Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hybrid Agent & Component-based Management of Backchannels

This paper describes the use of the SoSAA software framework to implement the hybrid management of communication channels (backchannels) across a distributed software system. SoSAA is a new integrated architectural solution enabling context-aware, open and adaptive software while preserving system modu- larity and promoting the re-use of existing component-based and agent-oriented frameworks and associated methodologies. In particular, we show how SoSAA can be used to orchestrate the adoption of network adapter components to bind functional components that are distributed across different component contexts. Both the performance of the different computational nodes involved and the efficiencies and faults in the underlying transport layers are taken into account when deciding which transport mechanisms to use.
Seeker Optimization Algorithm for Beamforming of Linear Antenna Arrays

This paper presents Seeker Optimization Algorithm (SOA) to the optimization of current excitation weights and uniform inter-element spacing for the optimal design of hyper beam forming of linear antenna arrays. Hyper beam forming is based on sum and difference beam patterns, each raised to the power of hyper beam exponent parameter for linear antenna arrays. In the SOA, the act of human searching capability and understanding are exploited for the purpose of optimization of the hyper beam pattern. In this algorithm, the search direction is based on empirical gradient by evaluating the response to the position changes and the step length is based on uncertainty reasoning by using a simple fuzzy rule. The simulation experiment is performed on 10-, 14-, and 20-element linear antenna arrays with an objective of obtaining maximum Side Lobe Level (SLL) reduction and much more improved first null beam width (FNBW) for SOA. Finally, the SOA based optimal hyper beam forming designs have proven to be superior in achieving the greatest reduction in SLL and much more improved FNBW, keeping the same value of hyper beam exponent.
Principles of macroeconometric modeling

Preface. Models of the Economy as a Whole. What is a model? A Macroeconomic model - a new approach. Another accounting system, input-output (I-O). Yet another accounting system, flow-of-funds (F/F). Models of the Centrally Planned and Transition Economies. The basic framework. Demand determined models. Supply determined systems: the supply side. Fully supply determined systems. Quasi-supply determined systems. Disequilibrium macromodels. The use of macroeconometric models. Major Topics in Macromodelling. Final and intermediate demand functions. Supply determination. Production functions and production potential. Price and wage equations. Financial flows. Project Link. The LINK Matrix. The LINK algorithm. Some LINK applications. New directions for LINK. Simulation. Formulas of simulation. The Gauss-Seidel algorithm: linear case. The Gauss-Seidel algorithm: nonlinear case. The Newton method. Stochastic simulation. Model Validation. Sources of error. Descriptive measures of error. Analytical measures of error. Some limits to accuracy. Dynamic Analysis. A theory of economic fluctuations. Some sinusoidal limit theorems for econometric models. Otsuki's sinusoidal limit theorem. Measurement - the spectral approach to the frequency domain. Measurement - an autoregressive approach in the time domain. Some interpretations of economic dynamics. New directions in time series analysis. VAR models. Stationarity and non-stationarity. Equilibrium relationships and cointegration analysis. Rational expectations. Multiplier and Policy Analysis. Multipliers. Some multiplier tabulations and policy simulations. Optimal economic policy. Forecasting. Ex ante prediction. Forecast preparation. The forecast horizon. Combinations of high and low frequency forecasts. Ex ante forecast error.
Promoting Awareness and Participation in Large Class Lectures: The Digital Backchannel Backstage

This article reports on the conception of a novel digital backchannel, code name Backstage , dedicated to large classes aiming at empowering not only the audience but also the speaker, at promoting the awareness of both audience and speaker, and at promoting an active participation of students in the lecture. The backchannel supports different forms of inter-student communication via short microblog messages, social evaluation and ranking of messages by the students themselves, and aggregation of student's opinions aiming at increasing the students' community feeling, strengthening the students' awareness of and co-responsibility for the class work aiming at promoting the students' participation in the lecture. The backchannel further supports immediate concise feedback to the lecturer of selected and aggregated students' opinions aiming at strengthening the lecturer's awareness for students' difficulties. The backchannel's conception is motivated by learning sciences' findings and theories.
Phonetic information in audiovisual speech is more important for adults than for infants; preliminary findings

Infants and adults are able to match auditory and visual speech but the cues on which they rely may differ. Here we provide an initial assessment of the relative contribution of temporaland phonetic cues available in the AV signal. Adults (N=52) and infants (N=18) matched 2 trisyllabic speech sounds, either natural speech or SWS, with visual speech information. Adults saw two articulating faces and matched a sound to one of these, while infants were presented with the same stimuli in a preferential looking paradigm. Adults’ performance was almost flawless with natural speech, but was significantly less accurate with SWS. In contrast, infants matched the sound to the articulating face, irrespective of whether it was natural speech or SWS. We propose that infants matched the AV signal based on temporal cues whereas adults relied more heavily on phonetic cues. This is in line with the idea that lipreading improves with age.
Studies on the Development of Potential Biomarkers for Rapid Assessment of Copper Toxicity to Freshwater Fish using Esomus danricus as Model

