Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scalable real-time control of intersections in urban traffic networks thanks to a leader-follower coordination approach

This paper proposes a distributed coordination mechanism between local feedback controllers that adapt the switching times of traffic lights at neighboring intersections. Some heavily loaded intersections are designated “leader intersections”. There, a local control agent sets switching times to minimize the expected queues, knowing vehicle passing times at local upstream sensors only, and sends its intended switching plan to neighboring “follower intersections”. Each follower agent uses this information to try to minimize the waste of green capacity at the neighboring leader intersection: in addition to minimizing its local queues, it also takes into account the expected queues that their switching decisions imply for their leader. We show, in realistic simulations, how the coordination introduced by this element allows to reduce queues not only at the leaders, but also at the follower nodes. The potential and key aspects of this scalable and simple coordinated control method for other applications is briefly discussed.
Male Infertility, Impaired Sperm Motility, and Hydrocephalus in Mice Deficient in Sperm-Associated Antigen 6

ABSTRACT Gene targeting was used to create mice lacking sperm-associated antigen 6 (Spag6), the murine orthologue of Chlamydomonas PF16, an axonemal protein containing eight armadillo repeats predicted to be important for flagellar motility and stability of the axoneme central apparatus. Within 8 weeks of birth, approximately 50% of Spag6-deficient animals died with hydrocephalus. Spag6-deficient males surviving to maturity were infertile. Their sperm had marked motility defects and was morphologically abnormal with frequent loss of the sperm head and disorganization of flagellar structures, including loss of the central pair of microtubules and disorganization of the outer dense fibers and fibrous sheath. We conclude that Spag6 is essential for sperm flagellar motility and that it is important for the maintenance of the structural integrity of mature sperm. The occurrence of hydrocephalus in the mutant mice also implicates Spag6 in the motility of ependymal cilia.
Edge-enhanced Dynamic MR imaging using compressed sensing

The critical challenge in Dynamic MR imaging is the trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution due to the limited availability of acquisition time. To address this it is imperative to under-sample k-space and develop specific reconstruction techniques. We propose an improvement to the well-known compressed sensing-based Total Variation (TV) minimization constrained reconstruction scheme by utilizing the gradient information obtained by a static high resolution data set to improve the quality of the dynamic volumes in the time series. This high resolution data set is assumed to be obtained before the start of the dynamic acquisitions. For every dynamic data acquisition, a weighting factor is estimated based on the gradient image and time elapsed, to compute the modified value of the pixels. Under sampled data is acquired using variable density sampling technique and TV minimization is used for reconstruction. The proposed method is tested on 6 real dynamic time-series consisting of 2 breast data sets and 4 abdomen data sets spanning 840 images in all. For data availability of only 10%, quality assessment metrics shows an average improvement in SSIM quality index of up to 36% on breast data and about 7% on abdomen data, for the proposed method as against the baseline TV-reconstruction.
Aggregation and ensemble of fully connected and convolutional activations for image retrieval

Recently many works using deep convolutional neural networks for image classification and retrieval have suggested that activations of the network layers (CNN activations) are able to serve as good descriptors. In this paper, we investigate two popular activations: fully connected and convolutional activations, and propose a simple but effective method for aggregating those local activations to compact global descriptors (MPFC-SPC). Firstly, we use max pooling of fully connected activations (MPFC) and sum pooling of convolutional activations (SPC) as aggregation methods. Then we blend MPFC and SPC descriptors according to the complementary properties between these two activations. Our method achieves competitive results compared with other related state-of-the-art CNN descriptors and almost doesn't increase time overhead. In addition, we perform multi-scale vector of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD) on MPFC and SPC. Further improved performance with ensemble of multiple levels' descriptors verifies the effectiveness of our method.
The Stellar Initial Mass Function in 2007: A Year for Discovering Variations

The characteristic mass M_c and slope Gamma of the IMF are reviewed for clusters, field regions, galaxies, and regions formed during cosmological times. Local star formation has a somewhat uniform M_c and Gamma. Statistical variations in Gamma are summarized, as are the limitations imposed by these variations. Cosmological star formation appears to have both a higher M_c and a slightly shallower slope at intermediate to high stellar mass. The center of the Milky Way may have a shallow slope too. Field regions have slightly steeper slopes than clusters, but this could be the result of enhanced drift of low mass stars out of clusters and associations. Dwarf galaxies also have steeper slopes. Results from the observation of pre-stellar clumps are reviewed too. Pre-stellar clumps appear to have about the same mass function as stars and are therefore thought to be the main precursors to stars. If this is the case, then the IMF is generally determined by gas-phase processes. Brown dwarf formation also shares many characteristics of star formation, suggesting that they form by similar mechanisms.
Stock price jumps: news and volume play a minor role

