Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Video over Cognitive Radio Networks : When Compression Meets the Radios

1. Introduction Video content delivery over wireless networks is expected to grow drastically in the coming years. The compelling need for ubiquitous video content access will significantly stress the capacity of existing and future wireless networks. To meet this critical demand, the Cognitive Radio (CR) technology provides an effective solution that can exploit co-deployed networks and aggregate underutilized spectrum for future video-aware wireless networks.
Clinical and metabolic results of fasting abbreviation with carbohydrates in coronary artery bypass graft surgery.

INTRODUCTION Limited information is available about preoperative fasting abbreviation with administration of liquid enriched with carbohydrates (CHO) in cardiovascular surgeries. OBJECTIVES To evaluate clinical variables, security of the method and effects on the metabolism of patients undergoing fasting abbreviation in coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. METHODS Forty patients undergoing CABG were randomized to receive 400 ml (6 hours before) and 200 ml (2 hours before) of maltodextrin at 12.5% (Group I, n=20) or just water (Group II, n=20) before anesthetic induction. Perioperative clinical variables were evaluated. Insulin resistance (IR) was evaluated by Homa-IR index and also by the need of exogenous insulin; pancreatic beta-cell excretory function by Homa-Beta index and glycemic control by tests of capillary glucose. RESULTS Deaths, bronchoaspiration, mediastinitis, stroke and acute myocardial infarction did not occur. Atrial fibrillation occurred in two patients of each group and infectious complications did not differ among groups (P=0.611). Patients of Group I presented two days less of hospital stay (P=0.025) and one day less in the ICU (P<0.001). The length of time using dobutamine was shorter in Group I (P=0.034). Glycemic control in the first 6h after surgery was worse for Group II (P=0.012). IR was verified and did not differ among groups (P>0.05). A decline in the endogenous production of insulin was observed in both groups (P<0.001). CONCLUSION Preoperative fasting abbreviation with the administration of CHO in the CABG was safe. The glycemic control improved in the ICU; there was less time in the use of dobutamine and length of hospital and ICU stay was reduced. However, neither IR nor morbimortality during hospital phase were influenced.
Real-time Incremental Speech-to-Speech Translation of Dialogs

In a conventional telephone conversation between two speakers of the same language, the interaction is real-time and the speakers process the information stream incrementally. In this work, we address the problem of incremental speech-to-speech translation (S2S) that enables cross-lingual communication between two remote participants over a telephone. We investigate the problem in a novel real-time Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based S2S framework. The speech translation is performed incrementally based on generation of partial hypotheses from speech recognition. We describe the statistical models comprising the S2S system and the SIP architecture for enabling real-time two-way cross-lingual dialog. We present dialog experiments performed in this framework and study the tradeoff in accuracy versus latency in incremental speech translation. Experimental results demonstrate that high quality translations can be generated with the incremental approach with approximately half the latency associated with non-incremental approach.
Signific ant Permission Identific ation for Android Malware Detection

A recent report indicates that a newly developed malicious app for Android is introduced every 11 seconds. To combat this alarming rate of malware creation, we need a scalable malware detection approach that is effective and efficient. In this thesis, we introduce SigPID, a malware detection system based on permission analysis to cope with the rapid increase in the number of Android malware. Instead of analyzing all 135 Android permissions, our approach applies 3-level pruning by mining the permission data to identify only significant permissions that can be effective in distinguishing benign and malicious apps. Based on the identified significant permissions, SigPID utilizes classification algorithms to classify different families of malware and benign apps. Our evaluation finds that only 25% of permissions (34 out of 135 permissions) are significant. We then compare the performance of our approach, using only 25% of all permissions, against a baseline approach that analyzes all permissions. The results indicate that when Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used as the classifier, we can achieve over 90% of precision, recall, accuracy, and F-measure, which are about the same as those produced by the baseline approach. We also show that SigPID is effective when used with 67 other commonly used supervised learning approaches. We find that 55 out of 67 algorithms can achieve F-measure of at least 85%, while the average running time can be reduced by 85.6% compared with the baseline approach. When we compare the detection effectiveness of SigPID to those of other approaches, SigPID can detect 96.54% of malware in the data set while other approaches detect 3.99% to 96.41%. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to give my thanks to my advisers Dr. Witawas Srisa-an and Dr. Qiben Yan. When I was an undergraduate student at UNL, I have no ideas about doing research in Computer Science. Dr. Witty discussed with me and gave me good advice to start my research at UNL. His kindness and guidance supports my three-year research study here. In Dr. Witty's research group, not only I learn tremendous amount of knowledge about research in security, I also learn other lifelong skills such as profound thinking and interpersonal interactions. I really appreciate his continuous help and patience during my study, which gives me courage and confidence to conduct research in areas that I am interested in. At the same time, I also want to give my thanks to Dr. Qiben Yan. Without …
Global Dissemination of a Single Mutation Conferring White Pericarp in Rice

