Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy and Tolerability of Telmisartan Plus Amlodipine in Asian Patients Not Adequately Controlled on Either Monotherapy or on Low-Dose Combination Therapy

Objective. To evaluate the efficacy and safety of the telmisartan plus amlodipine (T/A) single-pill combination (SPC) in Asian patients with hypertension whose blood pressure (BP) was not adequately controlled on either monotherapy or on low-dose combination therapy. Patients and Methods. Data are presented from five Boehringer Ingelheim-sponsored phase 3, double-blind, 8-week, studies: two studies in nonresponders to amlodipine (data pooled for amlodipine), two studies on nonresponders to telmisartan (pooled data), and one on nonresponders to low-dose T/A SPC. Results. After 8 weeks' treatment, mean reductions from the reference baseline in diastolic BP (DBP; primary endpoint), systolic BP (SBP), and SBP, DBP goal, and response rates were higher with the T/A SPC than respective monotherapies. The T80/A5 SPC resulted in greater reductions in DBP and SBP, and higher DBP goal and response rate than the low-dose T40/A5 SPC. Peripheral edema incidence was low (amlodipine 0.5%, telmisartan 0.0%, and T/A SPC 0.7%). Discussion and Conclusion. In Asian patients whose BP is not adequately controlled with telmisartan or amlodipine monotherapy, T/A SPC treatment results in greater BP reduction, and higher DBP and SBP goal and response rates. The safety and tolerability of the T/A SPC are comparable to those of the respective monotherapies and consistent with those reported in previous studies.
Efficient Authentication of Outsourced String Similarity Search

Cloud computing enables the outsourcing of big data analytics, where a third party server is responsible for data storage and processing. In this paper, we consider the outsourcing model that provides string similarity search as the service. In particular, given a similarity search query, the service provider returns all strings from the outsourced dataset that are similar to the query string. A major security concern of the outsourcing paradigm is to authenticate whether the service provider returns sound and complete search results. In this paper, we design AutoS3, an authentication mechanism of outsourced string similarity search. The key idea of AutoS3 is that the server returns a verification object VO to prove the result correctness. First, we design an authenticated string indexing structure named MBtree for VO construction. Second, we design two lightweight authentication methods named VS2 and EVS2 that can catch the service provider various cheating behaviors with cheap verification cost. Moreover, we generalize our solution for top k string similarity search. We perform an extensive set of experiment results on real world datasets to demonstrate the efficiency of our approach.
Generative Class-conditional Autoencoders

Recent work by Bengio et al. (2013) proposes a sampling procedure for denoising autoencoders which involves learning the transition operator of a Markov chain. The transition operator is typically unimodal, which limits its capacity to model complex data. In order to perform efficient sampling from conditional distributions, we extend this work, both theoretically and algorithmically, to gated autoencoders (Memisevic, 2013), The proposed model is able to generate convincing class-conditional samples when trained on both the MNIST and TFD datasets.
Which university?: the factors influencing the choices of prospective undergraduates

The book investigates factors influencing tertiary applicants’ selection of a preferred university including the information sources the applicants are using. It is based on a survey of tertiary applicants at the time of application in 1998, a follow-up survey at that time and a series of interviews with twelve applicants. The findings provide valuable information for groups interested in the application and selection processes used by students for entry to undergraduate education. It is clear that applicants differ substantially in their priorities and that field of study preferences may be the most reliable predictor of what influenced that particular applicant’s choice. Polices need to be designed to expand and enhance the information base on which prospective students make their decisions taking into account the diverse interests and values outlined in this report.
Group Communication Protocols Based on Hybrid Types of Logical and Physical Clocks

In distributed systems, multiple processes are cooperating with each other by exchanging messages in underlying networks. In order to realize distributed applications, a group of n processes are required to cooperate with each other. In a distributed group, each member process is peer and directly exchanges messages with other processes with no centralized coordination. That is, each process sends messages to other processes and receives messages from other processes in a group. Each process has to not only reliably and efficiently but also causally deliver messages. In addition, a group is required to be scalable. In this paper, we discuss a hybrid type of clock (HC) to causally deliver messages in a scalable group. The HC protocol takes advantage of linear clock (LC) and physical clock (PC). There might be no causally precedent relation between some pair of messages ordered in the LC protocol. This means, some pair of messages are unnecessarily ordered. A physical clock in a computer is now synchronized with a time server in NTP and PTP. Thus, a process can read more precise physical time on each computer. In the LC and PC protocols, each message carries just LC and PC variables, respectively. Hence, the message length is O(1) for number n of processes in a group. We show unnecessarily ordered messages can be reduced in the HC protocol compared with the LC protocol through the evaluation of the implemented HC protocol.
The design of a hardware-software platform for long-term energy eco-feedback research

