Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
COMPUTING CONTOUR LINE FROM 2 D SCALAR FIELD OF HIGH DEGREE THROUGH BEZIER CLIPPING

The contour line is one of the most important features of 2D scalar field in scientific visualization. A new method for contour line extraction is presented in this paper. Unlike the existing methods, the contour line is extracted in image space. In order to accelerate root-finding procedure, Bezier clipping and subdivision algorithm are used in the proposed method. Cross scan-line algorithm is adopted to overcome sample insufficiency problem. The implementation results show that the proposed method can extract contour line in the pixel level accurately and fast.
The Actinome of Dictyostelium discoideum in Comparison to Actins and Actin-Related Proteins from Other Organisms

Actin belongs to the most abundant proteins in eukaryotic cells which harbor usually many conventional actin isoforms as well as actin-related proteins (Arps). To get an overview over the sometimes confusing multitude of actins and Arps, we analyzed the Dictyostelium discoideum actinome in detail and compared it with the genomes from other model organisms. The D. discoideum actinome comprises 41 actins and actin-related proteins. The genome contains 17 actin genes which most likely arose from consecutive gene duplications, are all active, in some cases developmentally regulated and coding for identical proteins (Act8-group). According to published data, the actin fraction in a D. discoideum cell consists of more than 95% of these Act8-type proteins. The other 16 actin isoforms contain a conventional actin motif profile as well but differ in their protein sequences. Seven actin genes are potential pseudogenes. A homology search of the human genome using the most typical D. discoideum actin (Act8) as query sequence finds the major actin isoforms such as cytoplasmic beta-actin as best hit. This suggests that the Act8-group represents a nearly perfect actin throughout evolution. Interestingly, limited data from D. fasciculatum, a more ancient member among the social amoebae, show different relationships between conventional actins. The Act8-type isoform is most conserved throughout evolution. Modeling of the putative structures suggests that the majority of the actin-related proteins is functionally unrelated to canonical actin. The data suggest that the other actin variants are not necessary for the cytoskeleton itself but rather regulators of its dynamical features or subunits in larger protein complexes.
A New Task Scheduling Algorithm in Hybrid Cloud Environment

Although some cloud providers look at the hybrid cloud as blasphemy, there are strong reasons for them to adopt it. Hybrid clouds offer the cost and scale benefits of public clouds while also offering the security and control of private clouds. Task scheduling, one of the most famous combinational optimization problems, plays a key role in the hybrid cloud environment. We propose a graph-based task scheduling algorithm. In order to achieve minimum cost, our algorithm takes into account not only the private resources but also the public resources. This paper also presents an extensive evaluation study and demonstrates that our proposed algorithms minimize the user's cost in a hybrid cloud environment.
Cool elevator: A thermal-aware routing algorithm for partially connected 3D NoCs

Despite of high throughput and low fabrication cost of vertically partially connected 3D NoCs, thermal difficulties arise from poor heat dissipation and inappropriate traffic distribution of these kinds of 3D NoCs. This paper proposes an adaptive routing algorithm in order to manage thermal challenges in partially connected 3D NoCs. In the proposed routing algorithm, vertical links declare their availability/unavailability status to their neighbor nodes due to their current temperature. In this way, hot vertical links have a chance to reduce their traffic load and to cool down. In a predefined time periods vertical links update process is done to determine current hot and cool vertical links. In an updating time periods, cool vertical links are announced to the routers of each layer for transmitting packets to other layers. Access Noxim simulator is used to evaluates the routing algorithm in different partially 3D networks. Results show that the proposed routing algorithm decreases the number of overheated nodes by at least 74% and improves the thermal variance by at least 13%. These results are achieved within at most 10% overhead in average latency delay.
Distributed Algorithms for TDMA Link Scheduling in Sensor Networks

The paper is devoted to Time Division Multiple Access Link Scheduling Protocols in wireless sensor networks for full duplex (two-way) communication, where each sensor is scheduled on an incident link as a transmitter and as a receiver in two different time slots. We formulate the full duplex link scheduling problem (FDLSP) as distance-2 edge coloring in bidirected graphs. We proves that there exists a Δ-approximation algorithm for FDLSP (Δ being the maximum node degree in the network). Then, we present two distributed algorithms. The first is a synchronous algorithm based on finding maximal independent sets. The second is an asynchronous depth first search (DFS) algorithm. The maximal independent set based algorithm requires only O(Δlog*n) communication rounds (where n is the number of processors in the network) for growth bounded graphs, which is a realistic geometric model of sensor networks. For general graphs, the maximal independent set based algorithm requires O(Δ4 + Δ3log*n) communication rounds, improving upon the previous best algorithm with O(nΔ2 +n2m) communication rounds (where m is the number of links in the network). The asynchronous DFS based algorithm requires only O(n) communication rounds for both general and growth bounded graphs. The simulations show that the proposed algorithms assign on average equal or fewer number of time slots compared to the best known distributed algorithm while being significantly faster.
A Food Retail-Based Intervention on Food Security and Consumption

