Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Linear Matroid Intersection is in Quasi-NC

Given two matroids on the same ground set, the matroid intersection problem asks to find a common independent set of maximum size. In case of linear matroids, the problem had a randomized parallel algorithm but no deterministic one. We give an almost complete derandomization of this algorithm, which implies that the linear matroid intersection problem is in quasi-NC. That is, it has uniform circuits of quasi-polynomial size nO(logn)\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$n^{O(\log n)}$$\end{document} and O(polylog(n)) depth. Moreover, the depth of the circuit can be reduced to O(log2n) in case of zero characteristic fields. This generalizes a similar result for the bipartite perfect matching problem. Our main technical contribution is to derandomize the Isolation lemma for the family of common bases of two matroids. We use our isolation result to give a quasi-polynomial time blackbox algorithm for a special case of Edmonds' problem, i.e., singularity testing of a symbolic matrix, when the given matrix is of the form A0+A1x1+⋯+Amxm\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$A_{0} + A_{1 }x_{1} + \cdots + A_{m} x_{m}$$\end{document}, for an arbitrary matrix A0 and rank-1 matrices A1,A2,⋯,Am\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$A_{1}, A_{2}, \dots, A_{m}$$\end{document}. This can also be viewed as a blackbox polynomial identity testing algorithm for the corresponding determinant polynomial. Another consequence of this result is a deterministic solution to the maximum rank matrix completion problem. Finally, we use our result to find a deterministic representation for the union of linear matroids in quasi-NC.
Model Validation for Vision Systems via Graphics Simulation

Rapid advances in computation, combined with latest advances in computer graphics simulations have facilitated the development of vision systems and training them in virtual environments. One major stumbling block is in certification of the designs and tuned parameters of these systems to work in real world. In this paper, we begin to explore the fundamental question: Which type of information transfer is more analogous to real world? Inspired from the performance characterization methodology outlined in the 90's, we note that insights derived from simulations can be qualitative or quantitative depending on the degree of the fidelity of models used in simulations and the nature of the questions posed by the experimenter. We adapt the methodology in the context of current graphics simulation tools for modeling data generation processes and, for systematic performance characterization and trade-off analysis for vision system design leading to qualitative and quantitative insights. In concrete, we examine invariance assumptions used in vision algorithms for video surveillance settings as a case study and assess the degree to which those invariance assumptions deviate as a function of contextual variables on both graphics simulations and in real data. As computer graphics rendering quality improves, we believe teasing apart the degree to which model assumptions are valid via systematic graphics simulation can be a significant aid to assisting more principled ways of approaching vision system design and performance modeling.
Stable Model Semantics for Tuple-Generating Dependencies Revisited

Normal tuple-generating dependencies (NTGDs) are TGDs enriched with default negation, a.k. a. negation as failure. Query answering under NTGDs, where negation is interpreted according to the stable model semantics, is an intriguing new problem that gave rise to flourishing research activity in the database and KR communities. So far, all the existing works that investigate this problem, except for one recent paper that adopts an operational semantics based on the chase, follow the so-called logic programming (LP) approach. According to the LP approach, the existentially quantified variables are first eliminated via Skolemization, which leads to a normal logic program, and then the standard stable model semantics for normal logic programs is applied. However, as we discuss in the paper, Skolemization is not appropriate in the presence of default negation since it fails to capture the intended meaning of NTGDs, while the operational semantics mentioned above fails to overcome the limitations of the LP approach. This reveals the need to adopt an alternative approach to stable model semantics that is directly applicable to NTGDs with existentially quantified variables. We propose such an approach based on a recent characterization of stable models in terms of second-order logic, which indeed overcomes the limitations of the LP approach. We then perform an in-depth complexity analysis of query answering under prominent classes of NTGDs based on the main decidability paradigms for TGDs, namely weak-acyclicity, guardedness and stickiness. Interestingly, weakly-acyclic NTGDs give rise to robust and highly expressive query languages that allow us to solve in a declarative way problems in the second level of the polynomial hierarchy.
A Bayesian Nonparametric Approach for Mapping Dynamic Quantitative Traits

