Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Opportunities and Challenges of Performing Vector Operations inside the DRAM

In order to overcome the low memory bandwidth and the high energy costs associated with the data transfer between the processor and the main memory, proposals on near-data computing started to gain acceptance in systems ranging from embedded architectures to high performance computing. The main previous approaches propose application specific hardware or require a large amount of logic. Moreover, most proposals require algorithm changes and do not make use of the full parallelism available on the DRAM devices. These issues limits the adoption and the performance of near-data computing. In this paper, we propose to implement vector instructions directly inside the DRAM devices, which we call the Memory Vector Extensions (MVX). This balanced approach reduces data movement between the DRAM to the processor while requiring a low amount of hardware to achieve good performance. Comparing to current vector operations present on processors, our proposal enable performance gains of up to 97x and reduces the energy consumption by up to 70x of the full system.
Modeling for Classifying Data Streams with Concept Drift

We propose a novel methodology of maintaining a classification model on streaming data, such as sensor data or log data. Our approach uses an ensemble for classifying data streams which consists of a set of classifiers. New classifiers of the ensemble on streaming data will be generated dynamically according to the estimated distribution of streaming data instead of periodically building them. Also our approach is able to deal with changes of class distribution as well as changes of data distribution. We compared the results of our approach and of the previous approach which can only deal with changes of data distribution. In experiments with 10 benchmark data sets, our approach produced an average of 3.61% higher classification accuracy.
Optimal Coalition Structure Generation in Cooperative Graph Games

Representation languages for coalitional games are a key research area in algorithmic game theory. There is an inherent tradeoff between how general a language is, allowing it to capture more elaborate games, and how hard it is computationally to optimize and solve such games. One prominent such language is the simple yet expressive Weighted Graph Games (WGGs) representation (Deng and Papadimitriou, 1994), which maintains knowledge about synergies between agents in the form of an edge weighted graph. We consider the problem of finding the optimal coalition structure in WGGs. The agents in such games are vertices in a graph, and the value of a coalition is the sum of the weights of the edges present between coalition members. The optimal coalition structure is a partition of the agents to coalitions, that maximizes the sum of utilities obtained by the coalitions. We show that finding the optimal coalition structure is not only hard for general graphs, but is also intractable for restricted families such as planar graphs which are amenable for many other combinatorial problems. We then provide algorithms with constant factor approximations for planar, minor-free and bounded degree graphs.
The IBaCoP Planning System: Instance-Based Configured Portfolios

Sequential planning portfolios are very powerful in exploiting the complementary strength of different automated planners. The main challenge of a portfolio planner is to define which base planners to run, to assign the running time for each planner and to decide in what order they should be carried out to optimize a planning metric. Portfolio configurations are usually derived empirically from training benchmarks and remain fixed for an evaluation phase. In this work, we create a per-instance configurable portfolio, which is able to adapt itself to every planning task. The proposed system pre-selects a group of candidate planners using a Pareto-dominance filtering approach and then it decides which planners to include and the time assigned according to predictive models. These models estimate whether a base planner will be able to solve the given problem and, if so, how long it will take. We define different portfolio strategies to combine the knowledge generated by the models. The experimental evaluation shows that the resulting portfolios provide an improvement when compared with non-informed strategies. One of the proposed portfolios was the winner of the Sequential Satisficing Track of the International Planning Competition held in 2014.
2016 Ieee International Conference on Big Data (big Data) Predicted Max Degree Sampling : Sampling in Directed Networks to Maximize Node Coverage through Crawling

—Sampling through crawling is an important research topic in social network analysis. However there is very little existing work on sampling through crawling in directed networks. In this paper we present a new method of sampling a directed network, with the objective of maximizing the node coverage. Our proposed method, Predicted Max Degree (PMD) Sampling, works by predicting which k open nodes are most likely to have the highest number of unobserved neighbors in a particular iteration. These nodes are queried, and the whole process repeats until all the available budget has been used up. We compared PMD against three baseline algorithms with three networks, and saw large improvements vs. baseline sampling algorithms: With a budget of 2000, PMD found 15%, 87.4% and 170.2% more nodes than the closest baseline algorithm in the wiki-Votes, soc-Slashdot and web-Google networks respectively.
SPAN OF SHORT-TERM MEMORY FOR VISUALLY PRESENTED REDUNDANT STIMULI

