Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
WANalytics: Analytics for a Geo-Distributed Data-Intensive World

Large organizations today operate data centers around the globe where massive amounts of data are produced and consumed by local users. Despite their geographically diverse origin, such data must be analyzed/mined as a whole. We call the problem of supporting rich DAGs of computation across geographically distributed data Wide-Area Big-Data (WABD). To the best of our knowledge, WABD is not supported by currently deployed systems nor suciently studied in literature; it is addressed today by continuously copying raw data to a central location for analysis. We observe from production workloads that WABD is important for large organizations, and that centralized solutions incur substantial cross-data center network costs. We argue that these trends will only worsen as the gap between data volumes and transoceanic bandwidth widens. Further, emerging concerns over data sovereignty and privacy may trigger government regulations that can threaten the very viability of centralized solutions. To address WABD we propose WANalytics, a system that pushes computation to edge data centers, automatically optimizing workow execution plans and replicating data when needed. Our Hadoop-based prototype delivers 257 reduction in WAN bandwidth on a production workload from Microsoft. We round out our evaluation by also demonstrating substantial gains for three standard benchmarks: TPC-CH, Berkeley Big Data, and BigBench.
Cs294-1 Homework 3

In this assignment, the goal was to parse a large set of Wikipedia articles, to extract features into a sparse feature matrix and to cluster them with a clustering algorithm of our choice. One motivation to perform automated clustering on unstructured, unlabeled data is to detect correlations between data points; for instance, in the case of Wikipedia, one might be able to automatically group articles into a small set of larger categories such as “Politics”, “People”, etc. Although Wikipedia does provide category labels, labels are not centrally controlled or restricted (any user can create a category), which results in a very large amount of category labels. Also, there is no documentation page that shows a list of labels, and some online resources point out that Wikipedia’s current set o category labels by no means form a tree, but rather a directed acyclical graph.
Interactive Football-Training Based on Rebounders with Hit Position Sensing and Audio-Visual Feedback

The last decade’s advancements in computer technology have facilitated a growing interest in the development of interactive sports-training equipment. This development has provided athletes and coaches with measurement and training tools, with performance analysis or skill improvement as purpose. However, most of these tools are created with a single goal, either to measure or train, and are often used and tested in very controlled settings. In this paper, we present an interactive football-training platform, called Football Lab, featuring sensor-mounted rebounders as well as audio-visual feedback. Football Lab enables the creation of novel training games, which aim to improve players’ technical skills, and simultaneously function as a tool for measuring player performance and development over time. A logging of the Football Lab was conducted through 92 weeks, where the platform was available for the general public, analysis of a subset of the 20.000 games played in the period are discussed. Moreover, the paper contains a discussion covering challenges in data collection, transferability issues for interactive training equipment, as well as examples of experiments conducted with the platform. Finally, directions for future research within the area of interactive training equipment are proposed.
Repercussions of the intrinsic motivation on the determinants relating to the retention of the personnel in the Public Institutions of higher education in Rwanda

This research, realized within the public education institutions, is interested in the implications of the intrinsic motivation, in the meaning of the self-determination theory of Deci and Ryan (1985), on a rough satisfaction on work and an affective organizational commitment which constitutes determining factors for the retention of the employees. Multiple linear regression analyses show that the intrinsic motivation presents significant linear associations with respect to emotional organizational commitment and the job satisfaction and that association is stronger with this latter. With regard to the moderating effects, they prove to be not-significant. On the other hand, the perceived organizational support holds a direct and significant influence on emotional organizational commitment, just as the style of the transformational leadership of the direct or immediate supervisor towards emotional organizational commitment is stronger than that between the intrinsic motivation. Key words : Motivation, Satisfaction, Implication, organizational commitment, transformational Leadership.
Longitudinal analysis on the development of hospital quality management systems in the Netherlands.

OBJECTIVE Many changes have been initiated in the Dutch hospital sector to optimize health-care delivery: national agenda-setting, increased competition and transparency, a new system of hospital reimbursement based on diagnosis-treatment combinations, intensified monitoring of quality and a multi-layered organizational development programme based on quality improvement collaboratives. The objective is to answer the question as to whether these changes were accompanied by a further development of hospital quality management systems and to what extent did the development within the multi-layered programme hospitals differ from that in other hospitals. DESIGN Longitudinal data were collected in 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2007 using a validated questionnaire. Descriptive analyses and multi-level modelling were applied to test whether: (1) quality management system development stages in hospitals differ over time, (2) development stages and trends differ between hospitals participating or not participating in the multi-layered programme and (3) hospital size has an effect on development stage. SETTING Dutch hospital sector between 1995 and 2007. PARTICIPANTS Hospital organizations. INTERVENTION Changes through time. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Quality management system development stage. RESULTS Since 1995, hospital quality management systems have reached higher development levels. Programme participants have developed their quality management system more rapidly than have non-participants. However, this effect is confounded by hospital size. CONCLUSIONS Study results suggest that the combination of policy measures at macro level was accompanied by an increase in hospital size and the further development of quality management systems. Hospitals are entering the stage of systematic quality improvement.
Catalase Influence in the Regulation of Coronary Resistance by Estrogen: Joint Action of Nitric Oxide and Hydrogen Peroxide