In biology, many quantitative traits are dynamic in nature. They can often be described by some smooth functions or curves. A joint analysis of all the repeated measurements of the dynamic traits by functional quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping methods has the benefits to (1) understand the genetic control of the whole dynamic process of the quantitative traits and (2) improve the statistical power to detect QTL. One crucial issue in functional QTL mapping is how to correctly describe the smoothness of trajectories of functional valued traits. We develop an efficient Bayesian nonparametric multiple-loci procedure for mapping dynamic traits. The method uses the Bayesian P-splines with (nonparametric) B-spline bases to specify the functional form of a QTL trajectory and a random walk prior to automatically determine its degree of smoothness. An efficient deterministic variational Bayes algorithm is used to implement both (1) the search of an optimal subset of QTL among large marker panels and (2) estimation of the genetic effects of the selected QTL changing over time. Our method can be fast even on some large-scale data sets. The advantages of our method are illustrated on both simulated and real data sets.
Shear wave elastography of adrenal masses is feasible and may help to differentiate between solid and cystic lesions - an initial report.

INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and usefulness of supersonic shear wave elastography (SSWE) in the diagnosis of nonmalignant adrenal masses. MATERIAL AND METHODS 13 patients with a total number of 16 adrenal masses were enrolled in the study. In each case, both conventional ultrasound imaging and SSWE for stiffness assessment were performed. The final diagnosis was based on CT, MRI, biochemical studies, surgery or more than one year of follow up. RESULTS The final diagnosis: nodular hyperplasia in six masses, six adenomas, three cysts, and one myelolipoma. All solid adrenal masses presented the elastography signal in contrast to cystic lesions that were devoid of it, as shear waves do not propagate through fluids. CONCLUSIONS SSWE is a feasible technique that can be applied during ultrasound of the abdomen and retroperitoneum. SSWE presents potential for the differentiation of solid and cystic adrenal lesions. Further large scale studies evaluating the possibility of differentiation of adrenal and other retroperitoneal masses with SSWE are warranted.
[Photosynthetic characteristics of three tree species seedlings in Changbai Mountain under different CO2 concentrations].

The photosynthetic characteristics of three-year-old seedlings of coniferous Pinus koraiensis and Pinus sylvestriformis and broadleaf Fraxinus mandshurica in open-top chambers in Changbai Mountain were studied. Seedlings were planted at four different conditions respectively:elevated CO2 concentration(700 and 500 mumol.mol-1) and ambient CO2 concentration (control chamber and in open field). After treating of two growing seasons in the first two years, seedlings were continuously grown under different CO2 concentration for another eight weeks. The results indicated that the photosynthetic capacity of three species was enhanced under high CO2 concentration in the first two growing seasons. The maximum net photosynthetic rates and light response parameters of different tree species were different at the same CO2 concentration. No photosynthetic acclimation was observed in the third growing season except Pinus sylvestriformis seedlings grown under 500 mumol.mol-1 CO2. The increase or decrease of net photosynthetic rates and light response parameters were related to the time of CO2 treatment. Elevated CO2 concentration could alter the ability of utilizing strong light and low light of seedlings.
Impact of Software Vulnerability Announcements on the Market Value of Software Vendors - an Empirical Investigation

Researchers in the area of information security have mainly been concerned with tools, techniques and policies that firms can use to protect themselves against security breaches. However, information security is as much about security software as it is about secure software. Software is not secure when it has defects or flaws which can be exploited by hackers to cause attacks such as unauthorized intrusion or denial of service attacks. Any public announcement makes about a software defect is termed as 'vulnerability disclosure'. Although research in software economics have studied firms' incentive to improve overall quality, there have been no studies to show that software vendors have an incentive to invest in building more secure software. In this paper, we use the event study methodology to examine software vendors' incentives to build more secure software. We collect data from leading national newspapers and industry sources like CERT by searching for reports on published software vulnerabilities. We show that vulnerability disclosures lead to a negative and significant change in market value for a software vendor. On average, a vendor loses around 0.6% value in stock price when a vulnerability is reported. This is equivalent to a loss in market capitalization values of $0.86 billion per vulnerability announcement. To provide further insight, we use the information content of the disclosure announcement to classify vulnerabilities into various types. We find that the change in stock price is more negative if the vendor fails to provide a patch at the time of disclosure. Moreover, vulnerabilities which cause a confidentiality related breach cause a greater decline in the market value for a vendor than the vulnerabilities which cause non-confidentiality related breaches. Also, more severe flaws have a significantly greater impact than flaws with low or moderate severity. Finally, we find that the markets do not punish a software vendor more severely if a third party discovers a flaw in its product than if the vendor itself discovers the flaw. Our analysis provides many interesting implications for software vendors as well as policy makers.
Common Region between Euler Subspace and Rodrigues Fundamental Zone for a Cubic Crystal and Orthotropy Sample Symmetry

