Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Downlink precoding for multiuser MISO systems with imperfect channel knowledge

It is well-known that the downlink beamforming problem of minimizing the total transmit power under users' signal-to-interference- plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints can be reformulated as a conic quadratic optimization problem and efficiently solved, if the transmitter is provided with the perfect information about the channel. In this work, we study the robust counterpart of the latter, convex problem. By robustness it is meant that the base station knows only uncertainty regions where the exact channels lie, and that it is supposed to satisfy the conic quadratic constraints for all channels that belong to these regions. We provide a direct optimal solution for this problem, based on the ellipsoid method from convex optimization theory. By exploiting the structure of the problem, we define also a virtual robust mean square error optimization problem, that can be solved by semidefinite programming methods in a much more efficient manner, and which presents (at least) a tight conservative approximation of the main problem.
Flame retardant exposure: polybrominated diphenyl ethers in blood from Swedish workers.

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are used as additives in polymers and textiles to prohibit the development of fires. Because of the production and use of PBDEs, their lipophilic characteristics, and persistence, these compounds have become ubiquitous environmental contaminants. The aim of the present study was to determine potential exposures of PBDEs to clerks working full-time at computer screens and personnel at an electronics-dismantling plant, with hospital cleaners as a control group. Five PBDE congeners--2,2',4,4'-tetraBDE; 2,2',4,4',5,5'-hexaBDE; 2,2',4,4',5, 6'-hexaBDE; 2,2',3,4,4',5',6-heptaBDE; and decaBDE--were quantified in blood serum from all three categories of workers. Subjects working at the dismantling plant showed significantly higher levels of all PBDE congeners in their serum as compared to the control group. Decabromodiphenyl ether is present in concentrations of 5 pmol/g lipid weight (lw) in the personnel dismantling electronics; these concentrations are comparable to the concentrations of 2,2',4, 4'-tetraBDE. The latter compound was the dominating PBDE congener in the clerks and cleaners. The major compound in personnel at the dismantling plant was 2,2',3,4,4',5',6-heptaBDE. Concentrations of this PBDE congener are almost twice as high as for 2,2',4, 4'-tetraBDE in these workers and seventy times the level of this heptaBDE in cleaners. The total median PBDE concentrations in the serum from workers at the electronics-dismantling plant, clerks, and cleaners were 37, 7.3, and 5.4 pmol/g lw, respectively. The results show that decabromodiphenyl ether is bioavailable and that occupational exposure to PBDEs occurs at the electronics-dismantling plant. ImagesFigure 1Figure 2
A Journey from Manual Testing to Automated Test Generation in an Industry Project

Test automation is essential in fast-paced agile de-velopment environments. The main goal is to speed up test execu-tion cycles and to reduce the effort involved in running tests manually. We took test automation one step further and applied test generation to a GUI-based application developed in a large industry project. The paper describes the transition from manual exploratory testing to automated GUI test generation. Key les-sons to be learned are: (1) the test automation pyramid proposed for agile development tends to underestimate the need for high-level GUI testing, (2) automated test generation does not reduce test effort but shifts it to writing test adapters and checks, and (3) the effort for analyzing results produced by generated tests limits the practical application of automated test generation. The report describes the successful application of test generation in a real-world industry project, but it also highlights several open issues to be addressed by future research on test automation.
Alterations of Gray and White Matter Networks in Patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Multimodal Fusion Analysis of Structural MRI and DTI Using mCCA+jICA

