Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Restless Bandit Marginal Productivity Indices, Diminishing Returns, and Optimal Control of Make-to-Order/Make-to-Stock M/G/1 Queues

This paper presents a framework grounded on convex optimization and economics ideas to solve by index policies problems of optimal dynamic allocation of effort to a discrete-state (finite or countable) binary-action (work/rest) semi-Markov restless bandit project, elucidating issues raised by previous work. Its contributions include: (i) the concept of a restless bandit’s marginal productivity index (MPI), characterizing optimal policies relative to general cost and work measures; (ii) the characterization of indexable restless bandits as those satisfying diminishing marginal returns to work, consistently with a nested family of threshold policies; (iii) sufficient indexability conditions via partial conservation laws (PCLs); (iv) the characterization of the MPI as an optimal marginal productivity rate relative to feasible active-state sets; (v) application to semi-Markov bandits under several criteria, including a new mixed average-bias criterion; and (vi) PCL-indexability analyses and MPIs for optimal service control of make-to-order/make-to-stock queues with convex holding costs, under discounted and average-bias criteria.
Strings on a Violin: Location Dependence of Frequency Tuning in Active Dendrites

Strings on a violin are tuned to generate distinct sound frequencies in a manner that is firmly dependent on finger location along the fingerboard. Sound frequencies emerging from different violins could be very different based on their architecture, the nature of strings and their tuning. Analogously, active neuronal dendrites, dendrites endowed with active channel conductances, are tuned to distinct input frequencies in a manner that is dependent on the dendritic location of the synaptic inputs. Further, disparate channel expression profiles and differences in morphological characteristics could result in dendrites on different neurons of the same subtype tuned to distinct frequency ranges. Alternately, similar location-dependence along dendritic structures could be achieved through disparate combinations of channel profiles and morphological characteristics, leading to degeneracy in active dendritic spectral tuning. Akin to strings on a violin being tuned to different frequencies than those on a viola or a cello, different neuronal subtypes exhibit distinct channel profiles and disparate morphological characteristics endowing each neuronal subtype with unique location-dependent frequency selectivity. Finally, similar to the tunability of musical instruments to elicit distinct location-dependent sounds, neuronal frequency selectivity and its location-dependence are tunable through activity-dependent plasticity of ion channels and morphology. In this morceau, we explore the origins of neuronal frequency selectivity, and survey the literature on the mechanisms behind the emergence of location-dependence in distinct forms of frequency tuning. As a coda to this composition, we present some future directions for this exciting convergence of biophysical mechanisms that endow a neuron with frequency multiplexing capabilities.
Computing necessary integrability conditions for planar parametrized homogeneous potentials

Let <i>V</i> ∈ Q(<i>i</i>)(<b>a</b><sub>1</sub>,., <b>a</b><sub><i>n</i></sub>)(<b>q</b><sub>1</sub>, <b>q</b><sub>2</sub>) be a rationally parametrized planar homogeneous potential of homogeneity degree <i>k</i> ≠ −2, 0, 2. We design an algorithm that computes polynomial <i>necessary</i> conditions on the parameters (<b>a</b><sub>1</sub>,., <b>a</b><sub><i>n</i></sub>) such that the dynamical system associated to the potential <i>V</i> is integrable. These conditions originate from those of the Morales-Ramis-Simó integrability criterion near all Darboux points. The implementation of the algorithm allows to treat applications that were out of reach before, for instance concerning the non-integrability of polynomial potentials up to degree 9. Another striking application is the first complete proof of the non-integrability of the <i>collinear three body problem</i>.
Improved multi-camera 3D Eye Tracking for human-computer interface

A human being accumulates the majority of the surrounding impressions through vision. With the ability to track and observe a user's gaze, it is possible to obtain deep insights into the person's attention and, based on the gathered information, understand his or hers behavior and actions. In this paper we present an improved Multi-Camera 3D Eye Tracking framework for human-computer interface based on an algorithm that provides automated control of a Pan-Tilt camera (PTC) to follow a person's eye. We employ a fixed 3D wide-angle depth sensor (Kinect) in order to determine the position of the human face and its features, most importantly the eyes. By means of the supervised descent method (SDM), we compute correctly the position of the two eyes using 6 landmarks for each eye and the position of the head. Then, an active pan-tilt camera is oriented to one of the users' eyes, and in this way, a high-precision eye tracking is accomplished.
A Knowledge Management Approach to User Support

This paper considers the problem of computer user support and workplace learning in general. Theoretically our work is influenced by ideas on knowledge management, expertise networks and communities of practice. Our approach seeks to tap into the powerful and situated learning potential of the collaborative support provided by colleagues. We consider that such support could be enhanced through the use of a collaborative support system. We outline our investigations into design issues, a generic model and various experiments related to the development of such a system. In particular, we emphasise the value of recorded demonstrations for representing computer-related practice. We present a number of design conclusions derived from our experiences, and warn that whereas active user participation is the essential ingredient in a support system it is perhaps the most difficult thing to achieve.
Effect of barriers length and doping concentration on GaAs/AlGaAs RTD

