Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ADVANCED TECHNIQUES FOR IMPROVING INDIRECT BRANCH PREDICTION ACCURACY

Deep pipelines and fast clock rates are necessitating the development of high accuracy branch predictors. From microarchitectural viewpoint, in the last decade the importance of indirect branch prediction increased even though, in the computing programs the indirect jumps remain less frequent than the more predictable conditional branches. One reason refers to predicative execution that implies decreasing of conditional branches number. The dimension took by the desktop, visual or object-oriented applications development (C++, Java – characterized by a large amount of indirect calls comparative to procedural programs), represents another reason which illustrates that indirect branch prediction misses start to dominate the overall misprediction cost. Since the maximum prediction accuracy obtained by a feasible PPM predictor and reported in literature is around 90% implies the necessity of implementing new efficient indirect branch prediction schemes. Thus, we developed a hybrid predictor with arity-based selection that improves indirect branch prediction accuracy reaching in average to 93.77%, comparable with a multi-stage cascaded predictor. We also showed that a modified Target Cache structure based on confidence mechanism and indexed with extended global correlation information represents a more simple and feasible solution that could replace the more complex PPM predictor.
Staphylococcus aureus SrrAB Affects Susceptibility to Hydrogen Peroxide and Co-Existence with Streptococcus sanguinis

Staphylococcus aureus is a pathogen and a commensal bacterial species that is found in humans. Bacterial two-component systems (TCSs) sense and respond to environmental stresses, which include antimicrobial agents produced by other bacteria. In this study, we analyzed the relation between the TCS SrrAB and susceptibility to the hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) that is produced by Streptococcus sanguinis, which is a commensal oral streptococcus. An srrA-inactivated S. aureus mutant demonstrated low susceptibility to the H2O2 produced by S. sanguinis. We investigated the expression of anti-oxidant factors in the mutant. The expression of katA in the mutant was significantly higher than in the wild-type (WT) in the presence or absence of 0.4 mM H2O2. The expression of dps in the mutant was significantly increased compared with the WT in the presence of H2O2 but not in the absence of H2O2. A katA or a dps-inactivated mutant had high susceptibility to H2O2 compared with WT. In addition, we found that the nitric oxide detoxification protein (flavohemoglobin: Hmp), which is regulated by SrrAB, was related to H2O2 susceptibility. The hmp-inactivated mutant had slightly lower susceptibility to the H2O2 produced by S. sanguinis than did WT. When a srrA-inactivated mutant or the WT were co-cultured with S. sanguinis, the population percentage of the mutant was significantly higher than the WT. In conclusion, SrrAB regulates katA, dps and hmp expression and affects H2O2 susceptibility. Our findings suggest that SrrAB is related in vivo to the co-existence of S. aureus with S. sanguinis.
Total Syntheses and Biological Evaluation of Both Enantiomers of Several Hydroxylated Dimeric Nuphar Alkaloids.

Herein, we describe the first total syntheses of five members of the dimeric nuphar alkaloids: (+)-6,6'-dihydroxythiobinupharidine (+)-1 a, (+)-6-hydroxythiobinupharidine (+)-1 b, (-)-6,6'-dihydroxythionuphlutine (-)-2 a, (-)-6,6'-dihydroxyneothiobinupharidine (-)-3 a, and (+)-6,6'-dihydroxyneothionuphlutine (+)-4 a. The latter two have not been found in nature. We have also made each of their enantiomers (-)-1 a-b, (+)-2 a, (+)-3 a, and (-)-4 a. The key step in these syntheses was the dimerization of an α-aminonitrile (a hydrolytically stable surrogate for its corresponding hemiaminal) with chiral Lewis acid complexes. We have also reassigned the literature structures of (+)-1 a-1 b—for those instances in which the NMR spectra were obtained in CD3OD—to their corresponding CD3O-adducts. Our efforts provide for the first time apoptosis data for (-)-3 a, (+)-4 a, and all five non-natural enantiomers prepared. The data indicate high apoptotic activity regardless of the enantiomer or relative stereochemical configuration at C7 and C7'.
Low Complexity User Scheduling Design for Multi-Pair Two-Way Relay Channels