The effect of the built environment on diet (and ensuing health outcomes) is less understood than the effect of diet on obesity. Natural experiments are increasingly advocated in place of cross-sectional studies unable to suggest causality. The central research question of this paper, therefore, asks whether a neighborhood-level food retail intervention will affect dietary habits or food security. The intervention did not have a significant impact on fruit and vegetable consumption, and the intervention population actually purchased prepared meals more frequently. More problematic, only 8% of respondents overall regularly consumed enough fruits and vegetables, and 34% were food insecure. Further complicating this public health issue, the new grocery store closed after 17 months of operation. Results indicate that geographic access to food is only one element of malnutrition, and that multi-pronged dietary interventions may be more effective. The economic failure of the store also suggests the importance of non-retail interventions to combat malnutrition.
Antibiotic residues in broiler and layer meat in Chittagong district of Bangladesh

Aim: The present study was described thin layer chromatography (TLC) and ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) method for the detection of antibacterial substances in poultry muscle (breast and thigh), kidney, and liver. Materials and Methods: TLC method was used for screening detection of tetracycline, amoxicillin, ciprofloxacin, and enrofloxacin residues in poultry tissues. The samples were extracted with trichloroacetic acid (30%), diethyl ether, followed by detection in pre-coated TLC paper on ultraviolet detector. The UHPLC method was used for the quantification of antimicrobial residues in poultry tissues. Results: The residues of tetracycline were 48% in livers, 24% in kidneys, 20% in thigh muscles, and 24% in breast muscles. Ciprofloxacin residues were found 44% in liver, 42% in kidneys, 34% in thigh muscles and 30% in breast muscles. Enrofloxacin residues were found 40% in liver, 34% in kidneys, 22% in thigh muscles, and 18% in breast muscles. Amoxicillin residues were found 42% in liver, 30% in kidneys, 26% in thigh muscles and 22% in breast muscles. Most of the cases highest residues were found in liver such as tetracycline (48%), ciprofloxacin (44%), enrofloxacin (40%) and amoxicillin (42%) and almost lowest in breast muscles. In addition, nine positive samples from broiler were selected for amoxicillin residue quantification by UHPLC. It was observed that the concentration of amoxicillin residue in liver was ranging from 16.92 μg/kg to 152.62 μg/kg and in breast muscle was 45.38 μg/kg to 60.55 μg/kg, respectively. The maximum and minimum peak time was 4.7-5.2 min. Among the poultry tissues, liver had the highest level of antibiotic residues in comparison to other samples but the variation was not significant (p>0.05). Conclusions: Evidence suggests that more judicious use of antimicrobials in food animals will reduce the selection of resistant bacteria and help to preserve these valuable drugs for both human and veterinary medicine. The method described in this study is a simple, easy inexpensive which can be readily adopted by any laboratory for the detection of antibiotic residues in tissues of food-producing animals.
Real Quartic Surfaces in RP_3 containing 16 Skew Lines

In [BN] the authors construct a special complex of degree 20 over M, which for an open three dimensional set parametrizes smooth complex surfaces of degree four invariant which are Heisenberg invariant and each member of the family contains 32 lines but only 16 skew lines. The coordinates of the lines however need not be real. For a point l in a Zariski open set of M an algorithm is presented which evaluates the real coefficients of l in terms of the K-coordinates of l. The author uses a code in Maple which allows him to construct very explicite examples of real smooth Heisenberg invariant Kummer surfaces containing the special configuration of 16 real skew lines. An example is constructed at the end of the paper.
Biochemical reconstitution of abasic DNA lesion replication in Xenopus extracts

Cellular DNA is under constant attack from numerous exogenous and endogenous agents. The resulting DNA lesions, if not repaired timely, could stall DNA replication, leading to genome instability. To better understand the mechanism of DNA lesion replication at the biochemical level, we have attempted to reconstitute this process in Xenopus egg extracts, the only eukaryotic in vitro system that relies solely on cellular proteins for DNA replication. By using a plasmid DNA that carries a site-specific apurinic/apyrimidinic (AP) lesion as template, we have found that DNA replication is stalled one nucleotide before the lesion. The stalling is temporary and the lesion is eventually replicated by both an error-prone mechanism and an error-free mechanism. This is the first biochemical system that recapitulates efficiently and faithfully all major aspects of DNA lesion replication. It has provided the first direct evidence for the existence of an error-free lesion replication mechanism and also demonstrated that the error-prone mechanism is a major contributor to lesion replication.
The Impact of Co-Presence and Visual Elements in 3D VLEs on Interpersonal Emotional Connection in Telecollaboration.

