Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Online Measurement of Timing in Circuits: For Health Monitoring and Dynamic Voltage & Frequency Scaling

Reliability, power consumption and timing performance are key considerations for the utilisation of field-programmable gate arrays. Online measurement techniques can determine the timing characteristics of an FPGA application while it is operating, and facilitate a range of benefits. Degradation can be monitored by tracking changes in timing performance, while power consumption can be reduced through dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) of the power supply to exploit any spare timing headroom. If higher performance is the objective, dynamic frequency scaling (DFS) can be used to maximise operating frequency. In both cases, online timing measurement of the application circuit is used to exploit favourable operating conditions. This work demonstrates a method of online measurement, achieved by sweeping the phase of a secondary clock signal, driving additional shadowing registers strategically added to the application design. The measurement technique and initial voltage and frequency scaling experiments are demonstrated on an Alter a Cyclone III FPGA. Timing performance can be measured with a best case resolution of 96ps. The additional circuitry results in minimal overhead in terms of area and performance. Power savings of 23% dynamic and 13% static in an example circuit are achieved through DVS, or performance improvements of 21% through DFS, when compared with operating at nominal core voltage, or timing model FMax.
Gray Matter Is Targeted in First-Attack Multiple Sclerosis

The cause of multiple sclerosis (MS), its driving pathogenesis at the earliest stages, and what factors allow the first clinical attack to manifest remain unknown. Some imaging studies suggest gray rather than white matter may be involved early, and some postulate this may be predictive of developing MS. Other imaging studies are in conflict. To determine if there was objective molecular evidence of gray matter involvement in early MS we used high-resolution mass spectrometry to identify proteins in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of first-attack MS patients (two independent groups) compared to established relapsing remitting (RR) MS and controls. We found that the CSF proteins in first-attack patients were differentially enriched for gray matter components (axon, neuron, synapse). Myelin components did not distinguish these groups. The results support that gray matter dysfunction is involved early in MS, and also may be integral for the initial clinical presentation.
SPONTANEOUS SWIMMING ACTIVITY OF ATLANTIC COD GADUS MORHUA EXPOSED TO GRADED HYPOXIA AT THREE TEMPERATURES

The spontaneous swimming activity of Atlantic cod Gadus morhua was investigated at graded levels of hypoxia at three temperatures (5, 10 and 15 °C) by using a computerized system monitoring animal activity. The fish were tested individually, and swimming distance was used as a measure of activity. No significant effect of temperature on swimming distance in normoxic water was found. At all temperatures, activity level decreased with decreasing oxygen saturation. Swimming behaviour at normoxia and 50 % and 25 % oxygen saturation is described. No apparent avoidance of hypoxic water was found based on the distribution of swimming speeds and turning angles. The possible benefits of a decreased activity level in a hypoxic environment are discussed.
Mature osteoblasts dedifferentiate in response to traumatic bone injury in the zebrafish fin and skull

Zebrafish have an unlimited capacity to regenerate bone after fin amputation. In this process, mature osteoblasts dedifferentiate to osteogenic precursor cells and thus represent an important source of newly forming bone. By contrast, differentiated osteoblasts do not appear to contribute to repair of bone injuries in mammals; rather, osteoblasts form anew from mesenchymal stem cells. This raises the question whether osteoblast dedifferentiation is specific to appendage regeneration, a special feature of the lepidotrichia bone of the fish fin, or a process found more generally in fish bone. Here, we show that dedifferentiation of mature osteoblasts is not restricted to fin regeneration after amputation, but also occurs during repair of zebrafish fin fractures and skull injuries. In both models, mature osteoblasts surrounding the injury downregulate the expression of differentiation markers, upregulate markers of the pre-osteoblast state and become proliferative. Making use of photoconvertible Kaede protein as well as Cre-driven genetic fate mapping, we show that osteoblasts migrate to the site of injury to replace damaged tissue. Our findings suggest a fundamental role for osteoblast dedifferentiation in reparative bone formation in fish and indicate that adult fish osteoblasts display elevated cellular plasticity compared with mammalian bone-forming cells.
Predicting Soft Tissue Deformation Based on an Improved Biomechanical Model

This paper presents an improved biomechanical model for the prediction of the soft tissues in the plastic surgical simulator. The new model is built on nonlinear finite mixed-element method (NFM-EM) in which the internal soft tissues (muscles and fat) are discretized into tetrahedral solid elements and the skin tissues into triangular shell elements, which distinguishes between the internal soft tissues and the skin in their geometrical structures, and addresses the non-homogenous problem of the facial soft tissues in their biomechanical characteristics. Moreover, after the investigation of the three different nonlinear strain-potential models, the biomechanical characteristics of the skin and the internal soft tissues are modeled with the most suitable one. The quantitative validation and the comparative results with other models illustrated the effectiveness of the approach on the simulation of complex cranio-facial surgery.
A Multi-agent Architecture for Knowledge Management Systems

