Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stormgen - A Domain specific Language to create ad-hoc Storm Topologies

Large-scale distributed data processing has gained significant momentum in research in the past decade. With the introduction of MapReduce, many frameworks have been developed that either implement MapReduce or provide additional functionalities useful in a larger domain. While the framework introduced in the MapReduce paper performs batch-processing of data, Apache Storm performs real-time computation on data. Storm does this with the help of Topologies, and the constituents of the Topology are developed using General-purpose Programming Languages (GPL). A Domain-specific Language (DSL) can provide a higher level of abstraction over GPLs and model the specialized features of a particular domain in a better way. In this paper, we propose the development of Storm Topology generator (Stormgen), a DSL for Storm Topology development, and show how the specifications of this DSL can be utilized during the code generation of exact Storm Topology components in Java. The parser and code generator for Stormgen's syntax are developed using the Eclipse Modelling Framework. The practical use of Stormgen is illustrated with a case study which considers the modelling of a Topology for the Word Count application.
Natural stimuli evoke dynamic sequences of states in sensory cortical ensembles

Although temporal coding is a frequent topic of neurophysiology research, trial-to-trial variability in temporal codes is typically dismissed as noise and thought to play no role in sensory function. Here, we show that much of this supposed “noise” faithfully reflects stimulus-related processes carried out in coherent neural networks. Cortical neurons responded to sensory stimuli by progressing through sequences of states, identifiable only in examinations of simultaneously recorded ensembles. The specific times at which ensembles transitioned from state to state varied from trial to trial, but the state sequences were reliable and stimulus-specific. Thus, the characterization of ensemble responses in terms of state sequences captured facets of sensory processing that are missing from, and obscured in, other analyses. This work provides evidence that sensory neurons act as parts of a systems-level dynamic process, the nature of which can best be appreciated through observation of distributed ensembles.
Online mechanism design for scheduling non-preemptive jobs under uncertain supply and demand

We design new algorithms for the problem of allocating uncertain flexible, and multi-unit demand online given uncertain supply, in order to maximise social welfare. The algorithms can be seen as extensions of the expectation and consensus algorithms from the domain of online scheduling. The problem is especially relevant to the future smart grid, where uncertain output from renewable generators and conventional supply need to be integrated and matched to flexible, non-preemptive demand. To deal with uncertain supply and demand, the algorithms generate multiple scenarios which can then be solved offline. Furthermore, we use a novel method of reweighting the scenarios based on their likelihood whenever new information about supply becomes available. An additional improvement allows the selection of multiple non-preemptive jobs at the same time. Finally, our main contribution is a novel online mechanism based on these extensions, where it is in the agents' best interest to truthfully reveal their preferences. The experimental evaluation of the extended algorithms and different variants of the mechanism show that both achieve more than 85% of the offline optimal economic efficiency. Importantly, the mechanism yields comparable efficiency, while, in contrast to the algorithms, it allows for strategic agents.
Realization of AdS Vacua in Attractor Mechanism on Generalized Geometries

We evaluate flux vacua attractor equations in type IIA string theory compactified on generalized geometries with orientifold projections. The four-dimensional N = 1 superpotential in this compactification is described as a sum of the Ramond-Ramond superpotential and the one described by the (non)geometric flux charges. We demonstrate a single modulus model in which supersymmetric AdS and Minkowski solutions are classified by means of the discriminants of the two superpotentials. We further study various configurations without the Ramond-Ramond flux charges. There we also find supersymmetric AdS vacua both in the case of compactifications on the generalized geometry with SU(3) × SU(3) structures, and on the manifold with SU(3)-structure without the nongeometric flux charges. Especially, in the latter case, we have to introduce a correction into the prepotential of the special geometry in order to realize consistent vacua. This deformation is interpreted as the α corrections caused by the back reaction of the geometric fluxes on the compactified space.
Simuler une “artificial society”: organisation sociale, gouvernance et attitudes sociétales