Here we report that the change from the red seeds of wild rice to the white seeds of cultivated rice (Oryza sativa) resulted from the strong selective sweep of a single mutation, a frame-shift deletion within the Rc gene that is found in 97.9% of white rice varieties today. A second mutation, also within Rc, is present in less than 3% of white accessions surveyed. Haplotype analysis revealed that the predominant mutation originated in the japonica subspecies and crossed both geographic and sterility barriers to move into the indica subspecies. A little less than one Mb of japonica DNA hitchhiked with the rc allele into most indica varieties, suggesting that other linked domestication alleles may have been transferred from japonica to indica along with white pericarp color. Our finding provides evidence of active cultural exchange among ancient farmers over the course of rice domestication coupled with very strong, positive selection for a single white allele in both subspecies of O. sativa.
Simple and efficient oracle-based consensus protocols for asynchronous Byzantine systems

This paper is on the consensus problem in asynchronous distributed systems where (up to f) processes (among n) can exhibit a Byzantine behavior, i.e., can deviate arbitrarily from their specification. A way to solve the consensus problem in such a context consists of enriching the system with additional oracles that are powerful enough to cope with the uncertainty and unpredictability created by the combined effect of Byzantine behavior and asynchrony. Considering two types of such oracles, namely, an oracle that provides processes with random values, and a failure detector oracle, the paper presents two families of Byzantine asynchronous consensus protocols. Two of these protocols are particularly noteworthy: they allow the processes to decide in one communication step in favorable circumstances. The first is a randomized protocol that assumes n > 5f. The second one is a failure detector-based protocol that assumes n > 6f. These protocols are designed to be particularly simple and efficient in terms of communication steps, the number of messages they generate in each step, and the size of messages. So, although they are not optimal in the number of Byzantine processes that can be tolerated, they are particularly efficient when we consider the number of communication steps they require to decide, and the number and size of the messages they use. In that sense, they are practically appealing.
Tongue Cooling: A New Reward for Thirsty Rodents

Thirsty rodents will persistently lick a stream of dry air pumped through a standard drinking tube. This air-licking is attenuated by experimental manipulations which reduce the evaporative cooling of the tongue and mouth produced by the airstream. This suggests that such cooling is itself an effective reward for thirstry rodents. We tested this hypothesis by presenting thirsty rodents with a piece of cold, dry metal. Different species spent from 9 to 40 percent of their session time licking the cold metal. When deprived of water hamsters reared from birth without access to drinking water licked cold metal in preference to metal maintained at room or body temperature. This preference was approximately equal to that of littermates reared normally. We conclude that tongue cooling is a primary reward for thirsty rodents.
Wirelessly accessible sensor populations (WASP) for elderly care monitoring

This paper presents an application of a service-based architecture to pervasive monitoring of the elderly using ambient and wearable sensors. The design consideration of the model addresses heterogeneous computing and network resource utilization, allowing inter-operability and supporting dynamic environments to achieve system wide resource optimization. An application of this architecture is presented for assessing the activities of daily living, which is the basis for pervasive sensing for elderly care.
Diverse type 2 diabetes genetic risk factors functionally converge in a phenotype-focused gene network

Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) constitutes a global health burden. Efforts to uncover predisposing genetic variation have been considerable, yet detailed knowledge of the underlying pathogenesis remains poor. Here, we constructed a T2D phenotypic-linkage network (T2D-PLN), by integrating diverse gene functional information that highlight genes, which when disrupted in mice, elicit similar T2D-relevant phenotypes. Sensitising the network to T2D-relevant phenotypes enabled significant functional convergence to be detected between genes implicated in monogenic or syndromic diabetes and genes lying within genomic regions associated with T2D common risk. We extended these analyses to a recent multiethnic T2D case-control exome of 12,940 individuals that found no evidence of T2D risk association for rare frequency variants outside of previously known T2D risk loci. Examining associations involving protein-truncating variants (PTV), most at low population frequencies, the T2D-PLN was able to identify a convergent set of biological pathways that were perturbed within four of five independent T2D case/control ethnic sets of 2000 to 5000 exomes each. These same pathways were found to be over-represented among both known monogenic or syndromic diabetes genes and genes within T2D-associated common risk loci. Our study demonstrates convergent biology amongst variants representing different classes of T2D genetic risk. Although convergence was observed at the pathway level, few of the contributing genes were found in common between different cohorts or variant classes, most notably between the exome variant sets which suggests that future rare variant studies may be better focusing their power onto a single population of recent common ancestry.
HSPICE implementation of a numerically efficient model of CNT transistor

