Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A New Exact Algorithm for the Maximum Weight Clique Problem

Given an undirected graph with weight for each vertex, the maximum weight clique problem is to find the clique of the maximum weight. Ostergard proposed a fast exact algorithm for solving this problem. We show his algorithm is not efficient for very dense graphs. We propose an exact algorithm for the problem, which is faster than Ostergard’s algorithm in case the graph is dense. We show the efficiency of our algorithm with some experimental results.
Repeat Lumbar Surgery: A Review of Patients With Failure from Previous Lumbar Surgery Treated by Spinal Canal Exploration and Lumbar Spinal Fusion

Thirty-six patients with chronic back and/or leg pain following previous lumbar surgery who underwent both spinal canal exploration and spinal fusion were subjected to retrospective review. The purpose was to determine the probability of success for this surgical approach. Twenty (56%) of the 36 patients had a satisfactory result. In 15 patients with multiple objective findings of an ongoing radiculopathy, 11 (73%) improved. Only nine (43%) of 21 patients improved if these preoperative criteria were absent. Analysis according to the type of surgery performed in the spinal canal demonstrated improvement in (a) 17 (74%) of 23 patients who had wide bony decompression, (b) eight (61%) of 12 patients who had discectomy, and (c) seven (47%) of 15 patients who had an extensive neurolysis. In 17 patients whose time interval between the previous operation and present reconstruction was greater than 18 months, 13 (76%) improved. Only seven (36%) of 19 patients with a shorter time interval improved. The presence of pseudarthrosis was a poor indication for repeat lumbar surgery. The number of previous lumbar surgeries may not necessarily preclude a satisfactory outcome. Solid fusion correlated highly with a satisfactory outcome. Best results are obtained when objective preoperative findings indicate the presence of a surgically correctable abnormality.
Requirements Trade-off Analysis for Test-First Development

Test-first development requires tests before implementation and provides fast feedback after implementation. However, this development method emphasizes functional testing rather than non-functional testing. Furthermore, it does not provide any approach to handle requirements trade-off problems even requirements conflicts are inevitable during software development. Thus, in this research we design a Requirement Trade-off Analysis Framework (RTAF) to automatically explore conflicts between requirements. This framework allows developers to define functional and nonfunctional requirements, set the properties of each requirement, and specify the critical design point of the system. In our approach, a critical design point may be implemented by several designs. By evaluating the satisfaction degrees of all requirements with respective to the possible designs, RTAF will determine the best design according to the critical method of different designs. This research will introduce a process to apply RTAF. A sorting example is developed to describe our framework and process. This approach is implemented on the basis of JUnit and JUnitPerf. Keywords—Test-first development, requirements conflicts, trade-off analysis
A correspondence between zeros of time-frequency transforms and Gaussian analytic functions

In this paper, we survey our joint work on the point processes formed by the zeros of time-frequency transforms of Gaussian white noises [1], [2]. Unlike both references, we present the work from the bottom up, stating results in the order they came to us and commenting what we were trying to achieve. The route to our more general results in [2] was a sort of ping pong game between signal processing, harmonic analysis, and probability. We hope that narrating this game gives additional insight into the more technical aspects of the two references. We conclude with a number of open problems that we believe are relevant to the SampTA community.
Ingested IFN-alpha: results of a pilot study in relapsing-remitting MS.