The Impact of Co-presence and Visual Elements in 3D VLEs on Interpersonal Emotional Connection in Telecollaboration Hisae Matsui The purpose of this study is to examine participant’s perception of the usefulness of the visual elements in 3D Virtual Learning Environments, which represent co-presence, in developing interpersonal emotional connections with their partners in the initial stage of telecollaboration. To fulfill the purpose, two Japanese students and two American students were paired and participated in conversational sessions in two different virtual environments: one where they shared the environments with their partners and the other where they did not. The participants had five twenty-minute conversational sessions in Japanese in Second Life. By following single subject research designs, the quantitative data were obtained from the results of a Likert scale, which was adapted from the measurement of social presence while the qualitative data were obtained from narrative reflections from participants and conversation analysis. Both kinds of data were analyzed together and the following conclusions were reached: (1) learners may find avatars useful as a cue to remember the contents of the conversation, (2) 3-D VLEs may help native speakers or non-native speakers with higher proficiency to enforce emotional connections, (3) for non-native speakers, 3-D VLEs may bring positive effects, a sense of connection with their partners, and a negative effect, uncomfortableness, (4) other factors, such as topic of the conversation, gain impacts on emotional connections as the collaboration goes on.
Evaluating and comparing complexity, coupling and a new proposed set of coupling metrics in cross-project vulnerability prediction

Software security is an important concern in the world moving towards Information Technology. Detecting software vulnerabilities is a difficult and resource consuming task. Therefore, automatic vulnerability prediction would help development teams to predict vulnerability-prone components and prioritize security inspection efforts. Software source code metrics and data mining techniques have been recently used to predict vulnerability-prone components. Some of previous studies used a set of unit complexity and coupling metrics to predict vulnerabilities. In this study, first, we compare the predictability power of these two groups of metrics in cross-project vulnerability prediction. In cross-project vulnerability prediction we create the prediction model based on datasets of completely different projects and try to detect vulnerabilities in another project. The experimental results show that unit complexity metrics are stronger vulnerability predictors than coupling metrics. Then, we propose a new set of coupling metrics which are called Included Vulnerable Header (IVH) metrics. These new coupling metrics, which consider interaction of application modules with outside of the application, predict vulnerabilities highly better than regular coupling metrics. Furthermore, adding IVH metrics to the set of complexity metrics improves Recall of the best predictor from 60.9% to 87.4% and shows the best set of metrics for cross-project vulnerability prediction.
Process model extension using heuristics miner: (Case study: Incident management of Volvo IT Belgium)

VINST is a system used to record all activities related to the incident and problem management in Volvo IT Belgium. In this VINST system, activities recorded in several attributes, such as serial number, change date and time, status, and any other attributes needed, which is stored in the event log. In these sequenced activities, there are some specific knowledge that is not explicitly described in the event log. To find some of the necessary knowledge, this study extracts knowledge from the event log, by using process mining. Heuristic miner algorithm was implemented in this study, because this algorithm has advantages compared to other methods, such as the ability to calculate the frequency of the process, to handle noise, and to combine the frequency between events and trace in the event log to build a process model. The steps being taken in this study began with the discovery process, followed by conformance checking, and completed with process model extension in enhancement step, which was finding knowledge based on analysing process model and event log. This study was using a specifically designed program to achieve the goals of this study. This study used VINST incident records with 149 cases consisting of 2.771 events. By applying heuristics miner, a process model discovered with precision, recall, and f-measure more than 96%. Knowledge gained from this process model extension were the analysis of time and organizational perspectives in forms of timestamp-impact attribute relation and originator-impact attribute relation.
Correlation between handwriting characteristics

This study is part of an on-line editor project [1]. It intends to find correlations between handwriting characteristics, then to keep the most relevant ones to bring into light handwriting styles in order to improve further recognition. They can be used to extract global word features to reduce a lexicon like in [2] or select style based recognizers. A similar study has been carried out by JP Crettez in [3] on off-line words, he was particularly interested in the frequency of the handwriting different orientations.
Conjugated linoleic acid inhibits peritoneal metastasis in human gastrointestinal cancer cells

