Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bribery Dynamics : An agent-based approach with evolutionary learning Working Paper

This paper studies the dynamics of bribery that occurs between citizens and bureaucrats when the formers go to the laters in order to aquire a public service that requires an administrative procedure. The study is based in an agent-based model. Citizens adapt their bribes levels through social learning. Bureaucrats develop their decisions through both individual and social learning mechanisms. The act of bribing can be caught and punish with certain probability, provoking the agents to inccur in different types of costs. Unlike most agent-based models of corruption, the penalization for bureacrats consists on a loss of utlility rathaer than jail time, or suspension from the game. This is intended to be a representative condition of the incentives structure of many countries in which this type of bribery is common. Bribing also generates a social costs among the population of citizens. This work is focused in two objectives: replicate the notion of bribery stable levels as a “social convention” through evolutionary social learning, and to compare two scenarios for hypothesis testing. The experiment testes the idea that societies with disparities in the social cost of corruption across the population, bribery remains higher than in those with flat social cost distribution. Furthermore, the former will be better off than the later. The model accomplishes both objectives, and provides useful insights about the direction and implementation of anti-bribery public policies.
Chapter 12: Game Data Mining

1. The data revolution in games – and everywhere else – calls for analysis methods that scale to with dataset size. The solution: game data mining 2. Game data mining deals with the challenges of acquiring actionable insights from game telemetry. 3. Read the chapter for an introduction to game data mining, an overview of methods commonly and not so commonly used, examples, case studies and a substantial amount of practical advice on how to employ game data mining effectively.
Predicate Invention in Inductive Logic Programming

The ability to recognise new concepts and incorporate them into our knowledge is an essential part of learning. From new scientific concepts to the words that are used in everyday conversation, they all must have at some point in the past, been invented and their definition defined. In this position paper, we discuss how a general framework for predicate invention could be made, by reasoning about the problem at the meta-level using an appropriate notion of top theory in inductive logic programming.
2016 Fifth International Conference on Recent Trends in Information Technology Application of Crowdsourcing in Software Development

—Crowdsourcing is an emerging area by which the knowledge of an expert community is applied to solve critical issues. Though crowdsourcing is popular among the companies for gaining innovative ideas, the software organizations are looking up for community based software development. This paper explores the conceptual areas of crowdsourcing and examines the viability of crowdsourcing in software development. The basic characteristics of crowdsourcing software artifacts and their related issues were identified in this work. Besides this, this paper also gives the classification of the related issues.
Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes

Byers believes that modern-day college sports are no longer a student activity: they are a high-dollar commercial enterprise, and college athletes should have the same access to the free market as their coaches and colleges. He favors no one as he cites individual cases of corruption in NCAA history. From Byers's first enforcement case, against the University of Kentucky in 1952, to the NCAA's 1987 "death penalty" levied against Southern Methodist University of Dallas, he shows the change in the athletic environment from simple rules and personally responsible officials to convoluted, cyclopedic regulations with high-priced legal firms defending college violators against a limited NCAA enforcement system. This book is a must for anyone involved in college sports - athletes, coaches, fans, college faculty, and administrators.
Cowden Syndrome and Concomitant Pulmonary Neuroendocrine Tumor: A Presentation of Two Cases

Cowden Syndrome is a rare autosomal dominantly inherited disorder. Patients with Cowden Syndrome are at increased risk of various benign and malignant neoplasms in breast, endometrium, thyroid, gastrointestinal tract, and genitourinary system. Neuroendocrine tumors are ubiquitous neoplasms that may occur anywhere in the human body. Bronchopulmonary neuroendocrine tumors include four different histological subtypes, among these, typical and atypical pulmonary carcinoids. No association between Cowden Syndrome and neuroendocrine tumors has previously been described. We present two cases of Cowden Syndrome that were diagnosed with pulmonary carcinoids.
What programmable vector fields can (and cannot) do: force field algorithms for MEMS and vibratory plate parts feeders

Programmable vector fields can be used to control a variety of flexible planar parts feeders. When a part is placed on our devices, the programmed vector field induces a force and moment upon it. Over time, the part may come to rest in a dynamic equilibrium state. We demonstrate lower bounds on what the devices cannot do, and results on a classification of control strategies. We suggest sufficient conditions for programmable fields to induce well-behaved equilibria on every part placed on our devices. We define composition operators to build complex strategies from simple ones, and show the resulting fields are also well-behaved. We discuss whether fields outside this class can be useful and free of pathology. Using these tools, we describe new manipulation algorithms, and improve existing planning algorithms by a quadratic factor, and the plan-length by a linear factor. We relax earlier dynamic and mechanical assumptions to obtain more robust and flexible strategies. Finally, we consider parts feeders that can only implement a very limited "vocabulary" of vector fields. We discuss the trade-off between mechanical complexity and planning complexity.
ONDAR: An ontology for home automation