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether ingested human recombinant interferon-alpha2a (IFN-alpha2a) was safe and whether treatment reduces the number of gadolinium-enhanced lesions on serial MRI in patients with active relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS). METHODS Entry criteria included clinically definite RRMS and one or more gadolinium-enhanced lesions on a screening MRI. RESULTS Of 80 patients screened, 33 were eligible and 30 patients were enrolled for treatment. Patients were randomized (10 per group) to placebo, 10,000 or 30,000 IU IFN-alpha2a ingested on alternate days for 9 months. They were examined clinically and with monthly cerebral MRI. Sample size projections were based on the assumption of a parenteral IFN-like effect, a 90% reduction of enhancing lesions evident within 1 month of the initiation of treatment in the active treatment groups sustained during the 9-month study as the primary outcome variable. RESULTS There was no significant effect on enhancing lesions. However, post hoc analysis suggested a possible treatment effect in the 10,000 IU group. By direct monthly comparison of placebo and 10,000 IU group in treatment month 5, there were 73% (p < 0.05) fewer enhancements in the 10,000 IU group than in the placebo group. There was a decrease of tumor necrosis factor-alpha protein secretion at months 4 and 5. Relapses and adverse events were not different among the treatment groups. Ingested IFN-alpha2a did not induce systemic anti-IFN-alpha antibodies. CONCLUSIONS This trial showed no benefit based on the primary outcome measure. Because changes were detected in immune response and post hoc analysis suggested that a smaller dose could have an effect, IFN-alpha may deserve further study.
New Diagnostic and Therapeutic Tools for Thyroid Cancer

Thyroid cancer is the commonest endocrine malignancy but represents only 1% of all cancers. Although the prognosis of differentiated thyroid cancer is good, the survival time of anaplastic and of medullary thyroid cancer is still very short. More precise diagnosis with better stratification of patients and identification of risk patients may improve the prognosis of thyroid cancer. Treatment of thyroid cancer is multidisciplinary and involves endocrinologists, nuclear medicine specialists, and surgeons. The spectrum of contributions to this special issue in International Journal of Endocrinology is well reflecting this situation. The contributions to this special issue, two reviews and three studies, report mainly on laboratory and imaging techniques to improve diagnosis in thyroid cancer. J. Hannallah et al. emphasize the multimodal approach in diagnosis and managing patients with poorly differentiated thyroid cancer in their review. The identification of poorly differentiated thyroid cancer has been complicated by the lack of clear criteria for diagnosis. A panel of histological, immunohistochemical, and genetic markers and clinical parameters is listed which are typical for this thyroid carcinoma entity. The value of current treatment possibilities is critically discussed. In the paper review by G. Treglia et al. the role of Fluorine-18-Fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography in aggressive subtypes of different thyroid cancer types (Hurthle cell, anaplastic, poorly differentiated, more aggressive histological subtypes of differentiated thyroid cancer, and metastases) is discussed. FDG-PET-positivity in radio-iodine-refractory differentiated thyroid cancer appears to predict more aggressive tumor progression. Data on imaging of medullary thyroid carcinoma lesions using glucagon-like peptide 1 by [Lys40(Ahx-HYNIC-99mTc/EDDA)NH2]-exendin-4 are presented by D. Pach et al. Radioactively labeled GLP-1 analogues are successfully used in patients with insulinoma but the diagnostic value in medullary thyroid cancer is not clear. According to the first preliminary data, the analogues may possess a confirmatory role in lesions where inconsistent results are obtained with other imaging procedures. S. H. Hsieh et al. in their study identified male gender as prognostic parameter for higher recurrence in papillary thyroid cancer in stages II–IV. The study by B. C. Ahn et al., by contrast, deals with a very established clinical test, the measurement of serum thyroglobulin levels, for the identification of recurrent lesions in differentiated thyroid cancer. The importance of patients' antithyroglobulin levels in the calculation of thyroglobulin levels is addressed. The identification of potentially aggressive subtypes of thyroid cancer and the early detection of recurrent lesions play key roles in the managing of the patient. By compiling these papers, we hope to add some knowledge with respect to screening and postoperative care particularly of the more aggressive thyroid cancer types. Eleonore Frohlich Richard Wahl Barbara Czarnocka Leonidas Duntas
GSSA and ACO for assembly sequence planning: A comparative study