Due to crystal and sample symmetry, texture data can be presented uniquely in a smaller domain of Euler box or Rodrigues space. As these sub-domains are obtained by different criteria, a one-to-one relation does not always exist for conversion between Euler and Rodrigues coordinates. This work presents a methodology for finding the common region between the Euler sub-space and Rodrigues fundamental zone for the case of cubic crystal and orthotropy sample symmetry, and its size is found to be 0.0864068.
IRIT at TREC Microblog 2015

This paper presents the participation of the IRIT laboratory (University of Toulouse) to the Microblog Track of TREC 2015. This track consists in a real-time filtering task aiming at monitoring a stream of social media posts in accordance to a user's interest profile. In this context, our team proposes three approaches: (a) a novel selective summarization approach based on a decision of selecting/ignoring tweets without the use of external knowledge and relying on novelty and redundancy factors, (b) a processing workflow enabling to index tweets in real-time and enhanced by a notification and digests method guided by diversity and user personalization, and (c) a step by step stream selection method focusing on rapidity, and taking into account tweet similarity as well as several features including content, entities and user-related aspects. For all these approaches, we discuss the obtained results during the experimental evaluation.
Global potential distribution of Drosophila suzukii (Diptera, Drosophilidae)

Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura) is a species native to Western Asia that is able to pierce intact fruit during egg laying, causing it to be considered a fruit crop pest in many countries. Drosophila suzukii have a rapid expansion worldwide; occurrences were recorded in North America and Europe in 2008, and South America in 2013. Due to this rapid expansion, we modeled the potential distribution of this species using the Maximum Entropy Modeling (MaxEnt) algorithm and the Genetic Algorithm for Ruleset Production (GARP) using 407 sites with known occurrences worldwide and 11 predictor variables. After 1000 replicates, the value of the average area under the curve (AUC) of the model predictions with 1000 replicates was 0.97 for MaxEnt and 0.87 for GARP, indicating that both models had optimal performances. The environmental variables that most influenced the prediction of the MaxEnt model were the annual mean temperature, the maximum temperature of the warmest month, the mean temperature of the coldest quarter and the annual precipitation. The models indicated high environmental suitability, mainly in temperate and subtropical areas in the continents of Asia, Europe and North and South America, where the species has already been recorded. The potential for further invasions of the African and Australian continents is predicted due to the environmental suitability of these areas for this species.
Modulation of synchrony between single motor units during precision grip tasks in humans

During precision grip, coherence between motor cortex and hand muscle EMG oscillatory activity in the 15‐30 Hz range covaries with the compliance of the manipulated object. The current study investigated whether short‐term synchrony and coherence between discharges of single motor units (SMUs) in the first dorsal interosseous (1DI) muscle were similarly modulated by object compliance during precision grip. Eight subjects used index finger and thumb to grip two levers that were under robotic control. Guided by visual feedback of the lever force levels, subjects held the levers against a steady force of 1.3 N for 8 s; they then linearly increased the force to 1.6 N over a 2 s period and held for a further 8 s before linearly decreasing the force back to the 1.3 N level over another 2 s period. Subjects performed the task at two different levels of compliance, each with identical grip force levels. Both surface EMG and SMU activity were recorded from the 1DI muscle. Short‐term synchrony between the discharges of pairs of SMUs was assessed in the time domain by cross‐correlation and in the frequency domain by coherence analysis. Coherence was seen in two frequency ranges: 6‐12 Hz and 15‐30 Hz. The compliance of the gripped object had a significant effect on both short‐term synchronisation and coherence in the 15‐30 Hz range between SMUs; both were greater for the more compliant condition. There was no change in the 6‐12 Hz coherence.
Combination of clean and contaminated GMM/SVM for far-field text-independent speaker verification

