Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Properties and update semantics of consistent views

The problem of translating view updates to database updates is considered. Both databases and views are modeled as data abstractions. A data abstraction consists of a set of states and of a set of primitive update operators representing state transition functions. It is shown how complex update programs can be built from primitive update operators and how view update programs are translated into database update programs. Special attention is paid to a class of views that we call “consistent. ” Loosely speaking, a consistent view is a view with the following property: If the effect of a view update program on a view state is determined, then the effect of the corresponding database update is unambiguously determined. Thus, in order to know how to translate a given view update into a database update, it is sufficient to be aware of a functional specification of such a program. We show that consistent views have a number of interesting properties with respect to the concurrency of (high-level) update transactions. Moreover we show that the class of consistent views includes as a subset the class of views that translate updates under maintenance of a constant complement. However, we show that there exist consistent views that do not translate under constant complement. The results of Bancilhon and Spyratos [6] are generalized in order to capture the update semantics of the entire class of consistent views. In particular we show that the class of consistent views is obtained if we relax the requirement of a constant complement by allowing the complement to decrease according to a suitable partial order.
Fast Visual Object Identification and Categorization

Recently recognition and categorization of objects from images using local features has become very popular. While similar approaches have been used for identification and categorization tasks they have not been treated in a common framework. In this paper we present a method that treats visual object identification, categorization in a common framework by exploiting ideas from image interclass transfer. We propose a hierarchically organized visual memory, where the high levels of the hierarchy represent generic classes and the leaves individual objects. The features used in the nodes of the hierarchy are learned using Adaboost on integral orientation histogram features (using these features makes a real time implementation possible). Learning the discrimination within a layer of the hierarchy is inspired by the work of Ferencz. Therefore, one can view our method as a hierarchical generalization of the interclass image transfer. First experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is able to learn meaningful object categories, as well as identification of individual objects.
Tailored-Beam Ultrashort Laser Pulses

Laser pulses with picosecond and femtosecond durations are now indispensable tools in many scientific disciplines. These ultrashort pulses provide unique temporal resolutions for investigations of phenomena taking place in comparable time ranges. In addition, optical energies squeezed into such short time windows yield extremely high peak powers and intensities, paving the way to generate unprecedented light-matter interactions. On the other side, recent advances in spatial light intensity and phase modulation devices enables generation of laser beam profiles with intriguing physical properties. By merging the two realms, optics researchers can now have the ability to harness light both in space and time. These possibilities bring about new physical interactions and significantly facilitate many applications of lasers.
Impact of Consumer Reviews and Ratings on Sales, Prices, and Profits: Theory and Evidence

We provide a theoretical framework to understand the impacts of consumer reviews and ratings on firms’ prices, sales, profits, and consumer surplus. We show how the economic impacts may differ depending on the informativeness of the reviews, the quantifiability of the product attributes, and the competitive environment. First, even though a monopolist always benefits from an improvement in product rating, a firm in a competitive market can hurt by it. When the low quality firm’s product rating improves, its equilibrium profit will decrease if its quality is above a threshold, and increase if its quality is below that threshold. Second, if the high quality firm’s product rating improves, both the high quality and the low quality firm will benefit. Our empirical findings based on point-and-shoot digital camera and multivitamin data collected from Amazon.com provide strong support for these results.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Positive emotions preferentially engage an auditory-motor " mirror " system

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Protecting Against Cerebrovascular Injury: Contributions of 12/15-Lipoxygenase to Edema Formation After Transient Focal Ischemia