We tested the influence of estrogen on coronary resistance regulation by modulating nitric oxide (NO) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) levels in female rats. For this, estrogen levels were manipulated and the hearts were immediately excised and perfused at a constant flow using a Langendorff's apparatus. Higher estrogen levels were associated with a lower coronary resistance, increased nitric oxide bioavailability, and higher levels of H2O2. When oxide nitric synthase blockade by L-NAME was performed, no significant changes were found in coronary resistance of ovariectomized rats. Additionally, we found an inverse association between NO levels and catalase activity. Taken together, our data suggest that, in the absence of estrogen influence and, therefore, reduced NO bioavailability, coronary resistance regulation seems to be more dependent on the H2O2 that is maintained at low levels by increased catalase activity.
Development environment for literal inter-language use case driven modularization

Commonly, during programming the code related to use cases becomes scattered across different modules and at the same time the code related to different use cases becomes tangled. This way, it is hard to follow the intent, which is otherwise well comprehensible in use cases. In this paper, we demonstrate a development environment for literal inter-language use case driven modularization. The environment enables to preserve use cases and their steps and have each use case text and related code focused in one file. For this, code instrumentation at three levels is involved: continuous processing, preprocessing, and execution. The approach itself requires also execution control provided by a dedicated framework. Many aspects of the program can be controlled directly from the use case text. At the same time, it is comprehensible to a wide range of stakeholders. A layered 3D layout of the use case dependencies is provided in the environment (https://bitbucket.org/bystricky/literal-use-cases, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=R4ArqH4ZdgI).
Misbehaviour of XIST RNA in Breast Cancer Cells

A role of X chromosome inactivation process in the development of breast cancer have been suggested. In particular, the relationship between the breast cancer predisposing gene BRCA1 and XIST, the main mediator of X chromosome inactivation, has been intensely investigated, but still remains controversial. We investigated this topic by assessing XIST behaviour in different groups of breast carcinomas and in a panel of breast cancer cell lines both BRCA1 mutant and wild type. In addition, we evaluated the occurrence of broader defects of heterochromatin in relation to BRCA1 status in breast cancer cells. We provide evidence that in breast cancer cells BRCA1 is involved in XIST regulation on the active X chromosome, but not in its localization as previously suggested, and that XIST can be unusually expressed by an active X and can decorate it. This indicates that the detection of XIST cloud in cancer cell is not synonymous of the presence of an inactive X chromosome. Moreover, we show that global heterochromatin defects observed in breast tumor cells are independent of BRCA1 status. Our observations sheds light on a possible previously uncharacterized mechanism of breast carcinogenesis mediated by XIST misbehaviour, particularly in BRCA1-related cancers. Moreover, the significant higher levels of XIST-RNA detected in BRCA1-associated respect to sporadic basal-like cancers, opens the possibility to use XIST expression as a marker to discriminate between the two groups of tumors.
Does Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery Minimize Surgical Site Infections?

Study Design Retrospective review of prospectively collected data. Purpose To evaluate the incidence of surgical site infections (SSIs) in minimally invasive spine surgery (MISS) in a cohort of patients and compare with available historical data on SSI in open spinal surgery cohorts, and to evaluate additional direct costs incurred due to SSI. Overview of Literature SSI can lead to prolonged antibiotic therapy, extended hospitalization, repeated operations, and implant removal. Small incisions and minimal dissection intrinsic to MISS may minimize the risk of postoperative infections. However, there is a dearth of literature on infections after MISS and their additional direct financial implications. Methods All patients from January 2007 to January 2015 undergoing posterior spinal surgery with tubular retractor system and microscope in our institution were included. The procedures performed included tubular discectomies, tubular decompressions for spinal stenosis and minimal invasive transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (TLIF). The incidence of postoperative SSI was calculated and compared to the range of cited SSI rates from published studies. Direct costs were calculated from medical billing for index cases and for patients with SSI. Results A total of 1,043 patients underwent 763 noninstrumented surgeries (discectomies, decompressions) and 280 instrumented (TLIF) procedures. The mean age was 52.2 years with male:female ratio of 1.08:1. Three infections were encountered with fusion surgeries (mean detection time, 7 days). All three required wound wash and debridement with one patient requiring unilateral implant removal. Additional direct cost due to infection was $2,678 per 100 MISS-TLIF. SSI increased hospital expenditure per patient 1.5-fold after instrumented MISS. Conclusions Overall infection rate after MISS was 0.29%, with SSI rate of 0% in non-instrumented MISS and 1.07% with instrumented MISS. MISS can markedly reduce the SSI rate and can be an effective tool to minimize hospital costs.
Growth Stimulatory Effects and Genome-Wide Transcriptional Changes Produced by Protein Hydrolysates in Maize Seedlings