This paper addresses the problem of speaker verification under reverberant conditions, using only the signal acquired by a single distant microphone. The proposed system combines four different subsystems. Two of them are Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) based and the other two are Support Vector Machine (SVM) based. The subsystems that use the same type of classifier differ in terms of models: one is trained with clean speech and the other is trained with noisy and reverberant speech obtained through the contamination of the clean data with the measured impulse responses of the room. The results show that the proposed system outperforms each single subsystem under matched or mismatched conditions.
The Potential Influence of Common Viral Infections Diagnosed during Hospitalization among Critically Ill Patients in the United States

Viruses are the most common source of infection among immunocompetent individuals, yet they are not considered a clinically meaningful risk factor among the critically ill. This work examines the association of viral infections diagnosed during the hospital stay or not documented as present on admission to the outcomes of ICU patients with no evidence of immunosuppression on admission. This is a population-based retrospective cohort study of University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) academic centers in the U.S. from the years 2006 to 2009. The UHC is an alliance of over 90% of the non-profit academic medical centers in the U.S. A total of 209,695 critically ill patients were used in this analysis. Eight hospital complications were examined. Patients were grouped into four cohorts: absence of infection, bacterial infection only, viral infection only, and bacterial and viral infection during same hospital admission. Viral infections diagnosed during hospitalization significantly increased the risk of all complications. There was also a seasonal pattern for viral infections. Specific viruses associated with poor outcomes included influenza, RSV, CMV, and HSV. Patients who had both viral and bacterial infections during the same hospitalization had the greatest risk of mortality RR 6.58, 95% CI (5.47, 7.91); multi-organ failure RR 8.25, 95% CI (7.50, 9.07); and septic shock RR 271.2, 95% CI (188.0, 391.3). Viral infections may play a significant yet unrecognized role in the outcomes of ICU patients. They may serve as biological markers or play an active role in the development of certain adverse complications by interacting with coincident bacterial infection.
Blind Separation of Infinitely Many Sparse Sources

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Sintering of TiB2-Al composites using HP-HT method

Purpose: The subject of the work was to study the effect of the sintering temperature on the properties and structure of TiB2-Al composites. Design/methodology/approach: TiB2-Al composites reinforced with 70 vol.% ceramic particles were prepared by powder metallurgy method. The high pressure - high temperature (HP-HT) method was employed to consolidate the sinters. Composites were sintered at pressure of 7.0 ± 0.2 GPa and temperatures of 520°C and 600°C. The duration of sintering was 60 seconds. In order to investigate the structure changes, the scanning electron microscope was applied. Young modulus measurements were carried out using ultrasonic method. Mechanical properties were determined by Vickers hardness tester. Findings: Two variants of TiB2-Al with respect to the sintering temperature (520°C and 600°C) were obtained by the HP-HT method. The application of the higher temperature of 600°C and pressure of 7.0 ± 0.2 GPa and time of 60 seconds permits to obtain the higher properties of this composites in comparison with the sinters which were obtained at 520°C. Practical implications: From a practical position it is important to optimize the sintering densification of TiB2-Al composites by high pressure -high temperature (HP-HT) method. Originality/value: The results from this work can be useful in determining conditions for sintering the materials with the high amount of titanium diboride.
Modulation of Nitrosative Stress by S-Nitrosoglutathione Reductase Is Critical for Thermotolerance and Plant Growth in Arabidopsis [W]

Nitric oxide (NO) is a key signaling molecule in plants. This analysis of Arabidopsis thaliana HOT5 (sensitive to hot temperatures), which is required for thermotolerance, uncovers a role of NO in thermotolerance and plant development. HOT5 encodes S-nitrosoglutathione reductase (GSNOR), which metabolizes the NO adduct S-nitrosoglutathione. Two hot5 missense alleles and two T-DNA insertion, protein null alleles were characterized. The missense alleles cannot acclimate to heat as dark-grown seedlings but grow normally and can heat-acclimate in the light. The null alleles cannot heat-acclimate as light-grown plants and have other phenotypes, including failure to grow on nutrient plates, increased reproductive shoots, and reduced fertility. The fertility defect of hot5 is due to both reduced stamen elongation and male and female fertilization defects. The hot5 null alleles show increased nitrate and nitroso species levels, and the heat sensitivity of both missense and null alleles is associated with increased NO species. Heat sensitivity is enhanced in wild-type and mutant plants by NO donors, and the heat sensitivity of hot5 mutants can be rescued by an NO scavenger. An NO-overproducing mutant is also defective in thermotolerance. Together, our results expand the importance of GSNOR-regulated NO homeostasis to abiotic stress and plant development.