Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Helping Users Set Rules for Defining Short-Term Activity Goals

Goal-setting is a valuable behavior change strategy. For patients with multiple sclerosis, a variety of factors such as symptoms (e.g., pain, fatigue), environmental factors (e.g., weather), and mood can all greatly influence a person's ability to meet daily goals. Based on this, these patients and others with chronic pain, would likely benefit from strategies that could aid them in developing their own personalized physical activity goals that can take into account these factors dynamically. The purpose of this formative study was to explore this problem space via interviews and early formative prototyping of possible protocols to aid people in developing their own personalized and adaptive goals. Results from this work suggest interest in tools to support rules to help individuals define their "sweet spot" target for physical activity and further work appears warranted with longer studies.
Storage efficient particle filters for the out of sequence measurement problem

We propose a particle filter based solution which uses auxiliary fixed point smoothers to the problem of out of sequence measurements. Three different cases, namely, auxiliary extended Kalman smoother, auxiliary unscented Kalman smoother and auxiliary particle smoother are considered for the auxiliary fixed point smoother. The proposed filter which can effectively combine out of sequence measurements with arbitrary delay uses minimum storage requirements as opposed to a recently proposed alternative. The performance of our filters is compared to the other alternative in the literature using a simulated scenario of a target with a highly nonlinear motion dynamics and measurement relations. For this purpose, an extension of the alternative method is also proposed enabling it to work with nonlinear state dynamics.
Keyword-based mobile application sharing

The advent and wide adoption of smartphones in the second half of '00s has completely changed our everyday mobile computing experience. Tens of applications are being introduced every day in the application markets. Given the technology progress and the fact that mobile devices are becoming strong computing devices, mobile applications are expected to follow suit and become computation-heavy, bandwidth-hungry and latency-sensitive. In this paper, we introduce a new mobile computing paradigm to alleviate some of the network stress that mobile applications are already putting into the network, e.g., in case of crowded areas and events, where the mobile network effectively collapses. According to this paradigm, users can share the applications that they have on their mobile devices with nearby users that want access to processed information, which their own applications cannot provide. In a sense, then, the client application instance is also acting as a server instance in order to serve requests from nearby users. A representative example is a route-finder application in a busy station, airport, stadium or festival, or a gaming application onboard a flight. Our paradigm builds on Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and uses keyword-based requests to discover shared applications in the vicinity.
Nanostructured Materials from Clusters: Synthesis and Properties

The low energy cluster beam deposition technique (LECBD) is developed to prepare original nanostructured systems from clusters preformed in the gas phase. The nucleation and growth mechanism specific of the cluster deposits is studied in view to control the nanostructured morphology of the cluster assembled films, especially for future applications to high areal density devices. Examples of the synthesis and properties of metallic nanostructures as well as covalent ones are presented. In the first case, systems from noble metal clusters (Ag, Au, and Ag x Au 1-x ) and transition metal based clusters (Co, SmCo 5 ) assemblies are studied for their original optical or magnetic properties, respectively. In the second case, covalent semiconducting films exhibiting specific electronic structures are obtained by Si, C, and Si x C 1-x cage like clusters (fullerenes and heterofullerenes) depositions.
A theoretical study of wave dispersion and thermal conduction for HMX/additive interfaces

The wave dispersion rule for non-uniform material is useful for ultrasonic inspection and engine life prediction, and also is key in achieving an understanding of the energy dissipation and thermal conduction properties of solid material. On the basis of linear response theory and molecular dynamics, we derive a set of formulas for calculating the wave dispersion rate of interface systems, and study four kinds of interfaces inside plastic bonded explosives: HMX/{HMX, TATB, F2312, F2313}. (HMX: octahydro-1,3,5,7-tetranitro-1,3,5,7-tetrazocine; TATB: 1,3,5-triamino-2,4,6-trinitrobenzene; F2312, F2313: fluoropolymers). The wave dispersion rate is obtained over a wide frequency range from kHz to PHz. We find that at low frequency, the rate is proportional to the square of the frequency, and at high frequency, the rate couples with the molecular vibration modes at the interface. By using the results, the thermal conductivities of HMX/additive interfaces are derived, and a physical model is built for describing the total thermal conductivity of mixture explosives, including HMX multi-particle systems and {TATB, F2312, F2313}-coated HMX.
On the usefulness of type and liveness accuracy for garbage collection and leak detection

