Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Uncertainty-Aware Approach to Optimal Configuration of Stream Processing Systems

Finding optimal configurations for Stream Processing Systems (SPS) is a challenging problem due to the large number of parameters that can influence their performance and the lack of analytical models to anticipate the effect of a change. To tackle this issue, we consider tuning methods where an experimenter is given a limited budget of experiments and needs to carefully allocate this budget to find optimal configurations. We propose in this setting Bayesian Optimization for Configuration Optimization (BO4CO), an auto-tuning algorithm that leverages Gaussian Processes (GPs) to iteratively capture posterior distributions of the configuration spaces and sequentially drive the experimentation. Validation based on Apache Storm demonstrates that our approach locates optimal configurations within a limited experimental budget, with an improvement of SPS performance typically of at least an order of magnitude compared to existing configuration algorithms.
Performance of wavelet packets based multicarrier multicode CDMA communication system in the presence of narrowband jamming

In this paper, the performance of multicarrier (MC), multicode (MCD), code division multiple access (CDMA) system employing wavelet packets (WPs) for modulation in the presence of narrowband jamming is investigated. The system's performance is evaluated by means of bit error rate (BER) and outage probability (Pout). The effects of channel intensity profile, type of wavelet families and their filters length, number of superstreams of wavelets and number of substreams on the system performances were investigated by means of analytical methods and numerical results. Also, the performance of the system is compared to that of MC/MCD-CDMA based on sinusoidal carrier. Results reveal considerable performance improvement of MC/MCD-CDMA system based on WPs carrier over the system based on sinusoidal carrier.
Relay Assignment and Cooperation Maintenance in Wireless Networks

In this paper, we study the relay assignment problem in cooperative wireless networks with self-interested nodes. Such systems should be organized from the point of view of efficiency, stable and providing consistent incentives to all nodes. We propose a cooperation mechanism which includes the cooperative relationship formation stage and cooperation maintenance stage. The cooperative relationship among the nodes can be modeled as an exchange market game (a special coalitional game) where nodes trade transmission power between each other to get diversity gain. The exchange games have a basic assumption that each node conforms to trade agreement. So that, each agent has the option to trade its good in order to get a better one. In such game, \textit{strict core} is considered as individual rational, Pareto optimal and relationship-stable solution. A Cooperation Cycle Formation (CCF) algorithm is proposed to get the strict core solution. But, in networks, some deviated nodes may break the cooperation agreement to get more utility gain. Such deviated behaviors in the cooperation cycles can totally destroyed the cooperation relationship. However, the date transmissions in networks have the repeated element (e.g., the data of each user are transmitted in many time slots). Hence, based on the cooperative cycle formed by CCF, we introduce a repeated game model for cooperation maintenance in the second stage. A Dynamic Punishment and Recover (DPR) mechanism is proposed to punish the deviated behaviors and recover cooperation.
Release of Mast Cell Tryptase into Saliva: A Tool to Diagnose Food Allergy by a Mucosal Challenge Test?

Background: Our aim was to examine whether measurement of the saliva mast cell tryptase (MCT) concentrations before and after a mucosal challenge test with the offending food would be helpful in diagnosing food allergy. Methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of 44 food challenge tests performed in 38 patients between 2006 and 2009. Patients with a suspected history of food allergy chewed the food until they developed symptoms or until the amount of time known from the patients’ history to usually be required for the provocation of symptoms had passed. In 5 patients, saliva samples for the measurement of MCT were collected at minutes 0, 1, 4, 8, 11, and 16 after the first onset of symptoms. The remainder of the patients only had samples taken before chewing and 4 min after the end of the test period. Results: During repeated measurements, MCT peaked about 4 min after the onset of symptoms (p = 0.028). During 33 of the 44 tests (75.0%), we observed oral symptoms during testing; after 25 of the 33 (75.8%) tests evoking symptoms, the saliva MCT concentration increased. The MCT increase was negative in all other tests where no oral symptoms could be provoked. Conclusions: The measurement of saliva MCT 4 min after the onset of symptoms may be helpful to diagnose food allergy. Because of numerous confounding variables, however, a negative saliva MCT increase does not exclude food allergy.
Power levels and packet lengths in random multiple access

Multiple-power-level ALOHA has been proposed to take advantage of the capture phenomenon in order to improve the throughput of a multiple random access system. We study the effect of the use of multiple transmission power levels and of the corresponding packet lengths on the system throughput and energy efficiency. We prove that the single-power-level system in which all transmit at the maximum allowable power level achieves both optimal throughput and energy usage efficiency under a condition on the decodability threshold value.
Systematic variation in the apparent burning area of thermonuclear bursts and its implication for neutron star radius measurement

