Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Multi-Agent System for Controlling Building Environments

A working solution to the problem of thermal resource distribution in a building is demonstrated using a market-based systent In this system computational agents representing individual temperature controllers bid to buy or sell cool or warm air. They do so via a double-blind computerized auction which is moderated by a central computer auctioneer. The auctioneer sees to it that no agent buys resources for more than its bid and no agent sells resources for less than its bid. The market system has been implemented and runs on a regular basis as part of a building energy management system. Results show that the thermal auction leads to an equitable temperature distribution throughout the area under its control without incurring any extra costs such as excessive actuator movement.
Gaussian subtraction (GS) algorithms for word spotting in continuous speech

In this paper, a novel approach for the design of cohort models for word spotting in continuous speech is presented. This new approach is based on modifying the probability density function of a conventional filler so that regions in the feature space that are related to the keyword will be reduced or removed. By modifying these regions, the filler and keyword models become more orthogonal in the sense that they represent different areas in the feature space, making the filler appropriate to be used as a cohort model. The algorithms, named Gaussian Subtraction (GS) and Gaussian Removal (GR), may be considered discriminative training algorithms.
Natural Variation of Cold Deacclimation Correlates with Variation of Cold-Acclimation of the Plastid Antioxidant System in Arabidopsis thaliana Accessions

Temperature variations impact on the balance between photosynthetic electron transport and electron-consuming assimilation reactions and transiently increase generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Previous studies demonstrated that the expression of C-repeat binding factors (CBFs), which activate cold acclimation reactions, respond to chloroplast ROS signals and that cold deacclimation is partly halted for days after the transfer of acclimated plants to optimal growth conditions in four Arabidopsis accessions from cold-continental habitats. We hypothesized that these accessions differ from others in the regulation of the plastid antioxidant system (PAS). In the present study, we compared the expression intensity of the 12 most prominent PAS genes for peroxidases, superoxide dismutase and low molecular weight antioxidant regenerating enzymes in 10 Arabidopsis accessions with regulation of CBF and COR (cold regulated genes) transcript levels and cold-regulated metabolite levels prior to cold, after 2 week long cold acclimation and during the first 3 days of deacclimation. In the accessions with prolonged activation of cold responses, by trend, weaker induction of various cold-inducible PAS genes and stronger decreases in the expression of negatively cold-regulated PAS genes were observed. Low PAS gene expression delayed the post-cold decrease in H2O2 levels after transfer of the plants from cold to optimal growth conditions. We conclude that weaker expression of various PAS genes in the cold is an adapted strategy of the Arabidopsis accessions N14, N13, Ms-0, and Kas-1 to avoid full inactivation of cold-responses in the first days after the end of the cold period.
Operations of Electric Power Systems with High Penetration of Wind Power: Risks and Possible Solutions

This paper provides an assessment of wind power effects on technical and economic performance of today's electric power systems. While a small penetration of wind power is unlikely to cause any qualitative changes, significant deployment of wind-generated power will require a major rethinking of generation dispatch and automatic generation control, in particular. We summarize technical risks, as well as the economic implications on total cost of providing power to customers. The discussion is presented for both traditional fully regulated utilities and for the portions of the electric power interconnection which are undergoing restructuring. The paper suggests that the ultimate benefit of wind power to the customers will depend to a large extent on how well today's operating practices are adjusted to make the most out of the available resources, including the intermittent wind power. Moreover, we suggest that an analysis should be done to determine the amount of wind power for a given system beyond which benefits are difficult to capture because of the necessary additional infrastructure cost.
Microstructural Characterization and the Effect of Phase Transformations on Toughness of the UNS S31803 Duplex Stainless Steel Aged Treated at 850 °C

Duplex stainless steels, with ferritic-austenitic microstructure, have excellent mechanical properties and corrosion resistance. However, when duplex stainless steels are exposed to temperatures between 600 and 1000 °C, some phase transformations can occur such as chromium nitrides precipitation, chromium carbides precipitation and the sigma phase formation. The formation of such compounds leads to loss in both corrosion resistance and fracture toughness. The negative effects of the formation of chromium nitrides, carbides and the sigma phase are due to the chromium depletion in the matrix. The phase transformations cited above occur initially at ferritic-austenitic interfaces and at the grain boundaries. The aim of this work is to identify and characterize the phase transformations, which occur when aging heat treatments are carried out at temperatures at which the kinetics is the fastest for the reactions mentioned. At first, the samples were annealed at 1100 °C for 40 min. The aging heat treatments were then carried out at 850 °C for 6, 40 e 600 min. Microstructural characterization was done by using optical microscopy with different etchings, in order to identify each phase formed in the duplex stainless steel during aging heat treatments. The toughness was also evaluated by using Charpy impact test. Impact tests show that loss of toughness was related to phase transformations.
The resilience of WDM networks to probabilistic geographical failures