Background and Purpose— The concept of the neurovascular unit suggests that effects on brain vasculature must be considered if neuroprotection is to be achieved in stroke. We previously reported that 12/15-lipoxygenase (12/15-LOX) is upregulated in the peri-infarct area after middle cerebral artery occlusion in mice, and 12/15-LOX contributes to brain damage after ischemia–reperfusion. The current study was designed to investigate 12/15-LOX involvement in vascular injury in the ischemic brain. Methods— In cell culture, a human brain microvascular endothelial cell line was subjected to either hypoxia or H2O2-induced oxidative stress with or without lipoxygenase inhibitors. For in vivo studies, mice were subjected to 90 minutes middle cerebral artery occlusion, and the effects of either 12/15-LOX gene knockout or treatment with lipoxygenase inhibitors were compared. Expression of 12/15-LOX and claudin-5 as well as extravasation of immunoglobulin G were detected by immunohistochemistry. Edema was measured as water content of brain hemispheres according to the wet–dry weight method. Results— Brain endothelial cells were protected against hypoxia and H2O2 by the lipoxygenase inhibitor baicalein. After focal ischemia, 12/15-LOX was increased in neurons and endothelial cells. The vascular tight junction protein claudin-5 underwent extensive degradation in the peri-infarct area, which was partially prevented by the lipoxygenase inhibitor baicalein. Leakage of immunoglobulin G into the brain parenchyma was significantly reduced in 12/15-LOX knockout mice as well as wild-type mice treated with baicalein. Likewise, brain edema was significantly ameliorated. Conclusion— 12/15-LOX may contribute to ischemic brain damage not just by causing neuronal cell death, but also by detrimental effects on the brain microvasculature. 12/15-LOX inhibitors may thus be effective as both neuroprotectants and vasculoprotectants.
Parallelizable Authenticated Encryption from Functions

A new authenticated encryption (AE) mode for blockcipher is presented. The proposed scheme has attractive features for fast and compact operation. It requires rate-1 blockcipher call, and uses the encryption function of a blockcipher for both encryption and decryption. Moreover, the scheme enables one-pass, parallel operation under two-block partition. The proposed scheme thus attains similar characteristics as the seminal OCB mode, without using the inverse blockcipher. The key idea of our proposal is a novel usage of two-round Feistel permutation, where the round functions are derived from the theory of tweakable blockcipher. We also describe an instantiation of our idea using a non-invertible primitive, such as a keyed hash function.
Attribution of stratospheric ozone trends to chemistry and transport: a modelling study

Abstract. The decrease of the concentration of ozone depleting substances (ODSs) in the stratosphere over the past decade raises the question to what extent observed changes in stratospheric ozone over this period are consistent with known changes in the chemical composition and possible changes in atmospheric transport. Here we present a series of ozone sensitivity calculations with a stratospheric chemistry transport model (CTM) driven by meteorological reanalyses from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, covering the period 1978–2009. In order to account for the reversal in ODS trends, ozone trends are analysed as piecewise linear trends over two periods, 1979–1999 and 2000–2009. Modelled column ozone (TO3) inter-annual variability and trends are in excellent agreement with observations from the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) and Solar Backscatter UV (SBUV/2) as well as the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME/GOME2) and Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography (SCIAMACHY) instruments. In the period 1979–1999, modelled TO3 trends at mid-latitudes are dominated by changes in in situ gas-phase chemistry, which contribute to about 50% or more of the TO3 trend in most seasons. Changes in meteorology contribute around 35% to mid-latitude TO3 trends, with strong differences between different seasons. In springtime, export of ozone depleted air from polar latitudes contributes about 35–50% to the modelled TO3 trend at SH mid-latitudes and about 15–30% at NH mid-latitudes. Over the period 2000–2009 positive linear trends in modelled TO3, which agree well with observed TO3 trends, are dominated by changes in meteorology, as expected for the yet small decrease in stratospheric halogen loading over this period. While the TO3 trends themselves are not statistically significant over the period 2000–2009, changes in linear trends between 1978–1999 and 2000–2009 are significant at mid- and high latitudes of both hemisphere during most seasons. However, changes in meteorology have contributed substantially to these TO3 trend changes.
Socially-aware video recommendation using users' profiles and crowdsourced annotations

The recent explosive growth in the use of social networks has raised the question of how to meet the emerging demand for services that address the interests of the users. In this paper we show how considering homophily in social networks can improve video recommendation, using inferred user profiles and modeling users' interests. We propose a socially-aware framework for video commenting, sharing and interest discovery that combines recommendation algorithms, clustering techniques, tools for video tagging and evaluation of tag semantic relatedness. The system allows to connect to friends, curate a personal profile and get video recommendations through a social network.
Colour Terms Affect Detection of Colour and Colour-Associated Objects Suppressed from Visual Awareness