This paper concerns a multi-agent system architecture for knowledge management (KM) systems in research and development (R&D) projects. R&D teams have no time to organize project information and to articulate the rationale behind the actions that generate the information. Our aim is to provide an architecture, which supports collaborative work and helps to capture and to organize experiences without overloading the team members with extra-work. The article describes the components of the architecture, their interactions, and the principles of functioning.
Feature-based Sentiment Analysis Approach for Product Reviews

The researches and applications of sentiment analysis become increasingly important with the rapid growth of online reviews. But traditional sentiment analysis models have been lacking in concern on the modifying relationship between words for sentiment analysis of Chinese reviews, and limit the development of opinion mining. This paper proposes a feature-based vector model and a novel weighting algorithm for sentiment analysis of Chinese product reviews. It considers both modifying relationships between words and punctuations in review texts. Specifically, it can classify reviews into two categories, i.e., positive and negative, and can also represent the sentiment strength by adverb of degree. Moreover, a novel feature extraction method based on dependency parsing is presented to identify the corresponding aspects that opinions words modify. We conduct some experiments to evaluate our algorithms, and demonstrate that the proposed approaches are efficient and promising.
Robust Multidimensional Poverty Comparisons

We investigate how to make poverty comparisons using multidimensional indicators of well-being, showing in particular how to check whether the comparisons are robust to the choice of poverty indices and poverty lines. Our methodology applies equally well to either of what can be defined as "union" and "intersection" approaches to dealing with multidimensional indicators of well-being. When one of two variables is discrete, our methods specialize to those that Atkinson (1991), Jenkins and Lambert (1993) and others have developed to deal with household composition heterogeneity. The results also extend the statistical results recently derived in Davidson and Duclos (2000) to cases where well-being is measured in two or more dimensions. We thus derive the sampling distribution of various multidimensional poverty estimators, including estimators of the "critical" frontiers of poverty lines above which multidimensional poverty comparisons are no longer ethically robust.
Synthesis and Properties of Macrocyclic Butanoic Acid Conjugates as a Promising Delivery Formulation for the Nutrition of Colon

Butanoic acid plays a significant role in the maintenance of mucosal health and is the preferred energy substrate for the cells in the colon. Here, butanoic acid was selectively conjugated to the secondary hydroxyl group of β-cyclodextrin through ester bond using sodium hydride as the deprotonation reagent. The preliminary release behaviors of butanoic acid in rat gastrointestinal tract contents were investigated at 37°C within 12 h. In the contents of stomach, the conjugates did seldom release butanoic acid, released butanoic acid only 5.8% in the contents of small intestine, and released butanoic acid significantly up to 38.4% in the contents of colon. These results indicate that the conjugate activation took place site specifically in the rat colonic contents, via the biodegradation by glycosidases and hydrolases in the colon. Therefore, the β-cyclodextrin conjugates of butanoic acid may be of value as an orally administered colon-specific formulation for the nutrition of colon.
Support Vector Regression and Immune Clone Selection Algorithm for Predicting Financial Distress

In the analysis of predicting financial distress based on support vector regression (SVR), irrelevant or correlated features in the samples could spoil the performance of the SVR classifier, leading to decrease of prediction accuracy. In order to solve the problems mentioned above, this paper used rough sets as a preprocessor of SVR to select a subset of input variables and employed the immune clone selection algorithm (ICSA) to optimize the parameters of SVR. Additionally, the proposed ICSA-SVR model that can automatically determine the optimal parameters was tested on the prediction of financial distress. Then, we compared the proposed ICSA-SVR model with other artificial intelligence models of (BPN and fix-SVR). The experiment indicates that the proposed method is quite effective and ubiquitous.
Diagnosing Schistosomiasis by Detection of Cell-Free Parasite DNA in Human Plasma

