Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Verification of Real-Time Embedded Systems using Petri Net Models and Timed Automata

There is a lack of new verification methods that overcome the limitations of traditional validation techniques and are, at the same time, suitable for real-time embedded systems. This paper presents an approach to formal verification of real-time embedded systems modeled in a timed Petri net representation. We translate the Petri net model into timed automata and use model checking to prove whether certain properties hold with respect to the system model. We propose two strategies to improve the efficiency of verification. First, we apply correctness-preserving transformations to the system model in order to obtain a simpler, yet semantically equivalent, one. Second, we exploit the structure of the system model by extracting its the sequential behavior. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in the efficiency of verification.
The supermassive black hole of Fornax A

The radio galaxy Fornax A (NGC 1316) is a prominent merger remnant in the outskirts of the Fornax cluster. Its giant radio lobes suggest the presence of a powerful active galactic nuclei (AGN) and thus a central supermassive black hole (SMBH). FomaxA now seems to be in a transition state between active black hole growth and quiescence, as indicated by the strongly declined activity of the nucleus. Studying objects in this evolutionary phase is particularly important in order to understand the link between bulge formation and black hole growth, which is manifested in the M • -σ relation between black hole mass and bulge velocity dispersion. So far, a measurement of the SMBH mass has not been possible in Fomax A, as it is enshrouded in dust which makes optical measurements impossible. We present high-resolution adaptive optics assisted integral-field data of Fomax A, taken with SINFONI at the Very Large Telescope in the K band, where the influence of dust is negligible. The achieved spatial resolution is 0.085 arcsec, which is about a fifth of the diameter of the expected sphere of influence of the black hole. The stellar kinematics was measured using the region around the CO bandheads at 2.3 μm. Fornax A does not rotate inside the inner ∼3 arcsec. The velocity dispersion increases towards the centre. The weak AGN emission affects the stellar kinematics in the inner ∼0.06 arcsec only. Beyond this radius, the stellar kinematics appears relaxed in the central regions. We use axisymmetric orbit models to determine the mass of the SMBH in the centre of Fornax A. The three-dimensional nature of our data provides the possibility to directly test the consistency of the data with axisymmetry by modelling each of the four quadrants separately. According to our dynamical models, consistent SMBH masses M • and dynamical K s -band mass-to-light ratios T are obtained for all quadrants, with (M • ) = 1.3 x 10 8 M ⊙ [rms(M.) = 0.4 x 10 8 M ⊙ ] and (T) = 0.68 [rms(T) = 0.03], confirming the assumption of axisymmetry. For the folded and averaged data, we find M. = 1.5 +0.75 -0.8 x 10 8 M ⊙ and T = 0.65 +0.075 -0.05 (3σ errors). Thus, the black hole mass of Fomax A is consistent within the error with the Tremaine et al. M • -σ relation, but is a factor of ∼4 smaller than expected from its bulge mass and the Marconi & Hunt relation.
Pacific Northwest GridWise™ Testbed Demonstration Projects; Part I. Olympic Peninsula Project

This report describes the implementation and results of a field demonstration wherein residential electric water heaters and thermostats, commercial building space conditioning, municipal water pump loads, and several distributed generators were coordinated to manage constrained feeder electrical distribution through the two-way communication of load status and electric price signals. The field demonstration took place in Washington and Oregon and was paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy and several northwest utilities. Price is found to be an effective control signal for managing transmission or distribution congestion. Real-time signals at 5-minute intervals are shown to shift controlled load in time. The behaviors of customers and their responses under fixed, time-of-use, and real-time price contracts are compared. Peak loads are effectively reduced on the experimental feeder. A novel application of portfolio theory is applied to the selection of an optimal mix of customer contract types.
Counterfactual Analyses of Oil Price Shocks using a World Model

Oil price shocks have played a dominant role in the macroeconomic development of the world economy over the last twenty five years. In this paper a large, estimated, macro-economic world model with time varying trade weights, monetary and fiscal policy rules and explicit modelling of the behaviour of the OPEC countries is used for counterfactual analyses of oil price shocks. An alternative history with constant real oil prices is developed, showing that the recessions in the OECD area in 1974/75 and in 1980 would have been milder without the preceding oil price hike, while the 1982 recession seems unrelated to oil prices. A separate simulation indicates that the oil price drop in 1985/86 prevented a small recession from developing. The paper also shows that macroeconomic oil price effects vary considerably between the US, Germany and Japan according to the degree of oil dependence, trade with OPEC and the working of domestic labour markets. In particular there are notable differences in inflationary effects in Germany and the US. Results are tested against alternative specifications of monetary and fiscal policy rules.
Explicit 4-descents on an elliptic curve

