Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Social Construction of Innovation Narratives: Implications for Management Studies

The paper is an attempt to understand innovation from social constructivist framework and an effort to theoretically map how innovation embodies social goals and power relationships. It examines how socio-cultural approaches can reveal deeper insights in understanding different facets of socio-technical change. We argue that the concept of innovation (at least as framed within a certain literature of innovation studies) is a social construction itself culturally and historically determined. We draw our theoretical discussions from social construction of technology and actor-network theory. The first part of the paper briefly introduces the concept of innovation, and its different perspectives. It also opens up debates about social constructionist approaches to understand innovation. The second part of the paper states the problem and highlights the limitations of the dominant management perspectives. The paper concludes setting a future research agenda for management scholars, which takes into account some of the lessons provided by the social constructivist framework.
Decentralized Linear Motion Estimators for AUV Formations with Fixed Topologies

Abstract This paper addresses the problem of decentralized state estimation in formations of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) with fixed topologies. In the envisioned scenario, each AUV in the formation estimates its own state relying only on locally available measurements and data communicated by neighboring agents, requiring lower computational and communication loads than centralized solutions. A method for designing local state observers featuring global error dynamics that converge asymptotically to zero is detailed, and an algorithm for improving its performance under stochastic disturbances and Gaussian uncertainties is presented. The proposed algorithm aims to minimize the H 2 norm of the global estimation error dynamics, expressed as an optimization problem subject to Bilinear Matrix Inequality (BMI) constraints. To assess the performance of the solution, realistic simulation results are presented and discussed for several formation topologies.
ResponseAssociated with a Differential Inflammatory Oxidized Low-Density Lipoprotein Is Expression in Human Macrophages with Individual Variation of Scavenger Receptor

Atherosclerosis is an inﬂammatory disease in which oxidized low-density lipoprotein (oxLDL) plays important roles. Scavenger receptors (SR) CD36, SR-A, and LOX-1 uptake over 90% of the oxLDL leading to foam cell formation and secretion of inﬂammatory cytokines. To investigate whether the interindividual differences in macrophage SR gene expression could determine the inﬂammatory variability in response to oxLDL, we quantiﬁed the gene and protein expression of SR and inﬂammatory molecules from macrophages isolated from 18 volunteer subjects and incubated with oxLDL for 1, 3, 6, and 18 h. The individual gene expression proﬁle of the studied SR a t 1 h ofincubation was highly variable, showing a wide fold-change range: CD36 : (cid:1) 3.57–4.22, SR-A : (cid:1) 5.0–4.43, and LOX-1 : (cid:1) 1.56–75.32. We identiﬁed subjects as high and low responders depending on whether their SR gene expression was above or below the median, showing a different inﬂammation response pattern. CD36 and LOX-1 gene expression correlated positively with IL-1 (cid:2) ; SR-A correlated negatively with IL-8 and positively with PPAR (cid:3) and NF- (cid:4) B (cid:5) A . These results were conﬁrmed in the same subjects 3 mo after the ﬁrst sampling. Furthermore, a negative correlation existed between CD36 and SR-A at protein level after 18 h of oxLDL incubation ( R (cid:6) (cid:1) 0.926,
Poster: Understanding YouTube QoE in Cellular Networks with YoMoApp: A QoE Monitoring Tool for YouTube Mobile

The performance of YouTube in cellular networks is crucial to network operators, who try to find a trade-off between cost-efficient handling of the huge traffic amounts and high perceived end-user Quality of Experience (QoE). In this paper we present YoMoApp (YouTube Performance Monitoring Application), an Android application which passively monitors key performance indicators (KPIs) of YouTube adaptive video streaming on end-user smartphones. The monitored KPIs (i.e., player state/events, re-buffering, and video quality levels) can be used to analyze the QoE of mobile YouTube video sessions. YoMoApp is a valuable tool to assess the performance of cellular networks with respect to YouTube traffic, as well as to develop optimizations and QoE models for mobile HTTP adaptive streaming. We try YoMoApp through real subjective QoE lab tests showing that the tool is accurate to capture the experience of end-users watching YouTube on smartphones.
OBSERVATIONS OF ROTATING RADIO TRANSIENTS WITH THE FIRST STATION OF THE LONG WAVELENGTH ARRAY

Rotating radio transients (RRATs) are a subclass of pulsars first identified in 2006 that are detected only in searches for single pulses and not through their time averaged emission. Here, we present the results of observations of 19 RRATs using the first station of the Long Wavelength Array (LWA1) at frequencies between 30 and 88 MHz. The RRATs observed here were first detected in higher frequency pulsar surveys. Of the 19 RRATs observed, two sources were detected and their dispersion measures, periods, pulse profiles, and flux densities are reported and compared to previous higher frequency measurements. We find a low detection rate (11%), which could be a combination of the lower sensitivity of LWA1 compared to higher frequency telescopes, and the result of scattering by the interstellar medium or a spectral turnover.
Evaluating Relevance Feedback: An Image Retrieval Interface for Children