Introduction Schistosomiasis (bilharzia), one of the most relevant parasitoses of humans, is confirmed by microscopic detection of eggs in stool, urine, or organ biopsies. The sensitivity of these procedures is variable due to fluctuation of egg shedding. Serological tests on the other hand do not distinguish between active and past disease. In patients with acute disease (Katayama syndrome), both serology and direct detection may produce false negative results. To overcome these obstacles, we developed a novel diagnostic strategy, following the rationale that Schistosoma DNA may be liberated as a result of parasite turnover and reach the blood. Cell-free parasite DNA (CFPD) was detected in plasma by PCR. Methodology/Principal Findings Real-time PCR with internal control was developed and optimized for detection of CFPD in human plasma. Distribution was studied in a mouse model for Schistosoma replication and elimination, as well as in human patients seen before and after treatment. CFPD was detectable in mouse plasma, and its concentration correlated with the course of anti-Schistosoma treatment. Humans with chronic disease and eggs in stool or urine (n = 14) showed a 100% rate of CFPD detection. CFPD was also detected in all (n = 8) patients with Katayama syndrome. Patients in whom no viable eggs could be detected and who had been treated for schistomiasis in the past (n = 30) showed lower detection rates (33.3%) and significantly lower CFPD concentrations. The duration from treatment to total elimination of CFPD from plasma was projected to exceed one year. Conclusions/Significance PCR for detection of CFPD in human plasma may provide a new laboratory tool for diagnosing schistosomiasis in all phases of clinical disease, including the capacity to rule out Katayama syndrome and active disease. Further studies are needed to confirm the clinical usefulness of CFPD quantification in therapy monitoring.
Rank based efficient task scheduler for cloud computing

Cloud data centers have become crucial infrastructure for computing and data storage that facilitate the development of varied services offered by the cloud. In every datacenter, thousands of virtual servers or virtual machines run at any instance of time which hosts many tasks and in parallel cloud system should keep receiving the batches of task requests. In this context, out of many powered on servers only few targeted servers should fulfill batch of incoming tasks. Hence, task scheduling is an important issue which greatly influences the performance of cloud. The main objective of the scheduling algorithms in cloud environment is to utilize the resources efficiently while balancing the load between resources, to get the minimum execution time. In this paper we designed a rank based efficient task scheduler which effectively utilizes resources and provides high performance than spaceshared and timeshared task schedulers. This algorithm has been tested using CloudSim toolkit and results were compared with spaceshared and timeshared task schedulers.
SDSS J121811.0+465501.2: A New Low Surface Brightness Galaxy with Low Metallicity

We have serendipitously found a new nearby low surface brightness (LSB) galaxy from the SDSS database. We estimate the oxygen abundance of its H II region SDSS J121811.0+465501.2 from its electron temperature, as well as that of another H II region, SDSS J135440.5+535309.6, located in the irregular LSB galaxy UGC 8837. These two extragalactic H II regions were classified as stars in the SDSS DR4 database and were found occasionally by us in the automatic recognition and classification of stellar spectra. Their optical spectra show obvious emission lines, i.e., strong [O III] λλ4959, 5007 and Balmer emission lines, but very weak [N II] λλ6548, 6583 and [S II] λλ6317, 6731, which could indicate that they are metal-poor star-forming regions. The derived oxygen abundances of the two objects are 12 + log(O/H) ∼ 7.88 ± 0.30 and 7.70 ± 0.30, respectively. The host of the H II region SDSS J121811.0+465501.2 is identified as a new nearly edge-on LSB disk galaxy (almost without a bulge), with a B-band central surface brightness μ0(B) of 23.68 mag arcsec-2 and an inclination angle of ∼75° by using the GIM2D software to analyze its g- and r-band images independently. It is a nearby dwarf galaxy with redshift z ∼ 0.00157, disk scale length ∼0.40 kpc, and B-band absolute magnitude MB ∼ -13.51 mag. The very low oxygen abundances of these two objects confirm the low metallicities of LSB galaxies.
Gauge fixing in Causal Dynamical

We relax the definition of the Ambjørn-Loll causal dynamical triangulation model in 1 + 1 dimensions to allow for a varying lapse. We show that, as long as the spatially averaged lapse is constant in time, the physical observables are unchanged in the continuum limit. This supports the claim that the time slicing of the model is the result of a gauge fixing, rather than a physical preferred time slicing. Email address: fotini@perimeterinstitute.ca Email address:lsmolin@perimeterinstitute.ca
Toward an attack-sensitive tamper-resistant biometric recognition with a symmetric matcher: A fingerprint case study

In order to render a biometric system robust against malicious tampering, it is important to understand the different types of attack and their impact as observed by the liveness and matching scores. In this study, we consider zero-effort impostor attack (referred to as the Z-attack), nonzero-effort impostor attack such as presentation attack or spoofing (S-attack), and other categories of attack involving tampering at the template level (U- and T-attacks). In order to elucidate the impact of all possible attacks, we (1) introduce the concepts of source of origin and symmetric biometric matchers, and (2) subsequently group the attacks into four categories. These views not only improve the understanding of the nature of different attacks but also turn out to ease the design of the classification problem. Following this analysis, we design a novel classification scheme that can take full advantage of the attack-specific data characteristics. Two realisations of the scheme, namely, a mixture of linear classifiers, and a Gaussian Copula-based Bayesian classifier, turn out to outperform a strong baseline classifier based on SVM, as supported by fingerprint spoofing experiments.
Toward clinical genomics in everyday medicine: perspectives and recommendations

