Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis, fast algorithm, and VLSI architecture design for H.264/AVC intra frame coder

Intra prediction with rate-distortion constrained mode decision is the most important technology in H.264/AVC intra frame coder, which is competitive with the latest image coding standard JPEG2000, in terms of both coding performance and computational complexity. The predictor generation engine for intra prediction and the transform engine for mode decision are critical because the operations require a lot of memory access and occupy 80% of the computation time of the entire intra compression process. A low cost general purpose processor cannot process these operations in real time. In this paper, we proposed two solutions for platform-based design of H.264/AVC intra frame coder. One solution is a software implementation targeted at low-end applications. Context-based decimation of unlikely candidates, subsampling of matching operations, bit-width truncation to reduce the computations, and interleaved full-search/partial-search strategy to stop the error propagation and to maintain the image quality, are proposed and combined as our fast algorithm. Experimental results show that our method can reduce 60% of the computation used for intra prediction and mode decision while keeping the peak signal-to-noise ratio degradation less than 0.3 dB. The other solution is a hardware accelerator targeted at high-end applications. After comprehensive analysis of instructions and exploration of parallelism, we proposed our system architecture with four-parallel intra prediction and mode decision to enhance the processing capability. Hadamard-based mode decision is modified as discrete cosine transform-based version to reduce 40% of memory access. Two-stage macroblock pipelining is also proposed to double the processing speed and hardware utilization. The other features of our design are reconfigurable predictor generator supporting all of the 13 intra prediction modes, parallel multitransform and inverse transform engine, and CAVLC bitstream engine. A prototype chip is fabricated with TSMC 0.25-/spl mu/m CMOS 1P5M technology. Simulation results show that our implementation can process 16 mega-pixels (4096/spl times/4096) within 1 s, or namely 720/spl times/480 4:2:0 30 Hz video in real time, at the operating frequency of 54 MHz. The transistor count is 429 K, and the core size is only 1.855/spl times/1.885 mm/sup 2/.
Time-varying complementary filtering for attitude estimation

Complementary filtering (CF) is a well known method that can effectively fuse a gyroscope and accelerometer measurement in order to robustly estimate the attitude of a rigid body in a planar single degree of freedom (DOF) setting. The attitude can be estimated individually by either integrating the gyroscope measurement or by calculating the inverse tangent of the components of a 2-axis accelerometer. The gyroscope can adequately estimate the angle in the higher frequency region, but suffers from drift issues at low frequency, whereas the accelerometer can accurately measure the acceleration and thus direction of gravity, but loses this accuracy when faced with motion accelerations. CF traditionally uses linear time invariant filters, however, this paper presents an extension to the CF method by proposing time-varying parameters. A fuzzy logic method is developed to adjust the parameters. Stability analysis as well as experimental results are presented to verify the proposed method.
Structure of solutions of resource allocation problems under general fairness constraints

Collective choice functions and an axiomatic framework will be used to characterize the structure of solutions of resource allocation problems on feasible utility sets. Feasible utility sets will be characterized as level sets of general interference functions. General fairness constraints will be introduced and solution outcomes satisfying the properties of efficiency, robustness and fairness will be analyzed. A new type of sets, basic bargaining sets will be defined and if the properties of the solution outcome are known on these sets then we know it's properties for all feasible utility regions.
On Pushing Multilingual Query Operators into Relational Engines

To effectively support today’s global economy, database systems need to manage data in multiple languages simultaneously. While current database systems do support the storage and management of multilingual data, they are not capable of querying across different natural languages. To address this lacuna, we have recently proposed two cross-lingual functionalities, LexEQUAL[13] and SemEQUAL[14], for matching multilingual names and concepts, respectively. In this paper, we investigate the native implementation of these multilingual functionalities as first-class operators on relational engines. Specifically, we propose a new multilingual storage datatype, and an associated algebra of the multilingual operators on this datatype. These components have been successfully implemented in the PostgreSQL database system, including integration of the algebra with the query optimizer and inclusion of a metric index in the access layer. Our experiments demonstrate that the performance of the native implementation is up to two orders-of-magnitude faster than the corresponding outsidethe- server implementation. Further, these multilingual additions do not adversely impact the existing functionality and performance. To the best of our knowledge, our prototype represents the first practical implementation of a crosslingual database query engine.
Targeting reduction of proteinuria in glomerulonephritis: Maximizing the antifibrotic effect of valsartan by protecting podocytes