Studies on information retrieval for children are not yet common. As young children possess a limited vocabulary and limited intellectual power, they may experience more difficulty in fulfilling their information need than adults. This paper presents an image retrieval user interface that is specifically designed for children. The interface uses relevance feedback and has been evaluated by letting children perform different search tasks. The tasks were performed using two interfaces; a more traditional interface - acting as a control interface - and the relevance feedback interface. One of the remarkable results of this study is that children did not favor relevance feedback controls over traditional navigational controls.
Interaction Design with Audio: Speculating on Sound in Future Design Education

A challenge for future design education in our post-screen world is how to develop design methods, practices, and education for non-visual interaction with interactive systems. The design education approach reported in this paper combines aspects of Sonic Interaction Design, Interaction Design, and physical computing to allow designers to explore the potential role of sound in interaction, and to sensitize designers to the use of sound for interaction. The Interaction Design with Audio (IDwA) approach reported in this paper foregrounds design thinking about the possible design connections between human physical action and sonic responses by interactive systems. This paper reports on the method and representative case studies of design and learning outcomes from IDwA workshops over three years with undergraduate and postgraduate design students. These case studies indicate that the focus on exploratory design thinking with a novel design task lends itself to sensitising designers to the rich possibilities of using sound in interaction. Exemplar design features include anthropomorphism, functional interaction, narrative flow, and environmental immersion. The case studies of using IDwA illustrate that new and intriguing forms of interaction can be mocked up using simple sensors, physical computing, and a little verve.
Automatic Facial Feature Extraction in Model-Based Coding

Model-based coding is a new image sequence compression technique for very low bit rate coding. Most researchers have paid more attention to facial image analysis and synthesis because facial images are very important in multimedia communication applications, such as video phone, video conferencing, remote learning etc. This coding method represents the image content in a structural way. This is the reason why modelbased coding can get a higher compression ratio (1-10 kb/s) than can the conventional coding methods. In order to encode image signals efficiently, it is necessary to create a suitable generic model and adapt it to the actual object accurately. In this paper, we propose a scheme, based on the integral-projection algorithm, which adapts a face model to an actual face automatically. First, the image is preprocessed by means of edge detection. From the edge mapped image, we use the feature of the increasing sudden edge density to indicate the rough vertical positions of eyes and mouth. According to the local threshold value in each feature area, all of the control points about the eyes and mouth are found. Finally, we use these control points to adapt the model to an actual face.
Virtues, ecological momentary assessment/intervention and smartphone technology

Virtues, broadly understood as stable and robust dispositions for certain responses across morally relevant situations, have been a growing topic of interest in psychology. A central topic of discussion has been whether studies showing that situations can strongly influence our responses provide evidence against the existence of virtues (as a kind of stable and robust disposition). In this review, we examine reasons for thinking that the prevailing methods for examining situational influences are limited in their ability to test dispositional stability and robustness; or, then, whether virtues exist. We make the case that these limitations can be addressed by aggregating repeated, cross-situational assessments of environmental, psychological and physiological variables within everyday life—a form of assessment often called ecological momentary assessment (EMA, or experience sampling). We, then, examine how advances in smartphone application (app) technology, and their mass adoption, make these mobile devices an unprecedented vehicle for EMA and, thus, the psychological study of virtue. We, additionally, examine how smartphones might be used for virtue development by promoting changes in thought and behavior within daily life; a technique often called ecological momentary intervention (EMI). While EMA/I have become widely employed since the 1980s for the purposes of understanding and promoting change amongst clinical populations, few EMA/I studies have been devoted to understanding or promoting virtues within non-clinical populations. Further, most EMA/I studies have relied on journaling, PDAs, phone calls and/or text messaging systems. We explore how smartphone app technology provides a means of making EMA a more robust psychological method, EMI a more robust way of promoting positive change, and, as a result, opens up new possibilities for studying and promoting virtues.
Activity profiling of deubiquitinating enzymes in cervical carcinoma biopsies and cell lines