In this paper, we consider low-complexity user scheduling schemes for the multi-pair two-way relay channel, where L pairs of single antenna users are selected from K pairs to perform pair-wise information exchange via an Nr-antenna amplify-and-forward (AF) relay (Nr ≥ 2L - 1) with analogue network coding (ANC). We first propose a simple channel norm (CN) based scheme, which enables low-complexity implementation. Then, we propose a near-optimal user scheduling by jointly considering the pair-wise channels norms and orthogonality among all the users (CNO-A), which requires global channel state information (CSI) and centralized computation at the relay. It is noted that CNO-A scheme can achieve comparable performance as the optimal scheduling with reduced computational complexity. Finally, we propose a two-step selective CNO scheme (CNO-S), which strikes a flexible balance between complexity/CSI overhead and performance. CNO-S significantly reduces CSI overhead and computational complexity at the relay, while achieving comparable performance as the CNO-A scheme. Numerical results and complexity analysis not only show that the proposed schemes are feasible and effective, but also demonstrate their advantages over the existing schemes.
Hepatocyte-specific NEMO deletion promotes NK/NKT cell– and TRAIL-dependent liver damage

Nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) is one of the main transcription factors involved in regulating apoptosis, inflammation, chronic liver disease, and cancer progression. The IKK complex mediates NF-κB activation and deletion of its regulatory subunit NEMO in hepatocytes (NEMOΔhepa) triggers chronic inflammation and spontaneous hepatocellular carcinoma development. We show that NEMOΔhepa mice were resistant to Fas-mediated apoptosis but hypersensitive to tumor necrosis factor–related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) as the result of a strong up-regulation of its receptor DR5 on hepatocytes. Additionally, natural killer (NK) cells, the main source of TRAIL, were activated in NEMOΔhepa livers. Interestingly, depletion of the NK1.1+ cells promoted a significant reduction of liver inflammation and an improvement of liver histology in NEMOΔhepa mice. Furthermore, hepatocyte-specific NEMO deletion strongly sensitized the liver to concanavalin A (ConA)–mediated injury. The critical role of the NK cell/TRAIL axis in NEMOΔhepa livers during ConA hepatitis was further confirmed by selective NK cell depletion and adoptive transfer of TRAIL-deficient−/− mononuclear cells. Our results uncover an essential mechanism of NEMO-mediated protection of the liver by preventing NK cell tissue damage via TRAIL/DR5 signaling. As this mechanism is important in human liver diseases, NEMOΔhepa mice are an interesting tool to give insight into liver pathophysiology and to develop future therapeutic strategies.
A RESPONSABILIDADE SOCIAL À LUZ DA PERCEPÇÃO DE JUSTIÇA DE PREÇO

Este estudo analisou a influencia da responsabilidade social sobre a percepcao de justica de preco. Especificamente, procurou-se investigar se a responsabilidade social antecede a percepcao de justica de preco, gerando maiores percepcao de valor, satisfacao e intencoes de compra e diminuindo as emocoes negativas. Esta fundamentacao gerou algumas propostas conceituais, descritas por meio de um conjunto de hipoteses, que foram avaliadas por meio de uma pesquisa descritiva. A pesquisa de campo foi realizada junto a 418 respondentes e os dados coletados foram submetidos a testes estatisticos por meio da tecnica de modelagem em equacoes estruturais. Os resultados obtidos indicam que a responsabilidade social antecede a percepcao de justica de preco, gerando impactos fortes e positivos no valor percebido, na satisfacao e nas intencoes de compra. Ressalta-se que foi tambem verificado que a satisfacao impacta negativamente nas emocoes negativas. Sao discutidas as limitacoes, sugestoes e implicacoes academicase gerenciais.
Dual Inhibition of Bruton’s Tyrosine Kinase and Phosphoinositide-3-Kinase p110δ as a Therapeutic Approach to Treat Non-Hodgkin’s B Cell Malignancies