This paper includes the effect of barrier length variations associated with the I-V characteristics of GaAs/AlGaAs Resonant Tunneling Diode (RTD). The changes in device like electron density, charge density and Fermi levels have been shown with their characteristics, which give the actual behavior of the device and helps in analyzing the device. Furthermore, comparison of these changes with previous have also been calculated and simulated with the help of simulation tool. Simulation performed using Nextnano3 and Atlas tools which confirm the various characteristics presented in this work.
Reset Control of an Industrial In-Line pH Process

This work presents a reset/hybrid control application of an in-line pH process. The nonlinear process dynamic is linearized around different operating points, and as a result a second-order plus dead time plant with uncertain gain and delay is obtained for control purposes. A standard PI compensator and reset compensator are designed and tuned. The main aim of this work was to compare the performance of both compensators by practical experimentation. The results show the reset compensator is able to overcome fundamental limitations of linear and time invariant control with a faster tracking response and overall improvement in disturbance rejection.
Role of alternative promoter elements in transcription from the nar promoter of Escherichia coli

The effects of mutations in the -10, -35, and Fnr box regions of the narGHJI promoter of Escherichia coli were determined by assaying the expression of beta-galactosidase from narG::lacZ fusion plasmids under aerobic and anaerobic conditions. A 1-base change in the -10 hexamer completely abolished expression, whereas a 3-base change to create the consensus TATAAT resulted in significant aerobic as well as anaerobic expression. A mutation in the putative -35 hexamer did not affect anaerobic expression but reduced aerobic expression from the construction with the -10 consensus sequence. A mutation in the Fnr box severely reduced anaerobic expression but did not affect aerobic expression. When the complete 5' region of the nar operon including the NarL box was present, nitrate stimulated both aerobic and anaerobic expression. Stimulation of expression by nitrate occurred in an fnr mutant but not in a narL mutant. We conclude that the rate of transcription of the nar operon is dependent on two distinct modes of transcription. One mode, which occurs at low levels, depends on the -10 and -35 hexamer sequences and is dramatically enhanced by changing the -10 sequence to the consensus TATAAT. The second depends on the -10 and Fnr box sequences but is independent of the -35 sequence. This second mode occurs at a very high level under anaerobic conditions when Fnr is activated and is also enhanced by changing the -10 sequence to the consensus TATAAT. NarL, activated by nitrate, stimulated both modes of transcription, indicating that it does not act through Fnr but that it directly affects the interaction of RNA polymerase with the promoter.
Thrombospondin Signaling of Focal Adhesion Disassembly Requires Activation of Phosphoinositide 3-Kinase*

Thrombospondin is an extracellular matrix protein involved in modulating cell adhesion. Thrombospondin stimulates a rapid loss of focal adhesion plaques and reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton in cultured bovine aortic endothelial cells. The focal adhesion labilizing activity of thrombospondin is localized to the amino-terminal domain, specifically amino acids 17–35. Use of a synthetic peptide (hep I), containing amino acids 17–35 of thrombospondin, enables us to examine the signaling mechanisms specifically involved in thrombospondin-induced disassembly of focal adhesions. We tested the hypothesis that activation of phosphoinositide 3-kinase is a necessary step in the thrombospondin-induced signaling pathway regulating focal adhesion disassembly. Both wortmannin and LY294002, membrane permeable inhibitors of phosphoinositide 3-kinase activity, blocked hep I-induced disassembly of focal adhesions. Similarly, wortmannin inhibited hep I-mediated actin microfilament reorganization and the hep I-induced translocation of α-actinin from focal adhesion plaques. Hep I also stimulated phosphoinositide 3-kinase activity approximately 2–3-fold as measured in anti-phosphoinositide 3-kinase and anti-phosphotyrosine immunoprecipitates. Increased immunoreactivity for the 85-kDa regulatory subunit in anti-phosphotyrosine immunoprecipitates suggests that the p85/p110 form of phosphoinositide 3-kinase is involved in this pathway. In32Pi-labeled cells, hep I increased levels of phosphatidylinositol (3,4,5)-trisphosphate, the major product of phosphoinositide 3-kinase phosphorylation. These results suggest that thrombospondin signals the disassembly of focal adhesions and reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton by a pathway involving stimulation of phosphoinositide 3-kinase activity.
Decreased Nighttime Heart Rate Variability Is Associated With Increased Stroke Risk