Ubiquitin specific proteases (USPs) regulate the production and recycling of ubiquitin and are thereby critically involved in the control of cell growth, differentiation, and apoptosis. Increasing evidence implicates deregulation of USPs in malignant transformation but there is very little information on the overall and specific activity of USPs in normal and tumor tissues. We have used a chemistry‐based functional proteomics approach to profile the activities of individual USPs in biopsies of human papillomavirus (HPV) carrying cervical carcinoma and adjacent normal tissue. To assess the contribution of HPV proteins, USP activity was also compared in HPV positive and negative cervical carcinoma cell lines and HPV E6/E7 immortalized human keratinocytes. The activity of the C‐terminal hydrolases UCH‐L3 and UCH37 was upregulated in the majority of tumor tissues compared to the adjacent normal tissues. UCH‐L1 activity was lower in a significant proportion of the tumors but to a less extent in advanced tumors. In accordance with the relatively low UCH‐L1 activity in tumor biopsies, UCH‐L1 was detected only in one out of eight cervical carcinoma lines. UCH‐L1, UCH‐L3, USP7, and USP9X activity was upregulated following HPV E6/E7 immortalization of keratinocytes, suggesting a role of these enzymes in growth transformation. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Eye-specific segregation requires neural activity in three-eyed Rana pipiens

The addition of a third eye primordium to the forebrain region of a Rana pipiens embryo invariably results in the development of a series of periodic, mutually exclusive eye-specific bands in tectal lobes dually innervated by the host and supernumerary fibers. A number of investigators have proposed that such source-specific segregation arises as a compromise between two mechanisms that are normally involved in retinotectal map formation: one which is dependent on cell surface affinities to align the map and produce a rough retinotopy and a second that “fine tunes” the map by stabilizing adjacent terminals from neighboring retinal ganglion cell bodies at the expense of terminals from non-neighboring cells. In this study we have tested the idea that this second “fine-tuning” mechanism is dependent on neural activity by blocking impulse activity in the optic nerves of three-eyed tadpoles. To assess the requirement for activity on the formation of bands, both normal optic nerves of 17 three-eyed tadpoles were crushed intraorbitally. Two weeks after this operation, the supernumerary retinal projection had debanded and spread to cover the entire tectum in a continuous fashion. By 4 weeks, however, the host optic fibers regenerated back to the tecta and began to form segregated stripes with the fibers from the third eye. Six to 7 weeks after the optic nerve crush the periodic pattern of eye-specific segregation characteristic of dually innervated tecta was again pronounced. When activity in all three optic nerves was eliminated with tetrodotoxin (TTX; embedded in a slow release plastic) during the last 3 weeks of this process, the fibers from the two competing eyes failed to segregate and, instead, formed two completely overlapping, continuous projections across the tectal surface. To test for the requirement of activity in the maintenance of segregation, we also subjected three-eyed tadpoles without optic nerve crush to TTX blockade for 2, 3, and 4 weeks. Animals sacrificed at 2 weeks show overlap of the projections in the rostral tectum but distinct interdigitating stripes in other regions of these lobes. After 3 weeks of blockade, segregation of the projections was less distinct in the central tectum as well. After 4 weeks of TTX blockade the terminals from both eyes spread to form continuous overlapping projections throughout the tectum. Examination of well isolated, individual retinal ganglion cell terminal arbors during this period reveals that they occupy a significantly greater area of tectum following the TTX treatment.
Urban and social sensing for sustainable mobility in smart cities

In this contribution, we describe the SMARTY project. The project is funded by the Tuscany Region and aims to develop innovative services for sustainable transport and mobility in smart cities. These services are based on data collected by environmental and social sensors: such data are pre-processed and analysed by data mining techniques for determining useful information such as state of the traffic flow and parking lots, special events, demonstrations and accidents. All this information is used by SMARTY to suggest optimal routes to the users, taking also the multi-modality into account.
Directable Synthetic Characters

Assuming a centralized narrative control mechanism, we must build synthetic characters that can accept and enact direction in real -time from the narrative manager. These characters must adhere to both the character design as intended by the author, as well as the performance requirements of their autonomous behavior, such as military doctrine or social roles. To explore how we can build such artifacts, we first analyze the requirements that directable synthetic characters must meet. We formalize these in terms of both directability and believability. We then examine the various types of conflicts that can occur when our synthetic characters are faced with a direction. Finally, we propose an agent design that integrates deliberate goal pursuit with coherent improvisation to achieve the type of believable behavior such directable systems would require.
Implementation of Fuzzy Self-Tuning PID and Feed-Forward Design for High-Performance Motion Control System