Precision measurements of neutron star radii can provide a powerful probe of the properties of cold matter beyond nuclear density. Beginning in the late 1970s, it was proposed that the radius could be obtained from the apparent or inferred emitting area during the decay portions of thermonuclear (type I) X-ray bursts. However, this apparent area is generally not constant, preventing a reliable measurement of the source radius. Here, we report for the first time a correlation between the variation of the inferred area and the burst properties, measured in a sample of almost 900 bursts from 43 sources. We found that the rate of change of the inferred area during decay is anticorrelated with the burst decay duration. A Spearman rank correlation test shows that this relation is significant at the < 10 ―45 level for our entire sample, and at the 7 x 10 ―37 level for the 625 bursts without photospheric radius expansion. This anticorrelation is also highly significant for individual sources exhibiting a wide range of burst durations, such as 4U 1636-536 and Aql X-1. We suggest that variations in the colour factor, which relates the colour temperature resulted from the scattering in the neutron star atmosphere to the effective temperature of the burning layer, may explain the correlation. This in turn implies significant variations in the composition of the atmosphere between bursts with long and short durations.
Endophytic diversity of hanging velamen roots in the epiphytic orchid Acampe praemorsa

ABSTRACT Background The ecological functions of the aerial hanging roots (velamen roots) in orchids are not yet fully understood. Aims The aim of this work was to explore the velamen-root-associated fungal community of Acampe praemorsa and its variation in relation to three different geographic locations and to examine the surface characteristics of the velamen roots in attached positions. Methods Segments of velamen roots of A. praemorsa collected from different geographic locations of Kerala, India were screened for the presence of velamen-root-associated fungi. The isolated strains were identified by morphological and nrITS DNA barcoding. Surface characteristics of the host-attached or soil-attached velamen roots were analysed using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Results The SEM observations of the host-attached or soil-attached surface of velamen roots of A. praemorsa show tufts of unicellular hairs arising from the surface of contact. 211 fungal strains belonging to 15 taxa were discovered from the velamen roots; the nrITS nucleotide sequences of 13 taxa are deposited in GenBank. Conclusions Fifteen endophytic fungal associates were identified from the velamen roots of A. praemorsa, which showed variation in their community assemblages in plant specimens from different geographic locations.
Intermediate checkpointing with conflicting access prediction in transactional memory systems

Transactional memory systems promise to reduce the burden of exposing thread-level parallelism in programs by relieving programmers from analyzing complex inter-thread dependences in detail. By encapsulating large program code blocks and executing them as atomic blocks, dependence checking is deferred to run-time at which point one of many conflicting transactions will be committed whereas the others will have to roll-back and re-execute. In current proposals, a checkpoint is taken at the beginning of the atomic block and all execution can be wasted even if the conflicting access happens at the end of the atomic block In this paper, we propose a novel scheme that (1) predicts when the first conflicting access occurs and (2) inserts a checkpoint before it is executed. When the prediction is correct, the only execution discarded is the one that has to be re-done. When the prediction is incorrect, the whole transaction has to be re-executed just as before. Overall, we find that our scheme manages to maintain high prediction accuracy and leads to a quite significant reduction in the number of lost cycles due to roll-backs; the geometric mean speedup across five applications is 16%.
Probabilistic Analysis on Mesh Network Fault Tolerance: Deterministic vs. Stochastic

In this paper, following our recent developed concept of subnet model in mesh networks, we continue to investigate the characterizations of probabilistic fault tolerance for the mesh networks with faulty node. We consider two fault models: each node has deterministic or stochastic failure probability, then we study the fault tolerance of mesh networks based on our novel technique - subnet model. We derive lower bounds on the connectivity probability for mesh networks. Our study shows that mesh networks of practical size can tolerate a large number of faulty nodes thus are reliable enough for multicomputer systems under deterministic or stochastic node failure probability. Comparing with deterministic node failure probability, stochastic model is close to realistic case.
On the Evaluation of VM Provisioning Time in Cloud Platforms for Mission-Critical Infrastructures

Cloud Computing has risen a great interest over the last years as it represents an enabling technology for flexible and ubiquitous access over the network to a set of shared computing resources. This work comes from an industrial experience aiming at exploiting the cloud potential for virtualizing complex infrastructures such as an entire Air Traffic Center (ATC), a clear example of complex SoS (System of Systems). The use of virtualization is convenient because industry can leverage in-house test-beds to perform distributed testing campaigns in pre-operational phases or to design new automatic fail-over mechanisms for fully distributed systems. In order to realize such mitigation and recovery techniques in the ATC field, indeed, a cloud platform is required to guarantee a low VM provisioning time with the objective of minimizing the service disruption. In this perspective, after having introduced the principal concepts and factors of the provisioning time, we propose a deep analysis and comparison for two different Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms, namely Open Stack and Open Nebula (using KVM as hypervisor), that were selected through a preliminary scouting phase.
User Profiling in the Time of HTTPS