The attempts to model past societies by the latest techniques, such as multi-agent systems, are limited by the difficulties in modeling the processes of Human and Social Sciences: social organization, social rules, management, societal attitudes. While addressing this problem, the archaeologist is often led to select the climatic change and the economic processes, which are easier to quantify and model and therefore to find only “eco-systemic” explanations for changes in societies. We are here trying to initiate work on the modeling of such processes, the foundations of which are found in the work of earlier authors (history, anthropology, sociology).
Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity

Great apes, our closest living relatives, live longer and mature later than most other mammals and modern humans are even later‐maturing and potentially longer‐lived. Evolutionary life‐history theory seeks to explain cross‐species differences in these variables and the covariation between them. That provides the foundation for a hypothesis that a novel role for grandmothers underlies the shift from an ape‐like ancestral pattern to one more like our own in the first widely successful members of genus Homo. This hypothesis links four distinctive features of human life histories: 1) our potential longevity, 2) our late maturity, 3) our midlife menopause, and 4) our early weaning with next offspring produced before the previous infant can feed itself. I discuss the problem, then, using modern humans and chimpanzees to represent, respectively, genus Homo and australopithecines, I focus on two corollaries of this grandmother hypothesis: 1) that ancestral age‐specific fertility declines persisted in our genus, while 2) senescence in other aspects of physiological performance slowed down. The data are scanty but they illustrate similarities in age‐specific fertility decline and differences in somatic durability that are consistent with the hypothesis that increased longevity in our genus is a legacy of the “reproductive” role of ancestral grandmothers. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 15:380–400, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Acoustic factor analysis based universal background model for robust speaker verification in noise

The Universal Background Model (UBM) is known as a speaker independent Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) trained on a large speech corpus containing many speakers’ recordings in various conditions. When noisy test data is involved, UBM trained on clean data is generally not optimal. Using noisy data for UBM training, however, creates a bias towards the specific development noise samples resulting in degraded speaker recognition performance in unseen noise types. In this study, we utilize an Acoustic Factor Analysis (AFA) based UBM that iteratively learns the dominant feature sub-spaces in each mixture component, resulting in a more robust model. We explore two variants of the model: one with an isotropic and the other with a diagonal residual noise. The Maximum-Likelihood (ML) training formulations of the models are provided. The latent variables of the model, termed acoustic factors, are used as features to train the second stage of factor analysis parameters, i.e., the traditional i-vector extractor. Experiments performed on the 2012 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE) indicate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in both clean and noisy conditions. Index Terms: speaker verification, NIST SRE 2012, noisy data, acoustic factor analysis
Self-organize multi-channel random selection medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes a novel multi-channel medium access control (MAC) that is based on CSMA/CA mechanism. The objective of this research is to evaluate the possibility of increasing network capacity and addressing collision problem of wireless sensor network comprising of low spec physical hardware. The proposed protocol can be implemented into wireless sensor network platform i.e. MICAz, Tmote-Sky without any additional hardware or firmware. Experiment results show that the proposed protocol can effectively improve the network performance compared with traditional single channel MAC.
Checking Access to Protected Members in the Java Virtual Machine

This paper illustrates how to check access to protected members in the JVM, which is not explained in [7] and, to the author’s knowledge, has been completely neglected in the research literature. This aspect of enforcing type safety in the JVM is rather subtle and its correct implementation is not straightforward, as also evidenced by a bug in Sun’s Java 2 SDK version 1.4 that causes some illegal programs to be accepted and some legal programs to be rejected (see [3] for concrete examples with source code). Java compilers can easily check access to protected members and constructors by looking them up in their declaring classes, which must be available in source or bytecode form. Checking access to protected members in the JVM is made difficult by dynamic class loading.
Mining Patient Experiences on Web 2.0 - A Case Study in the Pharmaceutical Industry