In order to understand the origin of stock price jumps, we cross-correlate high-frequency time series of stock returns with different news feeds. We find that neither idiosyncratic news nor market wide news can explain the frequency and amplitude of price jumps. We find that the volatility patterns around jumps and around news are quite different: jumps are followed by increased volatility, whereas news tend on average to be followed by lower volatility levels. The shape of the volatility relaxation is also markedly different in the two cases. Finally, we provide direct evidence that large transaction volumes are_not_ responsible for large price jumps. We conjecture that most price jumps are induced by order flow fluctuations close to the point of vanishing liquidity.
Design of a digital power IC

To satisfy today's power demands of a VLSI chip, the digital power IC has been designed in order to have more programmability, faster transient response and higher efficiency. Thank to the advance of the semiconductor manufacturing process. It has enabled the ability to integrate the power MOSFET, the analog and the digital circuits into one chip. In this paper, a 12V, 2A digital synchronous DC-DC buck converter IC with the nonlinear control (NLC) to improve the transient response and the pulse-skipping mode (PSM) to improve the power conversion efficiency has been designed and fabricated. The I2C is provided to let the host controller in-situ program and monitor the operating conditions of the IC. Both the loading current and the operating mode transient response of the IC have been demonstrated.
Dynamic scheduling of MicroGrid connected system with storage devices

Technological development and restructuring of power system have encouraged the Independent Power Producers (IPPs) to connect their Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to the existing power system. DERs can be used to its maximum efficiency through MicroGrid (MG). This also led to a path for Smart MicroGrid (SMG) where DERs are scheduled and dispatched economically as well as eco-friendly. Due to intermittent nature of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) in MG and dynamic nature of demand static dispatch of modern power system is not of any use. Thus, it is very important to research economical scheduling and associated dispatch of power system connected with MG. This considers random variations of DERs referred as dynamic dispatch. This paper presents the economic as well as environmental dispatch scheduling of a power system connected to MG composed of different distributed energy resources and storage devices. The overall generation cost of static and dynamic dispatch of proposed system has also been compared. A mathematical model of given system has been formulated considering all the system constraints and ramp rate constraint of generators to minimize the operational and pollutant treatment cost. The optimization study has been carried out in two different modes: (i) Grid connected with MG; and (ii) Isolated grid operation. Mixed Integer Non Linear Programming technique has been used to solve the Unit Commitment (UC) and dispatch problem. The influence of scheduling strategies on operational cost and pollutant treatment cost has been obtained and compared and the impact of MG interconnection with the power system has been shown in terms of operational cost, pollutant treatment cost, total cost and on the unit commitment of power system to reduce the burden on grid generators.
Succession and Replacement of Bacterial Populations in the Caecum of Egg Laying Hens over Their Whole Life

In this study we characterised the development of caecal microbiota in egg laying hens over their commercial production lifespan, from the day of hatching until 60 weeks of age. Using pyrosequencing of V3/V4 variable regions of 16S rRNA genes for microbiota characterisation, we were able to define 4 different stages of caecal microbiota development. The first stage lasted for the first week of life and was characterised by a high prevalence of Enterobacteriaceae (phylum Proteobacteria). The second stage lasted from week 2 to week 4 and was characterised by nearly an absolute dominance of Lachnospiraceae and Ruminococcaceae (both phylum Firmicutes). The third stage lasted from month 2 to month 6 and was characterised by the succession of Firmicutes at the expense of Bacteroidetes. The fourth stage was typical for adult hens in full egg production aged 7 months or more and was characterised by a constant ratio of Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes formed by equal numbers of the representatives of both phyla.
A Robust, Scalable Framework for Conducting Climate Change Susceptibility Analyses

Abstract : Resource managers must consider climate change during their planning processes as future landscapes have the potential to vary greatly from current conditions. Military training and testing lands are extremely important and must be assessed for potential impacts of climate change. Climate change susceptibility analyses are commonly limited in their scope, thereby requiring multiple independent analyses within the same region. Without a standardized, comprehensive analysis method, the ability to prioritize areas susceptible to climate change within a region of interest is hindered. This deficit limits the applicability of results as well, further illustrating the need to develop a standardized method that incorporates multiple factors into a scalable framework to provide a more complete climate change susceptibility analysis. This framework must allow individual users the option of weighting environmental variables differently based on conservation concerns in managed areas. In this technical note, the authors present a method that allows multiple stakeholders each with their own management requirements and concerns for assessing susceptibility to use a common framework to assess climate change susceptibility. This framework enables improved analytical results of climate change to be incorporated into long-term regional conservation planning. The framework should prove to be a valuable tool for resource managers faced with integrating the potential impacts of climate change into their natural resource plans.
On testing timing-speculative circuits