Living in an environment that has been altered considerably by anthropogenic activities, fish are often exposed to a multitude of stressors including heavy metals. Copper ions are quite toxic to fish when concentrations are increased in environmental exposures often resulting in physiological, histological, biochemical and enzymatic alterations in fish, which have a great potential to serve as biomarkers. Esomus danricus was chosen as model in the present study and the metabolic rate, gill morphology, total glycogen, total protein, superoxide dismutase and catalase were critically evaluated. The 96h LC50 value was found to be 5.5mg/L (Cu as 1.402mg/L). Fish groups were separately exposed to lethal (5.5mg/L) and sub lethal concentrations (0.55 mg/L) of copper sulphate over a period of 96h to examine the subtle effects caused at various functional levels. Controls were also maintained simultaneously. Significant decrease in the metabolic rate (p<0.001) of the fish was observed in both the concentrations studied. Studies employing Automated Video Tracking System revealed gross changes in the architecture of gill morphology like loss, fusion, clubbing of secondary gill lamellae, and detachment of gill rakers following softening of gill shaft in fish under lethal exposures indicating reduced respiratory surface area. Biochemical profiles like total glycogen and total protein in gills and muscle of fish exposed to 5.5 mg/L showed appreciable decrease (p<0.05 to 0.001) from control. Significant inhibition of superoxide dismutase (60.83%), catalase (71.57%) from control was observed in fish exposed to 5.5 mg/L at the end of 96h exposure only. Interestingly, in fish exposed to 0.55 mg/L enzyme activity is not affected except for catalase. Toxic responses evaluated at various functional levels are more pronounced in fish exposed to 5.5mg/L and these can serve as potential biomarkers for rapid assessment of acute copper toxicity in environmental biomonitoring.
Software Diversity: Security, Entropy and Game Theory

Although many have recognized the risks of software monocultures, it is not currently clear how much and what kind of diversity would be needed to address these risks. Here we attempt to provide insight into this issue using a simple model of hosts and vulnerabilities connected in a bipartite graph. We use this graph to compute diversity metrics as Renyi entropy and to formulate an anti-coordination game to understand why computer host owners would choose to diversify. Since security isn't the only factor considered when choosing software in the real world, we propose a slight variation of the popular security wargame Capture the Flag that can serve as a testbed for understanding the utility of diversity as a defense strategy.
Globalizing Practices and University Responses: European and Anglo-American Differences

Investigates the impact that certain globalizing practices have on European and American universities. Due to dwindling resources and the ideology of privatization, universities are becoming more corporatized and managerial. The authors investigate the consequences of these changes on the lives of academics and analyze how globalizing practices such as managerialism, accountability, and employment flexibility penetrate different universities. Globalization is a contested term. It exists in the form of an integrated world economy and global communication networks. Along with this material world, politicians have created a neoliberal ideology that exhorts nation states to open up their economies to free trade, reduce their public sector, and allow market forces to reshape their public agencies. In effect, this means a reduced role for government, lower taxes, and diminishing funds for public institutions like universities. The underlying thesis of this book is that globalization is not an inexorable force. All nations need to debate its consequences. The authors analyze how globalizing practices are penetrating universities. Are they creating a certain uniformity? Are academics adapting to or resisting particular globalizing practices? The premise at the beginning of the study was that European universities were responding differently to globalizing practices than Anglo-American universities. This premise was confirmed as some universities saw certain globalizing practices as inevitable and other universities resisted them. The authors asked academics and key managers how their funding had changed, and which accountability mechanisms their universities adopted. They also investigated the use of the Internet in their teaching. They found differences between European and American universities in their approach to permanent employment. The French and Norwegian universities were maintaining many of their traditional values and only the Dutch university showed some movement towards the globalizing practices, which American universities were more readily adopting.
A new determination of the orbit and masses of the Be binary system δ Scorpii

The binary starδ Sco (HD143275) underwent remarkable brightening in the visible in 2000, and continues to be irregularly variable. The system was observed with the Sydney University Stellar Interferometer (SUSI) in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2006 and 2007. The 1999 observations were consistent with predictions based on the previously published orbital elements. The subsequent observations can only be explained by assuming that an optically bright emission region with an angular size of 2 ± 1 mas formed around the primary in 2000. By 2006/2007 the size of this region grew to an estimated 4m as. We have determined a consistent set of orbital elements by simultaneously fitting all the published interferometric and spectroscopic data as well as the SUSI data reported here. The resulting elements and the brightness ratio for the system measured prior to the outburst in 2000 have been used to estimate the masses of the components. We find MA = 15 ± 7M � and MB = 8.0 ± 3.6 M� . The dynamical parallax is estimated to be 7.03 ± 0.15 mas, which is in good agreement with the revised Hipparcos parallax.
Adaptive Fusion Method of Multi-Focused Image Based on Wavelet Transform