An increasing number of patients and family members interact online and exchange their experiences with diseases and therapies. The huge amount of online health data represents a rich source of knowledge pharmaceutical companies. The analysis of this data enables the identification of strengths and weaknesses of their drugs. An approach is presented which allows the extraction and analysis of patient experiences with drugs expressed in online reviews by combining methods coming from text mining and data mining. The approach is exemplarily applied to a data set comprising patients' experiences with smoking deterrents.
Capacity of the channel with action-dependent state and reversible input

We consider a problem of coding for channels with action-dependent states available noncausally to the encoder where the decoder is additionally required to be able to decode the channel input reliably. The complete characterization of the channel capacity is given in this work to complete our previous result presented in ISIT 2011. The key contribution essentially lies in the converse proof of the capacity result where the restriction on the set of input distribution is shown to coincide with the two-stage coding condition. Some interesting discussion on the two-stage coding condition and the connection to the multiple-access setting is also provided.
Hepatoprotective and antidiabetic activities of Fraxinus angustifolia Vahl extracts in animal models: characterization by high performance liquid chromatography analysis.

BACKGROUND/AIM The present study was designed to explore antidiabetic and hepatoprotective potentials of Fraxinus angustifolia leaf (FAL) and bark (FAB) extracts in vivo. MATERIALS AND METHODS Streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic rats, pretreated with the extracts (25 and 50 mg/kg), were monitored for fasting blood glucose (FBG) levels. Hepatoprotective potential was examined after injection of an excessive dose of paracetamol (10 g/60 kg) by analysis of biochemical parameters (transaminases, bilirubin), malondialdehyde (MDA) levels, and histological sections. high performance liquid chromatography analysis was also performed for partial characterization. RESULTS A considerable hypoglycemic effect was noticed 2 h after the STZ-induction, with a higher efficiency (P < 0.05) for FAL (68%) as compared with FAB (57%). A significant (P < 0.05) reduction in MDA was observed for paracetamol-fed mice pretreated with FAL (50 mg/kg), FAB (50 mg/kg), or both (25 mg/kg each) extracts, and the MDA levels for the three conditions were 0.290 ± 0.034, 0.340 ± 0.038, and 0.25 ± 0.058 nmoles/mg of liver tissue, respectively). Hence, simultaneous treatment provided a better protection. Histological observations confirmed the higher hepatoprotective potential of FAL over FAB extracts. CONCLUSION The obtained results indicate the possibility of pharmacological exploitation of F. angustifolia extracts in the treatment of diabetes and associated liver diseases.
Normalized Auditory Attention LevelsFor Automatic Audio Surveillance

In this paper, we define features that can be computed along audio signals in order to assess the level of auditory attention on a normalized scale, i.e. between 0 and 1. The proposed features are derived from a time-frequency representation of audio signals and highlight salient regions such as regions with high loudness, temporal and frequency contrasts. Normalized auditory attention levels can be used to detect sudden and unexpected changes of audio textures and to focus the attention of a surveillance operator to sound segments of interest in audio streams that are monitored. The proposed algorithms have been tested on audio material consisting of security-relevant audio events (e.g., gun shot, glass breaking, woman scream, siren sound, etc) embedded in sound ambiences in public places (e.g., airport hall, metro station, subway train, sport stadium, etc).
Higher-order and crystalline topology in a phenomenological tight-binding model of lead telluride

In this work, we revisit the model of PbTe presented in [E. Fradkin, E. Dagotto, and D. Boyanovsky, Phys. Rev. Lett. 57, 2967 (1986)]. We show that the low energy theory of this model corresponds to a (higher-order) topological crystalline insulator in space group $Fm\bar{3}m1'$, diagnosable by symmetry indicators. We show that the gapless fermions found on antiphase domain walls are the topological boundary modes of the system, due to a nonvanishing mirror Chern number. Furthermore, we show that any symmetric completion of the model must be in this same topological phase. Finally, we comment on the relationship of this model to realistic PbTe, which has recently been predicted to have a phase which realizes same bulk symmetry indicators.
Design of potential therapeutic peptides and carriers to inhibit amyloid β peptide aggregation