Although angiotensin (Ang) II blockade has become a standard antifibrotic therapy in kidney disease, the therapeutic efficacy of Ang II blockade is yet to be optimized. Considering the prognostic impact of proteinuria reduction, we hypothesized that titration of Ang II blockade for optimal anti-proteinuric effect would improve renoprotection. One day after induction of Thy 1.1 glomeruonephritis, rats were treated with increasing doses of the Ang II receptor blocker valsartan in drinking water. Six days after disease induction, the therapeutic effect on proteinuria, podocyte injury and glomerular fibrosis was evaluated. Increasing doses of valsartan resulted in increasing reduction of proteinuria. The maximally effective dose of valsartan was determined to be 1000 mg/l, which reduced proteinuria by 80% and maximally reduced glomerular matrix expansion, fibronectin, collagen I and collagen III staining and glomerular mRNAs for TGFß1, PAI-1, FN and collagen I. Notably, valsartan given at this dose prevented podocyte dysfunction by preserving expression of podocin and nephrin and the counter-regulating molecule B7-1 that is involved in podocyte injury. These results support the hypothesis that higher doses of valsartan are required to optimize proteinuria reduction and glomerulosclerosis amelioration. Further, the optimal dose of valsartan also provides an additional therapeutic effect by preventing podocyte dysfunction.
Long-Latency Reductions in Gamma Power Predict Hemodynamic Changes That Underlie the Negative BOLD Signal

Studies that use prolonged periods of sensory stimulation report associations between regional reductions in neural activity and negative blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signaling. However, the neural generators of the negative BOLD response remain to be characterized. Here, we use single-impulse electrical stimulation of the whisker pad in the anesthetized rat to identify components of the neural response that are related to “negative” hemodynamic changes in the brain. Laminar multiunit activity and local field potential recordings of neural activity were performed concurrently with two-dimensional optical imaging spectroscopy measuring hemodynamic changes. Repeated measurements over multiple stimulation trials revealed significant variations in neural responses across session and animal datasets. Within this variation, we found robust long-latency decreases (300 and 2000 ms after stimulus presentation) in gamma-band power (30–80 Hz) in the middle-superficial cortical layers in regions surrounding the activated whisker barrel cortex. This reduction in gamma frequency activity was associated with corresponding decreases in the hemodynamic responses that drive the negative BOLD signal. These findings suggest a close relationship between BOLD responses and neural events that operate over time scales that outlast the initiating sensory stimulus, and provide important insights into the neurophysiological basis of negative neuroimaging signals.
Partitioning of VLSI circuits and systems

Partitioning plays an increasingly important role in the design process of VLSI circuits and systems. There are partitioning problems to be solved on all levels of abstraction. The rapidly increasing size of the designs will make good partitioning tools even more essential in the future. As an introduction to the other papers in this session, this tutorial presentation discusses the numerous facets of partitioning.
Diagnosis of Fibromyalgia Syndrome—A Comparison of Association of the Medical Scientific Societies in Germany, Survey, and American College of Rheumatology Criteria

