Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
S EE DB : Supporting Visual Analytics with Data-Driven Recommendations

Data analysts often build visualizations as the first step in their analytical workflow. However, when working with high-dimensional datasets, identifying visualizations that show relevant or desired trends in data can be laborious. We propose SEEDB, a visualization recommendation engine to facilitate fast visual analysis: given a subset of data to be studied, SEEDB intelligently explores the space of visualizations, evaluates promising visualizations for trends, and recommends those it deems most “useful” or “interesting”. The two major obstacles in recommending interesting visualizations are (a) scale: dealing with a large number of candidate visualizations and evaluating all of them in parallel, while responding within interactive time scales, and (b) utility: identifying an appropriate metric for assessing interestingness of visualizations. For the former, SEEDB introduces pruning optimizations to quickly identify high-utility visualizations and sharing optimizations to maximize sharing of computation across visualizations. For the latter, as a first step, we adopt a deviation-based metric for visualization utility, while indicating how we may be able to generalize it to other factors influencing utility. We implement SEEDB as a middleware layer that can run on top of any DBMS. Our experiments show that our framework can identify interesting visualizations with high accuracy. Our optimizations lead to multiple orders of magnitude speedup on relational row and column stores and provide recommendations at interactive time scales. Finally, we demonstrate via a user study the effectiveness of our deviation-based utility metric and the value of recommendations in supporting visual analytics.
The real-time (in)significance of M2

This paper examines the relationships between output, prices, interest rates, and M2 using data sets which were available in real time from 1973:1 to 1997:4. The purpose is threefold. First, the paper delineates a potential role for M2 in policymaking. Second, it provides a more accurate basis for interpreting historical policymaking. Third, it evaluates the cause and effect of the historical redefinitions of M2. The latter two objectives make it necessary to use data which was available to policymakers at the time decisions were made. In regard to the first objective, the approach is both novel and complementary to the existing literature.
Volcanosedimentary Basins in the Arabian-Nubian Shield: Markers of Repeated Exhumation and Denudation in a Neoproterozoic Accretionary Orogen

The Arabian-Nubian Shield (ANS) includes Middle Cryogenian-Ediacaran (790–560 Ma) sedimentary and volcanic terrestrial and shallow-marine successions unconformable on juvenile Cryogenian crust. The oldest were deposited after 780–760 Ma shearing and suturing in the central ANS. Middle Cryogenian basins are associated with ~700 Ma suturing in the northern ANS. Late Cryogenian basins overlapped with and followed 680–640 Ma Nabitah orogenesis in the eastern ANS. Ediacaran successions are found in pull-apart and other types of basins formed in a transpressive setting associated with E-W shortening, NW-trending shearing, and northerly extension during final amalgamation of the ANS. Erosion surfaces truncating metamorphosed arc rocks at the base of these successions are evidence of periodic exhumation and erosion of the evolving ANS crust. The basins are evidence of subsequent subsidence to the base level of alluvial systems or below sea level. Mountains were dissected by valley systems, yet relief was locally low enough to allow for seaways connected to the surrounding Mozambique Ocean. The volcanosedimentary basins of the ANS are excellently exposed and preserved, and form a world-class natural laboratory for testing concepts about crustal growth during the Neoproterozoic and for the acquisition of data to calibrate chemical and isotopic changes, at a time in geologic history that included some of the most important, rapid, and enigmatic changes to Earth’s environment and biota.
Rice-Style Theorems for Complexity Theory

Rice''s Theorem states that all nontrivial language properties of recursively enumerable sets are undecidable. Borchert and Stephan [BS00] started the search for complexity-theoretic analogs of Rice''s Theorem, and proved that every nontrivial counting property of boolean circuits is UP-hard. Hemaspaandra and Rothe [HR00] improved the UP-hardness lower bound to UP_{O(1)}-hardness. The present paper raises the lower bound for nontrivial counting properties from UP_{O(1)}-hardness to FewP-hardness, i.e., from constant-ambiguity nondeterminism to polynomial-ambiguity nondeterminism. We also prove a Rice-style theorem for NP, namely that every nontrivial language property of NP sets is NP-hard, and we prove that every P-constructibly semi-switching counting property of circuits is PP-hard.
Micro-finance: Problems and Constraints in Vellore District, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract This article analyses the problems and constraints faced by women SHG members in Vellore district in Tamil Nadu. The causes of the problems may arise from within the family or their own organization (SHG) or emanate from out of the external environment and their community. The study has used 13 key variables that affect the performance of micro-finance and tries to analyse the chief variables among them that poses problems and act as a constraint to the effective functioning of the SHG. The researcher collected responses from 450 women respondents from two blocks in Vellore district in Tamil Nadu. Delay in getting the loans followed by marketing of products emerged as the chief problems and constraints to the microfinance through SHGs. The paper provides the framework of the problems and constraints and also the approaches of how the members manage them. Simple statistical tools were used to analyze the data to arrive at solid conclusions.
Knowledge Management in Tourism: Policy and Governance Applications

