Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impulse / sliding mode hybrid system modeling of interacting rigid body systems

In this paper, a new modeling approach based on a sliding manifold and hybrid system formulation, is developed to describe the dynamics of interacting rigid body systems. Appropriate discrete states, events, reset maps, and threshold parameters are developed. These yield a hybrid automaton framework to describe interacting rigid body systems. The new result is applied to the modeling and simulation of a rolling ball virtual reality system, which illustrates the validity of the approach.
Comparison of Three Different Derivative Approaches Aiming at Estimation of Image Movement

The use of optical flow techniques to extract the velocity from the cardiac movement has to take into account the computational inaccuracy raised from the derivative operator over discrete data. This study presents a comparison of three different derivative approaches (two based on linear and other based on non-linear filtering) to find out the best solution. Results of the experiments are compared using a structural distortion based image quality metric.
The prosody of Occitan-French bilinguals

Occitan is a threatened Gallo-Romance language in a diglossic contact situation with French in Southern France. To examine the extent of prosodic interference we proceeded to a comparative analysis of semi-spontaneous speech recorded with bilingual speakers in both languages and monolingual northern French speakers. The higher frequency of schwa syllables gives southern French rhythmic properties that recall Occitan. Both languages display Accentual Phrases, a prosodic unit that may contain more than one lexical word but only one final pitch accent, and an optional initial rise. However, in the bilinguals’ prosody, AP-internal rhythmic prominences denote a tendency to maintain remainders of Occitan lexical accent in their French, whereas they correspond to a weakening of word accent in Occitan under French influence.
Weighted sparse signal decomposition

Standard sparse decomposition (with applications in many different areas including compressive sampling) amounts to finding the minimum ℓ<sup>0</sup>-norm solution of an underdetermined system of linear equations. In this decomposition, all atoms are treated `uniformly' for being included or not in the decomposition. However, one may wish to weigh more or less certain atoms, or, assign higher costs to some other atoms to be included in the decomposition. This can happen for example when there is prior information available on each atom. This motivates generalizing the notion of minimal ℓ<sup>0</sup>-norm solution to that of minimal weighted ℓ<sup>0</sup>-norm solution. On the other hand, relaxing weighted ℓ<sup>0</sup>-norm via the weighted ℓ<sup>1</sup>-norm is challenging. This paper deals with minimal weighted ℓ<sup>0</sup>-norm solutions of underdetermined linear systems, provides conditions for their uniqueness, and develops an algorithm for their estimation.
Machine Translation without a source text

This paper concerns an approach to Machine Translation which differs from the typical 'standard' approaches crucially in that it does not rely on the prior existence of a source text as a basis of the translation. Our approach can be characterised as an 'intelligent secretary with knowledge of the foreign language', which helps monolingual users to formulate the desired target-language text in the context of a (key-board) dialogue translation systems.
Strategies for Aligning Variability Model and Architecture

We have recently developed a tool-supported approach for the transitioning from implicit to explicit variability management of existing software products. Such an approach requires the definition of a variability model that is then linked to the existing product architecture to document how the variability is realized in the architecture. As the existing architecture has typically not been developed with variability in mind, different inconsistencies can occur when linking the variability model to the architecture. In this paper we classify the different inconsistencies, show how they can be detected, and propose different refactoring strategies to support the systematic alignment of variability model and architecture. As a proof-of-concept, the identified strategies have been applied in a first case study of introducing explicit variability management in our own architecture toolkit.
Improving DNN-Based Automatic Recognition of Non-native Children Speech with Adult Speech

Acoustic models for state-of-the-art DNN-based speech recognition systems are typically trained using at least several hundred hours of task-specific training data. However, this amount of training data is not always available for some applications. In this paper, we investigate how to use an adult speech corpus to improve DNN-based automatic speech recognition for non-native children's speech. Although there are many acoustic and linguistic mismatches between the speech of adults and children, adult speech can still be used to boost the performance of a speech recognizer for children using acoustic modeling techniques based on the DNN framework. The experimental results show that the best recognition performance can be achieved by combining children's training data with adult training data of approximately the same size and initializing the DNN with the weights obtained by pre-training using the full training set of the adult corpus. This system can outperform the baseline system trained on only children's speech with an overall relative WER reduction of 11.9%. Among the three speaking tasks studied, the picture narration task shows the largest gain with a WER reduction from 24.6 % to 20.1%.
Dynamo action in turbulent flows