Telecommunications networks, and in particular optical WDM networks, are vulnerable to large-scale failures of their physical infrastructure, resulting from physical attacks (such as an Electromagnetic Pulse attack) or natural disasters (such as solar flares, earthquakes, and floods). Such events happen at specific geographical locations and disrupt specific parts of the network but their effects are not deterministic. Therefore, we provide a unified framework to model the network vulnerability when the event has a probabilistic nature, defined by an arbitrary probability density function. Our framework captures scenarios with a number of simultaneous attacks, in which network components consist of several dependent subcomponents, and in which either a 1+1 or a 1∶1 protection plan is in place. We use computational geometric tools to provide efficient algorithms to identify vulnerable points within the network under various metrics. Then, we obtain numerical results for specific backbone networks, thereby demonstrating the applicability of our algorithms to real-world scenarios. Our novel approach allows for identifying locations which require additional protection efforts (e.g., equipment shielding). Overall, the paper demonstrates that using computational geometric techniques can significantly contribute to our understanding of network resilience.
A unifying view on energy-efficiency metrics in cognitive radio channels

The objective of this paper is to provide a unifying framework of the most popular energy-efficiency metrics proposed in the wireless communications literature. The target application is a cognitive radio system composed of a secondary user whose goal is to transmit in an optimal energy-efficient manner over several available bands under the interference constraints imposed by the presence of the primary network. It turns out that, the optimal allocation policies maximizing these energy-efficiency metrics can be interpreted as Pareto-optimal points lying on the optimal tradeoff curve between the rate maximization and power minimization bi-criteria joint problem. Using this unifying framework, we provide several interesting parallels and differences between these metrics and the implications w.r. t. the optimal tradeoffs between achievable rates and consumed power.
A Bio-inspired Adaptive Job Scheduling Mechanism on a Computational Grid

Summary A computational grid is a highly dynamic and distributed environment. Unlike tightly-coupled parallel computing environment, high performance computing on the grid is complicated by the heterogeneous computational performances of each node, possible node unavailability, unpredictable node behavior, and unreliable network connectivity. Compared to a static scheduling, an adaptive scheduling mechanism is more favorable and attractive in a grid-computing environment, because it can adjust the scheduling policy according to its dynamically changing computational environment. In this paper, we present a job scheduling mechanism that enable the adaptation of naturally parallel and compute-intensive jobs to clustered computational farms with heterogeneous performance. The kernel of this scheduling technique is a swarm intelligent algorithm, which is inspired from the ants’ behavior in a social insect colony. We applied the bio-inspired adaptive mechanism in a simulated computational grid and compared it with static scheduling algorithms. Our results showed good performance, adaptability, and robustness in a dynamic computational grid with respect to its competitors.
Postoperative Respiratory Failure

Postoperative pulmonary complications (PPCs) are a frequent and costly issue in the perioperative setting. PPCs are twice as common as cardiac complications in the perioperative setting and result in prolonged hospital stays and increased costs. Steps to identify and prevent these complications can lead to significant cost reductions by way of reduced hospital stays and reduced resource utilization. More importantly, the decrease in patient morbidity and mortality that can be achieved by identifying patients at risk for the development of PPCs before the development of respiratory failure can be significant. Prevention of PPCs is achieved through modification of multiple factors, including patient/family education, pain control, and chest physiotherapy. If, despite a priori preventative measures, a patient develops a pulmonary complication that progresses to respiratory failure, knowledge of rescue therapies can reduce duration and impact of the respiratory insult. In this chapter, we will discuss the overall effects of PPCs on patient outcome. Specifically, we will discuss means of identifying patients at risk and describe interventions to assist the practitioner in reducing or aborting adverse respiratory events before the development of acute postoperative respiratory failure.
Prevention of Sudden Death in Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy: But Which Defibrillator for Which Patient?