ObjectivesThe survey and the Association of the Medical Scientific Societies in Germany (AWMF) criteria had been developed to overcome problems associated with tender point criterion of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) (lacking validation for clinical diagnosis, inconsistent use by rheumatologists, and nonrheumatologists) for the clinical diagnosis of fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS). We compared the concordance between these 3 criteria. MethodsConsecutive patients of different clinical settings referred for the evaluation of chronic widespread pain or management of established FMS diagnosis were assessed by medical history, a complete physical examination including tender points, and questionnaires [self-constructed symptoms questionnaire, regional pain scale (RPS), Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ 9 and 15)]. FMS according to AWMF-criteria was diagnosed by the history of widespread pain (axial and all 4 extremities), the symptoms sleep disturbances, fatigue, and feeling of swelling or stiffness of the hands or feet or face (Numeric rating scale ≥1/10 each symptom) and the exclusion of somatic diseases sufficiently explaining the symptoms. FMS according to survey criteria was diagnosed by regional pain scale score ≥8 and fatigue score ≥6/10 on a visual analogue scale. ResultsOut of 310 patients, 292 could be analysed. AWMF and ACR were concordant in 86.6%, AWMF and survey criteria were concordant in 78.8% and survey and ACR-criteria were concordant in 79.5% of the cases. DiscussionAWMF, survey, and ACR criteria were moderately concordant. As AWMF and survey criteria do not require tender point examination, these criteria can be used by nonrheumatologists for the clinical diagnosis of FMS.
Investigation of TI6AL4V microstructure effects on process material interaction during micro milling

INVESTIGATION OF TI6AL4V MICROSTRUCTURE EFFECTS ON PROCESS MATERIAL INTERACTION DURING MICRO MILLING Masoud Ahmadi M.S. in Mechanical Engineering Advisor: Yiğit Karpat December 2017 The interrelationship between material microstructure and process parameters must be well understood in order to improve the machinability. In micro milling, the process parameters including depth of cut, feed and cutting edge radius are comparable to grain size of the material which significantly affects the mechanics of machining. This thesis investigates the contribution of microstructural characteristics including grain size, grain morphology and phase fractions/distributions of dual phase Ti6Al4V titanium alloy in micro scale milling. Various heat treatments were performed on the Ti6Al4V samples obtaining five different microstructures including fine equiaxed plus elongated, two size enlarged equiaxed, lamellar and martensitic microstructures. The influences of microstructures on built upedge (BUE) formation, cutting forces, surface quality and burr formation were studied. It was observed that smaller grain size leads to larger BUE and burr formation and higher cutting forces. However, when feed is set properly it also yields better surface roughness. The crystallographic texture and microstructure of the machined surface of selected samples were investigated using electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) analysis which revealed that at low feed rates can result in occurrence of dynamic recrystallization (DRX) on the microstructure of the machined surfaces. It was observed that up and down milling stages led to different crystallographic texture of the machined samples during micro scale milling. The findings of this study are important in terms of developing predictive modeling of machining based on material microstructure.
Urban growth, climate change, and freshwater availability

Nearly 3 billion additional urban dwellers are forecasted by 2050, an unprecedented wave of urban growth. While cities struggle to provide water to these new residents, they will also face equally unprecedented hydrologic changes due to global climate change. Here we use a detailed hydrologic model, demographic projections, and climate change scenarios to estimate per-capita water availability for major cities in the developing world, where urban growth is the fastest. We estimate the amount of water physically available near cities and do not account for problems with adequate water delivery or quality. Modeled results show that currently 150 million people live in cities with perennial water shortage, defined as having less than 100 L per person per day of sustainable surface and groundwater flow within their urban extent. By 2050, demographic growth will increase this figure to almost 1 billion people. Climate change will cause water shortage for an additional 100 million urbanites. Freshwater ecosystems in river basins with large populations of urbanites with insufficient water will likely experience flows insufficient to maintain ecological process. Freshwater fish populations will likely be impacted, an issue of special importance in regions such as India's Western Ghats, where there is both rapid urbanization and high levels of fish endemism. Cities in certain regions will struggle to find enough water for the needs of their residents and will need significant investment if they are to secure adequate water supplies and safeguard functioning freshwater ecosystems for future generations.
Deferred-acceptance auctions and radio spectrum reallocation