Smart homes are houses equipped by computational technology to assist inhabitants in several situations. To design these complex systems we have to take into account the inhabitant's experiences and needs. A modeling language supporting the semantic aspect allows modeling close to end user needs. Such language is in general based on the concept of ontology. However research including ontologies to design smart homes is still limited. In this paper we define a smart home, we study the proposed approaches and we present ONDAR, an ontology for home automation.
Distributed Resource Allocation for Relay-Aided Device-to-Device Communication Under Channel Uncertainties: A Stable Matching Approach

Wireless device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular network is a promising concept to improve user experience and resource utilization. Unlike traditional D2D communication, where two mobile devices in the proximity establish a direct local link bypassing the base station, in this work, we focus on relay-aided D2D communication. Relay-aided transmission could enhance the performance of D2D communication when D2D user equipments (UEs) are far apart from each other and/or the quality of D2D link is not good enough for direct communication. Considering the uncertainties in wireless links, we model and analyze the performance of a relay-aided D2D communication network, where the relay nodes serve both the cellular and D2D users. In particular, we formulate the radio resource allocation problem in a two-hop network to guarantee the data rate of the UEs while protecting other receiving nodes from interference. Utilizing time sharing strategy, we provide a centralized solution under bounded channel uncertainty. With a view to reducing the computational burden at relay nodes, we propose a distributed solution approach using stable matching to allocate radio resources in an efficient and computationally inexpensive way. Numerical results show that the performance of the proposed method is close to the centralized optimal solution and there is a distance margin beyond which relaying of D2D traffic improves network performance.
Multimedia QoS adaptation for inter-tech roaming

We introduce a scalable application-level QoS adaptation service for roaming between wireless networks that are based on different technologies ('inter-tech' roaming). The service is part of a platform that supports the distribution of multimedia streams (e.g., a streamed TV channel) to mobile clients operating in a heterogeneous environment. Central to our approach is the notion of a service class, which is a domain-specific perceptual QoS level. Each domain in a wireless infrastructure must support a limited number of these service classes. Our adaptation service handles inter-tech roaming by handing a client off from one service class to another. We focus on the design of the adaptation service's client-side components. They combine the loss characteristics of the client's network interfaces with configurable policies to decide when to initiate a handoff to a target service class and when to complete it. We conclude with some experimental results.
Moving beyond research to inform policy: barriers and strategies in developing countries

This paper examines issues of communication across the researcher-policymaker interface in four countries: Malawi Tanzania India and Pakistan. In-depth interviews were conducted with researchers working in health issues and policymakers responsible for the formation of health policies at the local and national levels. The range of strategies used by researchers to disseminate research outputs to policymakers was similar across all study countries: most researchers disseminated their findings through research reports and workshops and there was a heavy reliance on dissemination through academic circles. Policymakers reported difficulties in accessing research outputs particularly when disseminated through academic channels. The interviews identified a number of barriers to effective communication between researchers and policymakers. The lack of clear communication channels between researchers and policymakers and the lack of a central depository for research outputs restricts the dissemination of research outputs. Researchers felt that policymakers lack of understanding and respect for research limited the extent to which research is used in policy formation whilst their own lack of skills and resources for dissemination restricts the effectiveness of their dissemination efforts. (excerpt)
Secondary structure element voting for RNA gene finding

An exploration of the use of multiple secondary structure elements for structural RNA gene finding is conducted. The secondary structure models are combined through a multilayer voting system which first combines the probability output of support vector machines and then combines the results of those votes to predict whether a sequence is a structural RNA gene or not. It is found that the voting in the first layer of the system has significant impact on the performance of individual secondary structure element models with improvements in classification results of up to 56%. Likewise, gains in classification F-measure over 0.6 were seen when two secondary structure element model predictions were voted together. When all the secondary structure element models were used in voting, an accuracy of over 93% was achieved by the secondary structure RNA gene classification system.
Interactive Search Interfaces for Young Children - The PuppyIR Approach

Finding and understanding information is key for children's development. The Internet offers exciting new ways to meet people, learn about different cultures and develop their creative potential. However, children's ability to use the Internet is severely hampered by the lack of appropriate search tools. Most Information Retrieval (IR) systems are designed for adults and unsuitable for children. In this paper we present an approach to provide appropriate IR interfaces for children.
Artificial Microbiome-Selection to Engineer Microbiomes That Confer Salt-Tolerance to Plants