The role of the short-term memory in human information processing hardly requires special mention.It is absolutely indispensable for decoding sequentially coded information as well as for re-organizing input information into larger and more abstract units.The short-term memory is characterized by the facility of instantaneous access,but is severely restricted in its span.Furthermore,the span of shortterm memory is influenced by the characteristics of materials to be stored. The influence of the characteristics of materials upon the span of short-term memory has been a subject of a number of experimental studies.Pollack(1953), using aurally presented random sequences of English consonants and numerals,suggested that the memory span is limited not by the total amount of information but by the number of symbols.Aborn and Rubenstein(1952,Rubenstein & Aborn, 1954),using consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams of various degree of redundancy, found that the number of syllables recalled increased but the amount of information recalled decreased as the redundancy of sequences increased.Miller(1958)utilized a finite state grammar to generate redundant sequences,and demonstrated that the amount of recall of redundant sequences was larger than that of random sequences.Hogan(1961)used a finite state grammar to generate redundant sequences and asked his subjects to copy a sequence,and obtained the essentially same results as Aborn and Rubenstein,and showed that with highly redundant sequences subjects processed more symbols but less amount of information than that with random sequences. The results of these experimental studies suggest that it is not possible to specify the memory span either by the number of memory units(`chunks'),or by the total amount of information retained.Mizuno (1975)investigated the memory span for a brief visual display of both redundant and non-redundant sequences of symbols generated by controlling the probability of symbol occurrence in a random sequence in order to clarify the factor that deter1 The author wishes to acknowledge Prof.Yoshi-
Wire Marking Results in a Small but Significant Reduction in Avian Mortality at Power Lines: A BACI Designed Study

Background Collision with electric power lines is a conservation problem for many bird species. Although the implementation of flight diverters is rapidly increasing, few well-designed studies supporting the effectiveness of this costly conservation measure have been published. Methodology/Principal Findings We provide information on the largest worldwide marking experiment to date, including carcass searches at 35 (15 experimental, 20 control) power lines totalling 72.5 km, at both transmission (220 kV) and distribution (15 kV–45 kV) lines. We found carcasses of 45 species, 19 of conservation concern. Numbers of carcasses found were corrected to account for carcass losses due to removal by scavengers or being overlooked by researchers, resulting in an estimated collision rate of 8.2 collisions per km per month. We observed a small (9.6%) but significant decrease in the number of casualties after line marking compared to before line marking in experimental lines. This was not observed in control lines. We found no influence of either marker size (large vs. small spirals, sample of distribution lines only) or power line type (transmission vs. distribution, sample of large spirals only) on the collision rate when we analyzed all species together. However, great bustard mortality was slightly lower when lines were marked with large spirals and in transmission lines after marking. Conclusions Our results confirm the overall effectiveness of wire marking as a way to reduce, but not eliminate, bird collisions with power lines. If raw field data are not corrected by carcass losses due to scavengers and missed observations, findings may be biased. The high cost of this conservation measure suggests a need for more studies to improve its application, including wire marking with non-visual devices. Our findings suggest that different species may respond differently to marking, implying that species-specific patterns should be explored, at least for species of conservation concern.
Transmitter Precoding for ICI Reduction in Closed-Loop MIMO OFDM Systems

The mitigation of intercarrier interference (ICI) in closed-loop single-input-single-output (SISO) and multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is considered. The authors show that the ICI coefficient matrix is approximately unitary and exploit this property to design a nonlinear Tomlinson-Harashima precoder for the reduction of ICI in closed-loop SISO OFDM and orthogonal space-time block-coded (OSTBC) MIMO OFDM. With the proposed design, the transmitter does not need to know the frequency offsets, and hence, their impact on the bit error rate (BER) is significantly reduced. Moreover, for spatially correlated MIMO channels, the precoder and OSTBC OFDM perform with a negligible BER-performance loss
Design of assistive Wheelchair System directly Steered by Human Thoughts

Integration of brain-computer interface (BCI) technique and assistive device is one of chief and promising applications of BCI system. With BCI technique, people with disabilities do not have to communicate with external environment through traditional and natural pathways like peripheral nerves and muscles, and could achieve it only by their brain activities. In this paper, we designed an electroencephalogram (EEG)-based wheelchair which can be steered by users' own thoughts without any other involvements. We evaluated the feasibility of BCI-based wheelchair in terms of accuracies and real-world testing. The results demonstrate that our BCI wheelchair is of good performance not only in accuracy, but also in practical running testing in a real environment. This fact implies that people can steer wheelchair only by their thoughts, and may have a potential perspective in daily application for disabled people.
Obfuscated instructions for software protection