Protein hydrolysates are an emerging class of crop management products utilized for improving nutrient assimilation and mitigating crop stress. They generally consist of a mixture of peptides and free amino acids derived from the hydrolysis of plant or animal sources. The present work was aimed at studying the effects and the action mechanisms of a protein hydrolysate derived from animal residues on maize root growth and physiology in comparison with the effects induced by either free amino acids or inorganic N supply. The application of the protein hydrolysate caused a remarkable enhancement of root growth. In particular, in the protein hydrolysate-treated plants the length and surface area of lateral roots were about 7 and 1.5 times higher than in plants treated with inorganic N or free amino acids, respectively. The root growth promoting effect of the protein hydrolysate was associated with an increased root accumulation of K, Zn, Cu, and Mn when compared with inorganic N and amino acids treatments. A microarray analysis allowed to dissect the transcriptional changes induced by the different treatments demonstrating treatment-specific effects principally on cell wall organization, transport processes, stress responses and hormone metabolism.
Improving the performance of complex agent plans through reinforcement learning

Agent programming in complex, partially observable and stochastic domains usually requires a great deal of understanding of both the domain and the task, in order to provide the agent with the knowledge necessary to act effectively. While symbolic methods allow the designer to specify declarative knowledge about the domain, the resulting plan can be brittle since it is difficult to supply a symbolic model that is accurate enough to foresee all possible events in complex environments, especially in the case of partial observability. Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques, on the other hand, can learn a policy and make use of a learned model, but it is difficult to reduce and shape the scope of the learning algorithm by exploiting a priori information. We propose a methodology for writing complex agent programs that can be effectively improved through experience. We show how to derive a stochastic process from a partial specification of the plan, so that the latter's perfomance can be improved solving a RL problem much smaller than classical RL formulations. Finally, we demonstrate our approach in the context of Keepaway Soccer, a common RL benchmark based on a RoboCup Soccer 2D simulator.
A Semantically Enhanced UPnP Control Point for Sharing Multimedia Content

The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol lets users share multimedia content across devices and display it in multimedia renderers in home-based LANs. However, UPnP doesn't support sharing this content between homes (for example, with friends, relatives, or workmates), and content can be difficult to find. A UPnP extension provides uniform access to multimedia content belonging to different homes, such as content from a user's Facebook friends. In addition, an extended UPnP control point lets users add semantic annotations to their multimedia resources and link them to the linked data cloud to facilitate their discovery by others.
Automatic Projector Calibration Using Self-Identifying Patterns

Calibrating multiple monitor or projector display elements to provide a composite image can be a time-consuming task if performed manually. Ideally the user would like to roughly aim a number of projectors at a surface, define the desired display corners, and have some automatic method to align the display. A digital camera and computer vision can be used to calibrate the projectors with the assistance of self-identifying patterns. To account for distortion effects and to equalize brightness, it is desirable to know the mapping of many points within each projector image. A small set of images can be projected from each display element if a self-identifying pattern is used. An array of ARTag markers are used as a self-identifying pattern which is displayed in turn by each of the display monitors or projectors and recognized in the camera image. In this way an ad-hoc arrangement of projectors can be calibrated in seconds. Experimental results are shown validating this architecture.
Nitrogen Fixation and Hydrogen Metabolism in Cyanobacteria