By allowing the occurrence of infrequent timing errors and correcting them online, circuit-level timing speculation is one of the most promising variation-tolerant design techniques. How to effectively test timing-speculative circuits, however, has not been addressed in the literature. This is a challenging problem because conventional scan techniques cannot provide sufficient controllability and observability for such circuits. In this paper, we propose novel techniques to achieve high fault coverage for timing-speculative circuits without incurring high design-for-testability cost. Experimental results on various benchmark circuits demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
CAMT: Core assisted multicast tree for ad hoc networks

Generally, the multicast routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) build and maintain a group shared (tree or mesh-based) multicast delivery structure, which results in inefficient propagation of multicast traffic. In this article, a source tree based multicast routing protocol CAMT is proposed. CAMT employs only a fraction of nodes (core nodes) to disseminate their own and their neighbors' multicast interests to the network, while assuring the representation of all multicast receivers in these messages. As a result, only a small number of multicast group interest messages are generated. Moreover, CAMT benefits from the multipoint relay (MPR) optimizations to minimize retransmissions of these messages. Based on the information learnt through these messages, any multicast sender can generate a shortest path tree (rooted at itself), spanning across all core nodes interested in a particular multicast group. Simulation results indicate that the proposed protocol performs well under different network conditions.
Energy Efficient Distributed Connected Coverage Algorithms with Dynamic Coverage Maintenance in Wireless Sensor Networks

A combined algorithm is required to select an optimal set of sensors, satisfying the conditions of coverage and connectivity. Since topological changes have significant impact on the coverage quality, there is a need for dynamic coverage maintenance algorithms. In this paper, an energy efficient distributed connected coverage (EEDCC) algorithm and a set of dynamic coverage maintenance (DCM) algorithms have been proposed. EEDCC aims to reduce the energy consumption with a lower communication overhead. The DCM algorithms aid in the tracking of changes in network topology thereby addressing the issues related to dynamic coverage and loss recovery. These algorithms would assist in the adaptive maintenance of the coverage either by migrating sensor node or by updating the radii accordingly. Simulations results show that the EEDCC-DCM algorithms attain significant reduction of energy, with strong connectivity and coverage.
Convenient links for the estimation of hedonic price indexes: the case of unique, infrequently traded assets

Hedonic methods are a prominent approach in the construction of quality‐adjusted price indexes. This paper shows that the process of computing such indexes is substantially simplified if arithmetic (geometric) price indexes are computed based on exponential (log‐linear) hedonic functions estimated by the Poisson pseudo‐maximum likelihood (ordinary least squares) method. A Monte Carlo simulation study based on housing data illustrates the convenience of the links identified and the very attractive properties of the Poisson estimator in the hedonic framework.
Political analysis of shareholder activism in emergent democracies: a case study of Nigeria

Shareholder activism has become a force for good in the extant corporate governance literature. In this paper, we present a case study of Nigeria, characterised by a very turbulent polity, to show how shareholder activism, as a corporate governance mechanism, can constitute a space for unhealthy politics and politicking. As a result, we point out some translational challenges, and suggest more caution, in the diffusion of corporate governance practices across different institutional environments. We primarily contribute to the literature on corporate governance in Africa, whilst creating an understanding of the political embeddedness of shareholder activism in different institutional contexts – i.e. a step closer to a political theorising of shareholder activism.
Online Web Cluster Capacity Estimation and Its Application to Energy Conservation

Designers of data centers and Web servers aim to make on-demand allocation of resources to clients in order to lower the deployment cost of hosted services. Moreover, they must also minimize operating costs, such as energy consumption, by matching service-capacity demand with resource supply. However, since the term "capacity" is typically defined vaguely or inadequately, it is difficult to assess resource needs and, hence, servers, which are several times larger than needed at runtime, are usually deployed. The time-varying nature of the workload model further complicates the problem and necessitates an online capacity-estimation solution. To address this overprovisioning problem, we first define the capacity of a server cluster as the sustainable throughput subject to a request retransmission ratio constraint and then analyze different approaches to capacity estimation in a running system. Various capacity-estimation mechanisms, such as offline benchmarking and CPU-utilization evaluation, are discussed and compared with our queue-monitoring method. We employ several different data-collection methods (application instrumentation, user-space tools, simple network management protocol (SNMP), and kernel modules) to compare their effects on estimation accuracy. Of these, queue monitoring is found to provide a good and stable estimate of server capacity. To validate this finding, we propose a simple cluster- resizing mechanism and evaluate the energy-conservation performance. A good combination of data collection and online capacity estimation is found to make significantly more energy savings than traditional approaches (that is, static estimation and scheduled capacity). Our experimental results show that more than 40 percent of energy can be saved for regular daily usage patterns without any prior knowledge of the workload and that long start-up and shutdown delays affect energy savings considerably.
Two in One Image Secret Sharing Scheme with Increased Scalability