Tracking users within and across websites is the base for profiling their interests, demographic types, and other information that can be monetised through targeted advertising and big data analytics. The advent of HTTPS was supposed to make profiling harder for anyone beyond the communicating end-points. In this paper we examine to what extent the above is true. We first show that by knowing the domain that a user visits, either through the Server Name Indication of the TLS protocol or through DNS, an eavesdropper can already derive basic profiling information, especially for domains whose content is homogeneous. For domains carrying a variety of categories that depend on the particular page that a user visits, i.e., news portals, e-commerce sites, etc., the basic profiling technique fails. Still, accurate profiling remains possible through traffic fingerprinting that uses network traffic signatures to infer the exact page that a user is browsing, even under HTTPS. We demonstrate that transport-layer fingerprinting remains robust and scalable despite hurdles such as caching, dynamic content for different device types etc. Overall our results indicate that although HTTPS makes profiling more difficult, it does not eradicate it by any means.
A survey on different video restoration techniques

The recovery of a damaged or altered video file plays a vital role in searching for evidences to resolve a criminal case in digital forensics. Here, a frame-based recovery method for a corrupted video file has been proposed using the specifications of a codec that is used to encode the video data. The existing approaches try to recover a video file with the help of the file structure rather than frame structure. But the problem is that in the case where a target video file is severely fragmented or has a portion of video overwritten by other video content, video file recovery of existing approaches may fail. The proposed approach addresses how to extract video frames from a portion of the video to be restored as well as how to connect extracted video frames together according to the codec specifications. This paper proposes a technique to restore the video data on a frame basis from its corrupted versions where the video data has been significantly fragmented or partly overwritten in the storage media. The proposed method identifies, collects, and connects isolated video frames using the video codec specifications for non-overwritten portions of the video data to restore a corrupted video file.
Existence of Limit Cycles in the Repressilator Equations

The Repressilator is a genetic regulatory network used to model oscillatory behavior of more complex regulatory networks like the circadian clock. We prove that the Repressilator equations undergo a supercritical Hopf bifurcation as the maximal rate of protein synthesis increases, and find a large range of parameters for which there is a cycle.
Termination of Monotone Programs

We present an efficient approach to prove termination of monotone programs with integer variables, an expressive class of loops that is often encountered in computer programs. Our approach is based on a lightweight static analysis method and takes advantage of simple %nice properties of monotone functions. Our preliminary implementation %beats shows that our tool has an advantage over existing tools and can prove termination for a high percentage of loops for a class of benchmarks.
Discrete and Effortful Imagined Movements Do Not Specifically Activate the Autonomic Nervous System

Background The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is activated in parallel with the motor system during cyclical and effortful imagined actions. However, it is not clear whether the ANS is activated during motor imagery of discrete movements and whether this activation is specific to the movement being imagined. Here, we explored these topics by studying the baroreflex control of the cardiovascular system. Methodology/Principal Findings Arterial pressure and heart rate were recorded in ten subjects who executed or imagined trunk or leg movements against gravity. Trunk and leg movements result in different physiological reactions (orthostatic hypotension phenomenon) when they are executed. Interestingly, ANS activation significantly, but similarly, increased during imagined trunk and leg movements. Furthermore, we did not observe any physiological modulation during a control mental-arithmetic task or during motor imagery of effortless movements (horizontal wrist displacements). Conclusions/Significance We concluded that ANS activation during motor imagery is general and not specific and physiologically prepares the organism for the upcoming effortful action.
Supporting the selection of software requirements

The choice of candidate requirements for implementation is a primary determinant of customer satisfaction. It is argued that a set of requirements should be chosen which reflects both the importance and the estimated cost of each candidate requirement. A contribution-based method is proposed which determines importance and estimates cost and industrial experience in applying this method is reported. The results indicate that the contribution of candidate requirements can vary by orders of magnitude. By applying the method, software managers are in a position to select requirements for implementation based on each candidate requirement's contribution.
A model for exploration of factors affecting parallel research and development strategies

