Increasing the number of instruction queue (IQ) entries in a dynamically scheduled processor exposes more instruction-level parallelism, leading to higher performance. However, increasing a conventional IQ physical size leads to larger latencies and slower clock speeds. We introduce a new IQ design that divides a large queue into small segments, which can be clocked at high frequencies. We use dynamic dependence-based scheduling to promote instructions from segment to segment until they reach a small issue buffer. Our segmented IQ is designed specifically to accommodate variable-latency instructions such as loads. Despite its roughly, similar circuit complexity, simulation results indicate that our segmented instruction queue with 512 entries and 128 chains improves performance by tip to 69% over a 32-entry, conventional instruction queue for SpecINT 2000 benchmarks, and tip to 398% for SpecFP 2000 benchmarks. The segmented IQ achieves from 55% to 98% of the performance of a monolithic 512-entry queue while providing the potential for much higher clock speeds.
An Improved Technique Using Dental Prostheses for Field Quantification of the Force Required by Primates for the Dental Penetration of Fruit

Tooth morphology is an important determinant of primate diet, setting potential limits on processable item size and material properties. Plunger-based commercial fruit firmness testers (penetrometers) have been used to estimate primate diet item hardness and, by proxy, bite force required for penetration. However, geometric forms and surface areas of penetrometer plungers and primate teeth differ considerably. Accurate bite force estimation is especially important with pitheciine primates as these penetrate fruit pericarps with their canines. To achieve more realistic bite force measures, we replaced a fruit penetrometer's standard plunger with a Cacajao calvus canine prosthesis. We compared indentation and penetration values for Hevea spruceana (Euphorbiaceae; hard-pericarp) and Mauritia flexuosa (Arecaceae; soft-pericarp) fruits (both natural Cacajao foods), and standard penetrometer head and canine prosthesis values for penetrating H. spruceana sulci. Compared to the canine prosthesis, a standard head overestimated the force needed to indent and penetrate H. spruceana fruit by more than twofold and, due to greater width, could not effectively penetrate a sulcus: sulcal penetrability data were easily retrieved with the canine prosthesis. We believe this new approach using dental prostheses has potential in the analysis of primate foraging mechanisms, especially for pitheciines for which canines are of paramount importance in accessing food.
Apolipoprotein E4 homozygosity predisposes to serum cholesterol elevation during high fat diet.

The hypothesis that apolipoprotein E (apo E)-isoform-related differences in plasma and LDL cholesterol concentrations are due to differential responses to dietary lipids was explored in 110 North Karelian subjects who had previously participated in dietary intervention studies. This was accomplished by collecting fresh blood samples for apo E phenotyping and by re-analysis of the original plasma lipid data according to apo E phenotypes. During high fat, high cholesterol baseline (p = 0.003) and switchback diets (p = 0.002), plasma cholesterol correlated inversely with the sum of subscript numbers (e.g., apo E3/4 = 7). Thus, subjects with the apo E4/4 phenotype had the highest (7.63 +/- 1.32 mmol/l), and subjects with the apo E3/2 phenotype had the lowest baseline levels of plasma cholesterol (5.85 +/- 1.48 mmol/l). This association became weaker during a low fat, low cholesterol diet intervention (p = 0.069). Greater reductions in plasma cholesterol occurred in subjects homozygous for the apo epsilon 4 allele (-1.84 mmol/l) as compared to subjects with other genotypes (-1.13 mmol/l) (p = 0.0097). Moreover, these subjects responded to the switchback diet by greater increases in plasma cholesterol (1.52 mmol/l) than others (0.92 mmol/l, p = 0.0141). The results suggest that the effect of apo epsilon genotype on plasma cholesterol is modulated by dietary fat and cholesterol intake.
A Pilot Cohort Study of the Determinants of Longitudinal Opioid Use After Surgery