Sixty years after its birth, contemporary tourism is at crossroads. It has grown to become a key element of economic well-being, but it is threatened and threatening. Its enemies are congestion, destruction of natural and cultural environments, and social unrest. However, it also contributes its fair share to these evils. How can tourism really become a fulcrum for development and sustainability in the 21st century? This is a matter of crucial importance for entrepreneurs, governments, and civil society stakeholders, and Knowledge Management in Tourism: Policy and Governance Applications provides these key players with answers and queries, and above all with the strategic tools to understand and act. Knowledge Management in Tourism: Policy and Governance Applications is an indispensable instrument for everyone interested in the theory and practice of this very important human pursuit: the quest for effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of tourism activities in helping build the future of mankind.
Mobile IP-deployment after a decade

It has been over a decade since Mobility support for IPv4 was proposed and standardized by the IETF. The challenges of maintaining active sessions for mobile users without modifying existing correspondent hosts or the scalable nature of Internet routing were met by associating seperate IP addresses for routing and endpoint identification. This approach resulted in a per-packet overhead of a certain number of header bytes as well as suboptimal routing – a packet destined for a mobile user needed to always visit the home network before being sent to the actual location. Optimizations for routing as well as header compression techniques were proposed and standardized subsequently. The adoption of this standard, however, has been much slower than was previously expected even though commercial routers have been shipping with support for over half a decade. Additionally, the seeming lack of applications, poor handoff performance, suboptimal routing, signalling overheads and security issues have raised questions about whether Mobile IP will ever see widespread adoption. In this paper, we take the position that inspite of its limitations and slow uptake, Mobile IP will see widespread commercial deployment in the near future. The primary basis of our argument is the adoption, and subsequent use, of Mobile IP in the cellular service provider community.
POST-PROCESSING OF STREAMING VIDEO FOR RELIABLE BACKGROUND SUBTRACTION

The objective of this report is to study several global motion compensation algorithms that can stabilize a video sequence for motion detection. Firstly, we introduce the automatic gain control (AGC) correction that is used to automatically equalize the image intensity level. Then, we introduce the camera motion models which are the basis of image realignment. Then we study phase correlation and block matching algorithms, both of which are based on the translation model. We also describe the gradient descent algorithm that can find the optimal solution by solving a non-linear optimization problem. In order to compare the performances among different methods , we propose a global metric that can measure the stability of the compensated video sequence. Simulation results indicate that both phase correlation and block matching have the same performance at the same pixel accuracy; while the computational complexity of phase correlation is usually much lower than block matching. Sub-pixel accuracy motion compensation can contribute to more stable videos which in turn lead to better motion detection performance. However, the gains of using quarter-pixel or higher accuracy motion compensation turns out to be quite limited.
Efficient Multitone Detection [DSP Tips & Tricks]

This article presents the digital signal processing (DSP) tricks employed to build a computationally efficient multitone detection system, implemented without multiplications and with minimal data memory requirements. More specifically, the article describes the detection of incoming dial tones, validity checking to differentiate valid tones from noise signals, and the efficient implementation of the detection system. While the discussion focuses on dual-tone multifrequency (DTMF) telephone dial tone detection, the processing tricks presented may be employed in other multitone detection systems
A randomized placebo-controlled phase III study of granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor in adult patients (> 55 to 70 years of age) with acute myelogenous leukemia: a study of the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (E1490).

The treatment of adult patients greater than 55 to 70 years of age with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) is associated with a treatment-related mortality of approximately 25%. This prospective, double-blind randomized study was designed to see if the use of granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF; yeast-derived) could shorten the period of neutropenia and to determine any effect this would have on therapy-related morbidity and mortality. A total of 124 patients entered this study. Induction consisted of standard daunorubicin and cytarabine. A day-10 bone marrow was examined; if this was aplastic without leukemia, patients received blinded placebo or GM-CSF from day 11 until neutrophil recovery. Patients who entered complete remission received the identical study medication (blinded GM-CSF or placebo) in consolidation that they had received during induction. The overall complete remission rate was 52%; 60% for the GM-CSF arm and 44% for the placebo arm (P = .08). Median times to neutrophil recovery were significantly shortened on the GM-CSF arm. The overall treatment-related toxicity from start of GM-CSF/placebo was reduced on the GM-CSF arm (P = .049). Similarly, the infectious toxicity was significantly reduced on the GM-CSF arm (P = .015). The median survival for all patients was 10.6 months in the GM-CSF group and 4.8 months in the placebo arm (P = .048). It appears that GM-CSF is safe and efficacious for adult patients greater than 55 to 70 years of age with AML; its major impact is in reducing the duration of neutropenia and therapy-related mortality and morbidity. This may result in a better response rate.
Ensuring Correctness and Error Localisation In Cloud