C ase presentation: A 14-year-old girl died suddenly and unexpectedly while exercising. Clinical and echocardiographic family screening identified hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) in her only sibling, an asymptomatic 17-year-old boy. In her brother, echocardiography showed extreme septal ventricular hypertrophy, 35 mm in thickness; left ventricular (LV) outflow obstruction was absent. Left atrial dimension was 42 mm. Holter monitoring showed 2 runs of nonsustained ventricular tachycardia (5 and 8 beats). Blood pressure response during exercise was normal. The patient was judged to be at high risk for sudden death and a candidate for an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD). The overall favorable clinical profile (ie, no symptoms, preserved systolic function, and low risk of developing atrial fibrillation [AF]) suggested that long-term survival principally relied on effective prevention of sudden death. Therefore, ICD selection centered on the long-term reliability of the ICD system, particularly the leads. A single-chamber ICD with a single-coil active-fixation lead was implanted to facilitate extraction should lead removal be required. Moreover, a high–shock output ICD was used because of the massive LV hypertrophy and possible high defibrillation threshold. During the past few years, interest has increased in the use of the ICD in genetic cardiac diseases associated with sudden cardiac death, such as HCM, long-QT syndrome, arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, and Brugada syndrome.1,2 HCM is by far the most common of these cardiac conditions, with a prevalence of about 1:500 in the general population.3,4 Because most HCM patients at high risk for sudden death are young, with no or only mild symptoms and preserved systolic function, prevention of sudden death by the ICD may prolong life substantially in this disease and could offer a normal or near-normal life expectancy to many patients.1,4,5 Indeed, recent investigations have shown that the ICD is effective in preventing sudden death in HCM. …
Association studies for quantitative traits in structured populations

Association between disease and genetic polymorphisms often contributes critical information in our search for the genetic components of common diseases. Devlin and Roeder [1999: Biometrics 55:997–1004] introduced genomic control, a statistical method that overcomes a drawback to the use of population‐based samples for tests of association, namely spurious associations induced by population structure. In essence, genomic control (GC) uses markers throughout the genome to adjust for any inflation in test statistics due to substructure. To date, genomic control (GC) has been developed for binary traits and bi‐ or multiallelic markers. Tests of association using GC have been limited to single genes. In this report, we generalize GC to quantitative traits (QT) and multilocus models. Using statistical analysis and simulations, we show that GC controls spurious associations in reasonable settings of population substructure for QT models, including gene‐gene interaction. Through simulations, we explore GC power for both random and selected samples, assuming the QT locus tested is causal and its specific heritability is 2.5–5%. We find that GC, combined with either random or selected samples, has good power in this setting, and that more complex models induce smaller GC corrections. The latter suggests greater power can be achieved by specifying more complex genetic models, but this observation only follows when such models are largely correct and specified a priori. Genet. Epidemiol. 22:78–93, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The order of the largest complete minor in a random graph

Let ccl(G) denote the order of the largest complete minor in a graph G (also called the contraction clique number) and let Gn,p denote a random graph on n vertices with edge probability p. Bollobás, Catlin, and Erdős (Eur J Combin 1 (1980), 195–199) asymptotically determined ccl(Gn,p) when p is a constant. Łuczak, Pittel and Wierman (Trans Am Math Soc 341 (1994) 721–748) gave bounds on ccl(Gn,p) when p is very close to 1/n, i.e. inside the phase transition. We show that for every ε > 0 there exists a constant C such that whenever C/n < p < 1 ‐ ε then asymptotically almost surely ccl(Gn,p) = (1 ± ε)n/ $ \sqrt{\rm {log}_{b}(np)} $, where b := 1/(1 ‐ p). If p = C/n for a constant C > 1, then ccl(Gn,p) = Θ($ \sqrt{n} $). This extends the results in (Bollobás, Catlin, and P. Erdős, Eur J Combin 1 (1980), 195–199) and answers a question of Krivelevich and Sudakov (preprint, 2006). © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg. , 2008
Malicious URL Detection and Identification

links are used as a source by the distribution channels to broadcast malware all over the Web. These links become instrumental in giving partial or full system control to the attackers. This results in victim systems, which get easily infected and, attackers can utilize systems for various cyber crimes such as stealing credentials, spamming, phishing, denial-of-service and many more such attacks. To detect such crimes systems should be fast and precise with the ability to detect new malicious content. This paper introduces various aspects associated with the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) classification process which recognizes whether the target website is a malicious or benign. The standard datasets are used for training purpose from different sources. The rising problem spamming, phishing and malware, has generated a need for reliable framework solution which can classify and further identify the malicious URL. An alternative approach has been proposed which uses a Naive Bayes classifier for an automated classification and detection of malicious URLs. The proposed model based on Naive Bayes is supported by clustering and classification technique. On the other hand, they are rarely used for general probabilistic learning and inference which is typically used for estimating with conditional and marginal distributions. The proposed work in this paper shows that, for a wide range of benchmark datasets, Naive Bayes models learned using Probability model has better accuracy than Support Vector Machine model.
A Sequent Calculus for a Modal Logic on Finite Data Trees