where f(X,Z) is a binary quartic form (or quartic for short) with integer coefficients. One wishes to know whether equation (1) has a Q-rational point and if so to exhibit one. One can often show that equation (1) has no Qrational points by local methods. However, even if (1) is everywhere locally soluble, it does not follow necessarily that a Q-rational point exists; this failure of the “Hasse principle” is well known and gives rise to an element of the Tate–Shafarevich group. Further, it is not necessarily the case that a rational point on equation (1) will have “small” coordinates. Hence searching for a rational point (even when one is known to exist) may be futile. This is important in some conditional algorithms, e.g. [13], for determining generators of E when one computes, for instance, the rank of the curve by assuming the conjectures of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer. In such methods one then just needs to search for enough points with the correct regulator. One has a bound on the search region on the elliptic curve, but this can often be too large for practical use, especially if the curve has a generator with a large height. To get around this problem one could perform a 2-descent and then search in a bounded region on the descendants; this should be easier as this new region should be smaller. If however the search region is still too large, performing a further descent and obtaining a 4-descent will again reduce the search region, hopefully to something more manageable. Interest in practical algorithms to find the generators of the Mordell– Weil group has grown in recent years due to the need to find the gener-
A Pragmatic Approach for Sustainable Development of the Red-Mediterranean-Dead Seas Canal Project: A Case Study

Sustainability is a critically important goal for human activity and development. At the heart of the concept of sustainable development is the view that social, economic and environmental objectives should be complementary and interdependent in the development process. Sustainable development requires policy changes in many sectors and coherence between them, and entails balancing the economic, social and environmental objectives of society, integrating them wherever possible through mutually supportive policies and practices, and making appropriate trade-offs where necessary. The Red-Mediterranean-Dead Seas Canal project is an example of a mega project that may contribute significantly to sustainable development. The manner is examined in which Red-Mediterranean-Dead Seas Canal project contributes to the key factors for sustainability, along with the positive and negative environmental and socio-economic impacts of the project. The large amount of desalinated water expected from this project will be of great significance to the partners in the region. The stratification and dilution of the Dead Sea water mass with sea water may cause losses for the Dead Sea works and the Arab Potash Company, precipitation of gypsum and changes in the biological environment of the upper water mass. The feasibility of this project must be thoroughly studied, including the Dead Sea limnology.
Third Party Logistics Services Usage: A Case Study of Medium and Large Scale Chinese Firms

This paper examines the usage of third party logistics services in China. Foci was made on four constructs that we believe are the primary determinants of the future usage of third party logistics service. These constructs are: extent of use of the third party logistics services in the manufacturing and the trading enterprises; decision making process for choosing a contract logistics services provider; impact on the usage of contract logistics services on the organization; and different types of demands in different industries. An empirical research was carried out to study the impact of these four factors on the future usage of third party logistics services. Results based on the analysis of data relating to 156 firms in China indicate that the extent of use of the third party logistics services between manufacturing enterprises and trading enterprises differ greatly. Most of these users are satisfied with the services providers and have largely seen positive developments within the organization. With a high current level of satisfaction, most firms surveyed indicated a moderate to substantial increase in usage of their services
A language model approach to capture commercial intent and information relevance for sponsored search

A fundamental task of sponsored search is how to find the best match between web search queries and textual advertisements. To address this problem, we explicitly characterize the criteria for an advertisement to be a 'good match' to a query from two aspects (it should be relevant with the query from information perspective, and it should be able to capture and satisfy the commercial intent in the query). Correspondingly, we introduce in this paper a mixture language model of two parts: a commercial model which characterizes language bias of commercial intent leveraging on users' clicks on advertisements, and an informational model which is a traditional language model with consideration of the entropy of each word to capture informational relevance. We then introduce a regularized expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm model for parameters estimation, and integrate query commercial intent into the scoring function to boost overall click efficiency. Empirical evaluation shows that our model achieves better performance as compared to a well tuned classical language model and deliberated TFIDF-pLSI model (6% and 5% precision improvement at our operating point in production environment of 30% recall, and 5.3% and 6.3% AUC improvement), and performs superior to the KL Divergence language model for tail queries (0.5% nDCG improvement). Live traffic test shows over 2% CTR lift and 2.5% RPS lift as well.
Tabu search for solving optimization problems on Hopfield neural networks