Background and Purpose— Prediction of stroke in healthy individuals is challenging and there is a diurnal variation of stroke onset. We hypothesized that heart rate variability with a focus on nighttime heart rate variability will predict the risk of stroke in apparently healthy middle-age and elderly subjects. Methods— The population-based cohort of the Copenhagen Holter Study, consisting of 678 healthy subjects between age 55 and 75 years with no history of cardiovascular disease or stroke, was evaluated. All underwent 48-hour ambulatory electrocardiogram monitoring. The SD of normal-to-normal RR intervals (SDNN) was selected as the method of measuring heart rate variability. Nighttime SDNN was measured between 02:00 and 02:15 AM and could be evaluated in 653 subjects. Median follow-up was 76 months. Results— Nighttime SDNN was lower in women than in men (P=0.0008), and in diabetics than nondiabetics (P=0.03). However, smoking, cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, and age were not associated with nighttime SDNN. The risk of stroke was significantly associated with nighttime SDNN in a univariate analysis (HR, 0.66; 95% CI, 0.50–0.88; P=0.004) and after adjustment for conventional risk factors (HR, 0.67; 95% CI, 0.51–0.89; P=0.005) per 10 ms increments of SDNN. Eighty-one percent of all strokes (21/26) occurred in 330 subjects with the lower half of nighttime SDNN (⩽38 ms; HR, 4.31; 95% CI, 1.62–11.42; P=0.003). Conclusions— Nocturnal heart rate variability is a strong marker for the development of stroke in apparently healthy subjects. The mechanism is unknown, but reduced parasympathetic activity may increase the risk of stroke by increasing the risk of arrhythmias.
Programming Rework in Software Processes

Our long-term research in process programming is based on the hypothesis that software processes can and should be captured accurately and formally, using executable formalisms to support execution, analysis, and understanding. Many process languages have been developed over the years for modeling processes formally. In this paper, we argue that for automated support, we need not a process modeling language, but a process programming language – a language with semantics sufficient to support the execution of process definitions. Specifically, we argue that invocation semantics are required for accurately describing real-world development processes. We use the common phenomenon of rework as an example of a process feature which requires invocation semantics for adequate specification. In this paper, we argue that rework can only be accurately described using invocation semantics borrowed from general purpose programming languages. We argue this in the general case and demonstrate a specific case via an example using Little-JIL, our hierarchical process programming language.
Reproduction of focused sources by the spectral division method

Sound reproduction methods based on the physical resynthesis of a desired field using loudspeaker arrays are well-established nowadays. Their physical basis allows to resynthesize almost any desired wave field, even the field of sound sources positioned in between the loudspeakers and the listener. Such sources are known as focused sources. This paper will present a novel approach to the reproduction of focused sources with linear loudspeaker arrays. Its formulation is based on a representation of the respective fields in the spatio-temporal frequency domain. The derivation of the loudspeaker driving function is discussed, as well as a number of practical limits, the role of evanescent contributions and the connections to other established techniques.
A Temporal Description Logic for Reasoning about Actions and Plans

A class of interval-based temporal languages for uniformly representing and reasoning about actions and plans is presented. Actions are represented by describing what is true while the action itself is occurring, and plans are constructed by temporally relating actions and world states. The temporal languages are members of the family of Description Logics, which are characterized by high expressivity combined with good computational properties. The subsumption problem for a class of temporal Description Logics is investigated and sound and complete decision procedures are given. The basic language TL-F is considered first: it is the composition of a temporal logic TL - able to express interval temporal networks - together with the non-temporal logic F - a Feature Description Logic. It is proven that subsumption in this language is an NP-complete problem. Then it is shown how to reason with the more expressive languages TLU-FU and TL-ALCF. The former adds disjunction both at the temporal and non-temporal sides of the language, the latter extends the non-temporal side with set-valued features (i.e., roles) and a propositionally complete language.
Engineering Heap Overflow Exploits with JavaScript

This paper presents a new technique for exploiting heap overflows in JavaScript interpreters. Briefly, given a heap overflow, JavaScript commands can be used to insure that a function pointer is reliably present for smashing, just after the overflown buffer. A case study serves to highlight the technique: the Safari exploit that the authors used to win the 2008 CanSecWest Pwn2Own contest.
Under Consideration for Publication in Knowledge and Information Systems Discovery of 'comet' Communities in Temporal and Labeled Graphs (com 2 )