Many of previous neuroimaging studies on neuronal structures in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) used univariate statistical tests on unimodal imaging measurements. Although the univariate methods revealed important aberrance of local morphometry in OCD patients, the covariance structure of the anatomical alterations remains unclear. Motivated by recent developments of multivariate techniques in the neuroimaging field, we applied a fusion method called “mCCA+jICA” on multimodal structural data of T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of 30 unmedicated patients with OCD and 34 healthy controls. Amongst six highly correlated multimodal networks (p < 0.0001), we found significant alterations of the interrelated gray and white matter networks over occipital and parietal cortices, frontal interhemispheric connections and cerebella (False Discovery Rate q ≤ 0.05). In addition, we found white matter networks around basal ganglia that correlated with a subdimension of OC symptoms, namely ‘harm/checking’ (q ≤ 0.05). The present study not only agrees with the previous unimodal findings of OCD, but also quantifies the association of the altered networks across imaging modalities.
Clinical evaluation of multiplex real‐time PCR panels for rapid detection of respiratory viral infections

Respiratory viral infections are one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality, particularly in children, the elderly and immunocompromised persons. Rapid identification of viral etiology is critical in ruling out non‐viral infections, initiating antiviral treatment and limiting the spread of the infection. Multiplex assays of more than one viral gene target in a single tube have the advantage of rapid screening of a large number of potential viral pathogens in a short time. A multiplex real‐time PCR assay was used in this study for detection of respiratory RNA and DNA viral infections in 728 specimens received from 585 adult and pediatric patients comprised of symptomatic and asymptomatic organ transplant recipients and non‐recipients for diagnosis of respiratory illnesses and for routine clinical monitoring. Multiplex PCR was more sensitive than the multiplex immunofluoresence culture assay (R‐mix) and also detected additional respiratory viruses that were not covered by the R‐mix panel. The number of respiratory viruses detected in symptomatic patients was significantly higher than asymptomatic patients in both adult and pediatric patients. Herpesviral infections were the predominant cause of lower respiratory tract infection in the organ transplant recipients, whereas respiratory syncytial virus was the most common pathogen in non‐transplant patients particularly children. Multiplex real‐time PCR for detection of respiratory viruses has the potential for rapid identification of viral pathogens. In this era of emerging viral infections, addition of newer viral targets to the multiplex PCR panels will be beneficial in determining both patient management and public health epidemiology. J. Med. Virol. 84:162–169, 2011. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Unique B cell responses in B cell-dependent and B cell-independent EAE

Previous studies characterized B cell-dependent and B cell-independent models of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) in C57BL/6 mice. To further characterize the B cell response generated in these two models, the serum antibody response and the B cell surface immunoglobulin (Ig) repertoire were analyzed following immunization of wild-type C57BL/6 mice with either recombinant myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG; B cell-dependent EAE) or the encephalitogenic MOG35-55 peptide (B cell-independent EAE). Plasma ELISA revealed responses to unique linear epitopes of MOG following immunization with recombinant MOG that were absent in MOG35-55-immunized animals. B cell repertoire analysis by RT-PCR identified a unique response restricted to 7183 Ig heavy chain variable gene family in mice immunized with recombinant MOG that was not observed in MOG35-55-immunized mice. These insights could aid in the identification of the relevant B cell populations important to the pathogenesis of B cell-dependent EAE and in the mechanisms by which these B cell populations contribute to disease.
Analysis of Information Reconciliation in Secret Key Agreement from the AWGN Channel

We analyze the error performance of coding scheme that is found in the protocol for secret key agreement based on the Gaussian channel. The approach is regarded as the Slepian-Wolf coding or the source coding with side information at the decoder. One remarkable feature of the coding in the key agreement is that two parties may extract the set of reliable signals before Slepian-Wolf coding is performed. We derive a tight upper bound on the error probability of this coding scheme, which allows us to quantify the effect of signal extraction.
Efficient equivalence checking of multi-phase designs using phase abstraction and retiming