The idea that language can affect how we see the world continues to create controversy. A potentially important study in this field has shown that when an object is suppressed from visual awareness using continuous flash suppression (a form of binocular rivalry), detection of the object is differently affected by a preceding word prime depending on whether the prime matches or does not match the object. This may suggest that language can affect early stages of vision. We replicated this paradigm and further investigated whether colour terms likewise influence the detection of colours or colour-associated object images suppressed from visual awareness by continuous flash suppression. This method presents rapidly changing visual noise to one eye while the target stimulus is presented to the other. It has been shown to delay conscious perception of a target for up to several minutes. In Experiment 1 we presented greyscale photos of objects. They were either preceded by a congruent object label, an incongruent label, or white noise. Detection sensitivity (d’) and hit rates were significantly poorer for suppressed objects preceded by an incongruent label compared to a congruent label or noise. In Experiment 2, targets were coloured discs preceded by a colour term. Detection sensitivity was significantly worse for suppressed colour patches preceded by an incongruent colour term as compared to a congruent term or white noise. In Experiment 3 targets were suppressed greyscale object images preceded by an auditory presentation of a colour term. On congruent trials the colour term matched the object’s stereotypical colour and on incongruent trials the colour term mismatched. Detection sensitivity was significantly poorer on incongruent trials than congruent trials. Overall, these findings suggest that colour terms affect awareness of coloured stimuli and colour- associated objects, and provide new evidence for language-perception interaction in the brain.
Dietary factors associated with high serum ferritin levels in postmenopausal women with the Fifth Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES V), 2010-2012

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES Serum ferritin levels are significantly increased after menopause and greatly affect women's health. The aim of this study was to investigate the dietary and non-dietary factors associated with high ferritin levels in postmenopausal women. SUBJECTS/METHODS Among adult women in 2010-2012, qualified postmenopausal women (n = 3880) were separated into quartiles of serum ferritin. The variable differences among the quartiles of ferritin were determined using either procsurvey chi-square test (χ2-test) among categorical variables, or GLM (Generalized Linear Model) among continuous variables. The odds ratio for high ferritin in relation to dietary factors was also determined using procsurvery logistic analysis. RESULTS Age, obesity, drinking habit, and blood glucose levels were found to be significant indicators of high serum ferritin level after adjusting for all confounding factors. Among the food groups, grain, milk, vegetable, and seaweed intakes were significantly associated with high ferritin levels, but after adjusting for all confounding factors, only grains and vegetables remained significant factors. Among the nutrient groups, calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C intake were significant factors, but after adjustment, none of the nutrient groups analyzed were associated with a high risk of ferritin. CONCLUSION Age, obesity, drinking habit, and glucose levels, as well as inadequate intakes of grains and vegetables, were found to be significantly associated with high serum ferritin levels in postmenopausal Korean women.
Using Temporal Information to Improve Predictive Accuracy of Collaborative Filtering Algorithms

In recent years, collaborative filtering becomes one of the most successful recommender systems. Its key technique is to predict new ratings from the known ratings. Unfortunately, in the previous research, the temporal information was rarely applied. That is to say, the ratings at different time were considered the same. However, from our point of view, not only the mean values of ratings in different periods are different, but users' opinions toward items may change with the passage of time as well. We analyze the influence of the temporal information and introduce three methods to apply the temporal information. Firstly, by mixing user, item and time attributes, we present a regression-based method. Secondly, to guarantee that the ratings in different time can contribute different weights to the predicting rating, we adjust the prediction function by adding a parameter, which is a function of the time between the predicting rating and the known rating. Thirdly, we select different methods to predict ratings of different periods. Experiments on two real large datasets show that our methods are effective and can improve the accuracy.
A consensus‐binding structure for adenine at the atomic level permits searching for the ligand site in a wide spectrum of adenine‐containing complexes

Attempts to derive structural features of ligand‐binding sites have traditionally involved seeking commonalities at the residue level. Recently, structural studies have turned to atomic interactions of small molecular fragments to extract common binding‐site properties. Here, we explore the use of larger ligand elements to derive a consensus binding structure for the ligand as a whole. We superimposed multiple molecular structures from a nonredundant set of adenosine‐5′‐triphosphate (ATP) protein complexes, using the adenine moiety as template. Clustered binding‐site atoms of compatible atomic classes forming attractive contacts with the adenine probe were extracted. A set of atomic clusters characterizing the adenine binding pocket was then derived. Among the clusters are three vertices representing the interactions of adenine atom N6 with its protein‐binding niche. These vertices, together with atom C6 of the purine ring system, complete the set of four vertices for the pyramid‐like structure of the N6 anchor atom. Also, the sequence relationship for the adenine‐binding loop interacting with the C2–N6 end of the conjugated ring system is expanded to include a third hydrophilic cluster interacting with atom N1. A search procedure involving interatomic distances between cluster centers was formulated and applied to seek putative binding sites in test cases. The results show that a consensus network of clusters, based on an adenine probe and an ATP‐complexed training set of proteins, is sufficient to recognize the experimental cavity for adenine in a wide spectrum of ligand–protein complexes. Proteins 2003;52:400–411. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Eigenvector centrality of nodes in multiplex networks