Although new targeted therapies, such as ibrutinib and idelalisib, have made a large impact on non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) patients, the disease is often fatal because patients are initially resistant to these targeted therapies, or because they eventually develop resistance. New drugs and treatments are necessary for these patients. One attractive approach is to inhibit multiple parallel pathways that drive the growth of these hematologic tumors, possibly prolonging the duration of the response and reducing resistance. Early clinical trials have tested this approach by dosing two drugs in combination in NHL patients. We discovered a single molecule, MDVN1003 (1-(5-amino-2,3-dihydro-1H-inden-2-yl)-3-(8-fluoro-3,4-dihydro-2H-benzo[b][1,4]oxazin-6-yl)-1H-pyrazolo[3,4-d]pyrimidin-4-amine), that inhibits Bruton’s tyrosine kinase and phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase δ, two proteins regulated by the B cell receptor that drive the growth of many NHLs. In this report, we show that this dual inhibitor prevents the activation of B cells and inhibits the phosphorylation of protein kinase B and extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2, two downstream mediators that are important for this process. Additionally, MDVN1003 induces cell death in a B cell lymphoma cell line but not in an irrelevant erythroblast cell line. Importantly, we found that this orally bioavailable dual inhibitor reduced tumor growth in a B cell lymphoma xenograft model more effectively than either ibrutinib or idelalisib. Taken together, these results suggest that dual inhibition of these two key pathways by a single molecule could be a viable approach for treatment of NHL patients.
Role of IFIP TC 8 The Role of the IFIP ’ s Information Systems Committee

There are numerous methodologies for carrying out IT audits, as well as creating numerical representations of the audit assessments. The numerical representations always have to rely on the personal assessment and somewhat subjective views of the auditors, thus cannot become totally objective. On the other hand, the uncertainty in the accumulation process – the numerical representation of the audit observations – can be diminished. In the research a modified correlation matrix of the risk factors has been created, to better represent the effects on the overall risk level. By considering the additive and subtractive effects of co-existing risk factors on overall risk level, new risk assessment metrics are being created. With the help of a more objective risk assessment method, IT-management decisions and the allocation of resources concerning information systems can become more effective.
VMDriver: A Driver-Based Monitoring Mechanism for Virtualization

Monitoring virtual machine (VM) is an essential function for virtualized platforms. Existing solutions are either coarse-grained – monitoring in granularity of VM level, or not general – only support specific monitoring functions for particular guest operating system (OS). Thus they do not satisfy the monitoring requirement in large-scale server cluster such as data center and public cloud platform, where each physical platform runs hundreds of VMs with different guest OSes. In this paper, we propose VMDriver, a general and fine-grained approach for virtualization monitoring. The novel design of VMDriver is the separation of event interception point in VMM level and rich guest OS semantic reconstructions in management domain. With this design, variant monitoring drivers in management domain can mask the differences of guest OSes. We implement VMDriver on Xen and our experimental study shows that it introduces very small performance overhead. We demonstrate its generality by inspecting four aspects information about the target virtual machines with different guest OSes. The unified interface of VMDriver brings convenience to develop complex monitoring tools for distributed virtualization environment.
Relationship of Cardiac Disease to Stroke Occurrence, Recurrence, and Mortality