The effectiveness of garbage collectors and leak detectors in identifying dead objects depends on the accuracy of their reachability traversal. Accuracy has two orthogonal dimensions: (i) whether the reachability traversal can distinguish between pointers and nonpointers (type accuracy), and (ii) whether the reachability traversal can identify memory locations that will be dereferenced in the future (liveness accuracy). This article presents an experimental study of the importance of type and liveness accuracy for reachability traversals. We show that liveness accuracy reduces the reachable heap size by up to 62% for our benchmark programs. However, the simpler liveness schemes (e.g., intraprocedural analysis of local variables) are largely ineffective for our benchmark runs: one must analyze global variables using interprocedural analysis to obtain significant benefits. Type accuracy has an insignificant impact on a garbage collector's ability to find unreachable objects in our benchmark runs. We report results for programs written in C, C++, and Eiffel.
BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Background: Plain language search tools for MEDLINE/PubMed are few. We wanted to develop a search tool that would allow anyone using a free-text, natural language query and without knowing specialized vocabularies that an expert searcher might use, to find relevant citations in MEDLINE/PubMed. This tool would translate a question into an efficient search. Results: The accuracy and relevance of retrieved citations were compared to references cited in BMJ POEMs and CATs (critically appraised topics) questions from the University of Michigan Department of Pediatrics. askMEDLINE correctly matched the cited references 75.8% in POEMs and 89.2 % in CATs questions on first pass. When articles that were deemed to be relevant to the clinical questions were included, the overall efficiency in retrieving journal articles was 96.8% (POEMs) and 96.3% (CATs.) Conclusion: ask MEDLINE might be a useful search tool for clinicians, researchers, and other information seekers interested in finding current evidence in MEDLINE/PubMed. The text-only format could be convenient for users with wireless handheld devices and those with low-bandwidth connections in remote locations.
Smart employment of circuit redundancy to effectively counter trojans (SECRET) in third-party IP cores

Hardware Trojan horses (HTHs) are malicious inclusions or alterations to hardware designs developed and supplied by untrusted parties. The emerging threat of HTHs has a direct impact on the FPGA design community which mainly relies on third-party IP (3PIP) cores and design reuse practices. Efficient design and detection of HTHs have been the main interest of most related research work, but countermeasures against HTHs have not attained sufficient attention. We advance a novel approach promoting Smart Employment of Circuit Redundancy to Effectively Counter Trojans (SECRET) in 3PIP cores employed in reconfigurable hardware designs. Two identical instances of the protected IP core are employed for observation and operating purposes and a time shift is created between the two core inputs. Trojan detection circuitry is inserted during the design-time to monitor the observation core at run-time. Once a Trojan is detected in the observation core, the operating core with the delayed input is suspended or the identified triggering inputs are isolated for a specific period of time to bypass the Trojan activating trigger. We present the SECRET high-level architecture, a proof-of-concept application to a 3PIP crypto core containing an HTH of our design. The prototype is designed and validated on a Spartan-3 FPGA. Simulation and implementation results show the SECRET feasibility and effectiveness.
A Recurrent Chromosome Breakpoint in Breast Cancer at the NRG1/Neuregulin 1/Heregulin Gene

Most studies of genomic rearrangements in common cancers have focused on regional gains and losses, but some rearrangements may break within specific genes. We previously reported that five breast cancer cell lines have chromosome translocations that break in the NRG1 gene and that could cause abnormal NRG1 expression. NRG1 encodes the Neuregulins 1 (formerly the Heregulins), ligands for members of the ErbB/epidermal growth factor-receptor family, which includes ErbB2/HER2. We have now screened for breaks at NRG1 in paraffin sections of breast tumors. Tissue microarrays were screened by fluorescence in situ hybridization, with hybridization probes proximal and distal to the expected breakpoints. This screen detects breaks but does not distinguish between translocation or deletion breakpoints. The screen was validated with array-comparative genomic hybridization on a custom 8p12 high-density genomic array to detect a lower copy number of the sequences that were lost distal to the breaks. We also precisely mapped the breaks in five tumors with different hybridization probes. Breaks in NRG1 were detected in 6% (19 of 323) of breast cancers and in some lung and ovarian cancers. In an unselected series of 213 cases with follow-up, breast cancers where the break was detected tended to be high-grade (65% grade III compared with 28% of negative cases). They were, like breast tumors in general, mainly ErbB2 low (11 of 13 were low) and estrogen receptor positive (11 of 13 positive).
Increasing National Institutes of Health Funding for Cardiac Arrest Research

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an agency in possession of funds must be in need of a worthy cause. In this issue of JAHA , Coute et al[1][1] review the funding record of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, to assess its
Manipulation of magnetic microparticles in liquid phases for on-chip biomedical analysis methods