Over the past few decades, numerous attempts have been made to solve combinatorial optimization problems that are NP-complete or NP-hard in a heuristic approach. A Hopfield-type neural network is a method that is often used to solve problems such as the traveling salesman problem. However, it is difficult to find an optimal solution because it is based on gradient descent and its energy function has many local minima. Therefore, many attempts have been made to find ways of escaping from local minima and to find better solutions. T. Tanaka et al. (1996) succeeded in improving the solutions by controlling the coefficient of the energy function. However, their results were not completely satisfying in terms of the quality of the solutions and the computation time. In order to find better solutions in a short time, we introduced a method called tabu search into a Hopfield-type neural network. Tabu search is a simple and flexible method for obtaining good solutions quickly and has been applied to NP-complete problems. Through computer simulations, better solutions were obtained than those obtained by using an ordinary model. Moreover, the computation time was reduced.
Wireless information and power transfer in an underlay cognitive radio network

In this paper, we consider a secondary network with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer in a spectrum sharing scenario. In particular, a secondary user (SU) transmitter communicates with multiple SU receivers (SU-Rxs) under the peak interference power constraint of the primary user receiver and the SU maximum transmit power limit. We apply a channel quality-based threshold and exploit opportunistic scheduling. Specifically, an SU-Rx with best channel condition among a set of SU-Rxs satisfying the threshold is scheduled for data transmission. The remaining SU-Rxs with channel condition below the threshold, harvest the radio frequency energy. Analytical expressions of the SU ergodic capacity, symbol error rate, throughput, and energy harvesting are obtained. An optimal threshold satisfying a given target outage probability is determined. Numerical results are provided to investigate the impact of different parameters on the secondary network performance.
Safely Stimulating the Clock Synchronization Algorithm in Time-Triggered Systems–A Combined Formal and Experimental Approach

Deterministic replay is used during testing to reproduce a scenario and drive the system under test to a given state. In this work, we replay an a priori defined bus traffic to influence the clock synchronization mechanism. Beyond testing this distributed mechanism itself, our aim is to draw conclusions on the nodes' bus receiver operation. Since these replay activities are part of a transparent online test procedure, it is important to ensure that they do not represent a threat for proper system operation. We show this for TTP/C by means of a generic formal proof, while for the case of FlexRay we formally prove that the system precision can be bounded according to the replay operation applied. Experimental results confirm and illustrate our approach.
Bacterial Wall Attachment in a Flow Reactor

A mathematical model of microbial growth for limiting nutrients in a fully three dimensional flow reactor which accounts for the colonization of the reactor wall surface by the microbes is studied analytically. It can be viewed as a model of the large intestine or of the fouling of a commercial bioreactor or pipe flow. Two steady state regimes are identified, namely, the complete washout of the microbes from the reactor and the successful colonization of both the wall and bulk fluid by the microbes. Only one steady state is stable for any particular set of parameter values. Sharp and explicit conditions are given for the stability of each. The effects of adding an antimicrobial agent to the reactor are examined with and without wall growth.
Buchberger's algorithm and staggered linear bases

The most time consuming part is the S-polynomial reduction. Consequently Buchbergcr developed criteria for predicting that certain reductions lead to the zero polynomial, hence allowing the elimination of these reductions [Bu79]. A new interpretation of these criteria and an efficient implcmcntation of them is given in [GM861 and installed in Reduce 3.2 and in Scratchpad II. However there arc still many instances of s~~pcrfluous zero reductions not covered by these criteria.
Joint Optimization of Assortment Selection and Pricing under the Capacitated Multinomial Logit Choice Model with Product-Differentiated Price Sensitivities

 Joint Optimization of Assortment Selection and Pricing under the Capacitated Multinomial Logit Choice Model with Product-Differentiated Price Sensitivities Ruxian Wang HP Laboratories HPL-2012-207 Multinomial Logit model; assortment optimization; multi-product price optimization Many firms face a problem to select an assortment of products and determine their prices to maximize the total profit subject to a capacity constraint. Customers' purchase behavior follows the Multinomial Logit choice model. Our analysis shows the capacity is always fully used and the nested structure is lost when price sensitivities are product-differentiated. We propose a nonrecursive polynomial-time algorithm for the joint assortment and multi-product price optimization. External Posting Date: September 21, 2012 [Fulltext] Approved for External Publication Internal Posting Date: September 21, 2012 [Fulltext] Copyright 2012 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. Joint Optimization of Assortment Selection and Pricing under the Capacitated Multinomial Logit Choice Model with Product-Differentiated Price Sensitivities Ruxian Wang Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, California 94304, ruxian.wang@hp.com Many firms face a problem to select an assortment of products and determine their prices to maximize the total profit subject to a capacity constraint. Customers’ purchase behavior follows the Multinomial Logit choice model. Our analysis shows the capacity is always fully used and the nested structure is lost when price sensitivities are product-differentiated. We propose a nonrecursive polynomial-time algorithm for the joint assortment and multi-product price optimization.
Generalization of Mrs. Gerber's Lemma