An adaptive fusion method of multi-focused image based on wavelet transform is presented. The match degree of source image is considered as an adaptive threshold to decide whether maximum selection or weighted average to be used for new wavelet coefficients of sub-images. Experiments show that the proposed method will obtain more information content and higher clarity after wavelet inverse transform than traditional methods.
Naïve Bayes Approach for Predicting Missing Links in Ego Networks

Online social networking sites are a popular medium to exchange information among individuals. For measurement and analysis of social networking sites, we can assume it as a huge graph, where nodes represent users while edges represent links among users. Millions of nodes make the study of social network complex to analyze, so we narrow down by considering ego network rather than considering whole social network for our analysis. Ego network can be considered as an individual's own social network with their direct connections known as alters'. In this paper we are trying to identify the missing links among alters of an ego network with the help of Naïve Bayes classification technique considering it as a link prediction technique. Link prediction techniques are used to predict the possibility of creation of new links in the network. For predicting new links, existing link prediction techniques calculate similarity score between two nodes in the network. Higher similarity score leads to the possibility of new links between nodes. These techniques mainly use common connectivity information, node degree or individual node features separately to calculate similarity score which may leads to high number of false predictions. Secondly deciding threshold for prediction is another issue with the similarity score based link prediction techniques. Thus we have implemented Naïve Bayes approach by considering it as a binary classification problem to identify the missing links in an ego network. The proposed approach uses common neighbors and individual node features among its existing connections and based on that predicts the possibility of new links. We have validated the result with area under ROC curve.
A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE FOR QUANTUM COMMUNICATION SYSTEM DESIGN

Motivation (problems addressed): Several languages for “quantum programming” have been proposed before, which facilitate the description of algorithms for quantum computers. None such language has been developed specifically for protocol design and validation. Protocols for quantum cryptography give a guarantee of immunity to eavesdropping, but proofs of their unconditional security are purely theoretical. The goal of this work is to establish a framework for formal definition and validation of quantum protocols.
Anticonvulsant pharmacology of voltage‐gated Na+ channels in hippocampal neurons of control and chronically epileptic rats

Voltage‐gated Na+ channels are a main target of many first‐line anticonvulsant drugs and their mechanism of action has been extensively investigated in cell lines and native neurons. Nevertheless, it is unknown whether the efficacy of these drugs might be altered following chronic epileptogenesis. We have, therefore, analysed the effects of phenytoin (100 µm), lamotrigine (100 µm) and valproate (600 µm) on Na+ currents in dissociated rat hippocampal granule neurons in the pilocarpine model of chronic epilepsy. In control animals, all three substances exhibited modest tonic blocking effects on Na+ channels in their resting state. These effects of phenytoin and lamotrigine were reduced (by 77 and 64%) in epileptic compared with control animals. Phenytoin and valproate caused a shift in the voltage dependence of fast inactivation in a hyperpolarizing direction, while all three substances shifted the voltage dependence of activation in a depolarizing direction. The anticonvulsant effects on Na+ channel voltage dependence proved to be similar in control and epileptic animals. The time course of fast recovery from inactivation was potently slowed by lamotrigine and phenytoin in control animals, while valproate had no effect. Interestingly, the effects of phenytoin on fast recovery from inactivation were significantly reduced in chronic epilepsy. Taken together, these results reveal that different anticonvulsant drugs may exert a distinct pattern of effects on native Na+ channels. Furthermore, the reduction of phenytoin and, to a less pronounced extent, lamotrigine effects in chronic epilepsy raises the possibility that reduced pharmacosensitivity of Na+ channels may contribute to the development of drug resistance.
Short-term load forecasting by artificial neural ne tworks specified by genetic algorithms - a simulation stud y over a Brazilian dataset.