We extend the concept of eigenvector centrality to multiplex networks, and introduce several alternative parameters that quantify the importance of nodes in a multi-layered networked system, including the definition of vectorial-type centralities. In addition, we rigorously show that, under reasonable conditions, such centrality measures exist and are unique. Computer experiments and simulations demonstrate that the proposed measures provide substantially different results when applied to the same multiplex structure, and highlight the non-trivial relationships between the different measures of centrality introduced.
Approaching IT Automation Decisions using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

What is the future of the conventional phone-based corporate sales teams? As consumers grow more and more accustomed to purchasing online everything from holiday gifts to weekly groceries to boats and homes, companies have better and better opportunities to automate their own corporate sales processes. Today's companies are encountering an era of accessible and scalable information technologies (IT) and of an increasingly e-commerce-savvy customer base. This paper explores a decision process in a case company using analytical hierarchy process (AHP). Decision profiled in this study is to determine the most viable decision between developing an automated custom sales order interface system and using the existing manual process in which customers contact sales teams to place orders. Decision model is based on multiple criteria in order to assess each candidate system risks and benefits. Study analyzes the current trend of IT integration throughout the supply chain, develops a decision model based on user interviews, and aims to determine the circumstances under which automating the process is the best choice. Results indicate that, importance of decision criteria differs with respect to duration of contracts each customer makes. For instance, development cost has been identified as the most heavily weighted decision criterion at six month long contract cases whereas all decision criteria which are data quality, development costs, organizational politics and customer experience are weighted equally at one year contract cases. Results have also shown that although organizational politics has been ranked relatively lower in six months and one year contract cases it takes considerable precedence at contracts with duration of two years and more.
Simulation of main memory database parallel recovery

The paper describes the details of using J-SIM in main memory database parallel recovery simulation. In update intensive main memory database systems, I/O is still the dominant performance bottleneck. A proposal of parallel recovery scheme for large-scale update intensive main memory database systems is presented. Simulation provides a faster way of evaluating the new idea compared to actual system implementation. J-SIM is an open source discrete time simulation software package. The simulation implementation using J-SIM is elaborated in terms of resource modeling, transaction processing system modeling and workload modeling. Finally, with simulation results analyzed, the effectiveness of the parallel recovery scheme is verified and the feasibility of J-SIM's application in main memory database system simulation is demonstrated.
Automatic Enrichment of Semantic Relation Network and Its Application to Word Sense Disambiguation

The most fundamental step in semantic information processing (SIP) is to construct knowledge base (KB) at the human level; that is to the general understanding and conception of human knowledge. WordNet has been built to be the most systematic and as close to the human level and is being applied actively in various works. In one of our previous research, we found that a semantic gap exists between concept pairs of WordNet and those of real world. This paper contains a study on the enrichment method to build a KB. We describe the methods and the results for the automatic enrichment of the semantic relation network. A rule based method using WordNet's glossaries and an inference method using axioms for WordNet relations are applied for the enrichment and an enriched WordNet (E-WordNet) is built as the result. Our experimental results substantiate the usefulness of E-WordNet. An evaluation by comparison with the human level is attempted. Moreover, WSD-SemNet, a new word sense disambiguation (WSD) method in which E-WordNet is applied, is proposed and evaluated by comparing it with the state-of-the-art algorithm.
phMRI: methodological considerations for mitigating potential confounding factors

Pharmacological Magnetic Resonance Imaging (phMRI) is a variant of conventional MRI that adds pharmacological manipulations in order to study the effects of drugs, or uses pharmacological probes to investigate basic or applied (e.g., clinical) neuroscience questions. Issues that may confound the interpretation of results from various types of phMRI studies are briefly discussed, and a set of methodological strategies that can mitigate these problems are described. These include strategies that can be employed at every stage of investigation, from study design to interpretation of resulting data, and additional techniques suited for use with clinical populations are also featured. Pharmacological MRI is a challenging area of research that has both significant advantages and formidable difficulties, however with due consideration and use of these strategies many of the key obstacles can be overcome.