BACKGROUND: Determinants of the duration of opioid use after surgery have not been reported. We hypothesized that both preoperative psychological distress and substance abuse would predict more prolonged opioid use after surgery. METHODS: Between January 2007 and April 2009, a prospective, longitudinal inception cohort study enrolled 109 of 134 consecutively approached patients undergoing mastectomy, lumpectomy, thoracotomy, total knee replacement, or total hip replacement. We measured preoperative psychological distress and substance use, and then measured the daily use of opioids until patients reported the cessation of both opioid consumption and pain. The primary end point was time to opioid cessation. All analyses were controlled for the type of surgery done. RESULTS: Overall, 6% of patients continued on new opioids 150 days after surgery. Preoperative prescribed opioid use, depressive symptoms, and increased self-perceived risk of addiction were each independently associated with more prolonged opioid use. Preoperative prescribed opioid use was associated with a 73% (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.51%–87%) reduction in the rate of opioid cessation after surgery (P = 0.0009). Additionally, each 1-point increase (on a 4-point scale) of self-perceived risk of addiction was associated with a 53% (95% CI 23%–71%) reduction in the rate of opioid cessation (P = 0.003). Independent of preoperative opioid use and self-perceived risk of addiction, each 10-point increase on a preoperative Beck Depression Inventory II was associated with a 42% (95% CI 18%–58%) reduction in the rate of opioid cessation (P = 0.002). The variance in the duration of postoperative opioid use was better predicted by preoperative prescribed opioid use, self-perceived risk of addiction, and depressive symptoms than postoperative pain duration or severity. CONCLUSIONS: Preoperative factors, including legitimate prescribed opioid use, self-perceived risk of addiction, and depressive symptoms each independently predicted more prolonged opioid use after surgery. Each of these factors was a better predictor of prolonged opioid use than postoperative pain duration or severity.
Intercomparison of slant column measurements of NO 2 and O 4 by MAX-DOAS and zenith-sky UV and visible spectrometers

Abstract. In June 2009, 22 spectrometers from 14 institutes measured tropospheric and stratospheric NO2 from the ground for more than 11 days during the Cabauw Intercomparison Campaign of Nitrogen Dioxide measuring Instruments (CINDI), at Cabauw, NL (51.97° N, 4.93° E). All visible instruments used a common wavelength range and set of cross sections for the spectral analysis. Most of the instruments were of the multi-axis design with analysis by differential spectroscopy software (MAX-DOAS), whose non-zenith slant columns were compared by examining slopes of their least-squares straight line fits to mean values of a selection of instruments, after taking 30-min averages. Zenith slant columns near twilight were compared by fits to interpolated values of a reference instrument, then normalised by the mean of the slopes of the best instruments. For visible MAX-DOAS instruments, the means of the fitted slopes for NO2 and O4 of all except one instrument were within 10% of unity at almost all non-zenith elevations, and most were within 5%. Values for UV MAX-DOAS instruments were almost as good, being 12% and 7%, respectively. For visible instruments at zenith near twilight, the means of the fitted slopes of all instruments were within 5% of unity. This level of agreement is as good as that of previous intercomparisons, despite the site not being ideal for zenith twilight measurements. It bodes well for the future of measurements of tropospheric NO2, as previous intercomparisons were only for zenith instruments focussing on stratospheric NO2, with their longer heritage.
Indian visceral leishmaniasis with extensive lymphadenopathy – An unusual presentation: A case report with literature review

