Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Context-Aware SVM for Context-Dependent Information Recommendation

The purpose of this study is to propose Context-Aware Support Vector Machine (C-SVM) for application in a context-dependent recommendation system. It is important to consider users’ contexts in information recommendation as users’ preference change with context. However, currently there are few methods which take into account users’ contexts (e.g. time, place, the situation and so on). Thus, we extend the functionality of a Support Vector Machines (SVM), a popular classifier method used between two classes, by adding axes of context to the feature space in order to consider the users’ context. We then applied the Context-Aware SVM (C-SVM) and the Collaborative Filtering System with Context-Aware SVM (C-SVM-CF) to a recommendation system for restaurants and then examined the effectiveness of each approach.
Antidiabetic and Antihyperlipidaemic activity of Polygala chinensis L whole plant in alloxan induced diabetic rats

The ethanol extract of Polygala chinensis whole plant (Family: Polygalaceae) was investigated for its antidiabetic and antihyperlipidaemic effect in Wistar Albino rats. Diabetes was induced in Albino rats by administration of alloxan monohydrate (150mg/kg, i.p). The ethanol extracts of Polygala chinensis at a dose of 100 and 200mg/kg of body weight were administered at single dose per day to diabetes induced rats for a period of 14 days. The effect of ethanol extract of Polygala chinensis whole plant extract on blood glucose, serum insulin, urea, creatinine, glycosylated haemoglobin, serum lipid profile [total cholesterol (TR), triglycerides (TG), low density lipoprotein – cholesterol (LDL-C), very low density lipoprotein – cholesterol (VLDL-C), high density lipoprotein – cholesterol (HDL-C) and phospholipid (PL)] serum protein, albumin, globulin, serum enzymes [serum glutamate pyruvate transaminases (SGPT), and serum glutamate oxaloacetate transaminases (SGOT), and alkaline phosphatase (ALP)], were measured in the diabetic rats. The ethanol extract of Polygala chinensis whole plant elicited significant reductions of blood glucose (P<0.05), lipid parameters except HDL-C, serum enzymes and significantly increased HDLC. The extracts also caused significant increase in serum insulin (P<0.05) in the diabetic rats. From the above results, it is concluded that ethanol extract of Polygala chinensis possesses significant antidiabetic and antihyperlipidaemic effects in alloxan induced diabetic rats.
Sparsity-Promoting Tomographic Fluorescence Imaging With Simplified Spherical Harmonics Approximation

Fluorescence molecular tomography has become a promising technique for in vivo small animal imaging and has many potential applications. Due to the ill-posed and the ill-conditioned nature of the problem, Tikhonov regularization is generally adopted to stabilize the solution. However, the result is usually over-smoothed. In this letter, the third-order simplified spherical harmonics approximation to radiative transfer equation is utilized to model the photon propagation within biological tissues. Considering the sparsity of the fluorescent sources, we replace Tikhonov method with an iteratively reweighted scheme. By dynamically updating the weight matrix, L1-norm regularization can be approximated, which can promote the sparsity of the solution. Simulation study shows that this method can preserve the sparsity of the fluorescent sources within heterogeneous medium, even with very limited measurement data.
Mechanical and Morphological Study of Arecanut Leaf Sheath (ALS), Coconut Leaf Sheath (CLS) and Coconut Stem Fiber (CSF)

A quantitative as well as morphological analysis of three fibers (arecanut leaf sheath, coconut leaf sheath and coconut stem fiber) is showed here. FT-IR analysis of these fibers is also done for finding the difference of functional groups in the frequency domains of 4000-650 cm-1. Chemical analysis of fibers shows a comparative amount of chemical components such as aqueous extract, pectic matters, lignin, α–cellulose, hemicellulose, fatty and waxy matters in percent. Arecanut leaf sheath fiber represents the highest percent of α-cellulose. SEM analysis investigate the characteristics of the surface of the fibers. Correspondence to: Pinku Poddar, Department of Applied Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh; E-mail: p.pinku@yahoo.com
The memory gap and the future of high performance memories

The first main memories to be used on digital computers were constructed using a technology much slower than that used for the logic circuits, and it was taken for granted that there would be a memory gap. Mercury delay line memories spent a lot of their time waiting for the required word to come round and were very slow indeed. CRT (Williams Tube) memories and the core memories that followed them were much better. By the early 1970s semiconductor memories were beginning to appear. This did not result in memory performance catching up fully with processor performance, although in the 1970s it came close. It might have expected that from that point memories and processors would scale together, but this did not happen. This was because of significant differences in the DRAM semiconductor technology used for memories compared with the technology used for circuits. The memory gap makes itself felt when a cache miss occurs and the missing word must be be supplied from main memory. It thus only affects users whose programs do not fit into the L2 cache. As far as a workstation user is concerned, the most noticeable effect of an increased memory gap is to make the observed performance more dependent on the application area than it would otherwise be. Since 1980, the memory gap has been increasing steadily. During the last ten years, processors have been improving in speed by 60% per annum, whereas DRAM memory access has been improving at barely 10%. It may thus be said that, while the memory gap is not at present posing a major problem, the writing is on the wall. On an Alpha 21264 667 MHz workstation (XP1000) in 2000, a cache miss cost about 128 clock cycles. This may be compared with the 8 – 32 clock cycles in the minicomputer and workstations of 1990 [1]. If the memory latency remains unchanged, the number of cycles of processor idle time is doubled with each doubling of speed of the processor. A factor of four will bring us to about 500 clock cycles.
Dynamic Complexity under Definable Changes