The conformational changes and aggregation of amyloid β peptide (Aβ) are associated to Alzheimer's disease (AD). The aim of this work is to study the structure and fibril assembly of Aβ in the presence of charged and nonionic amphiphiles, and β-sheet breaker peptides/conjugates. It is expected that these molecules will inhibit Aβ aggregation. Liposome systems will be developed as carriers for these peptide conjugates to cross the brain blood barrier (BBB).
Pulmonary Edema in Healthy Subjects in Extreme Conditions

There are several pieces of evidence showing occurrence of pulmonary edema (PE) in healthy subjects in extreme conditions consisting of extreme psychophysical demand in normal environment and psychophysical performances in extreme environment. A combination of different mechanisms, such as mechanical, hemodynamic, biochemical, and hypoxemic ones, may underlie PE leading to an increase in lung vascular hydrostatic pressure and lung vascular permeability and/or a downregulation of the alveolar fluid reabsorption pathways. PE can be functionally detected by closing volume measurement and lung diffusing capacity test to different gases or directly visualized by multiple imaging techniques. Among them chest ultrasonography can detect and quantify the extravascular lung water, creating “comet-tail” ultrasound artefacts (ULCs) from water-thickened pulmonary interlobular septa. In this paper the physiopathological mechanisms of PE, the functional and imaging techniques applied to detect and quantify the phenomenon, and three models of extreme conditions, that is, ironman athletes, climbers and breath-hold divers, are described.
Comparing two methods for crowdsourcing speech transcription

This paper presents the results of an experimental study conducted with the aim of comparing two methods for crowdsourcing speech transcription that incorporate two different quality control mechanisms (i.e. explicit versus implicit) and that are based on two different processes (i.e. parallel versus iterative). In the Gold Standard method the same speech segment is transcribed in parallel by multiple contributors whose reliability is checked with respect to some reference transcriptions provided by experts. On the other hand, in the Dual Pathway method two independent groups of contributors work on the same set of transcriptions refining them in an iterative way until they converge, and thus eliminating the need to have reference transcriptions and to check transcription quality in a separate phase. These two methods were tested on about half an hour of broadcast news speech and for two different European languages, namely German and Italian. Both methods obtained good results in terms of Word Error Rate (WER) and compare well with the word disagreement rate of experts on the same data.
Hatching, attachment, and outgrowth of mouse blastocysts in vitro: fixed nitrogen requirements.

Hatching, attachment and outgrowth of mouse blastocysts in vitro are dependent upon the presence of specific free amino acids in the medium. When grown in Eagle's Basal Medium (BME) containing 1% dialyzed fetal calf serum, 67% of blastocysts hatch. Omission of histidine, methionine, threonine, tryptophan, tyrosine, or valine from BME significantly reduces the incidence of hatching. For attachment to occur, cystine and lysine are also required, and for trophoblastic outgrowth, every essential amino acid except isoleucine is required. Omission of glutamine reduces the extent of outgrowth. Addition of higher (10X–20X BME) concentrations of cystine, histidine, or lysine increases the extent of outgrowth, but addition of 10−5–10−2M concentrations of non-essential amino acids does not stimulate either hatching, attachment, or outgrowth. When all essential amino acids are at optimal concentrations, nearly 100% hatching occurs in a chemically defined medium in the absence of a macromolecular fixed nitrogen source. Extensive trophoblastic outgrowth and inner cell mass growth occur at optimal amino acid concentrations, but only in the presence of serum. Under these conditions, a collagen substrate is not necessary for growth and differentiation of the inner cell mass into endoderm and ectoderm in vitro. These requirements indicate that during post-blastocyst development in vitro the mouse embryo gradually becomes dependent upon specific exogenous fixed nitrogen sources, including essential amino acids and a non-dialyzable component from serum.
Mdm2 and p53 expressions and Ki-67 proliferative index in fibrohistiocytic tumors