Assembly sequence planning (ASP) is a crucial design step in the product development process which plays an important role in the fields of CAD/CAM design issues, the cost of assembly/manufacturing, as well as the selection of equipment. Whereas, ASP is an extremely diverse, large scale and highly constrained combinatorial problem, and it is difficult to find an optimal/near-optimal solution in an acceptable time. Numerous researchers have employed soft computing methods such as genetic algorithms (GA) and simulated annealing (SA) algorithms to go towards the assembly sequence features of speed and flexibility. As regards the large constraint assembly problems, however, traditional GAs depend on the initial sequence heavily, which results in the premature convergence in iterative operations. As for SA algorithms, it may generate a great deal of infeasible solutions in the evolution process by generating new sequences through exchanging position of the randomly selected two parts, which results in inefficiency of the solution-searching process. Considering the limitations above, two heuristics algorithms for ASP are presented. The proposed novel method under the name of genetic simulated annealing algorithm (GSAA) and ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm for ASP is possessed of the competence for assisting the planner in generating a satisfied and effective assembly sequence with respect to large constraint assembly perplexity. Furthermore, the GSAA and ACO are applied in a vice ASP, the results of which are compared in respect of the quality of solution and the efficiency of searching process. At last, the advantages and disadvantages of GSAA and ACO are pointed out by comparison, which gives some useful hint on future research.
The development of a scheduling system GPUSched for graphics processing units

Single unified programing interfaces and languages like CUDA and OpenCL have been released allowing algorithms across all fields of application to be coded and executed on the graphics processing units. In modern computer systems, the GPU is a processing device accessed through a host and it is not able to run its programs autonomously as a process in the operating system on the advertising host. The host administrates the work on the device including memory transfers, the context switch in the host process to access the device and the launch of kernels (GPU programs). With more and more software featuring GPU support, the access to this shared device has to become more controllable on a system-wide level. Therefore, a better integration of these devices into the operating system including central administration will be necessary. This work takes a first step to create such a central administration for the graphics processing units, by developing a scheduling system called GPUSched. It allows the programmer to formulate different tasks, but then it takes over and manages the execution. The tasks represent GPU code of programs running on a general-purpose operating system. Using a set of microbenchmarks and applications on a GPU system, we show that achieving better utilization of the GPU resources and using these as coprocessors to handle different tasks involve realistic trade-offs.
Neural representation of olfactory mixtures in the honeybee antennal lobe

Natural olfactory stimuli occur as mixtures of many single odors. We studied whether the representation of a mixture in the brain retains single‐odor information and how much mixture‐specific information it includes. To understand mixture representation in the honeybee brain, we used in vivo calcium imaging at the level of the antennal lobe, and systematically measured odor‐evoked activity in 24 identified glomeruli in response to four single odorants and all their possible binary, ternary and quaternary mixtures. Qualitatively, mixture‐induced activity patterns always contained glomeruli belonging to the pattern of at least one of the components, suggesting a high conservation of component information in olfactory mixtures. Quantitatively, glomerular activity saturated quickly and increasing the number of components resulted in an increase of cases in which the response of a glomerulus to the mixture was lower than that to the strongest component (‘suppression’). This shows global inhibition in the antennal lobe, probably acting as overall gain control. Single components were not equally salient (in terms of number of active glomeruli) and mixture activity patterns were always more similar to the more salient components, in a way that could be predicted linearly. Thus, although a gain control system in the honeybee antennal lobe prevents saturation of the olfactory system, mixture representation follows essentially elemental rules.
Temporal Sequence of Retweets Help to Detect Influential Nodes in Social Networks