Researchers often face engineering problems, such as optimizing prototype costs and ensuring easy access to the collected data, which are not directly related to the research problems being studied. This is especially true when dealing with long-term studies in real world scenarios. This paper describes the engineering perspective of the design, development and deployment of a long-term real word study on energy eco-feedback, where a non-intrusive home energy monitor was deployed in 30 houses for 18 months. Here we report on the efforts required to implement a cost-effective non-intrusive energy monitor and, in particular, the construction of a local network to allow remote access to multiple monitors and the creation of a RESTful web-service to enable the integration of these monitors with social media and mobile software applications. We conclude with initial results from a few eco-feedback studies that were performed using this platform.
Well-Being for Public Policy

Section I: Measuring well-being for public policy 1. Introduction 2. Defining well-being Section II: How well-being adds information 3. Limitations of economic and social indicators 4. Contributions of well-being measures 5. The well-being measures are valid 6. Issues regarding using well-being for policy 7. The Desirability of well-being as a guide for policy Section III: Examples of policy uses of well-being measures 8. Health and well-being: Policy examples 9. The environment and well-being: Policy examples 10. Work, the economy, and well-being: Policy examples 11. The social context of well-being: Policy examples Section IV: Implementing the measures 12. Existing surveys 13. Conclusions References Index
Energy Efficient Information-Driven Target Location Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper describes a technique to save energy in the distributed Information_Driven maximum likelihood algorithm used for the localization of a diffusive source in Wireless Sensor Networks. First, the accurate Information_driven maximum likelihood distributed estimation based on the Gauss- Newton method is derived and called Modified Information-driven Collaborative Processing (MIDCP). In this method, a neighborhood region is defined and the information of all sensor nodes in this area is used to increase the algorithm accuracy. Then, a method for decreasing the energy consumption of this algorithm is proposed and called Energy Efficient MIDCP (EFMIDCP). In this algorithm, for estimation update, first, the neighboring radius is set to communication range of sensor nodes. After that, based on the covariance of estimation error in each iteration, this radius is decreased. Therefore, the amount of energy consumption is abated because of less transmission. Simulation results show the low energy consumption in the second proposed algorithm while its accuracy is rather well.
Fumigant Toxicity of Lamiaceae Plant Essential Oils and Blends of Their Constituents against Adult Rice Weevil Sitophilus oryzae

To find a new and safe alternative to conventional insecticides, we evaluated the fumigant toxicity of eight Lamiaceae essential oils and their constituents against the adult rice weevil Sitophilus oryzae. Of the eight species tested, hyssop (Hyssopus offcinalis), majoram (Origanum majorana), and Thymus zygis essential oils showed strong fumigant toxicity against S. oryzae adults at 25 mg/L air concentration. Constituents of active essential oils were analyzed by gas chromatography coupled to flame ionization detector (FID) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. A total of 13, 15, and 17 compounds were identified from hyssop, majoram, and Thymus zygis essential oils, respectively. Pinocamphone and isopinocamphone were isolated by open column chromatography. Among the test compounds, pinocamphone and isopinocamphone showed the strongest fumigant toxicity against S. oryzae. Sabinene hydrate, linalool, α-terpineol, and terpinen-4-ol exhibited 100% fumigant toxicity against S. oryzae at 3.9 mg/L air concentration. The measured toxicity of the artificial blends of the constituents identified in hyssop, majoram, and Thymus zygis oils indicated that isopinocamphone, terpine-4-ol, and linalool were major contributors to the fumigant toxicity of the artificial blend, respectively.
Building executable union slices using conditioned slicing

Program slicing can be used as a support for program comprehension, because it allows a large program to be divided up into smaller slices, each of which can be understood in isolation from the rest. As such, slicing facilitates the familiar approach of 'divide and conquer'. Union slicing (the union of dynamic slices) is a useful technique for approximating a precise static slice. For program comprehension (and many other applications) it is often important that the union slice be an executable program, rather than merely a collection of statements which are relevant to the slicing criterion. This paper presents an algorithm for computing executable union slices, using conditioned slicing. A case study is used to illustrate the algorithm and how the executable union slice is preferable to the (possibly nonexecutable) union slice. The paper also shows, briefly, that the approach has wider applications than comprehension.
Commodity Price Effect on Stock Market: A Markov Switching Vector Autoregressive