Objective: Various genetic alterations including inactivation of tumor suppressor genes and activation of oncogenes, are described in different types of neoplasms as well as soft -tissue tumors. The purpose of the present study is to evaluate the expressions of mdm2 and p53, and Ki-67 proliferative activity and to investigate their interrelations with the clinicopathologic parameters in fibrohistiocytic soft tissue tumors. Study design: Of the 43 patients diagnosed as fibrohistiocytic tumors including 30 fibroblastic neoplasms and 13 undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcomas were studied. All slides were stained with mdm2, p53 antibodies and Ki-67 by using the standard biotin immunoperoxidase method. Nuclear staining was scored semiquantitatively for all of the cases. Results: p53 and mdm2 expressions were observed in 47.5% and 20% of the whole tumors, respectively. No association was found between p53 and mdm2 expressions and the clinicopathologic parameters; whereas, there was statistically significant difference between fibroblastic neoplasms and undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcomas in terms of p53 and mdm2 expressions. Ki-67 index showed a statistically significant relation with tumor grade and expression of p53 protein. Ki-67 values were also significantly different between fibroblastic neoplasms and undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcomas. Conclusions: Our results support the idea that mdm2 and p53 expressions indicate tumorigenic potential in soft tissue tumors. The expressions of p53 and mdm2 proteins and Ki-67 proliferative index in fibrohistiocy tic tumors seem to be useful markers for differential diagnosis.
Cerebellar atrophy following phenytoin intoxication

Cerebellar degeneration has been demonstrated in several patients receiving phenytoin therapy. In most cases it has been unclear, however, whether the degeneration was caused by the drug per se or by other mechanisms known to lead to cerebellar damage. We describe a patient who developed a marked cerebellar atrophy, demonstrated on computed tomographic scan, following an episode of acute, severe phenytoin intoxication. The patient received phenytoin prophylactically for 21/2 months after an uncomplicated subarachnoid hemorrhage and was in good health when the treatment was started. He has never had seizures, and no other possible cause of chronic cerebellar changes is known. The initially severe clinical signs of cerebellar dysfunction have subsided slowly. We conclude that phenytoin can directly cause cerebellar degeneration.
A HYBRID TRANSFORMATION TECHNIQUE FOR ADVANCED VIDEO CODING

A Video encoder performs video data compression by having combination of three main modules such as Motion estimation and compensation, Transformation, and Entropy encoding. Among these three modules, transformation is the module of removing the spatial redundancy that exists in the spatial domain of video sequence. Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) is the defacto transformation method in existing image and video coding standards. Even though the DCT has very good energy preserving and decorrelation properties, it suffers from blocking artifacts. To overcome this problem, a hybridization method has been incorporated in transformation module of video encoder. This paper presents an hybridization in the transformation module by incorporating DCT as transformation technique for inter frames and a combination of wavelet filters for intra frames of video sequence. This proposal is also applied in the existing H.264/AVC standard. Extensive experiments have been conducted with various standard CIF and QCIF video sequences. The results show that the proposed hybrid transformation technique outperforms the existing technique used in the H.264/AVC considerably.
D-Scan: Enabling Fast and Smooth Handoffs in AP-Dense 802.11 Wireless Networks

wireless networks have gained ever greater popularity nowadays. Apart from static wireless connections, people begin to expect more user-friendly features from this kind of networks, such as support for seamless roaming. In this paper, we study the handoff process in large AP-dense 802.11 networks, which is one of the most common forms of WiFi under usage. A series of field experiments are carried out and some critical handoff parameters are evaluated. With some newly discovered features, i.e. differentiated probe response time and rich AP information hidden in wireless traffic, we have managed to sig- nificantly improve the essential process of AP scan, a bottleneck towards fast and smooth handoffs. The solution is collectively called D-Scan (Scan in AP-Dense 802.11 networks). Real experi- ments are conducted to show the superiority of our solution.