We present results from numerical simulations of nonlinear MHD dynamo action produced by three-dimensional flows that become turbulent for high values of the fluid Reynolds number. The magnitude of the forcing function driving the flow is allowed to evolve with time in such way as to maintain an approximately constant velocity amplitude (and average kinetic energy) when the flow becomes hydrodynamically unstable. It is found that the saturation level of the dynamo increases with the fluid Reynolds number (at constant magnetic Prandtl number), and that the average growth rate approaches an asymptotic value for high fluid Reynolds number. The generation and destruction of magnetic field is examined during the laminar and turbulent phase of the flow and it is found that in the neighborhood of strong magnetic flux "cigars" Joule dissipation is balanced by the work done against the Lorentz force, while the steady increase of magnetic energy occurs mainly through work done in the weak part of the magnetic field.
Fluid Overload and Renal Angina Index at Admission Are Associated With Worse Outcomes in Critically Ill Children

Objectives: We investigated the association of fluid overload and oxygenation in critically sick children, and their correlation with various outcomes (duration of ventilation, ICU stay, and mortality). We also assessed whether renal angina index (RAI) at admission can predict mortality or acute kidney injury (AKI) on day 3 after admission. Design and setting: Prospective study, pediatric intensive care in a tertiary hospital. Duration: June 2013-June 2014. Patients: Patients were included if they needed invasive mechanical ventilation for >24 h and had an indwelling arterial catheter. Patients with congenital heart disease or those who received renal replacement therapy (RRT) were excluded. Methods: Oxygenation index, fluid overload percent (daily, cumulative), RAI at admission and pediatric logistic organ dysfunction (PELOD) score were obtained in all critically ill children. KDIGO classification was used to define AKI, using both creatinine and urine output criteria. Admission data for determination of RAI included the use of vasopressors, invasive mechanical ventilation, percent fluid overload, and change in kidney function (estimated creatinine clearance). Univariable and multivariable approaches were used to assess the relations between fluid overload, oxygenation index and clinical outcomes. An RAI cutoff >8 was used to predict AKI on day 3 of admission and mortality. Results: One hundred and two patients were recruited. Fluid overload predicted oxygenation index in all patients, independent of age, gender and PELOD score (p < 0.05). Fluid overload was associated with longer duration of ventilation (p < 0.05), controlled for age, gender, and PELOD score. Day-3 AKI rates were higher in patients with a RAI of 8 or more, and higher areas under the RAI curve had better prediction rates for Day-3 AKI. An RAI <8 had high negative predictive values (80–95%) for Day-3 AKI. RAI was better than traditional markers of pediatric severity of illness (PELOD) score for prediction of AKI on day 3. Conclusions: This study emphasizes that positive fluid balance adversely affects intensive care in critically ill children. Further, the RAI prediction model may help optimize treatment and improve clinical prediction of AKI.
Security in open versus closed systems - the dance of Boltzmann

Some members of the open-source and free software community argue that their code is more secure, because vulnerabilities are easier for users to (cid:12)nd and (cid:12)x. Meanwhile the proprietary vendor community maintains that access to source code rather makes things easier for the attackers. In this paper, I argue that this is the wrong way to approach the interaction between security and the openness of design. I show (cid:12)rst that under quite reasonable assumptions the security assurance problem scales in such a way that making it either easier, or harder, to (cid:12)nd attacks, will help attackers and defendants equally. This model may help us focus on and understand those cases where some asymmetry is introduced. However, there are more pressing security problems for the open source community. The interaction between security and openness is entangled with attempts to use security mechanisms for commercial advantage { to entrench monopolies, to control copyright, and above all to control interoperability. As an example, I will discuss TCPA, a recent initiative by Intel and others to build DRM technology into the PC platform. Although advertised as providing increased information security for users, it appears to have more to do with providing commercial advantage for vendors, and may pose an existential threat to open systems.
Unveiling Clusters of RNA Transcript Pairs Associated with Markers of Alzheimer’s Disease Progression

Background One primary goal of transcriptomic studies is identifying gene expression patterns correlating with disease progression. This is usually achieved by considering transcripts that independently pass an arbitrary threshold (e.g. p<0.05). In diseases involving severe perturbations of multiple molecular systems, such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), this univariate approach often results in a large list of seemingly unrelated transcripts. We utilised a powerful multivariate clustering approach to identify clusters of RNA biomarkers strongly associated with markers of AD progression. We discuss the value of considering pairs of transcripts which, in contrast to individual transcripts, helps avoid natural human transcriptome variation that can overshadow disease-related changes. Methodology/Principal Findings We re-analysed a dataset of hippocampal transcript levels in nine controls and 22 patients with varying degrees of AD. A large-scale clustering approach determined groups of transcript probe sets that correlate strongly with measures of AD progression, including both clinical and neuropathological measures and quantifiers of the characteristic transcriptome shift from control to severe AD. This enabled identification of restricted groups of highly correlated probe sets from an initial list of 1,372 previously published by our group. We repeated this analysis on an expanded dataset that included all pair-wise combinations of the 1,372 probe sets. As clustering of this massive dataset is unfeasible using standard computational tools, we adapted and re-implemented a clustering algorithm that uses external memory algorithmic approach. This identified various pairs that strongly correlated with markers of AD progression and highlighted important biological pathways potentially involved in AD pathogenesis. Conclusions/Significance Our analyses demonstrate that, although there exists a relatively large molecular signature of AD progression, only a small number of transcripts recurrently cluster with different markers of AD progression. Furthermore, considering the relationship between two transcripts can highlight important biological relationships that are missed when considering either transcript in isolation.
Performance comparison study of language identification tools for identification of Farsi web pages