In the setting of dynamic complexity, the goal of a dynamic program is to maintain the result of a fixed query for an input database that is subject to changes, possibly using additional auxiliary relations. In other words, a dynamic program updates a materialized view whenever a base relation is changed. The update of query result and auxiliary relations is specified using first-order logic or, equivalently, relational algebra. The original framework by Patnaik and Immerman only considers changes to the database that insert or delete single tuples. This article extends the setting to definable changes, also specified by first-order queries on the database, and generalizes previous maintenance results to these more expressive change operations. More specifically, it is shown that the undirected reachability query is first-order maintainable under single-tuple changes and first-order defined insertions, likewise the directed reachability query for directed acyclic graphs is first-order maintainable under insertions defined by quantifier-free first-order queries. These results rely on bounded bridge properties, which basically say that, after an insertion of a defined set of edges, for each connected pair of nodes there is some path with a bounded number of new edges. While this bound can be huge, in general, it is shown to be small for insertion queries defined by unions of conjunctive queries. To illustrate that the results for this restricted setting could be practically relevant, they are complemented by an experimental study that compares the performance of dynamic programs with complex changes, dynamic programs with single changes, and with recomputation from scratch. The positive results are complemented by several inexpressibility results. For example, it is shown that—unlike for single-tuple insertions—dynamic programs that maintain the reachability query under definable, quantifier-free changes strictly need update formulas with quantifiers. Finally, further positive results unrelated to reachability are presented: it is shown that for changes definable by parameter-free first-order formulas, all LOGSPACE-definable (and even AC1-definable) queries can be maintained by first-order dynamic programs.
Modeling Radial Velocity Signals for Exoplanet Search Applications

In this paper, we introduce an estimation technique for analyzing radial velocity data commonly encountered in extrasolar planet detection. We discuss the Keplerian model for radial velocity data measurements and estimate the 3D spectrum (power vs. eccentricity, orbital period and periastron passage time) of the radial velocity data by using a relaxation maximum likelihood algorithm (RELAX). We then establish the significance of the spectral peaks by using a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). Numerical experiments are carried out on a real life data set to evaluate the performance of our method.
Generation of formatters for context-free languages

Good documentation is important for the production of reusable and maintainable software. For the production of accurate documentation it is necessary that the original program text is not copied manually to obtain a typeset version. Apart from being tedious, this will invariably introduce errors. The production of tools that support the production of legible and accurate documentation is a software engineering challenge in itself. We present an algebraic approach to the generation of tools that produce typographically effective presentations of computer programs. A specification of a formatter is generated from the context-free grammar of a (programming) language. These generated formatters translate abstract syntax trees of programs into box expressions. Box expressions are translated by language-independent interpreters of the box language into ASCII or TEX. The formatting rules that are generated can easily be tuned in order to get the desired formatting of programs. We demonstrate this by means of real-life applications. Furthermore, we give a practical solution for the problem of formatting comments, which occur in the original text. The formatter generation approach proposed in this article can be used to generate formatting programs for arbitrary programming environments. Our formatter generation approach can be used to automatically generate formatters that have to be programmed explicitly in other systems.
Correction to ‘Estimating oxygen distribution from vasculature in three-dimensional tumour tissue’

[ J. R. Soc. Interface 13 , 20160070. (2016; Published online 2 March 2016) ([doi:10.1098/rsif.2016.0070][2])][2] The authors wish to add the following statement to the Funding section of the paper: The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie
SysCOLA: A framework for co-development of automotive software and system platform

A modeling language with formal semantics is able to capture a system's functionality unambiguously, without concerning implementation details. Such a formal language is well-suited for a design process that employs formal techniques and supports hardware/software synthesis. On the other hand, SystemC is a widely used system level design language with hardware-oriented modeling features. It provides a desirable simulation framework for system architecture design and exploration. This paper presents a design framework, called SysCOLA, that makes use of the unique advantages of both a new formal modeling language, COLA, and SystemC, and allows for parallel development of application software and system platform. In SysCOLA, function design and architecture exploration are done in the COLA based modeling environment and the SystemC based virtual prototyping environment, respectively. Our concepts of abstract platform and virtual platform abstraction layer facilitate the orthogonalization of functionality and architecture by means of mapping and integration in the respective environments. As SysCOLA is targeted at the automotive domain, the whole design approach is showcased using a case study of designing an automotive system.
FPlus: a programming environment for scientific applications