This paper studies the application of genetic algor ithms in helping to select the proper architecture and training paramet ers, by means of evolutionary simulations done on a series of real load data, for a neural network to be used in electric load forecasting. Particularly, we investi gate the application of a novel fitness function to the genetic algorithms, instead of the usual ones, based on the sum of the squares of the errors. We compare th e results of the neural networks thus specified with that of four benchmark s: two naive forecasters, a linear method, and a neural network in which the pa rameter values are found by means of a grid search.
Tablaction: collaborative brainstorming system with stylus-fingertip interactions on tablet PCs

In this paper, we introduce the Tablaction that supports collaborative brainstorming process by unifying various interactions utilize stylus and multi-touch finger input. Additionally, we demonstrate the specially designed stylus for it, and the paper prototype test. In a brainstorming meeting, there is a problem that everyone cannot equally participate in the brainstorming. There were several approaches to this problem; however, their interaction styles were limited to the devices. Tablet devices with multi-touch capability are commercialized fast in these days. In addition, the researches on pressure recognition to replace the touch panel are actively on progress. With the technologies, the tablets would be capable to recognize a stylus, and distinguishing it with a fingertip. We expect that the interaction design with the capability will accelerate idea expressions in a brainstorming meeting.
Exchange Rate Regimes and Capital Mobility: How Much of the Swoboda Thesis Survives?

Alexander Swoboda is one of the originators of the bipolar view that capital mobility creates pressure for countries to abandon intermediate exchange rate arrangements in favor of greater flexibility and harder pegs. This paper takes another look at the evidence for this hypothesis using two popular de facto classifications of exchange rate regimes. That evidence supports the bipolar view for the advanced countries, the sample for which it was originally developed, but not obviously for emerging markets and other developing countries. One interpretation of the contrast is that there is a tendency to move away from intermediate regimes in the course of economic and financial development, implying that emerging markets and other developing countries will eventually abandon intermediate regimes as well. Another interpretation is that the advanced countries have been faster to abandon soft pegs because they have been faster to develop attractive alternatives, notably Europe's monetary union. In this view, other countries are unlikely to abandon soft pegs because of the absence of the distinctive political conditions that have made the European alternative feasible. A final interpretation is that the advanced countries have been able to abandon soft peg because of their success in substituting inflation targeting for exchange rate targeting as the anchor for monetary policy. The paper presents some evidence for this view, which suggests the feasibility of further movement by emerging markets and developing countries in the direct of greater exchange rate flexibility.
Estimating number of speakers by the modulation characteristics of speech

A method for estimating number of speakers of mixed speech signals was proposed. The algorithm was based on the modulation characteristics of speech, specifically that a single speech utterance typically has a distinct modulation pattern with a peak around 4-5 Hz. Having observed that the modulation peak decreases as number of speakers increases, our estimation algorithm used the region of the modulation frequency between 2 and 8 Hz. We obtained a novel parameter we called "equivalent number of speakers" to estimate the number of simultaneous speakers when speech signals contain multiple speakers.
The Costs and Benefits of Going from Low Inflation to Price Stability

This paper evaluates the welfare gain from achieving price stability and compares it to the cost of the transition. In calculating the gain from price stability, the paper emphasizes the distortions caused by the interaction of inflation and capital income taxes. Because inflation exacerbates the tax distortions that would exist even with price stability, the annual deadweight loss of a two percent inflation rate is a surprisingly large one percent of GDP. Since the real gain from shifting to price stability grows in perpetuity at the rate of growth of GDP, its present value is a substantial multiple of this annual gain. Discounting the annual gains at the rate that investors require for risky equity investments (i.e., at the 5.1 percent real net-of-tax rate of return on the Standard and Poors portfolio of equities from 1970 to 1994) implies a present value gain equal to more than 35 percent of the initial level of GDP. Since the estimated cost of shifting from two percent inflation to price stability is about five percent of GDP, the gain substantially outweighs the cost of transition.
Oncogenic KRAS sensitizes premalignant, but not malignant cells, to Noxa-dependent apoptosis through the activation of the MEK/ERK pathway

KRAS is mutated in about 20-25% of all human cancers and especially in pancreatic, lung and colorectal tumors. Oncogenic KRAS stimulates several pro-survival pathways, but it also triggers the trans-activation of pro-apoptotic genes. In our work, we show that G13D mutations of KRAS activate the MAPK pathway, and ERK2, but not ERK1, up-regulates Noxa basal levels. Accordingly, premalignant epithelial cells are sensitized to various cytotoxic compounds in a Noxa-dependent manner. In contrast to these findings, colorectal cancer cell sensitivity to treatment is independent of KRAS status and Noxa levels are not up-regulated in the presence of mutated KRAS despite the fact that ERK2 still promotes Noxa expression. We therefore speculated that other survival pathways are counteracting the pro-apoptotic effect of mutated KRAS and found that the inhibition of AKT restores sensitivity to treatment, especially in presence of oncogenic KRAS. In conclusion, our work suggests that the pharmacological inhibition of the pathways triggered by mutated KRAS could also switch off its oncogene-activated pro-apoptotic stimulation. On the contrary, the combination of chemotherapy to inhibitors of specific pro-survival pathways, such as the one controlled by AKT, could enhance treatment efficacy by exploiting the pro-death stimulation derived by oncogene activation.