Real economic data always present nonlinear properties such as asymmetry and radically change in the series through time. Missing data and jumps as well as breaks also common reported in economic time series model. Thus, linear models are no longer suitable used in estimate the economic data and markov switching vector autoregressive model (MS-VAR) is applied in study the economic model. This paper will present the analysis of commodity price effect on stock market by using markov switching vector autoregressive model. Oil price and gold price are selected to represent the commodity price and the influence of those prices on Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia stock market are investigated. Furthermore, the mean adjusted markov switching vector autoregressive model (MSM-VAR) and mean adjusted heteroskedasticity markov switching vector autoregressive model (MSMH-VAR) are investigated to determine the suitable specification of the model in providing a more significance and reliable result when analysis the economic relationship model between oil price, gold price and stock market returns.
Discrete Optimization An optimal and scalable parallelization of the two-list algorithm for the subset-sum problem

In this paper, we suggest a parallel algorithm based on a shared memory SIMD architecture for solving an n item subset-sum problem in time O(2/p) by using p = 2 processors, 0 6 q 6 n 2 2log2n. This approach is an optimal and scalable parallelization of the well known two-list Horowitz and Sahni s algorithm, which is still the best complexity time bound for solving the Knapsack problem in a serial environment. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Ousting ivory tower research: towards a web framework for providing experiments as a service

With its close ties to the Web, the IR community is destined to leverage the dissemination and collaboration capabilities that the Web provides today. Especially with the advent of the software as a service principle, an IR community is conceivable that publishes experiments executable by anyone over the Web. A review of recent SIGIR papers shows that we are far away from this vision of collaboration. The benefits of publishing IR experiments as a service are striking for the community as a whole, and include potential to boost research profiles and reputation. However, the additional work must be kept to a minimum and sensitive data must be kept private for this paradigm to become an accepted practice. To foster experiments as a service in IR, we present a Web framework for experiments that addresses the outlined challenges and possesses a unique set of compelling features in comparison to existing solutions. We also describe how our reference implementation is already used officially as an evaluation platform for an established international plagiarism detection competition.
Enabling vertical wormhole switching in 3D NoC-Bus hybrid systems

In Networks-on-Chip (NoC) systems Wormhole Switching (WS) enables lower packet transmission latency and requires less silicon real estate than the Packet Switching (PS). However, enabling vertical WS in conventional 3D NoC-Bus hybrid systems requires a large amount of TSVs, which have low yield in state of the art 3D stacking technology. In this paper, we alleviate this issue by introducing a Bus Virtual Channel (VC) Allocation (BVA) mechanism, which assigns to at most one cross layer packet a free input VC in its target router before injecting it into the bus. In this way, a routing path is reserved by the head flit, and the rest of the packet flits can be WS transmitted through the vertical buses. Given that VC allocation is performed only once per packet per hop BVA can be performed in such a way that it doesn't become a system bottleneck. We evaluated our proposal with both synthetic and real application traffics and the experimental results indicate that when vertical WS is implemented, the bus critical path length is reduced by at least 31% and the average packet transmission latency is reduced by at least 22%, when compared with conventional pipelined bus or TDMA bus based systems. Moreover, the area cost and power consumption of the output buffer incident to the bus are reduced by 47% and 43%, respectively.
A network model of geometrically constrained deformations of granular materials

We study quasi-static deformation of dense granular packings. In the reference configuration, a granular material is under confining stress (pre-stress). Then the packing is deformed by imposing external boundary conditions, which model engineering experiments such as shear and compression. The deformation is assumed to preserve the local structure of neighbors for each particle, which is a realistic assumption for highly compacted packings driven by small boundary displacements. We propose a two-dimensional network model of such deformations. The model takes into account elastic interparticle interactions and incorporates geometric impenetrability constraints. The effects of friction are neglected. In our model, a granular packing is represented by a spring-lattice network, whereby the particle centers correspond to vertices of the network, and interparticle contacts correspond to the edges. We work with general network geometries: periodicity is not assumed. For the springs, we use a quadratic elastic energy function. Combined with the linearized impenetrability constraints, this function provides a regularization of the hard-sphere potential for small displacements. When the network deforms, each spring either preserves its length (this corresponds to a solid-like contact), or expands (this represents a broken contact). Our goal is to study distribution of solid-like contacts in the energy-minimizing configuration. We prove that under certain geometric conditions on the network, there are at least two non-stretched springs attached to each node, which means that every particle has at least two solid-like contacts. The result implies that a particle cannot loose contact with all of its neighbors. This eliminates micro-avalanches as a mechanism for structural weakening in small shear deformation.
Production and perception of listener-oriented clear speech in child language*

ABSTRACT In this paper, we ask whether children are sensitive to the needs of their interlocutor, and, if so, whether they – like adults – modify acoustic characteristics of their speech as part of a communicative goal. In a production task, preschoolers participated in a word learning task that favored the use of clear speech. Children produced vowels that were longer, more intense, more dispersed in the vowel space, and had a more expanded F0 range than normal speech. Two perception studies with adults showed that these acoustic differences were perceptible and were used to distinguish normal and clear speech styles. We conclude that preschoolers are sensitive to aspects of the speaker–hearer relationship calling upon them to modify their speech in ways that benefit their listener.
Pair and swap: An approach to graceful degradation for dependable chip multiprocessors