Background and Purpose: This is a study of cardiac diseases associated with the 1,382 cases of first cerebral infarction in residents of Rochester, Minn. , during 1960-1984. Methods: This is a population-based study in Rochester, Minn. , for which the medical record-linkage system was used to identify cardiac disease among patients with first cerebral infarction. Results: There were 318 patients (23%) who had at least one major potential cardiac source of emboli. The proportion of patients with a cardiac source of emboli was significantly higher among patients older than age 75 years (29%) than among younger patients (17%). The 30-day stroke recurrence rate among patients with a cardiac source of emboli (2%) was not significantly different than that among those without a cardiac source of emboli (2%). Among patients with a cardiac source of emboli, there was no difference in the probability of stroke at 30 days and at 90 days for those treated or not treated with anticoagulants. During the first 30 days after cerebral infarction, the risk of death in patients with a cardiac source of emboli (23%) was 14 times that of recurrent stroke. The risk of death at 30 days in patients without a cardiac source of emboli was 8%. Conclusions: Significant independent predictors of death (Cox proportional-hazards analysis) were age, prior myocardial infarction, atrial fibrillation present at onset of stroke, congestive heart failure before the stroke, and an age x congestive heart failure interaction. The only significant independent predictors of recurrent stroke were cardiac valve disease and congestive heart failure.
An Intrusion Detection System Based on Multi-Level Clustering for Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

In this work, an intrusion detection system (IDS) framework based on multi-level clustering for hierarchical wireless sensor networks is proposed. The framework employs two types of intrusion detection approaches: (1) “downward-IDS (D-IDS)” to detect the abnormal behavior (intrusion) of the subordinate (member) nodes; and (2) “upward-IDS (U-IDS)” to detect the abnormal behavior of the cluster heads. By using analytical calculations, the optimum parameters for the D-IDS (number of maximum hops) and U-IDS (monitoring group size) of the framework are evaluated and presented.
Transgenic Visual-and-Sound Compositions Artemis Moroni

Here we present some results obtained in Shapes, an evolutionary environment applied to artistic production in visual domain. In Shapes environment the user can interactively create and evolve visual compositions by using random variations of pre-programmed objects. Pixels of these compositions can be used in another evolutionary environment, ArTVox, to direct a sound sequence creating, in this way, “transgenic” visual-and-sound compositions. The genetic algorithm is described. Both environments, Shapes and ArTVox, were developed by the authors, in Java.
Pentoxifylline decreases serum level of adhesion molecules in atherosclerosis patients.

BACKGROUND Inflammation is involved in development, progression, and complications of atherosclerotic disease. Clinical studies have indicated that the level of monocyte chemoattractant protein 1 (MCP-1), IL-18, and adhesion molecules correlates with the severity of atherosclerosis and can predict future cardiovascular events. Experimental studies have shown pentoxifylline (PTX) reduces these factors in animal models. The purpose of the present pilot study was to evaluate effect of PTX on a group of inflammatory biomarkers in patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). METHODS Forty patients with angiographically documented CAD, who fulfilled inclusion and exclusion criteria, were entered in the double-blind, randomized, pilot clinical study. The patients were randomly given PTX (400 mg three times daily) or placebo (3 tab/day) for 2 months. Serum concentrations of MCP-1, IL-18, intercellular adhesion Molecule 1 (ICAM-1), and vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 (VCAM-1) were measured before and at the end of intervention by enzyme-linked immunosorbant assay. RESULTS Our study showed that the serum levels of ICAM-1 and VCAM-1 was decreased in the study population after two-month treatment (P<0.05). CONCLUSION Based on the results of our pilot study, administration of PTX in CAD patients significantly decreases adhesion molecules levels.
Estimation of the optimal spread of a guidance force field for a power assist system

We developed a power assist system based on a method with considering the operator's trajectory and dynamics prediction by using approachability. In order to realize the assist system, we proposed a concept of guidance force field. Our guidance force field method helped to improve maneuverability for operator. In this paper, we propose a method to improve maneuverability based on guidance force field and approachability of traditional impedance-controlled power assist system. We propose an estimation method of the optimal spread of the guidance force field from the experimental evaluation value when it take minimum value. As the experimental results, we showed that the guidance force contributed to improving maneuverability by defining the estimated function, and we obtained a best value of spread for the guidance force field.
Integrated System for Robust 6-DOF Positioning Utilizing New Closed-Form Visual Motion Estimation Methods in Planar Terrains