Early stages of product development are critical to success of the final product. Decisions made in the early stages will affect the design choices available during the entire development cycle. This thesis examines two research and development strategies. One product development strategy is to make critical decisions as early as possible to manage costs and coordinate work. Making decisions early can help controls costs. Early decisions can also limit the potential value of the product. The value of decisions made at the beginning of the development cycle when the least is known about the problem and the potential solutions are most susceptible to uncertainty. An alternate approach is to employ a parallel research and development strategy. Multiple alternative designs are pursued as if they were the final choice. Decision makers can then make more informed choices for the design of their product. This approach has higher development costs. The net benefit of the project can be higher due to increases in quality and decreases in schedule. Understanding when to apply parallel research and development strategy is an important consideration for those facing uncertainty in their product development cycle. A systems dynamics model was used to illustrate how the intensity and commitment to a parallel research and development strategy affects the efficiency and effectiveness of product development. The model shows that the number of alternatives and the time alternatives are developed before one alternative is chosen are both important factors for effectiveness and efficiency. The model also shows that it is important to strive for variety in the alternatives added.
An Analysis of the Effect of Student Prepared Notecards on Exam Performance

Abstract Allowing the use of student-prepared notecards has been suggested as a way to increase student performance, with the literature showing mixed results. By allowing students to utilize a notecard on some, but not all, tests in principles of macroeconomics, we examine the effect notecards have on student performance. Our analysis utilizes a novel method of controlling for student aptitude and instructor biases in each sample. The results show improvements in performance both as a whole and by level of question based on Bloom’s taxonomy and question difficulty levels. In addition, we find notecard usage by students leads them to become more optimistic and realistic about their test performance, as well as leading students to study more efficiently.
An Extensible Partitioning Framework for Safety-Critical Systems

Certification of safety-critical systems requires a separation of certified and non-safe components. Up to today, partitioning operating systems, that have the capability to isolate software components in safety-critical systems, are almost exclusively found in complex embedded systems with standardized runtime environments, e.g. in the avionic industry. On the other hand, their use is highly uncommon in deeply-embedded systems, that are frequently characterized by severe power, memory, and latency constraints. Here we show, how partitioning can be efficiently provided in deeply-embedded systems. For this purpose, we propose a framework for highly customized and constrained embedded devices, which achieves the separation of software components using a legacy real-time operating system. The approach focuses on the flexibility and low complexity of the framework in order to minimize the effort for safety certification. The framework is modular and extensible.
Impacts of MicroRNA Gene Polymorphisms on the Susceptibility of Environmental Factors Leading to Carcinogenesis in Oral Cancer

Background MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been regarded as a critical factor in targeting oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes in tumorigenesis. The genetic predisposition of miRNAs-signaling pathways related to the development of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) remains unresolved. This study examined the associations of polymorphisms with four miRNAs with the susceptibility and clinicopathological characteristics of OSCC. Methodology/Principal Findings A total of 895 male subjects, including 425 controls and 470 male oral cancer patients, were selected. Polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) and real-time PCR were used to analyze miRNA146a, miRNA196, miRNA499 and miRNA149 genetic polymorphisms between the control group and the case group. This study determined that a significant association of miRNA499 with CC genotype, as compared to the subjects with TT genotype, had a higher risk (AOR = 4.52, 95% CI = 1.24–16.48) of OSCC. Moreover, an impact of those four miRNAs gene polymorphism on the susceptibility of betel nut and tobacco consumption leading to oral cancer was also revealed. We found a protective effect between clinical stage development (AOR = 0.58, 95% CI = 0.36–0.94) and the tumor size growth (AOR = 0.47, 95% CI = 0.28–0.79) in younger patients (age<60). Conclusions Our results suggest that genetic polymorphism of miRNA499 is associated with oral carcinogenesis, and the interaction of the miRNAs genetic polymorphism and environmental carcinogens is also related to an increased risk of oral cancer in Taiwanese.
Strongly consistent nonparametric forecasting and regression for stationary ergodic sequences

Let {(Xi,Â Yi)} be a stationary ergodic time series with (X,Â Y) values in the product space Rd[circle times operator]R. This study offers what is believed to be the first strongly consistent (with respect to pointwise, least-squares, and uniform distance) algorithm for inferring m(x)=E[Y0Â Â X0=x] under the presumption that m(x) is uniformly Lipschitz continuous. Auto-regression, or forecasting, is an important special case, and as such our work extends the literature of nonparametric, nonlinear forecasting by circumventing customary mixing assumptions. The work is motivated by a time series model in stochastic finance and by perspectives of its contribution to the issues of universal time series estimation.
A sharp bound for the Stein-Wainger oscillatory integral

Let ρ d denote the space of all real polynomials of degree at most d. It is an old result of Stein and Wainger that Formula math. for some constant C d depending only on d. On the other hand, Carbery, Wainger and Wright claim that the true order of magnitude of the above principal value integral is log d. We prove that Formula math.