SUMMARY This review summarizes recent aspects of (di)nitrogen fixation and (di)hydrogen metabolism, with emphasis on cyanobacteria. These organisms possess several types of the enzyme complexes catalyzing N2 fixation and/or H2 formation or oxidation, namely, two Mo nitrogenases, a V nitrogenase, and two hydrogenases. The two cyanobacterial Ni hydrogenases are differentiated as either uptake or bidirectional hydrogenases. The different forms of both the nitrogenases and hydrogenases are encoded by different sets of genes, and their organization on the chromosome can vary from one cyanobacterium to another. Factors regulating the expression of these genes are emerging from recent studies. New ideas on the potential physiological and ecological roles of nitrogenases and hydrogenases are presented. There is a renewed interest in exploiting cyanobacteria in solar energy conversion programs to generate H2 as a source of combustible energy. To enhance the rates of H2 production, the emphasis perhaps needs not to be on more efficient hydrogenases and nitrogenases or on the transfer of foreign enzymes into cyanobacteria. A likely better strategy is to exploit the use of radiant solar energy by the photosynthetic electron transport system to enhance the rates of H2 formation and so improve the chances of utilizing cyanobacteria as a source for the generation of clean energy.
Camera Calibration from Vanishing Points in Image of Architectural Scenes

We address the problem of recovering 3D models from uncalibrated images of architectural scenes. We propose a simple, geometrically intuitive method which exploits the strong rigidity constraints of parallelism and orthogonality present in indoor and outdoor architectural scenes. We present a novel algorithm that uses these simple constraints to recover the projection matrices for each viewpoint and relate our method to the algorithm of Caprile and Torre [2]. The projection matrices are used to recover partial 3D models of the scene and these can be used to visualise new viewpoints. Our approach does not need any a priori information about the cameras being used. A working system called PhotoBuilder has been designed and implemented to allow a user to interactively build a VRML model of a building from uncalibrated images from arbitrary viewpoints [3, 4].
Energy production in the formation of a finite thickness cosmic string

The classical electromagnetic modes outside a long, straight, superconducting cosmic string are calculated, assuming the string to be surrounded by a superconducting cylindric surface of radius R. Thereafter, by use of a Bogoliubov-type argument, the electromagnetic energy W produced per unit length in the lowest two modes is calculated when the string is formed ”suddenly”. The essential new element in the present analysis as compared with prior work of Parker [Phys. Rev. Lett. 59, 1369 (1987)] and Brevik and Toverud [Phys. Rev. D 51, 691 (1995)], is that the radius a of the string is assumed finite, thus necessitating Neumann functions to be included in the fundamental modes. We find that the theory is changed significantly: W is now strongly concentrated in the lowest mode (m,s) = (0,1), whereas the proportionality W ∝ (Gµ/t) 2 that is characteristic for zero-width strings is found in the next mode (1,1). Here G is the gravitational constant, µ the string mass per unit length, and t the GUT time.
Biogenic versus anthropogenic sources of CO in the United States

Aircraft observations of carbon monoxide (CO) from the ICARTT campaign over the eastern United States in summer 2004 (July 1–August 15), interpreted with a global 3‐D model of tropospheric chemistry (GEOS‐Chem), show that the national anthropogenic emission inventory from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (93 Tg CO y−1) is too high by 60% in summer. Our best estimate of the CO anthropogenic source for the ICARTT period is 6.4 Tg CO, including 4.6 Tg from direct emission and 1.8 Tg CO from oxidation of anthropogenic volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The biogenic CO source for the same period from the oxidation of isoprene and other biogenic VOCs is 8.3 Tg CO, and is independently constrained by ICARTT observations of formaldehyde (HCHO). Anthropogenic emissions of CO in the U.S. have decreased to the point that they are now lower than the biogenic source in summer.
Play Skills in Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder within Their Natural Environments

Play allows toddlers to exercise various skills. However not all toddlers, like those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), engage in developmentally appropriate play. Thus, it is important to investigate play given assessment of and treatment for ASD that often occurs in play environments. This study assessed mothers' reported play of toddlers with ASD (n=3; Mage=26.5 months) in their natural environments while enrolled in an intervention program. Toddlers play was coded using five play categories. Results showed no significant differences in toddlers' engagement in play categories; however, frequencies within play categories varied. This research is important for its insight of play in ASD for therapists and caregivers, and identifying play competencies to best conduct play based therapies
Did I really mean that? Applying automatic summarisation techniques to formative feedback

(2)This paper reports on an application that delivers automated formative feedback designed to help university students improve their assignments. (3)The aim of the system is to improve the confidence and skills of the user by promoting selfdirected learning through metacognition. (4)The system focuses on the content of an essay by using automatic summarisation techniques, automatic structure recognition, diagrams, animations, and interactive exercises that promote reflection. (15)The system is currently undergoing initial exploratory rounds of testing by ex-student volunteers and will be the subject of two full-scale empirical evaluations starting in September 2013. (1)The main claims of this paper are the application and adaptation of graph-based key word and key sentence ranking methods for a novel purpose, and ensuing observations concerning the suitability of two different centrality algorithms for the purposes of key word extraction.