We investigate the proof theory of a modal fragment of XPath equipped with data (in)equality tests over finite data trees, i.e. over finite unranked trees where nodes are labelled with both a symbol from a finite alphabet and a single data value from an infinite domain. We present a sound and complete sequent calculus for this logic, which yields the optimal PSPACE complexity bound for its validity problem.
A real-time RGB-D registration and mapping approach by heuristically switching between photometric and geometric information

Real-time 3D mapping has many applications and has recently received a large interest due to availability of consumer depth cameras at low prices. In this paper, we present a 3D registration and mapping method that heuristically switches between photometric and geometric features, therefore allowing it to accurately register scenes that may lack either visual or geometric information. We propose a novel informative sampling based geometric 3D feature extraction technique in which the points carrying the most useful geometric information are used for registration. This increases the computational speed significantly while preserving the accuracy of the registration when compared to using the dense point cloud for registration. After extracting the features from sequential frames, they are assigned with feature descriptors and matched with their correspondences from the previous frame. The matches are then refined and a rigid transformation between the frames is calculated using a highly robust estimator. A global pose for the camera and associated 3D position of the points are computed by concatenating the estimated relative transformations and a 3D map is constructed. We evaluate our method on publicly available RGB-D benchmark datasets [1] and compare it to the state of the art algorithms.
Automated 3‐dimensional morphologic analysis of sputum specimens for lung cancer detection: Performance characteristics support use in lung cancer screening

The LuCED Lung Test comprises an automated 3‐dimensional morphologic analysis of epithelial cells in sputum. For each cell, 594 morphology‐based features are measured to drive algorithmic classifiers that quantitatively assess whether neoplastic cells are present. The current interim clinical study involves sputum samples from patients with known benign and malignant outcomes to assess the feasibility of LuCED as an adjunctive test after suspicious low‐dose computed tomography (LDCT) results or as an independent screening test for lung cancer.
Behavioural responses of South African youth to the HIV/AIDS epidemic: A nationwide survey

South Africa is reported to have the largest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world. The present study investigated the behavioural responses of South African youth to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. A multi-stage stratified cluster sample of 2,430 youths aged 15–24 was selected, 46.9% of them males and 53.1% females. Nurses administered questionnaires to consenting youths, measuring behavioural risks and also took an oral fluid specimen for HIV antibody testing. It was found that the median age of sexual debut for both sexes was 16.5 years; most of the youths were sexually experienced with no variation by sex; sexual experience was highest among Africans living in informal urban areas; partner turnover was low and multiple partners were more common among African males living in urban informal settings; sexual frequency among sexually active youth was relatively low; secondary abstinence during the past 12 months was 24%; condom use at last sexual intercourse was high, at 52.8% for males and 47.6% for females, especially among Africans living in urban informal settings; and the majority of youths (74%) indicated that they had discussed HIV prevention with their partners during the past 12 months. These results suggest that South African youth are heeding the message to abstain, be faithful and use a condom; messages that are at the core of South Africa's HIV/AIDS prevention programme.
[Anxiety disorders and influence factors in adolescent patients with cleft lip and palate].

OBJECTIVE To investigate the anxiety disorders and influence factors that occur in adolescent patients with cleft lip and palate and to provide theoretical foundation for mental intervention. METHODS A total of 120 adolescent patients with cleft lip and palate were investigated using a general information questionnaire, the self-rating anxiety scale, and the social support rating scale (SSRS). The influence factors of anxiety disorders were analyzed. RESULTS The effective questionnaires were 119. The occurrence rate of anxiety disorder in adolescent patients was 49.6% (59/119), and the occurrence rates of mild, moderate, and severe anxieties were 41.2% (49/119), 7.6% (9/119), and 0.8% (1/119), respectively. The gender, residential area, disease category, family status (one child or no children), and incidence rate of anxiety disorder in patients were statistically different (P<0.05). The SSRS scores of patients with anxiety disorder were lower than those of patients without anxiety disorder (P<0.05). Multiple regression analysis showed that gender and social support were predictive factors of the occurrence of anxiety disorder (R=0.318). CONCLUSION A high anxiety disorder rate occurred in adolescent patients with cleft lip and palate. dender and social support were important influencing factors for anxiety disorder. In the after-mental intervention, considerable attention should be given to the anxiety disorders of patients and improve their mental health.
The United States Department of Defense revitalization of system security engineering through program protection

This paper discusses the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) state-of-practice of integrating security into systems engineering (SE) in order to implement system security engineering (SSE) through the program protection process. The discussion includes a description of new policies and the application of methods and techniques to implement SSE. Although SSE is normally viewed as a specialty engineering area, this paper emphasizes the need to more tightly integrate SSE with the overall systems engineering.