We develop a method to artificially select for rhizosphere microbiomes that confer salt-tolerance to the model grass Brachypodium distachyon. We differentially propagate microbiomes within the background of a non-evolving, highly-inbred plant population, and therefore only microbiomes evolve in our experiment, but not the plants. To optimize methods, we conceptualize artificial microbiome-selection as a special case of indirect selection: We do not measure microbiome properties directly, but we use host performance (e.g., biomass; seed set) as an indicator to infer association with rhizosphere microbiomes that confer salt-tolerance to a plant. We previously called this indirect-selection scheme host-mediated indirect selection on microbiomes (Mueller & Sachs 2015). Our methods aim to maximize evolutionary changes due to differential microbiome-propagation, while minimizing some (but not all) ecological processes affecting microbiome composition. Specifically, our methods aim to maximize microbiome perpetuation between selection-cycles and maximize response to artificial microbiome-selection by (a) controlling microbiome assembly when inoculating seeds at the beginning of each selection cycle; (b) using low-carbon soil to enhance host-control mediated by carbon secretions of plants during initial microbiome assembly and subsequent microbiome persistence; (c) fractionating microbiomes before transfer between plants to perpetuate and select only on bacterial and viral (but not fungal) microbiome components; and (d) ramping of salt-stress between selection-cycles to minimize the chance of over-stressing plants. Our selection protocol generates microbiomes that enhance plant fitness after only 1-3 rounds of artificial selection on rhizosphere microbiomes. Relative to fallow-soil control treatments, artificially-selected microbiomes increase plant fitness by 75% under sodium-sulfate stress, and by 38% under aluminum-sulfate stress. Relative to null control treatments, artificially-selected microbiomes increase plant fitness by 13% under sodium-sulfate stress, and by 12% under aluminum-sulfate stress. When testing microbiomes after nine rounds of differential microbiome propagation, the effect of bacterial microbiomes selected to confer tolerance to sodium-sulfate stress appears specific (these microbiomes do not confer tolerance to aluminum-sulfate stress), but the effect of microbiomes selected to confer tolerance to aluminum-sulfate stress appears non-specific (selected microbiomes ameliorate both sodium- and aluminum-sulfate stresses). Complementary metagenomic analyses of the artificially selected microbiomes will help elucidate metabolic properties of microbiomes that confer specific versus non-specific salt-tolerance to plants.
ROLE OF LOCAL STAKEHOLDERS IN REACHING, DEVELOPING, AND SUSTAINING COLLABORATIVE MANAGEMENT : CASE STUDY OF URBAN WETLANDS OF BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA

This research analyzes how local stakeholder participation helps reach, develop, and sustain collaborative management in urban wetlands of Bogota. Trajectories of management are traced from the early 1990s to present. Based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups carried out in seven urban wetlands, comparison were made by using a framework that allows analyzing deliberate social transformations. The results indicate that types of local stakeholder participation have effect on reaching, developing and sustaining collaborative management. The trajectories toward collaborative management of seven urban wetlands show that five of them reached this type of management at some point, two of these five were able to develop it, and only one could sustain it. All cases start with independent actions but only those that routinize collaborative and transformative participation events were able to develop collaborative management. The only case that sustains this type of management is because local stakeholder participation to make decisions is secured by court ruling that protects it from changes in the city’s political leadership. The case sheds light on the vulnerability of local stakeholder participation and collaborative management under unstable government rules to manage urban wetlands. The most successful strategy that local stakeholders use to address this volatile management condition is legal actions, which not only allows reaching collaborative management, but also protects their participation to develop and sustain this type of management.
Les changements institutionnels dans les industries de réseaux: une libéralisation prématurée dans les pays en développement ?

Les industries de reseau (transports, energie, eau, communications) donnent naissance a des externalites positives : economies d'echelle, economies d'envergure, effets de club, existence d'un " bien reseau ". Elles contribuent au developpement de ces industries, les usagers et l'economie nationale tirant une satisfaction d'autant plus grande que ces externalites sont importantes. Des changements institutionnels affectent ces industries de reseau : le monopole public laisse place a une concurrence reglementee, avec privatisation eventuellement. Dans le cas des pays en developpement, ce changement institutionnel risque de freiner le developpement des industries de reseau, donc l'apparition des externalites positives, ce qui priverait ces pays d'un des moteurs du developpement economique et social.
Potential Role of Protein Disulfide Isomerase in Metabolic Syndrome-Derived Platelet Hyperactivity