Estimating the relative positions and (or) trajectory of a camera from video images is a fundamental problem in motion vision. Of special relevance is the closed-form solution for planar scenes, for processing fly-over imagery from airborne and underwater robotics platforms, automated airplane landing utilizing runway landmarks, photomosaicing, etc. However, the method's robustness can break down in certain scenarios, e.g., due to inherent translation-rotation ambiguity of visual motion with short baselines and narrow field of view. The robustness can be improved by devising methods that compute a smaller set of motion parameters, utilizing other sensors to measure the remaining components. This paper addressed key issues in six degrees of freedom positioning from fly-over imagery by integrating vision with rotational angle sensors. First, we propose and utilize robust closed-form solutions for estimating the motion and orientation of a planar surface from the image flow variations up to first order, given measurements of pitch and roll motions. We also describe a calibration technique to enable the integration of angle sensor and visual measurements. Next, an error analysis enables us to evaluate the impact of inaccurate pitch and roll measurements on the estimates from the new closed-form solutions. Finally, the performance of our new methods and the integrated positioning system are evaluated in various experiments with synthetic and real data
Low-cost active cyber defence

The authors of this paper investigated relatively simple active strategies against selected popular cyber threat vectors. When cyber attacks are analysed for their severity and occurrence, many incidents are usually classified as minor, e.g. span or phishing. We are interested in the various types of low-end cyber incidents (as opposed to high-end states-ponsored incidents and advanced persistent threats) for two reasons: (1) being the least complicated incidents, we expect to find simple active response strategies; (2) being the most common incidents, fighting them will most effectively make cyberspace more secure. We present a literature review encompassing results from academia and practitioners, and describe a previously unpublished hands-on effort to actively hinder phishing incidents. Before that, we take a look at several published definitions of active cyber defence, and identify some contradictions between them. So far we have identified active strategies for the following cyber threats: (1) Nigerian letters - keep up conversation by an artificial intelligence (Al) text analyser and generator; (2) spar - traffic generation for advertised domains; (3) phishing - upload of fake credentials and/or special monitored sandboxed accounts; (4) information collection botnets - fake data (credit card, credentials etc.) upload. The authors analysed the proposed strategies from the security economics point of view to determine why and how these strategies might be effective. We also discuss the legal aspects of the proposed strategies.
Improving network efficiency in real-time groupware with general message compression

Groupware communicates by sending messages across the network, and groupware programmers use a variety of formats for these messages, such as XML, plain text, or serialized objects. Although these formats have many advantages, they are often so verbose that they overload the system's network resources. Groupware programmers could improve efficiency by using more compact formats, but this efficiency comes at the cost of increased complexity, reduced convenience, and reduced readability. In this paper we propose an alternate approach for improving efficiency -- an automatic compression system that transparently minimizes verbose formats. Our general message compressor -- GMC -- automatically finds and removes redundancy in message streams, without any knowledge of the contents or structure of the message, and without any need for the programmer to change the way they work. In tests with realistic message traces, GMC reduced text messages to 20% of their original size, XML messages to 8% of the original, and serialized objects to 9%. Although not as compact as a hand-coded representation, GMC provides most of the compression benefits with almost none of the work -- it allows groupware programmers to use convenient message formats without compromising transport efficiency.
Channel Dependent Termination of the Semidefinite Relaxation Detector

We study the problem of semidefinite relaxation (SDR) for detection of symbols transmitted over a general MIMO channel. In the SDR detector the maximum likelihood detection problem is relaxed into a semidefinite program (SDP) which is solved numerically using an interior-point path-following algorithm. Herein, we provide a criteria which, based on the channel matrix realization, determine the accuracy required by the SDP solver to give a good bit error rate performance of the overall SDR detector. This also reduce the complexity of the SDR detector as it limits the number of interior iterations required in the SDP solver. The performance is demonstrated through simulations