Cloud Computing has been envisioned as the next generation architecture of IT Enterprise. In contrast to traditional solutions, where the IT services are under proper physical, logical and personnel controls, Cloud Computing moves the application software and databases to the large data centres, where the management of the data and services may not be fully trustworthy. This unique attribute, however, poses many new security challenges which have not been well understood. In this paper, we are implementing the cloud data storage security, which has always been an important aspect of quality of service. To ensure the correctness of users’ data in the cloud, we propose an effective and flexible distributed scheme with two salient features, opposing to its predecessors. By utilizing the homomorphism token with distributed verification of erasure-coded data and low density parity check, our scheme achieves the integration of storage correctness insurance and data error localization, i.e., the identification of misbehaving server(s). Unlike most prior works, the new scheme further supports secure and efficient dynamic operations on data blocks, including: data update, delete and append. Extensive security and performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is highly efficient and resilient against Byzantine failure, malicious data modification attack, and even server colluding attacks.
A characterization of sapient agents

We present a proposal to characterize sapient agents in terms of cognitive concepts and abilities. In particular, a sapient agent is considered as a cognitive agent that learns its cognitive state and capabilities through experience. This characterization is based on formal concepts such as beliefs, goals, plans and reasoning rules, and formal techniques such as relational RL. We identify several aspects of cognitive agents that can be evolved through learning and indicate how these aspects can be learned. Other important features such as the social environment, interaction with other agents or humans and the ability to deal with emotions, will also be discussed. Finally, the directions for further research on sapient agents are described.
Real-Time for the Real World

We propose a new methodology for creating embedded software that meets real-time deadlines. Our approach is a synthesis of real-time analysis and traditional systems debugging techniques, based on two main ideas. First, we use probabilistic modeling techniques to make quantitative predictions about system behavior, as opposed to real-time analysis techniques whose results are binary and often pessimistic (either the system can be shown to always work or it cannot). In particular, we focus on application-level reliability requirements where traditional real-time analyses focus on individual failures irrespective of their effect on overall system behavior. Second, we have developed a systematic method, based on hierarchical scheduling, for restructuring systems software in order to solve real-time design problems. We validate our approach by applying it to software running on networked sensor nodes.
Inhibition of STAT3 signaling targets both tumor-initiating and differentiated cell populations in prostate cancer

Despite of tremendous research efforts to profile prostate cancer, the genetic alterations and biological processes that correlate with disease progression remain partially elusive. In this study we show that the STAT3 small molecule inhibitor Stattic caused S-phase accumulation at low-dose levels and led to massive apoptosis at a relatively high-dose level in prostate cancer cells. STAT3 knockdown led to the disruption of the microvascular niche which tumor-initiating cells (TICs) and non-tumor initiating cells (non-TICs)depend on. Primary human prostate cancer cells and prostate cancer cell line contained high aldehyde dehydrogenase activity (ALDHhigh) subpopulations with stem cell-like characteristics, which expressed higher levels of the active phosphorylated form of STAT3 (pSTAT3) than that of non-ALDHhigh subpopulations. Stattic could singnificantly decreas the population of ALDHhigh prostate cancer cells even at low-dose levels. IL-6 can convert non-ALDHhigh cells to ALDHhigh cells in prostate cancer cell line as well as from cells derived from human prostate tumors, the conversion mediated by IL-6 was abrogated in the presence of STAT3 inhibitor or upon STAT3 knockdown. STAT3 knockdown significantly impaired the ability of prostate cancer cells to initiate development of prostate adenocarcinoma. Moreover, blockade of STAT3 signaling was significantly effective in eradicating the tumor-initiating and bulk tumor cancer cell populations in both prostate cancer cell-line xenograft model and patient-derived tumor xenograft (PDTX) models. This data suggests that targeting both tumor initiating and differentiated cell populations by STAT3 inhibition is predicted to have greater efficacy for prostate cancer treatment.
On parameterization of block based copy-move forgery detection techniques