With more and more textual information making its way on-line, the importance of web page language identification has become more apparent. Up to now, different methods of language identification for text have been proposed and different tools are prepared according to these methods. But no comparison study on the performance of these tools on web pages has been reported yet. Therefor we decided to evaluate available tools in the field of web page language identification. Our primary desired language is Farsi (Persian), but for acquiring more precision and performing a deeper study we included Arabic, Urdu and English languages, as well. For this purpose, we gathered required information and made two data sets, `Clean Web' representing clean and noise-free web pages, and `Ordinary Web' representing normal noisy web pages which we usually visit in our daily web exploring tasks. We evaluated the data sets and tools against desired measures of accuracy and time. Finally we reported the best tools evaluated and discussed the deep effect of noise on their behavior. Results of this study can be applied in vast areas of application such as bootstrapping automatic web page translation, ontology extraction, topic classification, language-specific web crawling.
Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse Games on Omega-Terms

Fragments of first-order logic over words can often be characterized in terms of finite monoids or finite semigroups. Usually these algebraic descriptions yield decidability of the question whether a given regular language is definable in a particular fragment. An effective algebraic characterization can be obtained from identities of so-called omega-terms. In order to show that a given fragment satisfies some identity of omega-terms, one can use Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games on word instances of the omega-terms. The resulting proofs often require a significant amount of book-keeping with respect to the constants involved. In this paper we introduce Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games on omega-terms. To this end we assign a labeled linear order to every omega-term. Our main theorem shows that a given fragment satisfies some identity of omega-terms if and only if Duplicator has a winning strategy for the game on the resulting linear orders. This allows to avoid the book-keeping. As an application of our main result, we show that one can decide in exponential time whether all aperiodic monoids satisfy some given identity of omega-terms, thereby improving a result of McCammond (Int. J. Algebra Comput., 2001).
Gain-of-Function R225W Mutation in Human AMPKγ3 Causing Increased Glycogen and Decreased Triglyceride in Skeletal Muscle

Background AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is a heterotrimeric enzyme that is evolutionarily conserved from yeast to mammals and functions to maintain cellular and whole body energy homeostasis. Studies in experimental animals demonstrate that activation of AMPK in skeletal muscle protects against insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and obesity. The regulatory γ3 subunit of AMPK is expressed exclusively in skeletal muscle; however, its importance in controlling overall AMPK activity is unknown. While evidence is emerging that gamma subunit mutations interfere specifically with AMP activation, there remains some controversy regarding the impact of gamma subunit mutations [1]–[3]. Here we report the first gain-of-function mutation in the muscle-specific regulatory γ3 subunit in humans. Methods and Findings We sequenced the exons and splice junctions of the AMPK γ3 gene (PRKAG3) in 761 obese and 759 lean individuals, identifying 87 sequence variants including a novel R225W mutation in subjects from two unrelated families. The γ3 R225W mutation is homologous in location to the γ2R302Q mutation in patients with Wolf-Parkinson-White syndrome and to the γ3R225Q mutation originally linked to an increase in muscle glycogen content in purebred Hampshire Rendement Napole (RN-) pigs. We demonstrate in differentiated muscle satellite cells obtained from the vastus lateralis of R225W carriers that the mutation is associated with an approximate doubling of both basal and AMP-activated AMPK activities. Moreover, subjects bearing the R225W mutation exhibit a ∼90% increase of skeletal muscle glycogen content and a ∼30% decrease in intramuscular triglyceride (IMTG). Conclusions We have identified for the first time a mutation in the skeletal muscle-specific regulatory γ3 subunit of AMPK in humans. The γ3R225W mutation has significant functional effects as demonstrated by increases in basal and AMP-activated AMPK activities, increased muscle glycogen and decreased IMTG. Overall, these findings are consistent with an important regulatory role for AMPK γ3 in human muscle energy metabolism.
Comparison of Access Pattern Protection Schemes and Proposals for Efficient Implementation