Equivalence checking of finite state machines (FSMs) traditionally assumes single phase machines where a single clock (implicit or explicit) synchronizes the state of the FSM. We extend the equivalence checking paradignm to FSMs with multi-phase clocks. Such designs are becoming increasingly popular in high performance microprocessors since they result in lower synchronization overhead. In addition, aggressive pipelining and the use of “sparse” encodings results in designs where the ratio of steady states to the total state space is very low. In this paper, we show that automatically transforming such designs to ones that have more “dense” encodings can result in significant benefits in using implicit BDD-based techniques for their verification. We explore two such techniques: phase abstraction and retiming and demonstrate their utility in the context of FSM equivalence checking. The main contributions of our work are: —We show that a multi-phase FSM can be transformed to a functionally equivalent one phase FSM and this phase abstraction leads to significant improvement in the size of FSMs that can be checked for equivalence. —We show that min-latch retiming preserves equivalence and can be performed efficiently in multi-phase designs, even when latch borrowing and discarding is allowed at the primary inputs and outputs. —We demonstrate the utility of our approach on several controller FSMs from the industry.
A mass cyanide poisoning from pickling bamboo shoots

Context. Bamboo shoots contain cyanogenic glycosides named taxiphyllin. Cyanide poisoning from cyanogenic glycosides commonly occurs following ingestion. However, toxicity caused by inhalation of hydrogen cyanide gas (HCN) produced from pickled shoots has never been reported. Objective. To describe cyanide poisoning in eight victims who were exposed to HCN produced in a well containing pickling bamboo shoots. Materials and methods. Due to a series of botched rescue attempts, a total of eight patients entered into a 27 m3 well containing pickled bamboo shoots and immediately lost consciousness. After rescue, two patients developed cardiac arrest, metabolic acidosis and died. Four other patients suffered metabolic acidosis, but recovered after supportive care. The remaining two regained consciousness and recovered soon after the event. Ambient air study and cyanide content of bamboo shoots helped confirm the diagnosis. Results. All patients had high anion gap metabolic acidosis with normal oxygenation. Blood cyanide levels ranged from 2.66 to 3.30 mcg/ml (taken after about 18 h of incident). Ambient air study (21 h after incident) revealed oxygen 20.9%, and sulfur dioxide 19.4 ppm. The instrument was unfortunately not equipped to detect HCN. A simulation study revealed HCN and sulfur dioxide in the ambient air at 10 ppm and 7.5 ppm, respectively. Cyanide content in the bamboo shoots ranged from 39 to 434 mg/kg in the wet shoots. Discussion. This series of patients developed sudden onset of alteration of consciousness and metabolic acidosis upon exposure, and cyanide was confirmed in all victims. The simulation study confirmed the presence of HCN in the ambient air of the well containing bamboo shoots. Conclusion. We have reported mass acute cyanide poisoning with two fatalities. The source of HCN was unusual as it was produced from pickling bamboo shoot.
Effects of Session Representation Models on the Performance of Web Recommender Systems

Usage pattern discovery is a crucial part of Web recommendation systems and is strongly related with the performance of the recommender. User sessions which are constructed from Web access logs give information about a user's navigational behavior. These session records are one of the main resources in the pattern discovery stage. The representation of the sessions can be in different forms such as feature vectors based on page durations or existence/nonexistence of pages. This work analyzes the effects of the different recommendation models which consider different characteristics of user sessions. For this purpose, we used three different recommender models. The first one considers only the existence of the visited pages in a session and the view time of each page. The second recommender model considers only the order of the visited pages in each session. The third model is based on the co-occurrence of the visited pages among user sessions. Our experimental results show that using the ordering information improves the prediction accuracy of the next request.
Overexpression of Dyrk1A Is Implicated in Several Cognitive, Electrophysiological and Neuromorphological Alterations Found in a Mouse Model of Down Syndrome