With high increase in cyber-crime along with continuous development in multimedia processing and editing technologies, the credibility of digital images is highly at stake in the present day. Digital images act as the major source of legal evidence in various domains such as media, broadcast and legal industries. Hence any form of illegal modifications to them is intolerable. Recently a lot of researchers have focused on detection and control of digital image forgeries. However the literature lacks a standard way of evaluating and comparing the efficiencies of diverse forgery detection techniques. In this paper we propose a standard platform for estimating the efficiencies of state-of-the-art digital image forgery detection techniques. In this work we have dealt with a specific class of digital image forgery: the Copy-Move forgery, which is one of most prevalent forms of attack on digital images. We have compared and analyzed different copy-move forgery detection techniques using the proposed parameters. Our results prove the efficiency of the proposed parameterization and help to select the most suitable scheme according to the user's requirements.
Twisted Alexander Polynomials of Hyperbolic Knots

We study a twisted Alexander polynomial naturally associated to a hyperbolic knot in an integer homology 3-sphere via a lift of the holonomy representation to . It is an unambiguous symmetric Laurent polynomial whose coefficients lie in the trace field of the knot. It contains information about genus, fibering, and chirality, and moreover, is powerful enough to sometimes detect mutation. We calculated this invariant numerically for all 313 209 hyperbolic knots in S 3 with at most 15 crossings, and found that in all cases it gave a sharp bound on the genus of the knot and determined both fibering and chirality. We also study how such twisted Alexander polynomials vary as one moves around in an irreducible component X 0 of the -character variety of the knot group. We show how to understand all of these polynomials at once in terms of a polynomial whose coefficients lie in the function field of X 0. We use this to help explain some of the patterns observed for knots in S 3, and explore a potential relationship between this universal polynomial and the Culler–Shalen theory of surfaces associated to ideal points.
2T-DHT: A Two Tier DHT for Implementing Publish/Subscribe

In this paper, we propose a two-tiered Distributed Hash Table (DHT) based overlay for an implementation of publish/subscribe. In this overlay, upper tier consists of stable nodes with more resources whereas lower tier contains less stable nodes with limited resources. In our design, all nodes are required to join at lower tier and nodes with better uptime and resources may dynamically migrate to upper tier. Further, taking the advantage of prevalent skewness in subscription patterns, popular subscriptions are cached at upper tier nodes, which leads to better lookup efficiency. Overlay construction and maintenance costs in our scheme are also less compared to flat implementations as we are required to update finger tables and successor lists of upper tier nodes with less frequency. Experimental and analytical results indicate that our proposed infrastructure scales well with increasing number of nodes, suggesting its applicability for large scale distributed applications.
A Random Forest Approach for Authorship Profiling

In this paper we present our approach to extract profile information from anonymized tweets for the author profiling task at PAN 2015 ( 10). Particularly we explore the versatility of random forest classifiers for the genre and age groups information and random forest regressions to score important aspects of the personality of a user. Furthermore we propose a set of features tailored for this task based on characteristics of the twitters. In particular, our approach relies on previous proposed features for sentiment analysis tasks.
Members of a Novel Class of Arabidopsis Rho Guanine Nucleotide Exchange Factors Control Rho GTPase-Dependent Polar Growth[W]

Rho family small GTPases are signaling switches controlling many eukaryotic cellular processes. Conversion from the GDP- to GTP-bound form is catalyzed by guanine nucleotide exchange factors (GEFs). Rho GEFs in animals fall into two structurally distinct classes containing DH and DOCKER catalytic domains. Using a plant Rho GTPase (ROP1) as bait in yeast two-hybrid screens, we identified a family of Rho GEFs, named RopGEFs. The Arabidopsis thaliana RopGEF family of 14 members contains a conserved central domain, the domain of unknown function 315 (DUF315), and variable N- and C-terminal regions. In vitro GEF assays show that DUF315 but not the full-length version of RopGEF1 has high GEF activity toward ROP1. Our data suggest that the variable regions of RopGEF1 are involved in regulation of RopGEF through an autoinhibitory mechanism. RopGEF1 overexpression in pollen tubes produced growth depolarization, as does a constitutively active ROP1 mutant. The RopGEF1 overexpression phenotype was suppressed by expression of a dominant-negative mutant of ROP1, probably by trapping RopGEF1. Deletion mutant analysis suggested a requirement of RopGEF activity for the function of RopGEF1 in polar growth. Green fluorescent protein–tagged RopGEF1 was localized to the tip of pollen tubes where ROP1 is activated. These results provide strong evidence that RopGEF1 activates ROP1 in control of polar growth in pollen tubes.