This paper presents the algorithms of an implementation of a numerically efficient carbon nanotube transistor (CNT) model in HSPICE. The model is derived from cubic spline non-linear approximation of the non-equilibrium mobile charge density. The spline algorithm exploits a rapid and accurate solution of the numerical relationship between the charge density and the self-consistent voltage, which results in the acceleration of deriving the current through the channel without losing much accuracy. The output I–V characteristics of the proposed model have been compared with those of a recent HSPICE implementation of the Stanford CNT model and published experimental I–V curves. The results show superior accuracy of the proposed model while maintaining similar CPU time performance. Two versions of the HSPICE macromodel implementation have been developed and validated, one to reflect ballistic transport only and another with non-ballistic effects. To further validate the model a complementary logic inverter has also been implemented using the proposed technique and simulated in HSPICE.
The mechanism of directionally selective units in rabbit's retina.

Directionally selective single units have recently been found in the cerebral cortex of cats (Hubel, 1959; Hubel & Wiesel, 1959, 1962), the optic tectum of frogs and pigeons (Lettvin, Maturana, McCulloch & Pitts, 1959; Maturana & Frenk, 1963), and the retinae of rabbits (Barlow & Hill, 1963; Barlow, Hill & Levick, 1964). The term 'directionally selective' means that a unit gives a vigorous discharge of impulses when a stimulus object is moved through its receptive field in one direction (called the preferred direction), whereas motion in the reverse direction (called null) evokes little or no response. The preferred direction differs in different units, and the activity of a set of such units signals the direction of movement of objects in the visual field. In the rabbit the preferred and null directions cannot be predicted from a map of the receptive field showing the regions yielding on or off-responses to stationary spots. Furthermore, the preferred direction is unchanged by changing the stimulus; in particular, reversing the contrast of a spot or a black-white border does not reverse the preferred direction. Hubel & Wiesel (1962) thought that the directional selectivity of the cat's cortical neurons could be explained by the asymmetrical arrangement of on and off zones in the receptive field, and the simple interaction of effects summated over these zones, but the foregoing results rule out this explanation, at least in the rabbit's retina (Barlow & Hill, 1963). In the present paper we go on from this point to describe experiments which show, first, that directional selectivity is not due to optical aberrations of some kind and, secondly, that it is not a simple matter of the latency of response varying systematically across the receptive field. After these negative results we describe experiments upon the organization of directional selectivity within the receptive field, and upon its mechanism. These lead us to the conclusion that the ganglion cells responding to a
Wage Dispersion, Over-Qualification, and Reder Competition

Abstract The expansion of higher education in the Western countries has been accompanied by a marked widening of wage differentials and increasing over-qualification. While the increase in wage differentials has been attributed to skill-biased technological change that made advanced skills scarce, this explanation does not fit well with the observed increase in over-qualification which suggests that advanced skills are in excess supply. By “Reder-competition” I refer to the simultaneous adjustment of wage offers and hiring standards in response to changing labor market conditions. I present a simple model of Reder competition that depicts wages as driven by labor heterogeneity, rather than scarcity. The mechanism may give rise to a simultaneous increase in wage differentials and over-qualification.
Variational methods for glacier flow over plastic till

We investigate the mechanics of ice streams and glaciers flowing over a bed consisting of Coulomb-plastic subglacial sediment, or more generally, of channel flows with Coulomb or ‘solid’ friction laws at the boundary. Sliding is assumed to occur if shear stress at the glacier bed attains a prescribed, locally defined yield stress, while no sliding is assumed possible below that yield stress. Importantly, the location of regions of slip and no slip at the bed is not known a priori, but forms part of the solution. By analogy with friction problems in elasticity, we derive a weak formulation as a semi-coercive variational inequality, which admits a unique solution provided a solvability condition ensuring force balance is satisfied. The variational formulation is then exploited to calculate numerical solutions, and we investigate the effect of variations in subglacial water pressure, ice thickness and surface slope on the discharge of a valley glacier with a plastic bed. Significant differences are found between the behaviour of wide and narrow as well as steep and shallow-angled glaciers, and our results further indicate the need to develop models capable of accounting for longitudinal stresses.
MindLAB at the THUMOS Challenge

In this notebook paper we describe the MindLAB research group participation at the THUMOS challenge held as part of the ICCV 2013 conference. Two runs were submitted using different methods (SVM, OMF) with the features provided by the challenge organizers (DTF). The performance obtained shows an improvement over the baseline method.
Toward a Cyber Resilient and Secure Microgrid Using Software-Defined Networking