In this paper, we propose a processor-level fault tolerance technique called “Pair and Swap (P&S)” for a multi-core chip. In the P&S system, a 2n-cores-CMP (Chip Multiprocessor) which contains 2n processor cores composes n pairs. Two identical copies of a given task are executed on each pair of two processor cores and the results are compared repeatedly. If a fault is detected by a mismatch, partners of the mismatched pair are swapped with another pair and the mismatched task is re-executed from the latest checkpoint. Then, it is decided whether the fault is transient or permanent. If it is permanent, the faulty core is identified and isolated to reconfigure the entire system. P&S enables graceful degradation and tolerates both permanent and transient faults. We evaluate the performance of the proposed P&S and traditional triple module redundancy (TMR) using the Markov chains. The mean computation to failure of the P&S is about 1.4 times larger than that of dynamic TMR scheme.
Research Summary – Interactive Search for Smartphones –

In the late 90s, web search has matured into systems that can effectively retrieve and rank documents from the web. In addition to handling huge repositories (the entire web), these systems can also handle an enormous number of concurrent user queries [7]. Despite these amazing feats, the search experience itself has remained relatively unchanged since it first appeared more than 15 years ago. According to the basic approach, a user enters a set of keywords in a search box and documents from the web are ranked and returned accordingly. Geographical search is also very similar in its concept. The major difference is, that documents represent actual physical entities which have locations. These locations are then also used to determine document to keywords relevance. In addition to returning documents, a geographical search typically also depicts the locations associated with these documents, on a map. This traditional approach is well suited for personal computers which are stationary by nature. The rapid growth of smartphone sales is initiating a significant change. Smartphone shipments overtook personal computers for the first time in 2011 [9]. In addition, today more than 50% of all “local” searches are done from a mobile device. In 2014, mobile Internet usage is expected to overtake desktop Internet usage [8]. The ubiquitousness of smartphones, which contain a GPS sensor and have a constant (or highly frequent) Internet connection, have opened up a new way to do search. When using a smartphone, search can be done in an interactive manner. This allows a user to provide feedback as she engages the actual physical entities of the search. The reason is that, unlike a personal computer, the smartphone is always present with the user. Such a search can be optimized for achieving a user’s goal rather than merely a single subtask. The benefit is an innovative new interactive search experience that is tailored for smartphones rather than personal computers.
Euclidean Structure from Uncalibrated Images

A number of recent papers have demonstrated that camera “self-calibration” can be accomplished purely from image measurements, without requiring special calibration objects or known camera motion. We describe a method, based on self-calibration, for obtaining (scaled) Euclidean structure from multiple uncalibrated perspective images using only point matches between views. The method is in two stages. First, using an uncalibrated camera, structure is recovered up to an affine ambiguity from two views. Second, from one or more further views of this affine structure the camera intrinsic parameters are determined, and the structure ambiguity reduced to scaled Euclidean. The technique is independent of how the affine structure is obtained. We analyse its limitations and degeneracies. Results are given for images of real scenes. An application is described for active vision, where a Euclidean reconstruction is obtained during normal operation with an initially uncalibrated camera. Finally, it is demonstrated that Euclidean reconstruction can be obtained from a single perspective image of a repeated structure
Improving the Quality of Article Master Data: Specification of an Integrated Master Data Platform for Promotions in Retail

Today, meaningful data has to be provided intra-organisationally but also inter-organisationally. One of the major problems of information and data exchange in retail is a lack of structure in the data provided by industry and retailers as well as very heterogeneous and, thus, often poor data quality. Not only master data management but also the automation of promotion processes at the point of sale, e.g. with coupons, can greatly benefit from data which can be analysed automatically and maintained in a collaborative effort. We propose a hierarchical concept for handling article master data by analysing the demands on this data with respect to promotion campaigns. Based on that, we present the architecture and implementation of a promotion platform which utilises this concept to structure articles in retail and to support promotion campaigns more consistently and flexibly than traditional approaches can.
A wideband F-shaped patch antenna for S-band CubeSats communications

A wideband S-band F-shaped patch antenna is proposed for CubeSats communications. To broaden bandwidth, it uses two arms with different lengths to generate a second resonant frequency. The effect of the arm length and width on the return loss, resonant frequency and impedance bandwidth on a 3U CubeSat is studied. The simulation results show that the antenna achieves a wideband of 1121 MHz (1.606–2.727 GHz) with a return loss below −10 dB over the entire frequency band from 1.606 to 2.727 GHz. The antenna has a high gain of 8.51 dB and a small return loss of −32.85 dB at 2.45 GHz.