The effect of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) on peritoneal metastasis was examined by in vitro treatment of cancer cells and mouse peritoneal metastasis models. First, cell growth of MKN28 human gastric cancer cells and Colo320 human colon cancer cells was suppressed by CLA in a dose‐dependent manner with an increment in apoptosis. CLA significantly inhibited invasion into type IV collagen‐coated membrane of MKN28 and Colo320 cells (p < 0.05). CLA‐induced growth inhibition was recovered by the exposure to antisense S‐oligodeoxynucleotide for peroxisome proliferator‐activated receptor (PPAR)‐γ in both cell lines. BALB/c nu‐nu mice were inoculated with MKN28 and Colo320 cells into their peritoneal cavity, and administrated with CLA intraperitoneally (weekly, 4 times). CLA treatment did not affect food intake or weight gain of mice. CLA treatment significantly decreased metastatic foci of both cells in the peritoneal cavity (p < 0.005). Survival rate in mice inoculated with MKN28 or Colo320 cells was significantly recovered by CLA treatment (p = 0.0025 and 0.0052, respectively). Protein production in MKN28 and Colo320 cells treated with CLA showed a decrease in epidermal growth factor receptor and transforming growth factor‐α and an increase in Bax. These findings suggest that CLA inhibits metastasis of human gastric and colon cancer cells. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Component-Based Real Time Facial Expression Recognition in Video Streams

—In this article a new real-time approach is proposed to recognize facial expression in video database. First, face motion direction is estimated by using motion information and then according to the face width and direction, rectangular surrounding box is formed. The advantage of this method compared with previous methods is in improving classic rectangular surrounding box model and also, using the Steerable filters to determine face direction. As eyes and mouth are the most important components in a face, in this method, eye location is calculated by combining color features and morphological functions in surrounding box region. Afterwards, with regard to the lip contour and using image processing techniques, we are able to determine the detection of mouth very accurately with the help of four points. Finally, these features are modeled by using support vector machines (SVM). Experimental results show that this algorithm is more efficient than the previous ones.
Clay Components in Soil Dictate Environmental Stability and Bioavailability of Cervid Prions in Mice

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) affects cervids and is the only known prion disease to affect free-ranging wildlife populations. CWD spread continues unabated, and exact mechanisms of its seemingly facile spread among deer and elk across landscapes in North America remain elusive. Here we confirm that naturally contaminated soil contains infectious CWD prions that can be transmitted to susceptible model organisms. We show that smectite clay content of soil potentiates prion binding capacity of different soil types from CWD endemic and non-endemic areas, likely contributing to environmental stability of bound prions. The smectite clay montmorillonite (Mte) increased prion retention and bioavailability in vivo. Trafficking experiments in live animals fed bound and unbound prions showed that mice retained significantly more Mte-bound than unbound prions. Mte promoted rapid uptake of prions from the stomach to the intestines via enterocytes and M cells, and then to macrophages and eventually CD21+ B cells in Peyer's patches and spleens. These results confirm clay components in soil as an important vector in CWD transmission at both environmental and organismal levels.
Machine Learning and Mass Estimation Methods for Ground-Based Aircraft Climb Prediction

In this paper, we apply machine learning methods to improve the aircraft climb prediction in the context of ground-based applications. Mass is a key parameter for climb prediction. As it is considered a competitive parameter by many airlines, it is currently not available to ground-based trajectory predictors. Consequently, most predictors today use a reference mass that may be different from the actual aircraft mass. In previous papers, we have introduced a least squares method to estimate the mass from past trajectory points, using the physical model of the aircraft. Another mass estimation method, based on an adaptive mechanism, has also been proposed by Schultz et al. We now introduce a new approach, in which the mass is considered the response variable of a prediction model that is learned from a set of example trajectories. This machine learning approach is compared with the results obtained when using the base of aircraft data (BADA) reference mass or the two state-of-the-art mass estimation methods. In these experiments, nine different aircraft types are considered. When compared with the baseline method (respectively, the mass estimation methods), the Machine Learning approach reduces the RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) on the predicted altitude by at least 58% (resp. 27%) when assuming the speed profile to be known, and by at least 29% (resp. 17%) when using the BADA speed profile except for the aircraft types E145 and F100. For these types, the observed speed profile is far from the BADA speed profile.
Multi-channel MAC protocol for QoS support in ad-hoc network

This paper proposes a multi-channel MAC protocol that provides QoS for ad-hoc networks based on the IEEE 802.11 DCF mode. The IEEE 802.11 standard gives methodologies and examples for contention-based distributed coordination systems for only a single channel. To overcome this limited channel usage, many studies on how it works in multi-channel environment have been performed. The IEEE 802.11e has proposed the priority schemes that operate on the single channel. However, we combine this concept supporting QoS with multi-channel MAC protocol. Thus, we can achieve the advantage of multi-channel and provide QoS for real-time users.
Node-to-set disjoint paths problem in pancake graphs

In this paper, we give an algorithm for the nodeto-set disjoint paths problem in pancake graphs with its evaluation results. The algorithm is of polynomial order of n for an n-pancake graph. It is based on recursion and divided into two cases according to the distribution of destination nodes in classes into which all the nodes in a pancake graph are categorized. The sum of lengths of paths obtained and the time complexity of the algorithm are estimated and the average performance is evaluated based on computer simulation. key words: interconnection networks, graph algorithms, pancake graph, node-to-set disjoint paths, parallel computing