Metabolic Syndrome (MetS) has become a worldwide epidemic, alongside with a high socioeconomic cost, and its diagnostic criteria must include at least three out of the five features: visceral obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, insulin resistance, and high fasting glucose levels. MetS shows an increased oxidative stress associated with platelet hyperactivation, an essential component for thrombus formation and ischemic events in MetS patients. Platelet aggregation is governed by the peroxide tone and the activity of Protein Disulfide Isomerase (PDI) at the cell membrane. PDI redox active sites present active cysteine residues that can be susceptible to changes in plasma oxidative state, as observed in MetS. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the relationship between PDI and platelet hyperactivation under MetS and its metabolic features, in spite of PDI being a mediator of important pathways implicated in MetS-induced platelet hyperactivation, such as insulin resistance and nitric oxide dysfunction. Thus, the aim of this review is to analyze data available in the literature as an attempt to support a possible role for PDI in MetS-induced platelet hyperactivation.
Classification of Cancer Cell Lines Using an Automated Two-dimensional Liquid Mapping Method with Hierarchical Clustering Techniques*

A two-dimensional liquid mapping method was used to map the protein expression of eight ovarian serous carcinoma cell lines and three immortalized ovarian surface epithelial cell lines. Maps were produced using pI as the separation parameter in the first dimension and hydrophobicity based upon reversed-phase HPLC separation in the second dimension. The method can be reproducibly used to produce protein expression maps over a pH range from 4.0 to 8.5. A dynamic programming method was used to correct for minor shifts in peaks during the HPLC gradient between sample runs. The resulting corrected maps can then be compared using hierarchical clustering to produce dendrograms indicating the relationship between different cell lines. It was found that several of the ovarian surface epithelial cell lines clustered together, whereas specific groups of serous carcinoma cell lines clustered with each other. Although there is limited information on the current biology of these cell lines, it was shown that the protein expression of certain cell lines is closely related to each other. Other cell lines, including one ovarian clear cell carcinoma cell line, two endometrioid carcinoma cell lines, and three breast epithelial cell lines, were also mapped for comparison to show that their protein profiles cluster differently than the serous samples and to study how they cluster relative to each other. In addition, comparisons can be made between proteins differentially expressed between cell lines that may serve as markers of ovarian serous carcinomas. The automation of the method allows reproducible comparison of many samples, and the use of differential analysis limits the number of proteins that might require further analysis by mass spectrometry techniques.
Caffeine enhances cognitive function and skill performance during simulated soccer activity.

UNLABELLED There is little evidence regarding the benefits of caffeine ingestion on cognitive function and skillful actions during sporting performance, especially in sports that are multifaceted in their physiological, skill, and cognitive demands. PURPOSE To examine the influence of caffeine on performance during simulated soccer activity. METHODS Twelve male soccer players completed two 90-min soccer-specific intermittent running trials interspersed with tests of soccer skill (LSPT). The trials were separated by 7 days and adhered to a randomized crossover design. On each occasion participants ingested 6 mg/kg body mass (BM) of caffeine (CAF) or a placebo (PLA) in a double-blind fashion 60 min before exercise. Movement time, penalties accrued, and total time were recorded for the LSPT. Physiological and performance markers were measured throughout the protocol. Water (3 ml/kg BM) was ingested every 15 min. RESULTS Participants accrued significantly less penalty time in the CAF trial (9.7 +/- 6.6 s vs. PLA 11.6 +/- 7.4 s; p = .02), leading to a significantly lower total time in this trial (CAF 51.6 +/- 7.7 s vs. PLA 53.9 +/- 8.5 s; p = .02). This decrease in penalty time was probably attributable to an increased passing accuracy in the CAF trial (p = .06). Jump height was 2.7% (+/- 1.1%) higher in the CAF trial (57.1 +/- 5.1 cm vs. PLA 55.6 +/- 5.1 cm; p = .01). CONCLUSIONS Caffeine ingestion before simulated soccer activity improved players' passing accuracy and jump performance without any detrimental effects on other performance parameters.
DepthArtist: a stereoscopic 3D conversion tool for CG animation

In this paper we present a method to help with the creation of stereoscopic 3D content from a single monoscopic view alone with depth information. It is designed for CGI, where the 3D animation software has generated a high quality depth map. The system allows the Animator or postproduction Artist to define a depth budget, "auto balance" the parallax grade and also very simply to apply precise artistic controls to stereo and depth effects. These, for instance, can be used to tune the roundness aspect. It provides a simple and rapid method of generating optimal stereo views and previewing the results, with warnings about 3D perception errors. The novelty of this approach is in the use of the scene layers to help at the synthesis of high quality left and right views.