ABSTRACT Precision or personalized medicine through clinical genome and exome sequencing has been described by some as a revolution that could transform healthcare delivery, yet it is currently used in only a small fraction of patients, principally for the diagnosis of suspected Mendelian conditions and for targeting cancer treatments. Given the burden of illness in our society, it is of interest to ask how clinical genome and exome sequencing can be constructively integrated more broadly into the routine practice of medicine for the betterment of public health. In November 2014, 46 experts from academia, industry, policy and patient advocacy gathered in a conference sponsored by Illumina, Inc. to discuss this question, share viewpoints and propose recommendations. This perspective summarizes that work and identifies some of the obstacles and opportunities that must be considered in translating advances in genomics more widely into the practice of medicine.
Unrestricted versus restricted factor analysis of multidimensional test items: some aspects of the problem and some suggestions

Si un test multidimensional se analiza mediante el modelo factorial exploratorio, la estructura obtenida suele ser rechazada cuando se somete a un analisis factorial confirmatorio. El presente trabajo analiza algunos aspectos de este problema mediante estudios de simulacion y propone un procedimiento para evaluar la dimensionalidad que puede ser util en investigacion aplicada. Este procedimiento se ilustra mediante un ejemplo.
Linguistically Motivated Negation Processing: an Application for the Detection of Risk Indicators in Unstructured Discharge Summaries

The paper proposes a linguistically motivated approach to deal with negation in the context of information extraction. This approach is used in a practical application: the automatic detection of cases of hospital acquired infections (HAI) by processing unstructured medical discharge summaries. One of the important processing steps is the extraction of specific terms expressing risk indicators that can lead to the conclusion of HAI cases. This term extraction has to be very accurate and negation has to be taken into account in order to really understand if a string corresponding to a potential risk indicator is attested positively or negatively in the document. We propose a linguistically motivated approach for dealing with negation using both syntactic and semantic information. This approach is first described and then evaluated in the context of our application in the medical domain. The results of evaluation are also compared with other related approaches dealing with negation in medical texts.
Opportunistic detection of atrial fibrillation using blood pressure monitors: a systematic review

Background Atrial fibrillation (AF) affects around 2% of the population and early detection is beneficial, allowing patients to begin potentially life-saving anticoagulant therapies. Blood pressure (BP) monitors may offer an opportunity to screen for AF. Aim To identify and appraise studies which report the diagnostic accuracy of automated BP monitors used for opportunistic AF detection. Methods A systematic search was performed of the MEDLINE, MEDLINE In-Process and EMBASE literature databases. Papers were eligible if they described primary studies of the evaluation of a BP device for AF detection, were published in a peer-reviewed journal and reported values for the sensitivity and specificity. Included studies were appraised using the QUADAS-2 tool to assess their risk of bias and applicability to opportunistic AF detection. Values for the sensitivity and specificity of AF detection were extracted from each paper and compared. Results and Conclusions We identified seven papers evaluating six devices from two manufacturers. Only one study scored low risk in all of the QUADAS-2 domains. All studies reported specificity >85% and 6 reported sensitivity >90%. The studies showed that BP devices with embedded algorithms for detecting arrhythmias show promise as screening tools for AF, comparing favourably with manual pulse palpation. But the studies used different methodologies and many were subject to potential bias. More studies are needed to more precisely define the sensitivity and specificity of opportunistic screening for AF during BP measurement before its clinical utility in the population of interest can be assessed fully.
Object-Based Quorum Scheme for Replicated Objects

In object-based systems, objects are replicated to increase the performance, reliability, and availability. We discuss a novel object-based locking (OBL) protocol to lock replicas of objects by extending the quorumbased protocol for read and write to abstract methods. Unless two methods con ict, subsets of the replicas locked by the methods do not intersect even if the methods change the replicas. Methods not computed on a replica A but computed on another replica are computed on A when a method con icting with the methods are issued to A in the OBL protocol. We newly propose a version vector to identify what methods are computed on a replica.
An Effective Software Reliability Analysis Framework for Weapon System Development in Defense Domain

Software reliability has been regarded as one of the most important quality attributes for software intensive systems, especially in defense domain. As most of weapon systems complicated functionalities and controls are implemented by software which is embedded in hardware systems, it became more critical to assure high reliability for software itself. However, many software development organizations in Korea defense domain have had problems in performing reliability engineered processes for developing mission-critical and/or safety-critical weapon systems. In this paper, we propose an effective framework with which software organizations can identify and select metrics associated software reliability, analyze the collected data, appraise software reliability, and develop software reliability prediction/estimation model based on the result of data analyses.