Down syndrome (DS) phenotypes result from the overexpression of several dosage-sensitive genes. The DYRK1A (dual-specificity tyrosine-(Y)-phosphorylation regulated kinase 1A) gene, which has been implicated in the behavioral and neuronal alterations that are characteristic of DS, plays a role in neuronal progenitor proliferation, neuronal differentiation and long-term potentiation (LTP) mechanisms that contribute to the cognitive deficits found in DS. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of Dyrk1A overexpression on the behavioral and cognitive alterations in the Ts65Dn (TS) mouse model, which is the most commonly utilized mouse model of DS, as well as on several neuromorphological and electrophysiological properties proposed to underlie these deficits. In this study, we analyzed the phenotypic differences in the progeny obtained from crosses of TS females and heterozygous Dyrk1A (+/−) male mice. Our results revealed that normalization of the Dyrk1A copy number in TS mice improved working and reference memory based on the Morris water maze and contextual conditioning based on the fear conditioning test and rescued hippocampal LTP. Concomitant with these functional improvements, normalization of the Dyrk1A expression level in TS mice restored the proliferation and differentiation of hippocampal cells in the adult dentate gyrus (DG) and the density of GABAergic and glutamatergic synapse markers in the molecular layer of the hippocampus. However, normalization of the Dyrk1A gene dosage did not affect other structural (e.g., the density of mature hippocampal granule cells, the DG volume and the subgranular zone area) or behavioral (i.e., hyperactivity/attention) alterations found in the TS mouse. These results suggest that Dyrk1A overexpression is involved in some of the cognitive, electrophysiological and neuromorphological alterations, but not in the structural alterations found in DS, and suggest that pharmacological strategies targeting this gene may improve the treatment of DS-associated learning disabilities.
Energy-Aware Data Compression for Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Flash Memory

We discover significant value-dependent programming energy variations in multi-level cell (MLC) flash memories, and introduce an energy-aware data compression method that minimizes the flash programming energy rather than the size of the compressed data. We express energy-aware data compression as an entropy coding with unequal bit-pattern costs. Deploying a probabilistic approach, we derive the energy-optimal bit-pattern probabilities and the expected values of the bit-pattern costs for the large amounts of compressed data which are typical in multimedia applications. Then we develop an energy-optimal prefix coding that uses integer linear programming, and construct a prefix code table. From a consideration of Pareto-optimal energy consumption, we make tradeoffs between data size and programming energy, such as a 35% energy saving for a 50% area overhead.
Win-Coupon: An incentive framework for 3G traffic offloading

3G networks are currently facing severe traffic overload problems caused by excessive demands of mobile users. Offloading part of the 3G traffic through other forms of networks, such as Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), WiFi hotspots, and Femtocells, is a promising solution. However, since these networks can only provide intermittent and opportunistic connectivity to mobile users, utilizing them for 3G traffic offloading may result in a non-negligible delay. As the delay increases, the users' satisfaction decreases. In this paper, we investigate the tradeoff between the amount of traffic being offloaded and the users' satisfaction. We provide a novel incentive framework to motivate users to leverage their delay tolerance for 3G traffic offloading. To minimize the incentive cost given an offloading target, users with high delay tolerance and large offloading potential should be prioritized for traffic offloading. To effectively capture the dynamic characteristics of users' delay tolerance, our incentive framework is based on reverse auction to let users proactively express their delay tolerance by submitting bids. We further take DTN as a case study to illustrate how to predict the offloading potential of the users by using stochastic analysis. Extensive trace-driven simulations verify the efficiency of our incentive framework for 3G traffic offloading.
Practical Group Signatures without Random Oracles

We provide a construction for a group signature scheme that is provably secure in a universally composable framework, within the standard model with trusted parameters. Our proposed scheme is fairly simple and its efficiency falls within small factors of the most efficient group signature schemes with provable security in any model (including random oracles). Security of our constructions require new cryptographic assumptions, namely the Strong LRSW, EDH, and Strong SXDH assumptions. Evidence for any assumption we introduce is provided by proving hardness in the generic group model. Our second contribution is the first definition of security for group signatures based on the simulatability of real protocol executions in an ideal setting that captures the basic properties of unforgeability, anonymity, unlinkability, and exculpability for group signature schemes.
Intensively Computational Electromagnetic Tecniques for the Analysis of Complex Communication Devices