Magnetic microparticles and their application in bioanalytical microfluidic systems have been steadily gaining interest in recent years. This progress is fueled by the comparatively large and long range magnetic forces that can be obtained independently of the fluidic flow pattern. This thesis work presents new approaches for using magnetic microparticles in Lab-on-a-Chip systems. The first approach deals with the design of a magnetic droplet manipulation system and the second combines magnetic particle actuation with integrated optical detection. The applicability of both systems for miniaturized bioanalysis will be shown, demonstrating the potential of magnetic particle based Lab-on-a-Chip systems. The magnetic droplet manipulation system tackles the handling of small liquid volumes, which is an important task in miniaturized analytical systems. The careful adjustment of hydrophilic/hydrophobic surface properties and interfacial tensions leads to the design of a system, where small droplets are manipulated in a controllable fashion. The system's setup permits the direct implementation of bioanalytical protocols and two different procedures are in consequence examined. Based on a commercial laboratory kit, a platform for the on-chip extraction and purification of DNA will be designed. The miniaturized setup allows the user to capture and clean the DNA obtained from a raw cell sample containing as little as 10 cells, which is several orders of magnitude lower than known for macroscopic systems. A similar performance is observed for the colorimetric antibody detection further-on evaluated in the droplet manipulation system, where the small sample volumes permit a significant reduction of the reaction times. With the possibility of concentrating the biomolecules of interest on the particle surface, a sensitive and fast immunosorbent assay can be devised. A further miniaturization is examined in a CMOS system, which combines magnetic actuation and optical detection. The small dimensions of the actuation system allow the manipulation of single magnetic microparticles and the integration of Single Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPADs) enables their optical detection. An innovative detection algorithm permits hereby to distinguish the particles in size and, in combination with a velocity measurement, to evaluate the magnetic properties of the detected particles. In consequence, bioanalysis on a single magnetic particle using fluorescent measurements can be performed, as is shown by preliminary experiments.
Opinion mining from Arabic comparative sentences

This paper discuses the problem of identifying comparative opinion sentences in Arabic text. Most works in the field of opinion mining concentrate on extracting knowledge from direct opinions. Directly mining positive or negative opinions on a product review or its features is only one form of opinion mining; comparing a product review with some other competitive products is another form. Comparisons focus on mining opinions from comparative sentences, i.e., to determine which entities in products are preferred by its author. There are some work in this area in English language. This is the first in Arabic. Mining from comparative text can be divided into three tasks,. The first task is to identify comparative statement from non-comparative ones. In this task, we used method that depends on linguistic classification, where we got f-measure of 63.73 %. Then we used three machine learning methods where we got better performance which is about 86.63% in the best case. Finally, for this task, we used combined approach of linguistic and machine learning where we got fmeasure of 88.87%. In the second task we generated a set of rules to characterize three types of comparative statements. We left the third task for future work
Synchronous/Reactive Programming of Concurrent System Software

Synchronous languages are intended for programming reactive systems. Reactive systems, which include real‐time systems and key operating system components, interact continually with their environment. This paper considers the applicability of imperative synchronous/reactive languages to the development of general system software, that is, to the implementation of operating system kernels, file systems, databases, networks, server architectures, device drivers, etc. The languages Esterel and Reactive C (RC) receive special attention as Esterel is the oldest and most developed such language and RC is specifically designed for compatibility with C systems programming. An alternative soft‐instruction software architecture is described, which is well suited to real‐world system programming. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
NMLab: A Co-simulation Framework for Matlab and NS-2

This paper presents NMLab, a proposal of new co-simulation framework for Matlab and ns-2 targeted for networked control systems. NMLab enables to combine flexible and powerful numerical operations together with a realistic support for a wide range of up-to-date communication protocols, and permits simulating networking scenarios of high grade of complexity. At the same time the proposed solution is kept simple. The capabilities of NMLab are illustrated through a series of experiments, using as an example the academic version of the pendulum on a cart.
Feature Selection Based on CQCCs for Automatic Speaker Verification Spoofing

The ASVspoof 2017 challenge aims to assess spoofing and countermeasures attack detection accuracy for automatic speaker verification. It has been proven that constant Q cepstral coefficients(CQCCs) processes speech in different frequencies with variable resolution and performs much better than traditional features. When coupled with a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), it is an excellently effective spoofing countermeasure. The baseline CQCC+GMM system considers short-term impacts while ignoring the whole influence of channel. In the meanwhile, dimension of the feature is relatively higher than the traditional feature and usually with a higher variance. This paper explores different features for ASVspoof 2017 challenge. The mean and variance of the CQCC features of an utterance is used as the representation of the whole utterance. Feature selection method is introduced to avoid high variance and overfitting for spoofing detection. Experimental results on ASVspoof 2017 dataset show that feature selection followed by Support Vector Machine (SVM) gets an improvement compared to the baseline. It is also shown that pitch feature contributes to the performance improvement, and it obtains a relative improvement of 37.39% over the baseline CQCC+GMM system.
Revising Immersion: A Conceptual Model for the Analysis of Digital Game Involvement