While the analysis of unlabeled networks has been studied extensively in the past, finding patterns in different kinds of labeled graphs is still on open challenge. Given a large edge-labeled network, e.g. a time-evolving network, how can we find interessing patterns? We propose Com 2 , a novel, fast and incremental tensor analysis approach which can discover communities appearing over subsets of the labels. The method is (a) scalable, being linear on the input size, (b) general, (c) needs no user-defined parameters and (d) effective, returning results that agree with intuition. We apply our method to real datasets, including a phone-call network, a computer-traffic network and a flight information network. The phone call network consists of 4 million mobile users, with 51 million edges (phonecalls), over 14 days, while the flights dataset consists of 7 733 airports and 5 995 airline companies flying 67 663 different routes. We show that Com 2 spots intuitive patterns regarding edge labels that carry temporal or other discrete information. Our findings include large 'star'-like patterns, near-bipartite-cores, as well as tiny groups (5 users), calling each other hundreds of times within a few days. We also show that we are able to automatically identify competing airline companies. Received xxx Revised xxx Accepted xxx 2 Miguel Araujo et al
A probalistic approach to automatically extract new words from social media

Social media is the collection of different social networks containing different type of information. The information may be in the form of text, video, audio and image. Also various categories of users, various types of communities are available on social network. This research reports on the extraction of new keywords from messages posted on social media which will be helpful in the identification of various communities, category of user and hidden pattern present in the social media. In this paper, we applied Probalistic approach to recognize the new keywords and assign the group accordingly. State-of-the-art studies performed detection on the basis of existing keywords but the proposed approach take decision based on the existing keywords and also on new keywords extracted from social media.
Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering Manuscript No. Software Visualization

The Software Visualization (SV) discipline investigates approaches and techniques for static and dynamic graphical representations of algorithms, programs (code) and the processed data. SV is concerned primarily with analysis of programs and their development. The goal is to improve our understanding of inherently invisible and intangible software, particularly when dealing with large information spaces that characterize domains like software maintenance, reverse engineering, and collaborative development. The main challenge is to find effective mappings from different software aspects to graphical representations using visual metaphors. This paper provides an overview of the SV research, describes current research directions and includes an extensive list of recommended readings.
Constitutive Photomorphogenesis 1 and Multiple Photoreceptors Control Degradation of Phytochrome Interacting Factor 3, a Transcription Factor Required for Light Signaling in Arabidopsis

Light, in a quality- and quantity-dependent fashion, induces nuclear import of the plant photoreceptors phytochrome, promotes interaction of phytochrome A (phyA) and phyB with transcription factors including phytochrome interacting factor 3 (PIF3), and is thought to trigger a transcriptional cascade to regulate the expression of ∼2500 genes in Arabidopsis thaliana. Here, we show that controlled degradation of the transcription factor PIF3 is a major regulatory step in light signaling. We demonstrate that accumulation of PIF3 in the nucleus in dark requires constitutive photomorphogenesis 1 (COP1), a negative regulator of photomorphogenesis, and show that red (R) and far-red light (FR) induce rapid degradation of the PIF3 protein. This process is controlled by the concerted action of the R/FR absorbing phyA, phyB, and phyD photoreceptors, and it is not affected by COP1. Rapid light-induced degradation of PIF3 indicates that interaction of PIF3 with these phytochrome species is transient. In addition, we provide evidence that the poc1 mutant, a postulated PIF3 overexpressor that displays hypersensitivity to R but not to FR, lacks detectable amounts of the PIF3 protein. Thus, we propose that PIF3 acts transiently, and its major function is to mediate phytochrome-induced signaling during the developmental switch from skotomorphogenesis to photomorphogenesis and/or dark to light transitions.
Capturing the Interelectron Cusp Using a Geminal Layer on an Unconstrained Sum of Slater Determinants

Representations of the wavefunction of the multiparticle Schrodinger equation using an unconstrained sum of Slater determinants have the potential to be very efficient, except that they cannot capture the interelectron cusp. To remedy this shortcoming, we extend these representations to include interelectron geminals and analyze the algorithmic implications of doing so.
Improving Toxicity Assessment of Pesticide Mixtures: The Use of Polar Passive Sampling Devices Extracts in Microalgae Toxicity Tests

Complexity of contaminants exposure needs to be taking in account for an appropriate evaluation of risks related to mixtures of pesticides released in the ecosystems. Toxicity assessment of such mixtures can be made through a variety of toxicity tests reflecting different level of biological complexity. This paper reviews the recent developments of passive sampling techniques for polar compounds, especially Polar Organic Chemical Integrative Samplers (POCIS) and Chemcatcher® and the principal assessment techniques using microalgae in laboratory experiments. The progresses permitted by the coupled use of such passive samplers and ecotoxicology testing as well as their limitations are presented. Case studies combining passive sampling devices (PSD) extracts and toxicity assessment toward microorganisms at different biological scales from single organisms to communities level are presented. These case studies, respectively, aimed (i) at characterizing the “toxic potential” of waters using dose-response curves, and (ii) at performing microcosm experiments with increased environmental realism in the toxicant exposure in term of cocktail composition and concentration. Finally perspectives and limitations of such approaches for future applications in the area of environmental risk assessment are discussed.