Many computer systems are designed to make it easy for end-users to install and update software. An undesirable side-effect, from the perspective of many software producers, is that hostile end-users may analyze or tamper with the software being installed or updated. This paper proposes a way to avoid the side-effect without affecting the ease of installation and update. We construct a computer system M with the following properties: 1) the end-user may install program P in any conveniently accessible area of M; 2) the program P contains obfuscated instructions whose semantics are obscure and difficult to understand; and 3) an internal interpreter W, embedded in a non-accessible area of M, interprets the obfuscated instructions without revealing their semantics. Our W is a finite state machine (FSM) which gives context-dependent semantics and operand syntax to the obfuscated instructions in P; thus, attempts to statically analyze the relation between instructions and their semantics will not succeed. We present a systematic method to construct a P whose instruction stream is always interpreted correctly regardless of its input, even though changes in input will (in general) affect the execution sequence of instructions in P. Our framework is easily applied to conventional computer systems by adding a FSM unit to a virtual machine or a reconfigurable processor.
Synthesis and Electrochemical Lithium Storage Behavior of Carbon Nanotubes Filled with Iron Sulfide Nanoparticles

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) filled with iron sulfide nanoparticles (NPs) are prepared by inserting sulfur and ferrocene into the hollow core of CNTs followed by heat treatment. It is found that pyrrhotite‐11T iron sulfide (Fe‐S) NPs with an average size of ≈15 nm are encapsulated in the tubular cavity of the CNTs (Fe‐S@CNTs), and each particle is a single crystal. When used as the anode material of lithium‐ion batteries, the Fe‐S@CNT material exhibits excellent electrochemical lithium storage performance in terms of high reversible capacity, good cyclic stability, and desirable rate capability. In situ transmission electron microscopy studies show that the CNTs not only play an essential role in accommodating the volume expansion of the Fe‐S NPs but also provide a fast transport path for Li ions. The results demonstrate that CNTs act as a unique nanocontainer and reactor that permit the loading and formation of electrochemically active materials with desirable electrochemical lithium storage performance. CNTs with their superior structural stability and Li‐ion transfer kinetics are responsible for the improved rate capability and cycling performance of Fe‐S NPs in CNTs.
Toward a Noninvasive Automatic Seizure Control System in Rats With Transcranial Focal Stimulations via Tripolar Concentric Ring Electrodes

Epilepsy affects approximately 1% of the world population. Antiepileptic drugs are ineffective in approximately 30% of patients and have side effects. We are developing a noninvasive, or minimally invasive, transcranial focal electrical stimulation system through our novel tripolar concentric ring electrodes to control seizures. In this study, we demonstrate feasibility of an automatic seizure control system in rats with pentylenetetrazole-induced seizures through single and multiple stimulations. These stimulations are automatically triggered by a real-time electrographic seizure activity detector based on a disjunctive combination of detections from a cumulative sum algorithm and a generalized likelihood ratio test. An average seizure onset detection accuracy of 76.14% was obtained for the test set (n = 13). Detection of electrographic seizure activity was accomplished in advance of the early behavioral seizure activity in 76.92% of the cases. Automatically triggered stimulation significantly (p = 0.001) reduced the electrographic seizure activity power in the once stimulated group compared to controls in 70% of the cases. To the best of our knowledge this is the first closed-loop automatic seizure control system based on noninvasive electrical brain stimulation using tripolar concentric ring electrode electrographic seizure activity as feedback.
Anomalous diffusion and ergodicity breaking in heterogeneous diffusion processes

We demonstrate the non-ergodicity of a simple Markovian stochastic process with space-dependent diffusion coefficient D(x). For power-law forms D(x) ≃ |x|α, this process yields anomalous diffusion of the form 〈x2(t)〉 ≃ t2/(2−α). Interestingly, in both the sub- and superdiffusive regimes we observe weak ergodicity breaking: the scaling of the time-averaged mean-squared displacement δ2(Δ)¯? > remains linear in the lag time Δ and thus differs from the corresponding ensemble average 〈x2(t)〉. We analyse the non-ergodic behaviour of this process in terms of the time-averaged mean-squared displacement δ2¯? > and its random features, i.e. the statistical distribution of δ2¯? > and the ergodicity breaking parameters. The heterogeneous diffusion model represents an alternative approach to non-ergodic, anomalous diffusion that might be particularly relevant for diffusion in heterogeneous media.
Skeletal Muscle Calsequestrin Complex Formation by Cell Overlay and Two-Dimensional Blot Overlay Methodology