In this paper we introduce several formulations for the analysis of complex electromagnetic problems, based on the Integral Equation technique. The formulations are introduced in order to establish their advantages and drawbacks, as related to the application of advanced parallel computational techniques. The first formulation uses a very simple Kernel in the integral equation. This approach leads to huge systems of linear equations, which must be solved efficiently. In the second formulation, a complex Kernel is formulated to incorporate some features of the structure. In this way, the final numerical solution of the problem is reduced, and smaller systems of linear equations must be inverted. In this case the computational effort must be focused in the calculation of millions of smaller problems. Both formulations are applied to the analysis and study of practical communication devices, showing the need to develop powerful computational techniques.
Scalable secure computation from ANSI-C

With Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) becoming more and more practical, tools for automatized application development become of importance. Therefore, multiple compilers have been developed that translate high-level functionality descriptions into Boolean circuits, optimized for their use in MPC protocols. Previous efforts in compiler development for MPC either focused on domain specific (hardware) languages or only provided limited optimization techniques. Yet, for the practical use of MPC, compilers supporting common programming languages are desirable to provide developers an accessible interface to MPC, and to enable reusability of existing code. In this work we present a novel compilation approach from ANSI-C to Boolean circuits that allows scalable compilation with advanced optimization techniques. To achieve an efficient compilation, we present a source code decomposition approach based on static analysis and introduce the idea of source code guided circuit minimization. Multiple experiments illustrate the efficiency of our approach. For instance, comparing with other recently presented compilers, we report a circuit size that is 70% smaller for the example application of a floating point matrix multiplication with 22.8 million non-linear gates.
Spatial modeling of data with excessive zeros applied to reindeer pellet‐group counts

Abstract We analyze a real data set pertaining to reindeer fecal pellet‐group counts obtained from a survey conducted in a forest area in northern Sweden. In the data set, over 70% of counts are zeros, and there is high spatial correlation. We use conditionally autoregressive random effects for modeling of spatial correlation in a Poisson generalized linear mixed model (GLMM), quasi‐Poisson hierarchical generalized linear model (HGLM), zero‐inflated Poisson (ZIP), and hurdle models. The quasi‐Poisson HGLM allows for both under‐ and overdispersion with excessive zeros, while the ZIP and hurdle models allow only for overdispersion. In analyzing the real data set, we see that the quasi‐Poisson HGLMs can perform better than the other commonly used models, for example, ordinary Poisson HGLMs, spatial ZIP, and spatial hurdle models, and that the underdispersed Poisson HGLMs with spatial correlation fit the reindeer data best. We develop R codes for fitting these models using a unified algorithm for the HGLMs. Spatial count response with an extremely high proportion of zeros, and underdispersion can be successfully modeled using the quasi‐Poisson HGLM with spatial random effects.
MIGRATION OF GLYCOPROTEIN FROM GOLGI APPARATUS TO CELL COAT IN THE COLUMNAR CELLS OF THE DUODENAL EPITHELIUM

A layer of carbohydrate material appears at the surface of a variety of mammalian cells (1) and is particularly abundant at free surfaces such as the striated border of the columnar cells of the intestine (2). In electron micrographs of intestinal cells, this material appears as a discrete coating covering the tips and sides of the microvilli (3). From the various histochemical tests applied (3-I0), it has been concluded that this "cell coat" consists of glycoprotein rich in acidic residues (I, 9). After incubation of cat intestine with a labeled precursor of complex carbohydrates (glucose-SH) followed by EM radioautography, Ito (l l) observed radioautographic reaction first over the cytoplasm of columnar cells and, after 1 hr, over the cell coat of the free surfaces. In this laboratory, by means of light microscopic radioautography, after injection of galactose-3H into young rats, label was localized, at early time intervals, to the Golgi region of duodenal columnar cells, and later traced