Oblivious RAM (ORAM) schemes, the concept introduced by Goldreich and Ostrovsky, are very useful technique for protecting users’ privacy when storing data in remote untrusted servers and running software on untrusted systems. However they are usually considered impractical due to their huge overhead. In order to reduce overhead, many improvements have been presented. Thanks to these improvements, ORAM schemes can be considered practical on cloud environment where users can expect huge storage and high computational power. Especially for private information retrieval (PIR), some literatures demonstrated they are usable. Also dedicated PIRs have been proposed and shown that they are usable in practice. Yet, they are still impractical for protecting software running on untrusted systems. We first survey recent researches on ORAM and PIR. Then, we present a practical software-based memory protection scheme applicable to several environments. The main feature of our scheme is that it records the history of accesses and uses the history to hide the access pattern. We also address implementing issues of ORAM and propose practical solutions for these issues. key words: access pattern protection, oblivious RAM, private information retrieval
Conditional development of bacterial based swarm intelligent systems and real biological manipulation

Self organized systems have been widely studied during the past decades. The definition of a concrete collective behavior in a population and the interaction between the individuals is known as swarm intelligence (SI). By observing natural conducts, some SI models that are very popular nowadays have been developed recently like Ant Colony Optimization or Artificial Bee Colony algorithms. The aim of this paper is to describe the existing relationship between the advances in bacteriology research and the properties of bacterial communities which are useful for multiagent systems and SI developments. Bacterial populations present a powerful set of communication/interoperation protocols and are the most primitive example of SI. In this work it is presented the necessity of a concurrent and symbiotic work in the two different ways of designing multiagent bacterial based systems: computer SI models and real bacteria manipulation.
Redoop: Supporting Recurring Queries in Hadoop

The growing demand for large-scale data analytics ranging from online advertisement placement, log processing, to fraud detection, has led to the design of highly scalable data-intensive computing infrastructures such as the Hadoop platform. Recurring queries, repeatedly being executed for long periods of time on rapidly evolving high-volume data, have become a bedrock component in most of these analytic applications. Despite their importance, the plain Hadoop along with its state-of-art extensions lack built-in support for recurring queries. In particular, they lack efficient and scalable analytics over evolving datasets. In this work, we present the Redoop system, an extension of the Hadoop framework, designed to fill in this void. Redoop supports recurring queries as firstclass citizen in Hadoop without sacrificing any of its core features. More importantly, Redoop deploys innovative window-aware optimization techniques for recurring query execution including adaptive window-aware data partitioning, window-aware task scheduling, and inter-window caching mechanisms. Redoop retains the fault-tolerance of MapReduce via automatic cache recovery and task re-execution support. Our extensive experimental study with real datasets demonstrates that Redoop achieves significant runtime performance gains of up to 9x speedup compared to the plain Hadoop.
Acupressure game system with interactive installations

Due to the decreasing average age of Taiwanese internet users, developing 3C (computer, communication, consumer electronics) products for them becomes an important factor in education. The purpose of this research intends was to design a game system with interactive installations to enhance child-parent interaction through playing an acupressure game. After implementation, the researchers evaluated its validity and usability with two sets of questionnaires: experts' assessment and system usability scale (SUS).
Development of respiratory function in the American locust Schistocerca americana

SUMMARY We hypothesized that oxygen delivery becomes more difficult for insects and tracheate arthropods as they progress throughout an intermolt period. During this time, body mass can more than double, yet the major tracheae and spiracles cannot be increased in size until molting. Also, tissue growth could compress air sacs used for convective gas exchange. To test these possibilities, we investigated the effect of within-instar growth on respiratory parameters, including CO2 emission rate, ventilation frequency, tidal volume and critical oxygen partial pressure (PO) for first-, third- and fifth-instar juveniles and adults of the American locust Schistocerca americana. We found that late-stage grasshoppers tended to have 40% higher total CO2 emission rates but 15% lower mass-specific CO2 emission rates and 35% higher ventilation frequencies than early-stage animals. Maximal tracheal system conductance decreased by 20-33% at the end of an instar, possibly due to compression of air sacs. In addition, animals nearing the end of an instar had higher critical PO values for abdominal pumping, and late-stage adults had 50% lower tidal volumes, suggesting that increases in tissue mass throughout an instar may hinder the ability of animals to breathe deeply. Late-stage adults had lower critical PO values for CO2 emission, although this pattern was not found in any juvenile instars, indicating that late-stage juveniles compensate for decreased conductance by increasing ventilation frequency or the use of diffusive gas exchange. Our data suggest that late-stage arthropods are more vulnerable to hypoxia and may have reduced aerobic capacities and lower tissue PO s than early-stage arthropods.