A description is given of FPlus, a Fortran-based programming environment for engineers and scientists that lets them write code, test it immediately, incrementally develop applications, and generate documentation automatically. The incremental generation process is examined. FPlus testing facilities, which are available at any time during development and help to build in reliability, are discussed. Simple mechanisms that evaluate code and design to help improve programming style are provided. The FPlus environment also encourages uniformity with its structure-oriented editor and formatter. FPlus helps the user generate structured code and module and system documentation. It also provides a macro-definition facility for experienced programmers. <<ETX>>
Oxygen therapy improves cardiac index and pulmonary vascular resistance in patients with pulmonary hypertension.

STUDY OBJECTIVES We tested the hypothesis that breathing 100% oxygen could result in selective pulmonary vasodilatation in patients with pulmonary hypertension, including those patients who would not meet current Health Care Finance Administration guidelines for long-term oxygen therapy. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS From 1996 to 1999, 23 adult patients (mean +/- SEM age, 51 +/- 4 years) with pulmonary arterial hypertension without left-heart failure underwent cardiac catheterization in a university teaching hospital while breathing air and then 100% oxygen. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS Treatment with 100% oxygen increased arterial oxygen saturation (91 +/- 1% to 99 +/- 0.1%, p < 0.05) and PaO(2) (64 +/- 3 to 309 +/- 28 mm Hg, p < 0.05). Treatment with 100% oxygen also decreased mean pulmonary artery pressure (56 +/- 3 to 53 +/- 2 mm Hg, p < 0.05) and increased cardiac index (2.1 +/- 0.1 to 2.5 +/- 0.2 L/min/m(2), p < 0.05). Calculated mean pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR) decreased from 14.1 +/- 1.4 to 10.6 +/- 1.0 Wood units (p < 0.05). Vasodilatation with 100% oxygen occurred preferentially in the pulmonary circulation (PVR/systemic vascular resistance, 0.53 +/- 0.04 to 0.48 +/- 0.03; p < 0.05). The magnitude of the PVR response to oxygen therapy was correlated only with decreasing patient age (r = 0.45, p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS Treatment with 100% oxygen is a selective pulmonary vasodilator in patients with pulmonary hypertension, regardless of primary diagnosis, baseline oxygenation, or right ventricular function. Development of disease-specific oxygen prescription guidelines warrants consideration.
Arduino and Android Powered Object Tracking Robot 1 Arduino and Android Powered Object Tracking Robot

We have built a four wheeled robot with an Arduino microcontroller, specifically the Arduino Mega 2650. We have written Arduino and Android libraries to allow an Android device to control the robot through a USB connection. The robot is designed to track objects by spinning left and right to keep the object in sight and driving forward and backward to maintain a constant distance between the robot and the object. Images are acquired through the camera of an Android device which is attached to the robot. The camera is attached to servos on the robot which allow the camera to pan and tilt. Several image processing techniques are used to detect the location of the object being tracked in the images. Two different kernel based trackers are implemented as Android applications. One of them uses a color based tracking method and the other uses a template based tracking method. Both applications use Android's OpenCV library to help with the image processing. The experimental results of the robot using both methods show robust tracking of a variety of objects undergoing significant appearance changes, with a low computational complexity.
Inferring Social Rank in an Old Assyrian Trade Network

We present work in jointly inferring the unique individuals as well as their social rank within a collection of letters from an Old Assyrian trade colony in K\"ultepe, Turkey, settled by merchants from the ancient city of Assur for approximately 200 years between 1950-1750 BCE, the height of the Middle Bronze Age. Using a probabilistic latent-variable model, we leverage pairwise social differences between names in cuneiform tablets to infer a single underlying social order that best explains the data we observe. Evaluating our output with published judgments by domain experts suggests that our method may be used for building informed hypotheses that are driven by data, and that may offer promising avenues for directed research by Assyriologists.
Revision of a furosemide-loading vestibular-evoked myogenic potential protocol for detecting endolymphatic hydrops