Visceral leishmaniasis (VL), also known as kala-azar, is a life-threatening systemic disease caused by the obligate intracellular protozoan, Leishmania, and transmitted to humans by the female phlebotomine sand fly (Phlebotomus argentipes). The disease is fatal, if left untreated. We report a case of a patient clinically suspected of disseminated tuberculosis, but fine needle aspiration cytology of cervical and axillary lymph nodes yielded a diagnosis of leishmaniasis. Diagnosis of VL was challenging as the disease closely mimicked tuberculosis in the setting of extensive lymphadenopathy including conglomerate of mesenteric lymph nodes, on and off fever, and granulomatous lymphadenitis on aspiration. Bone marrow examination was further performed. A detailed workup revealed patient to be severely immunocompromised and newly diagnosed human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) positive. Worldwide, India has the largest number of VL cases, accounting for 40%–50% of world's disease burden and the second largest HIV-infected population, accounting for approximately 10% of the global disease burden. HIV increases the risk of developing VL by 100–2320 times in endemic areas and concurrently VL promotes the clinical progression of HIV disease. Co-infection with HIV alters the body's immune response to leishmaniasis thus leading to unusual presentations. This case highlights the diagnostic problem in the aforesaid setting. Moreover, co-infection with HIV in VL can be a potential source of drug resistance. An early diagnosis and intensified treatment is the key to patient management.
ADAM: another database of abbreviations in MEDLINE

MOTIVATION Abbreviations are an important type of terminology in the biomedical domain. Although several groups have already created databases of biomedical abbreviations, these are either not public, or are not comprehensive, or focus exclusively on acronym-type abbreviations. We have created another abbreviation database, ADAM, which covers commonly used abbreviations and their definitions (or long-forms) within MEDLINE titles and abstracts, including both acronym and non-acronym abbreviations. RESULTS A model of recognizing abbreviations and their long-forms from titles and abstracts of MEDLINE (2006 baseline) was employed. After grouping morphological variants, 59 405 abbreviation/long-form pairs were identified. ADAM shows high precision (97.4%) and includes most of the frequently used abbreviations contained in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Lexicon and the Stanford Abbreviation Database. Conversely, one-third of abbreviations in ADAM are novel insofar as they are not included in either database. About 19% of the novel abbreviations are non-acronym-type and these cover at least seven different types of short-form/long-form pairs. AVAILABILITY A free, public query interface to ADAM is available at http://arrowsmith.psych.uic.edu, and the entire database can be downloaded as a text file.
This Paper Is Included in the Proceedings of the 11th Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (nsdi '14). Blizzard: Fast, Cloud-scale Block Storage for Cloud-oblivious Applications Blizzard: Fast, Cloud-scale Block Storage for Cloud-oblivious Applications

Blizzard is a high-performance block store that exposes cloud storage to cloud-oblivious POSIX and Win32 applications. Blizzard connects clients and servers using a network with full-bisection bandwidth, allowing clients to access any remote disk as fast as if it were local. Using a novel striping scheme, Blizzard exposes high disk parallelism to both sequential and random workloads; also, by decoupling the durability and ordering requirements expressed by flush requests, Blizzard can commit writes out-of-order, providing high performance and crash consistency to applications that issue many small, random IOs. Blizzard's virtual disk drive, which clients mount like a normal physical one, provides maximum throughputs of 1200 MB/s, and can improve the performance of unmodified, cloud-oblivious applications by 2x–10x. Compared to EBS, a commercially available, state-of-the-art virtual drive for cloud applications , Blizzard can improve SQL server IOp rates by seven-fold while still providing crash consistency.
Evolving the selfish herd: emergence of distinct aggregating strategies in an individual-based model

From zebra to starlings, herring and even tadpoles, many creatures move in an organized group. The emergent behaviour arises from simple underlying movement rules, but the evolutionary pressure which favours these rules has not been conclusively identified. Various explanations exist for the advantage to the individual of group formation: reduction of predation risk; increased foraging efficiency or reproductive success. Here, we adopt an individual-based model for group formation and subject it to simulated predation and foraging; the haploid individuals evolve via a genetic algorithm based on their relative success under such pressure. Our work suggests that flock or herd formation is likely to be driven by predator avoidance. Individual fitness in the model is strongly dependent on the presence of other phenotypes, such that two distinct types of evolved group can be produced by the same predation or foraging conditions, each stable against individual mutation. We draw analogies with multiple Nash equilibria theory of iterated games to explain and categorize these behaviours. Our model is sufficient to capture the complex behaviour of dynamic collective groups, yet is flexible enough to manifest evolutionary behaviour.