Game studies literature has recently seen a renewed interest in game experience with the recent publication of a number of edited collections, dissertations and conferences focusing on the subject. This paper aims to contribute to that growing body of literature by presenting a summary of my doctoral research in digital game involvement and immersion. It outlines a segment of a conceptual model that describes and analyzes the moment by moment involvement with digital games on a variety of experiential dimensions corresponding to six broad categories of game features. The paper ends with a proposal to replace the metaphor of immersion with one of incorporation. Incorporation aims to avoid the binary notion of the player’s plunge into the virtual environment characteristic of “immersion” while dispelling the vagueness of application that all too often surrounds the term. AUTHOR KEYWORDS MMOGs, immersion, involvement, incorporation, player experience. This paper proposes an analytical model for describing and analyzing players’ moment by moment involvement in digital games. The game studies literature archive is steadily increasing in volume, but there has so far been a marked shying away from a structured framework analyzing game involvement and immersion. The first step in establishing such a framework is the identification of a clear set of game involvement specific terms. Using qualitative methods conducted in conjunction with the PhD project of which this paper is part, I have aimed to create a more detailed map of the phenomena of game involvement, building a vocabulary that acknowledges its varied and complex nature and in so doing contribute to the existing body of literature on game experience. In the process of this explication the model also affirms the importance of positing specific terms for addressing game involvement over other non-ergodic media objects. The aim is thus to enact a framework which will enable game students, theorists and designers to address issues of game involvement in more nuanced ways than the current conceptualizations allow.
Finding the Most Diverse Products using Preference Queries

In this paper, given a product database and a set of customer preferences, we address the problem of discovering a bounded set of r diverse products that attract the interests of di↵erent customers. This problem finds numerous applications in electronic marketplaces, e.g., for selecting the products that are placed in the home page of an online shop. Existing approaches to tackle this problem fall short because they ignore customer preferences, and instead rely solely on products’ attributes. We model this problem as a diversity problem, where each product is represented by its reverse top-k result set, and seek r products that maximize their diversity value. Since the problem is NP-hard, we employ a greedy algorithm that takes as input the reverse top-k result sets of all candidate products. To further improve performance, we also design a more ecient approximate algorithm that does not require the computation of all reverse top-k sets. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates the performance of the proposed algorithms and quality of the selected diverse products.
CyKEGGParser: tailoring KEGG pathways to fit into systems biology analysis workflows

The KEGG pathway database is a widely accepted source for biomolecular pathway maps. In this paper we present the CyKEGGParser app ( http://apps.cytoscape.org/apps/cykeggparser) for Cytoscape 3 that allows manipulation with KEGG pathway maps. Along with basic functionalities for pathway retrieval, visualization and export in KGML and BioPAX formats, the app provides unique features for computer-assisted adjustment of inconsistencies in KEGG pathway KGML files and generation of tissue- and protein-protein interaction specific pathways. We demonstrate that using biological context-specific KEGG pathways created with CyKEGGParser makes systems biology analysis more sensitive and appropriate compared to original pathways.
Controversies in cardiovascular medicine series Imaging of the unstable plaque : how far have we got ?

Cardiovascular Research, Institute of Physiology, Zurich Center for Integrative Human Physiology, University of Zurich, Zurich 8057, Switzerland; Cardiology, Cardiovascular Center, University Hospital Rämistrasse 100, 8091 Zürich, Switzerland; Division of Magnetic Resonance Research, Department of Radiology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21287, USA; Department of Radiology, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois and University of Lausanne, Lausanne 1011, Switzerland; and Center for Systems Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA
An H 1-Optimal Alternative to the FxLMS Algorithm 1

We study a general setting of active noise cancellation problems from the H1 point of view and present a solution that optimally limits the worst case energy gain from the interfering measurement errors, external disturbances, and initial condition uncertainty to the residual noise. The optimal bounding of this energy gain is the main characteristic of the proposed solution. To impose a nite impulse response (FIR) structure on the controller, we suggest an adaptation scheme for the weight vector of an FIR lter that approximates the H1-optimal solution. Our discussions in this paper explain; (i) why and how this new adaptive scheme generalizes previous results on the H1-optimality of the LMS algorithm, (ii) why it is an alternative for the widely used Filtered-X Least-MeanSquares (FxLMS) algorithm, and (iii) how the formulation provides an appropriate framework to address the issues of modeling error and robustness. Simulations are used to compare the performance of the proposed (approximate) H1-optimal adaptive scheme with the FxLMS algorithm.