Deferred-acceptance auctions choose allocations by an iterative process of rejecting the least attractive bid. These auctions have distinctive computational and incentive properties that make them suitable for application in some challenging environments, such as the planned US auction to repurchase television broadcast rights. For any set of values, any deferred acceptance auction with “threshold pricing”is weakly group strategy-proof, can be implemented using a clock auction, and leads to the same outcome as the complete-information Nash equilibrium of the corresponding paid-as-bid auction. A paid-asbid auction with a non-bossy bid-selection rule is dominance solvable if and only if it is a deferred acceptance auction. ∗The authors thank Alexey Kushnir as well as Mohammad Akbarpour, Piotr Dworczak, Tim Roughgarden, Inbal Talgam Cohen, Joshua Thurston-Milgrom, and Alex Wolitzky for their comments and suggestions. †Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. The authors are members of the Auctionomics’team advising the US Federal Communications Commission concerning the design of the US “incentive auction. ”This research analyzes some properties of proposals to which the authors have contributed. ‡Segal gratefully acknowledges the support of the Toulouse Network for Information Technology.
Early diagnosis of myocardial infarction with sensitive cardiac troponin assays.

BACKGROUND The rapid and reliable diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction is a major unmet clinical need. METHODS We conducted a multicenter study to examine the diagnostic accuracy of new, sensitive cardiac troponin assays performed on blood samples obtained in the emergency department from 718 consecutive patients who presented with symptoms suggestive of acute myocardial infarction. Cardiac troponin levels were determined in a blinded fashion with the use of four sensitive assays (Abbott-Architect Troponin I, Roche High-Sensitive Troponin T, Roche Troponin I, and Siemens Troponin I Ultra) and a standard assay (Roche Troponin T). The final diagnosis was adjudicated by two independent cardiologists. RESULTS Acute myocardial infarction was the adjudicated final diagnosis in 123 patients (17%). The diagnostic accuracy of measurements obtained at presentation, as quantified by the area under the receiver-operating-characteristic curve (AUC), was significantly higher with the four sensitive cardiac troponin assays than with the standard assay (AUC for Abbott-Architect Troponin I, 0.96; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.94 to 0.98; for Roche High-Sensitive Troponin T, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.94 to 0.98; for Roche Troponin I, 0.95; 95% CI, 0.92 to 0.97; and for Siemens Troponin I Ultra, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.94 to 0.98; vs. AUC for the standard assay, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.86 to 0.94). Among patients who presented within 3 hours after the onset of chest pain, the AUCs were 0.93 (95% CI, 0.88 to 0.99), 0.92 (95% CI, 0.87 to 0.97), 0.92 (95% CI, 0.86 to 0.99), and 0.94 (95% CI, 0.90 to 0.98) for the sensitive assays, respectively, and 0.76 (95% CI, 0.64 to 0.88) for the standard assay. We did not assess the effect of the sensitive troponin assays on clinical management. CONCLUSIONS The diagnostic performance of sensitive cardiac troponin assays is excellent, and these assays can substantially improve the early diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction, particularly in patients with a recent onset of chest pain. (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00470587.)
Response of extraabdominal desmoid tumors to therapy with imatinib mesylate

Desmoid tumor represents a rare monoclonal neoplasm arising from deep musculoaponeurotic structures and may occur sporadically or in association with the familial adenomatous polyposis and Gardner syndromes. Desmoid tumors do not appear to demonstrate metastatic potential; however, local infiltrative growth results in significant morbidity and potential mortality. Although the delineation of optimal therapy for desmoid tumors has been confounded by several factors, surgical resection with adjuvant radiotherapy for a positive surgical margin remains the standard approach. Responses have been demonstrated to nonsteroidal antiinflammatory agents, antiestrogen compounds, and a variety of other agents in small series. Imatinib mesylate appears to demonstrate inhibitory activity against multiple class 3 receptor tyrosine kinases, including platelet‐derived growth factor receptor (PDGFR)‐α and PDGFR‐β, as well as c‐kit.
Isotropic connections generate functional asymmetrical behavior in visual cortical cells.