The existing conventional motion controller does not perform well in the presence of nonlinear properties, uncertain factors, and servo lag phenomena of industrial actuators. Hence, a feasible and effective fuzzy self-tuning proportional integral derivative (PID) and feed-forward control scheme is introduced to overcome these problems. In this design, a fuzzy tuner is used to tune the PID parameters resulting in the rejection of the disturbance, which achieves better performance. Then, both velocity and acceleration feed-forward units are added to considerably reduce the tracking error due to servo lag. To verify the capability and effectiveness of the proposed control scheme, the hardware configuration includes digital signal processing (DSP) which plays the main role, dual-port RAM (DPRAM) to guarantee rapid and reliable communication with the host, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to handle the task of the address decoder and receive the feed-back encoder signal, and several peripheral logic circuits. The results from the experiments show that the proposed motion controller has a smooth profile, with high tracking precision and real-time performance, which are applicable in various manufacturing fields.
Becoming-sound: affect and assemblage in improvisational digital music making

The concepts of affect and assemblage proposed by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi can help us to understand the interaction between users and artefacts in interactive systems, particularly in the context of computer-supported improvisation and creativity. In this paper I provide an introduction to affect and assemblage theory for HCI practitioners. I then use a case study of Viscotheque, an iOS-based interface for group musical collaboration, to demonstrate the application of affective analysis in making sense of improvisational group music making.
The 5BSL3.2 Functional RNA Domain Connects Distant Regions in the Hepatitis C Virus Genome

Viral genomes are complexly folded entities that carry all the information required for the infective cycle. The nucleotide sequence of the RNA virus genome encodes proteins and functional information contained in discrete, highly conserved structural units. These so-called functional RNA domains play essential roles in the progression of infection, which requires their preservation from one generation to the next. Numerous functional RNA domains exist in the genome of the hepatitis C virus (HCV). Among them, the 5BSL3.2 domain in the cis-acting replication element (CRE) at the 3′ end of the viral open reading frame has become of particular interest given its role in HCV RNA replication and as a regulator of viral protein synthesis. These functionalities are achieved via the establishment of a complex network of long-distance RNA–RNA contacts involving (at least as known to date) the highly conserved 3′X tail, the apical loop of domain IIId in the internal ribosome entry site, and/or the so-called Alt region upstream of the CRE. Changing contacts promotes the execution of different stages of the viral cycle. The 5BSL3.2 domain thus operates at the core of a system that governs the progression of HCV infection. This review summarizes our knowledge of the long-range RNA–RNA interaction network in the HCV genome, with special attention paid to the structural and functional consequences derived from the establishment of different contacts. The potential implications of such interactions in switching between the different stages of the viral cycle are discussed.
Rapid and automatic atlas-based approach of Alzheimer's disease assessment by positron emission tomography neuroimages

Current Alzheimer's disease diagnosis and cognitive assessment are based on medical history assessment and evaluation of cognitive score systems. They are time-consuming and subjective. A rapid and automated method is developed by processing positron emission tomography neuroimages and performing statistical analysis. The brain areas are firstly extracted from the neuroimages by an atlas-assisted approach, and then transformed piecewise into a common atlas space by dividing the brain into 18 cubic regions based on the landmarks identified automatically. The statistical models of stepwise regressions and discriminant classification are applied to predict the cognitive scores and make a diagnosis on Alzheimer's disease or mild cognitive impairment. The proposed method is fully automatic and has been tested on 400 cases. The preliminary testing results are promising. For a group of 250 cases which are the samples of the regressions and discriminant classification, the success rates of disease diagnosis are 73.7%, 54.9%, and 79.7% for the patients with Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment, and normal subjects, respectively. The average success rate for another group of 150 cases is 61.3%.
Successive refinement of video: fundamental issues, past efforts, and new directions

The paper provides an overview of the fundamental issues confronting scalable video compression, together with some of the most promising general approaches to addressing these issues. For motivation, the paper sketches a compelling application in remote browsing of video, whose realization is not possible without efficient highly scalable video compression technology. The paper outlines some of the most important structural alternatives for wavelet-based scalable video compression systems, together with experimental findings in support of particular alternatives. In particular, the paper describes novel spatio-temporal decomposition structures, a novel finely embedded motion coding structure, and a complete compression system which addresses the needs of a wide range of potential applications. Preliminary compression performance results are provided together with information on an implementation which is capable of real-time decoding at CIF resolutions and beyond.
Experiments Testing Multiobject Allocation Mechanisms 641 2 . What Did We Do ?

This paper reports the results of over 130 auctions conducted under controlled conditions to examine the robustness of several auction mechanisms to allocate multiple objects. The simultaneous discrete auction process used by the Federal Communications Commission to allocate Personal Communications licenses was contrasted with a sequential auction and a combinatorial auction over a variety of demand conditions. In test environments created to check only the minimum competency of the procedures, the simultaneous discrete auction process produces highly efficient allocations, approaching levels similar to those found with a continuous form of the auction, and it outperforms a sequential auction. However, in environments created to stress test the procedures, a combinatorial auction outperforms the simultaneous discrete auction.