Abstract Objective: The presence of endolymphatic hydrops can be suggested by improving the amplitude of vestibular-evoked myogenic potential (VEMP) after furosemide administration (furosemide loading VEMP [FVEMP]). The authors aimed to determine a stimulation frequency and judgment criteria to ascertain whether a revised FVEMP protocol can be applied to clinical settings. Methods: The study included 25 individuals with unilateral Meniere’s disease (MD) and 11 normal healthy volunteers. Normalized amplitude of VEMP, using a tone burst sound at 250, 500, 700, 1000, 1500 and 2000 Hz, was measured before and after furosemide administration in the two groups. Improvement ratio (IR) of amplitude was calculated at each frequency. Results: There were no significant differences in IR between the control group and the MD group at each frequency, except at 500 Hz. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis revealed an IR cut-off value of 14.2% at 500 Hz, with a sensitivity of 0.706 and a specificity of 0.810. Conclusions: The revised FVEMP protocol using a 500 Hz tone burst stimulus and normalized amplitudes was defined as positive when IR exceeded 14.2% or when a biphasic wave could be detected after furosemide administration in cases without a detectable biphasic wave before administration.
Congestion and track usage improvement of large FPGAs using metro-on-FPGA methodology

Asynchronous serial transceivers have been recently used for data multiplexing in large on-chip systems to alleviate the routing congestion and improve the routability. FPGAs have considerable potential for using the serial transmission but these links have not been exploited in FPGAs yet. In this paper, we present a new architecture corresponding with a routing algorithm to use the asynchronous wire multiplexing technique in FPGAs. Experimental results show that allocated routing tracks and routing congestion can be reduced considerably (9.37% and 9.03%, respectively) by using the asynchronous wire multiplexing without any performance degradation in cost of a little overhead in area and computation time (2% and 0.84%, respectively)
Intratumoral Immune Cell Infiltrates, FoxP3, and Indoleamine 2,3-Dioxygenase in Patients with Melanoma Undergoing CTLA4 Blockade

Purpose: CTL-associated antigen 4 (CTLA4)-blocking monoclonal antibodies induce long-term regression of metastatic melanoma in some patients, but the exact mechanism is unknown. In this study, biopsies of selected accessible tumor lesions from patients treated with tremelimumab were examined to further elucidate the mechanism of its antitumor activity. Experimental Design: Fifteen tumor biopsies from 7 patients who had been treated with tremelimumab (CP-675,206) were collected. Samples were analyzed for melanoma markers, immune cell subset markers, the presence of the T regulatory-specific transcription factor FoxP3 and the immunosuppressive enzyme indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO). Results: Clinically responding lesions had diffuse intratumoral infiltrates of CD8+ T cells that were markedly increased in cases where comparison with a baseline biopsy was available. Nonregressing lesions had sparse, patchy CD8+ intratumoral infiltrates. Patients with regressing lesions had an increased frequency of CD8+ cells with or without a concomitant increase in CD4+ cells. Two of 3 responding patients with paired samples showed a slight increase in the number of FoxP3+ cells in the postdosing biopsies. In patients with regressing lesions who had paired samples, the intensity of IDO staining in macrophages and/or melanoma cells showed no clear pattern of change postdosing. Conclusions: Administration of tremelimumab was associated with massive intratumoral infiltrates of CD8+ CTLs in patients with regressing tumors but had varying effects on intratumoral infiltrates of CD4+ and FoxP3+ cells or intratumoral expression of IDO.
Present state and future of the world's mangrove forests

Mangroves, the only woody halophytes living at the confluence of land and sea, have been heavily used traditionally for food, timber, fuel and medicine, and presently occupy about 181 000 km2 of tropical and subtropical coastline. Over the past 50 years, approximately one-third of the world's mangrove forests have been lost, but most data show very variable loss rates and there is considerable margin of error in most estimates. Mangroves are a valuable ecological and economic resource, being important nursery grounds and breeding sites for birds, fish, crustaceans, shellfish, reptiles and mammals; a renewable source of wood; accumulation sites for sediment, contaminants, carbon and nutrients; and offer protection against coastal erosion. The destruction of mangroves is usually positively related to human population density. Major reasons for destruction are urban development, aquaculture, mining and overexploitation for timber, fish, crustaceans and shellfish. Over the next 25 years, unrestricted clear felling, aquaculture, and overexploitation of fisheries will be the greatest threats, with lesser problems being alteration of hydrology, pollution and global warming. Loss of biodiversity is, and will continue to be, a severe problem as even pristine mangroves are species-poor compared with other tropical ecosystems. The future is not entirely bleak. The number of rehabilitation and restoration projects is increasing worldwide with some countries showing increases in mangrove area. The intensity of coastal aquaculture appears to have levelled off in some parts of the world. Some commercial projects and economic models indicate that mangroves can be used as a sustainable resource, especially for wood. The brightest note is that the rate of population growth is projected to slow during the next 50 years, with a gradual decline thereafter to the end of the century. Mangrove forests will continue to be exploited at current rates to 2025, unless they are seen as a valuable resource to be managed on a sustainable basis. After 2025, the future of mangroves will depend on technological and ecological advances in multi-species silviculture, genetics, and forestry modelling, but the greatest hope for their future is for a reduction in human population growth.