1. We study the relationship between structure and function in inhibitory long-range interactions in visual cortex. The sharpening of orientation tuning with "cross-orientation inhibition" is used as an example to discuss anisotropies that are generated by long-range connections. 2. In this study, as opposed to the detailed cortex model described in a previous report, a model of the cortical orientation column structure is proposed in which cortical cells are described only by their orientation preference. 3. We present results using different geometric arrangements of orientation columns. In the simplest case, straight parallel orientation columns were used. We also utilized more realistic, curved columns generated by a simple algorithm. The results were confirmed by the study of a patch of real column structure, determined experimentally by Swindale et al. 4. A given cell receives functionally defined cross-orientation inhibition if the cell receives inhibitory input that is strongest along its nonpreferred orientation. On the other hand, a cell is said to receive structurally defined cross-orientation inhibition if the inhibition arises from source cells with an orientation preference orthogonal to that of the target cell. Even though those definitions seem to describe similar situations, we show that, in the general case, structurally defined cross-orientation inhibition does not efficiently sharpen orientation selectivity. In particular, for straight and parallel columns, structurally defined cross-orientation inhibition results in unequal amounts of inhibition for whole cell populations with different preferred orientations. 5. In more realistic column structures, we studied the question of whether structural cross-orientation inhibition could be implemented in a more efficient way. However, for the majority of cells, it is demonstrated that their nonpreferred stimulus will not preferably excite "cross-oriented" cells. Thus structural cross-orientation inhibition is not efficient in real cortical columns. 6. We propose a new mechanism called circular inhibition. In this connection scheme, a target cell receives inhibitory input from source cells that are located at a given distance (the same for all cells) from the target cell. Circular inhibition can be regarded as two-dimensional long-range lateral inhibition. As opposed to structural cross-orientation inhibition, this mechanism does not introduce unwanted anisotropies in the orientation tuning of the target cells. It is also conceptually much simpler and developmentally advantageous. It is shown that this connection scheme results in a net functional cross-orientation inhibition in all realistic column geometries. The inhibitory tuning strength obtained with circular inhibition is weak and similar to that measured in reality. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Predicting Linguistic Difficulty by Means of a Morpho-Syntactic Probabilistic Model

We propose in this paper a new contribution to the evaluation of linguistic diffi- culty. At the opposite of classical approaches relying on syntax, we show that a probabilis- tic morpho-syntactic analysis provides information enough to calculate different parameters, including surprisal. This method constitutes an original and robust model to linguistic com- plexity. It constitutes a solution towards complexity experiments using spoken languages.
Identification of functional modules from conserved ancestral protein-protein interactions

MOTIVATION The increasing availability of large-scale protein-protein interaction (PPI) data has fueled the efforts to elucidate the building blocks and organization of cellular machinery. Previous studies have shown cross-species comparison to be an effective approach in uncovering functional modules in protein networks. This has in turn driven the research for new network alignment methods with a more solid grounding in network evolution models and better scalability, to allow multiple network comparison. RESULTS We develop a new framework for protein network alignment, based on reconstruction of an ancestral PPI network. The reconstruction algorithm is built upon a proposed model of protein network evolution, which takes into account phylogenetic history of the proteins and the evolution of their interactions. The application of our methodology to the PPI networks of yeast, worm and fly reveals that the most probable conserved ancestral interactions are often related to known protein complexes. By projecting the conserved ancestral interactions back onto the input networks we are able to identify the corresponding conserved protein modules in the considered species. In contrast to most of the previous methods, our algorithm is able to compare many networks simultaneously. The performed experiments demonstrate the ability of our method to uncover many functional modules with high specificity. AVAILABILITY Information for obtaining software and supplementary results are available at http://bioputer.mimuw. edu.pl/papers/cappi.