Mrs. Gerber's Lemma (MGL) hinges on the convexity of $H(p*H^{-1}(u))$, where $H(u)$ is the binary entropy function. In this work, we prove that $H(p*f(u))$ is convex in $u$ for every $p\in [0,1]$ provided $H(f(u))$ is convex in $u$, where $f(u) : (a, b) \to [0, \frac12]$. Moreover, our result subsumes MGL and simplifies the original proof. We show that the generalized MGL can be applied in binary broadcast channel to simplify some discussion.
Global Dual Sourcing and Order Smoothing

Motivated by the recent trend of offshoring manufacturing facilities to seek lower production cost, while keeping some costly local facilities to better respond to changes in market demand, this paper studies a dual sourcing policy and characterizes the average sourcing allocation. We consider the total landed cost from origin (combining a cheap but slow source and a fast but expensive source) to destination (finished goods warehouse), including sourcing, capacity and inventory related costs. We adopt a linear control rule that allows an exact and analytically-tractable analysis of a dual sourcing or mixed-mode transportation policy that is easy to implement. Another distinguishing feature of our model is that it captures the leadtime difference between both sources. We provide an exact lower bound formula on the strategic base or offshore allocation when this leadtime difference equals one review period, and a close approximation for longer leadtime differences. This formula provides structural insight on the impact of financial, operational and demand parameters, and a starting point for data-driven decision making. We demonstrate the robustness of our results by showing that this dual sourcing smoothing policy is near optimal in terms of total cost minimization compared to existing single sourcing and dual sourcing models in the literature. We describe under which practical conditions the dual sourcing smoothing policy is advisable and when it can even outperform the other policies.
Modeling contaminant intrusion in water distribution networks based on D numbers

Efficient modeling on uncertain information plays an important role in estimating the risk of contaminant intrusion in water distribution networks. DempsterShafer evidence theory is one of the most commonly used methods. However, the Dempster-Shafer evidence theory has some hypotheses including the exclusive property of the elements in the frame of discernment, which may not be consistent with the real world. In this paper, based on a more effective representation of uncertainty, called D numbers, a new method that allows the elements in the frame of discernment to be non-exclusive is proposed. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method, we apply it to the water distribution networks to estimate the risk of contaminant intrusion.
Effects of Bilateral Passive Range of Motion Exercise on the Function of Upper Extremities and Activities of Daily Living in Patients with Acute Stroke

[Purpose] To evaluate the effects of early passive range of motion exercise on the function of upper extremities and activities of daily living in patients with acute stroke. [Methods] A total of 37 patients with acute stroke in intensive care units, were assigned to the experimental group (n=19) and control group (n=18). The experimental group performed passive range of motion exercise twice a day, for 4 weeks, immediately after a pretest; the patients in the control group performed the range of motion exercise in the same manner for 2 weeks beginning 2 weeks after the pretest. The functions of upper extremities (edema, range of motion), manual function, and activities of daily living of both groups were measured before and at four weeks after the intervention. [Results] The experimental group showed a significant decrease in the edema of upper extremities compared with the control group. It also showed a significant increase in the range of motion, function of upper extremities, and the activities of daily living compared to the control group. [Conclusion] Passive range of motion exercise in the early stage can improve the function of upper extremities and activities of daily living in patients with acute stroke.
Texture Generation for Fashion Design Using Genetic Programming

We present a methodology to generate textures for fashion design using genetic programming (GP). The proposed GP based scheme evolves tree representation of procedures to generate textures. We use Contrast of the generated textures/images to filter out poor textures. After filtering, the fitness value of a new texture is set as the fitness value of a cluster of (already generated) textures which is more similar to this new texture. For this, we execute a clustering step during the evolution. Statistical features are used to find the similarity between textures. Since the quality of a texture is best assessed by a human being, if the generated texture is quite dissimilar to the existing textures then user's discretion is sought to assign a fitness value to it by visual inspection of the texture
A Probabilistic Semantics for abstract Argumentation

Classical semantics for abstract argumentation frameworks are usually defined in terms of extensions or, more recently, labelings. That is, an argument is either regarded as accepted with respect to a labeling or not. In order to reason with a specific semantics one takes either a credulous or skeptical approach, i. e. an argument is ultimately accepted, if it is accepted in one or all labelings, respectively. In this paper, we propose a more general approach for a semantics that allows for a more fine-grained differentiation between those two extreme views on reasoning. In particular, we propose a probabilistic semantics for abstract argumentation that assigns probabilities or degrees of belief to individual arguments. We show that our semantics generalizes the classical notions of semantics and we point out interesting relationships between concepts from argumentation and probabilistic reasoning. We illustrate the usefulness of our semantics on an example from the medical domain.