Secret sharing schemes allows information to be shared among a group of participants so that all together (or qualified subsets) of participants can recover the information. A visual cryptography scheme (VCS) is a cryptographic technique which allows visual information (e.g. printed text, handwritten notes, and picture) to be encrypted in such a way that the decryption can be performed by the human visual system, without the aid of computers. The performance of any visual cryptography scheme depends on various measures such as pixel expansion, contrast, security, accuracy, computational complexity etc. This work throws light on the theoretical background and the comparison on the various visual cryptography schemes. Here introduces a 2 in 1 scheme which can embed additional information with reduced shadow size and better visual quality of revealed image. Compared with the two-in-one image secret sharing scheme (TiOISSS), this scheme might achieve smaller shadow size with acceptable visual quality. The paper discusses Sharing More Information Gray Visual Cryptography Scheme (SMIGVCS) which can embed additional information with reduced shadow size and better visual quality of revealed image. The main results of this paper include implementation of a visual cryptographic scheme with a reduced share size.
Augmented reliable multicast CORBA event service: a multimedia middleware

Continuous distributed interactive media applications require QoS-capable middleware platforms, in order to meet stringent requirements in terms of losses, bandwidth and jitter. Existing middleware platforms, such as OMG Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) do not meet these requirements. The major part of the this paper is dedicated to the proposal, presentation and discussion of a middleware platform - named Augmented Reliable Multicast CORBA Event Service, ARMS - developed with the aim to provide quality of service mechanisms for continuous distributed interactive medium support.
Distributed Coordination of Self-Organizing Mechanisms in Communication Networks

The fast development of the self-organizing networks (SON) technology in mobile networks renders critical the problem of coordinating SON functionalities operating simultaneously. SON functionalities can be viewed as control loops that may need to be coordinated to guarantee conflict-free operation, to enforce stability of the network, and to achieve performance gain. This paper proposes a distributed solution for coordinating SON functionalities. It uses Rosen's concave games framework in conjunction with convex optimization. The SON functionalities are modeled as linear ordinary differential equations. The stability of the system is first evaluated using a basic control theory approach. The coordination solution consists in finding a linear map (called coordination matrix) that stabilizes the system of SON functionalities. It is proven that the solution remains valid in a noisy environment using stochastic approximation. A practical example involving three different SON functionalities deployed in base stations of a long-term evolution network demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed method.
Draft Genome Sequence of Enterococcus mundtii SL 16, an Indigenous Gut Bacterium of the Polyphagous Pest Spodoptera littoralis

Insects are the most abundant and diverse animal class on Earth, and they are associated with an amazing variety of symbiotic microorganisms, which participate in many relationships with the hosts (Douglas, 2015). For example, the fungal symbiont (Leucoagaricus gongylophorus) of leaf-cutting ants produces diverse enzymes for the degradation of plant material (Kooij et al., 2016). Similarly, Bacillus pumilus isolated from the gut of wood boring Mesomorphus sp. (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae) exhibits significant cellulolytic and xylose isomerase activities (Balsingh et al., 2016). The Lepidoptera, including moths and butterflies, is one of the most widespread and widely recognizable insect orders in the world. Although butterflies and moths play an important role in the natural ecosystem as pollinators and as food in the food chain, their leaf-chewing larvae are often problematic in agriculture, as their main source of food is live plants (Mithofer and Boland, 2012). The leafworm Spodoptera littoralis (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) is a highly polyphagous lepidopteran pest found worldwide and also an important model system used in a variety of biological research. Recent extensive surveys of its microbiome reveal that Enterococcus mundtii is one of the predominant gut microorganisms of S. littoralis and present at high frequency (Tang et al., 2012; Chen et al., 2016; Teh et al., 2016). Particularly, a stable isotope labeling-based approach suggested that this phylotype was also highly metabolically active inside the host across life history of S. littoralis, indicating the significant role played by E. mundtii in host biology (Shao et al., 2014). Therefore, the symbiotic E. mundtii probably constitutes a key factor for the success of this generalist herbivore in adapting to different environments and food sources. The aim of this study was to produce a genome sequence of the strain SL 16, which would assist in understanding of the coevolution of the microbe and the insect host. The dataset has been submitted to NCBI Whole Genome Shotgun (WGS) projects and is reported here, providing an overview of the genome sequence and relevant features of gut symbiotic E. mundtii.