Based on the recent finding that a peroxidase-conjugated calsequestrin probe retains its biological binding properties, we have used it in two-dimensional blot and cell overlay procedures. Labeling of nitrocellulose replicas of electrophoretically separated microsomal proteins from predominantly fast versus slow fibres revealed self-aggregation of fast calsequestrin with molecular species of differing isolectric points. Incubation of transverse cryosections showed restricted calsequestrin interactions with elements in the fibre interior, mostly representing calsequestrin itself. This confirms that fast calsequestrin exists in large aggregates under native conditions and demonstrates the usefulness of blot and cell overlay techniques in identifying and locating supramolecular protein assemblies.
Internal kinematics of isolated modelled disc galaxies

We present a systematic investigation of rotation curves (RCs) of fully hydrodynamically simulated galaxies, including cooling, star formation with associated feedback, and galactic winds. Applying two commonly used fitting formulae to characterize the RCs, we investigated systematic effects on the shape of RCs by both the observational constraints and internal properties of the galaxies. We mainly focused on effects that occur in measurements of intermediate and high redshift galaxies. We found that RC parameters are affected by the observational setup, like slit misalignment or the spatial resolution and that they also depend on the evolution of a galaxy. Therefore, a direct comparison of quantities derived from measured RCs with predictions of semi-analytic models is difficult. The virial velocity V c , which is usually calculated and used by semi-analytic models, can differ significantly from fit parameters like V max or V opt inferred from RCs. We found that V c is usually lower than typical characteristic velocities derived from RCs. V max alone is in general not a robust estimator of the virial mass.
Accuracy of the spider model in decomposing layered surfaces

The surface of most natural objects is composed of two or more layers whose optical properties jointly determine the surface's overall reflectance. Light transmission through these layers can be approximated by using the Lambert-Beer (LB) model, which provides a good trade-off between the accuracy and simplicity to handle layer decomposition. Recently, a layer decomposition based on the LB-based model is proposed. Assuming surfaces with two layers, it estimates the reflectance of top and bottom layers, as well as the opacity of the top layer. The method introduces the “spider model”, which is named after the color distribution in the RGB space that resembles the shape of spiders. In this paper, we intend to verify the accuracy of the spider model and the optical model where it is based on (i.e., the LB-based model). We verify the LB-based model by comparing to the Kubelka-Munk (KM) model, which has previously been shown to be reliably accurate. The benefits of layer decomposition are easy to notice. First, many computer vision algorithms assume a single layer, and tend to fail when encountering multi-layered surfaces. Second, knowing the optical properties of each layer can provide further knowledge of the target objects.
The Emerging Field of Peer Support within Mental Health Services

The Centre for Medicaid Services has identified that “peer support services are an evidence-based mental health model of care” (2007, August 15, p. 1). Although an evidence-based practice, peer support remains an emerging discipline in mental health. Peer supporters help individuals seeking mental wellness by inspiring hope, using their recovery story, and by developing mutual relationships. Peer supporters believe in each individual's ability to recover. They know recovery is possible, because they have experienced it themselves. Understanding what peer support is, and how peer supporters work within their unique discipline is important to those wishing to include peer supporters in their service systems. Peer support is more than simply sharing stories; systems guided by licensing requirements and quality management teams require effective, well-trained individuals, with lived experience to work within peer support. With effective training, and a strong footing in their own recovery, peer supporters can be exceptional contributors within behavioral health systems of care.
Biografías de Género en Contextos de Cambio: Chile 1973-2010

The aim of the study was to analyze the perceptions of men and women regarding changes in gender relations that occurred in contexts of political, economic, and institutional transformations in Chile between 1973 and 2010 as well as the facilitating conditions for challenging gender inequalities provided by their family, social, work, cultural, and institutional environments. The study adopted a qualitative methodology of a descriptive type and employed a biographical approach. The purposive sample was comprised by 25 professional men and women grouped into 2 generations depending on their time of entry to the labor market (1973-1989 and 1990-2010), with whom life stories were generated. The narrators from both generations identified major changes in gender relations in several social areas, highlighting the positive consequences of this, especially for women. They also pointed out certain family, labor, educational, and social conditions that favored transformations of gender relations. In the accounts of men and women, it was possible to identify social interaction mechanisms that reproduce inequalities, which shows the complexity of gender-related transformations.
An analysis of ontology-based query expansion strategies

Sense based query expansion never proved its effectiveness except for the so-called “open domain question answering” task. The present work is still inconclusive at this regard, due to some experimental limitations, but we provide interesting evidence suggesting new guidelines for future research. Word sense disambiguation is in fact only one of the problems involved with sense based query expansion. The second is how to use sense information (and ontologies in general) to expand the query. We show that expanding with synonyms or hyperonyms has a limited effect on web information retrieval performance, while other types of semantic information derivable from an ontology are much more effective at improving search results.