To build a resilient and secure microgrid in the face of growing cyber-attacks and cyber-mistakes, we present a software-defined networking (SDN)-based communication network architecture for microgrid operations. We leverage the global visibility, direct networking controllability, and programmability offered by SDN to investigate multiple security applications, including self-healing communication network management, real-time and uncertainty-aware communication network verification, and specification-based intrusion detection. We also expand a novel cyber-physical testing and evaluation platform that combines a power distribution system simulator (for microgrid energy services) and an SDN emulator with a distributed control environment (for microgrid communications). Experimental results demonstrate that the SDN-based communication architecture and applications can significantly enhance the resilience and security of microgrid operations against the realization of various cyber threats.
Did the Great Inflation Occur Despite Policymaker Commitment to a Taylor Rule?

The authors study the hypothesis that misperceptions of trend productivity growth during the onset of the productivity slowdown in the United States caused much of the great inflation of the 1970s. They use the general equilibrium, sticky price framework of Woodford (2002), augmented with learning using the techniques of Evans and Honkapohja (2001). The authors allow for endogenous investment as well as explicit, exogenous growth in productivity and the labor input. They assume the monetary policymaker is committed to using a Taylor-type policy rule. The authors study how this economy reacts to an unexpected change in the trend productivity growth rate under learning. They find that a substantial portion of the observed increase in inflation during the 1970s can be attributed to this source.
Distribution Testing Lower Bounds via Reductions from Communication Complexity

We present a new methodology for proving distribution testing lower bounds, establishing a connection between distribution testing and the simultaneous message passing (SMP) communication model. Extending the framework of Blais, Brody, and Matulef [15], we show a simple way to reduce (private-coin) SMP problems to distribution testing problems. This method allows us to prove new distribution testing lower bounds, as well as to provide simple proofs of known lower bounds. Our main result is concerned with testing identity to a specific distribution, p, given as a parameter. In a recent and influential work, Valiant and Valiant [55] showed that the sample complexity of the aforementioned problem is closely related to the ℓ2/3-quasinorm of p. We obtain alternative bounds on the complexity of this problem in terms of an arguably more intuitive measure and using simpler proofs. More specifically, we prove that the sample complexity is essentially determined by a fundamental operator in the theory of interpolation of Banach spaces, known as Peetre’s K-functional. We show that this quantity is closely related to the size of the effective support of p (loosely speaking, the number of supported elements that constitute the vast majority of the mass of p). This result, in turn, stems from an unexpected connection to functional analysis and refined concentration of measure inequalities, which arise naturally in our reduction.
Design Pattern Coupling, Change Proneness, and Change Coupling: A Pilot Study

A design pattern realization consists of a cluster of classes that work together to solve a particular problem using a well known, named solution. Developers may build systems out of several pattern realizations, and these pattern realizations may be interconnected, or, in other words, coupled. Coupled pattern realizations may represent a reasonable solution to software design problems, however the coupling can introduce dependencies that increase faultproneness and lower adaptability. We identify mechanisms that can couple pattern realizations, and evaluate the relative tightness of the connections. An examination of pattern coupling in ve systems provides initial evidence that pattern coupling is common. In addition, we nd initial evidence that classes in pattern realizations that are coupled via associations are (1) more change prone and (2) exhibit higher change coupling o classes that are modied together in response to one required change o than those in pattern realizations that are coupled by other mechanisms
Efficient Compressive Phase Retrieval with Constrained Sensing Vectors

We propose a robust and efficient approach to the problem of compressive phase retrieval in which the goal is to reconstruct a sparse vector from the magnitude of a number of its linear measurements. The proposed framework relies on constrained sensing vectors and a two-stage reconstruction method that consists of two standard convex programs that are solved sequentially. In recent years, various methods are proposed for compressive phase retrieval, but they have suboptimal sample complexity or lack robustness guarantees. The main obstacle has been that there is no straightforward convex relaxations for the type of structure in the target. Given a set of underdetermined measurements, there is a standard framework for recovering a sparse matrix, and a standard framework for recovering a low-rank matrix. However, a general, efficient method for recovering a jointly sparse and low-rank matrix has remained elusive. Deviating from the models with generic measurements, in this paper we show that if the sensing vectors are chosen at random from an incoherent subspace, then the low-rank and sparse structures of the target signal can be effectively decoupled. We show that a recovery algorithm that consists of a low-rank recovery stage followed by a sparse recovery stage will produce an accurate estimate of the target when the number of measurements is $\mathsf{O}(k\,\log\frac{d}{k})$, where $k$ and $d$ denote the sparsity level and the dimension of the input signal. We also evaluate the algorithm through numerical simulation.