Identification of influential users in online social networks allows to facilitate efficient information diffusion to a large part of the network and thus benefiting diverse applications including viral marketing, disease control, and news dissemination. Existing methods have mainly relied on the network structure only for the detection of influential users. In this paper, we enrich this approach by proposing a fast, efficient, and unsupervised algorithm <italic>SmartInf</italic> to detect a set of influential users by identifying anchor nodes from a temporal sequence of retweets in Twitter cascades. Such anchor nodes provide important signatures of tweet diffusion across multiple diffusion localities and, hence, act as precursors for detection of influential nodes. <xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn1"><sup>1</sup></xref> The set of influential nodes identified by <italic>SmartInf</italic> has the capacity to expose the tweet to a large and diverse population, when targeted as seeds thereby maximizing the influence spread. Experimental evaluation on empirical datasets from Twitter shows the superiority of <italic>SmartInf</italic> over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of infecting larger population; further, our evaluation shows that <italic>SmartInf</italic> is scalable to large-scale networks and is robust to missing data. Finally, we investigate the key factors behind the improved performance of <italic>SmartInf</italic> by testing our algorithm on a synthetic network using synthetic cascades simulated on this network. Our results reveal the effectiveness of <italic>SmartInf</italic> in identifying a diverse set of influential users that facilitate faster diffusion of tweets to a larger population. <fn id="fn1"><label><sup>1</sup></label><p>We use the terms “influential nodes” and “influential users” interchangeably. </p></fn>
User requirement analysis for a railway ticketing portal with emphasis on semantic accessibility for older users

In this paper, we present the results from a survey on user requirements for older users of online ticketing services of a nationwide railway ticket and travel information portal. Our survey shows that older users differentiate in their attitude towards internet according to their experience with internet services and the service provided, not only according to their age. Further, our study indicates that in contrary to common belief advertisement or interactive elements are not perceived as negative all the time. The results of a questionnaire with 1200 responses, focus groups, interviews and qualitative analysis of user feedback also indicate that in order to improve and optimize the usage of the online system for older adults, it is needed to supply the system not only with technical accessibility requirements but also with an understanding of universal accessibility requirements. Universal requirements are defined by real user and usage cases and they consider standardization on not only coding but also predictability of usage and same patterns of interaction for similar websites.
Dual Role of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae TEA/ATTS Family Transcription Factor Tec1p in Regulation of Gene Expression and Cellular Development

ABSTRACT In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the transcription factors Tec1p and Ste12p are required for haploid invasive and diploid pseudohyphal growth. Tec1p and Ste12p have been postulated to regulate these developmental processes primarily by cooperative binding to filamentous and invasion-responsive elements (FREs), which are combined enhancer elements that consist of a Tec1p-binding site (TCS) and an Ste12p-binding site (PRE). They are present in the promoter regions of target genes, e.g., FLO11. Here, we show that Tec1p efficiently activates target gene expression and cellular development in the absence of Ste12p. We further demonstrate that TCS elements alone are sufficient to mediate Tec1p-driven gene expression by a mechanism termed TCS control that is operative even when Ste12p is absent. Mutational analysis of TEC1 revealed that TCS control, FLO11 expression, and haploid invasive growth require the C terminus of Tec1p. In contrast, the Ste12p-dependent FRE control mechanism is sufficiently executed by the N-terminal portion of Tec1p, which contains the TEA/ATTS DNA-binding domain. Our study suggests that regulation of haploid invasive and diploid pseudohyphal growth by Ste12p and Tec1p is not only executed by combinatorial control but involves additional control mechanisms in which Ste12p activates TEC1 expression via clustered PREs and where Tec1p regulates expression of target genes, e.g., FLO11, by TCS control.
Human Papillomavirus E6 and E7: Proteins which deregulate the cell cycle

Numerous clinical, epidemiological and molecular findings link some types of Human Papillomaviruses (HPV) with cancer of the genital tract. They share a common pathway of transformation with a number of DNA tumour viruses, such as Adenovirus and SV40. Although all these viruses are termed ‘DNA tumour viruses’ and have similar in vitro transforming activities, Human Papillomavirus is the only one so far clearly involved in human cancer. Extensive studies on HPV E6 and E7 proteins have demonstrated their involvement in malignant transformation. E6 and E7 bind the products of tumour suppressor genes, p53 and Rb1, respectively, modifying or inactivating their normal functions. The Rb1 and p53 genes are deleted or mutated in several cancers and both proteins regulate the transcription of genes involved in cell cycle progression control. The E6/p53 and E7/Rb1 interactions result in a deregulation of the cell cycle with loss of control of crucial cellular events, such as DNA replication, DNA repair and apoptosis.
Differential gene expression in relation to mating system in Peromyscine rodents

Abstract Behaviors that increase an individual's exposure to pathogens are expected to have important effects on immunoactivity. Because sexual reproduction typically requires close contact among conspecifics, mating systems provide an ideal opportunity to study the immunogenetic correlates of behaviors with high versus low risks of pathogen exposure. Despite logical links between polygynandrous mating behavior, increased pathogen exposure, and greater immunoactivity, these relationships have seldom been examined in nonhuman vertebrates. To explore interactions among these variables in a different lineage of mammals, we used RNAseq to study the gene expression profiles of liver tissue—a highly immunoactive organ—from sympatric populations of the monogamous California mouse (Peromyscus californicus) and two polygynandrous congeners (P. maniculatus and P. boylii). Differential expression and co‐expression analyses revealed distinct patterns of gene activity among species, with much of this variation associated with differences in mating system. This tendency was particularly pronounced for MHC genes, with multiple MHC Class I genes being upregulated in the two polygynandrous species, as expected if exposure to sexually transmitted pathogens varies with mating system. Our results underscore the role of mating behavior in influencing patterns of gene expression and highlight the use of emerging transcriptomic tools in behavioral studies of free‐living animals.
Genetic Architecture of Transcript-Level Variation in Differentiating Xylem of a Eucalyptus Hybrid

Species diversity may have evolved by differential regulation of a similar set of genes. To analyze and compare the genetic architecture of transcript regulation in different genetic backgrounds of Eucalyptus, microarrays were used to examine variation in mRNA abundance in the differentiating xylem of a E. grandis pseudobackcross population [E. grandis × F1 hybrid (E. grandis × E. globulus)]. Least-squares mean estimates of transcript levels were generated for 2608 genes in 91 interspecific backcross progeny. The quantitative measurements of variation in transcript abundance for specific genes were mapped as expression QTL (eQTL) in two single-tree genetic linkage maps (F1 hybrid paternal and E. grandis maternal). EQTL were identified for 1067 genes in the two maps, of which 811 were located in the F1 hybrid paternal map, and 451 in the E. grandis maternal map. EQTL for 195 genes mapped to both parental maps, the majority of which localized to nonhomologous linkage groups, suggesting trans-regulation by different loci in the two genetic backgrounds. For 821 genes, a single eQTL that explained up to 70% of the transcript-level variation was identified. Hotspots with colocalized eQTL were identified in both maps and typically contained genes associated with specific metabolic and regulatory pathways, suggesting coordinated genetic regulation.
Reducing Under-Frequency Load Shedding in Isolated Power Systems Using Neural Networks. Gran Canaria: A Case Study

Small isolated power systems often experience generator outages, which are responsible for the activation of the under-frequency load shedding scheme with the corresponding negative impact on electricity consumers and, hence, market loss. There are three main causes of this problem: the power system's low inertia, the speed governors' low capacity, and a poor size-ratio between generator and system. The most extensive research line in this area is focused on the optimization of the load shedding scheme, which is a partial solution. Another research line is presented to solve the problem from the point of view of the system operator. This paper proposes an online method to predict and correct possible load shedding by redistributing load dispatching. This proposal uses artificial intelligence techniques, in particular neural networks, and a special-purpose power system simulator. In order to evaluate the proposal, the achieved solution is applied to a real case study: the island of Gran Canaria. This application shows the improvement that might be achieved by implementing this simple method. The method proposed in this paper is strongly recommended for regions that have suitable geographical sites as well as energy problems similar to those of the Canary Islands (see tech. rep. “Map of the Canary Islands Power Systems” by Red Electrica de Espana).