Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Backhaul and performance optimality of joint processing schemes over the cluster area

In this paper, four Joint Processing (JP) schemes have been discussed and evaluated for Dynamic Point Selection (DPS) as well as Joint Transmission (JT) over a cluster of evolved Node B (eNBs) using WINNER II channel model developed for LTE-A. The purpose of this study is developing a cooperative LTE scenario in a fixed cluster of 3 eNBs in order to evaluate and compare the performance of these schemes for both centralized and partial cooperation. It would give us a good insight about choosing the optimum scheme which provides desired performance while putting reasonable amount of burden on the backhaul of the system. Moreover, the location dependency of JP is proved over the cluster area. As a final goal, in real-world networks, exploiting a dynamic joint processing scheme selection strategy would lead to the best performance taking care of backhaul limits. It has been proved through Simulations that, centralized joint processing has better performance for both joint transmission and dynamic point selection in comparison with the partial joint processing. Also, Dynamic point selection schemes follow the performance trend of joint transmission with less performance and lower backhaul load.
Introduction to the Special Issue on Emerging Adulthood

In 2000, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett (2000) published a seminal article in the American Psychologist followed by a book in which he proposed “a new theory of development from the late teens through the twenties” (p. 469). Coining the phrase “emerging adulthood,” he argued that in industrialized societies, economic and social changes of the late 20th century had led to an extended period of exploration for most. His ground breaking theoretical work led to paradigm shift (Kuhn, 2012) for developmentalists, a new academic society—the Society for Study of Emerging Adulthood (SSEA)—and a new journal—Emerging Adulthood—and even more importantly, launched innumerable conversations, debates, research, and indeed a new field. A cross-cultural comparison of 186 non-industrialized cultures conducted by anthropologists, examined the dividing line between adolescence and adulthood, and found that in the majority of cultures, marriage marked this transition—occurring between 16 and 18 years of age for young women and 18 to 20 years of age for young men (Schlegel & Barry, 1991). In industrialized societies, sociologists argued that up to the middle of the mid-century, the dividing line between adolescence and adulthood was marked by five classic milestones: leaving home, completing school, entering the workforce, getting married, and children (Setterson & Ray, 2011). The demographic shifts in the characteristics of the population, along with the evolution of social norms and changing economic realities led to a surge in an interest in ways to reconceptualize this age of development, however.
reMORPH: A Runtime Reconfigurable Architecture

Programmable hardware built on a regular architecture can partially alleviate the problem of increased defect densities associated with transistor scaling by dynamically wiring around the defects [1]. The fine granularity of FPGAs is however unsuitable for effectively exploiting runtime reconfiguration because of the high overheads involved. A coarse grain reconfigurable array with malleable communication links - reMORPH - is proposed in this paper. The compute tile uses DSP48E and BRAM embedded blocks in a Xilinx FPGA and has a very low footprint of about 200 slice LUTs. The semi-systolic near neighbour communication interconnect can be dynamically reconfigured for each “epoch” of computation. The “epoch” or phases of the application are obtained via profiling or static data flow analysis. Some of the links between the compute tiles are changed during the reconfiguration phase which drastically reduces the context switch overhead enabling high performance/area applications to be built on this fabric.
Photodissociation Feedback of Population III Stars onto Neighboring Prestellar Cores

We investigate the star formation process in the primordial environment in the presence of radiative feedback from other Population III stars that formed earlier. In this paper, we focus our attention on the effects of photodissociative radiation, leading toward a full understanding of the radiative feedback effects. We perform three-dimensional radiation hydrodynamics simulations on this issue, as well as analytic estimates, paying special attention to the self-shielding effect and the dynamics of the star-forming cloud. As a result, we find that the ignition timing of the source star is crucial. If the ignition is later than the epoch when the central density of the collapsing cloud exceeds ~103-104 cm-3, the collapse cannot be reversed, even if the source star is located at ≲100 pc. The uncertainty of the critical density comes from the variety of initial conditions of the collapsing cloud. We also find the analytic criterion for a cloud to collapse with a given central density, temperature, and Lyman-Werner-band flux that irradiates the cloud. Although we focus on the radiation from neighboring stars, this result can also be applied to the effects of the diffuse Lyman-Werner (LW) radiation field that is expected to be built up prior to the reionization of the universe. We find that self-gravitating clouds can easily self-shield from diffuse LW radiation and continue their collapse for densities larger than ~103 cm-3.
A flexible approach for service composition using service patterns

With the unceasing variation and evolution of user requirements and contexts, we notice that the number of Web services over internet is increasingly raising. Due to these phenomena, it appears that runtime automated service composition mechanisms are required. To achieve this goal, we propose a mechanism for adaptive and flexible service composition. The design-time components of our solution are service patterns that are used within the composition process for deriving different composition possibilities and for reducing the difficulty of the tasks of discovery and selection of the actual Web services. This mechanism relies also on a specification of user requirements structured as intentions graph. We show through this paper the steps of the proposed composition mechanism. Furthermore, we formulate a way of using OWL-S mechanisms to implement service patterns.
Working Paper Series 69 - r-filters: a Hodrick-Prescott Filter Generalization

A two-parameter family of filters is proposed in which the HP filter is considered as the lowest order member. While the HP filter converges to linear time trend as the smoothing factor grows, the higher order members of the proposed family converge to higher order polynomial time trends. The filter order – the new parameter introduced – allows to set the filter selectivity. Furthermore, two different methods to implement these filters are presented.
Nonlinear Transform Coding with Lossless Polar Coordinates by Demba Elimane

In conventional transform coding, the importance of preserving desirable quantization partition cell shapes prevents one from considering the use of a nonlinear change of variables. If no linear transformation of a given source would yield independent components, this means having to encode it at a rate higher than its entropy, i.e. suboptimally. This thesis proposes a new transform coding technique where the source samples are first uniformly scalar quantized and then transformed with an integerto-integer approximation to a nonlinear transformation that would give independent components. In particular, we design a family of integer-to-integer approximations to the Cartesian-to-polar transformation and analyze its behavior for high rate transform coding. Among the benefits of such an approach is the ability to achieve redundancy reduction beyond decorrelation without limitation to orthogonal linear transformations of the original variables. A high resolution analysis is given, and for source models inspired by a sensor network application and by image compression, simulations show improvements over conventional transform coding. A comparison to state-of-the-art entropy-coded polar quantization techniques is also provided. Thesis Supervisor: Vivek K Goyal Title: Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering
Extraction of Antioxidant Phenolics from Agri-Food Waste Biomass Using a Newly Designed Glycerol-Based Natural Low-Transition Temperature Mixture: A Comparison with Conventional Eco-Friendly Solvents

A novel natural low transition temperature mixture (LTTM), composed of glycerol and ammonium acetate (molar ratio 3:1), was tested for its efficacy as a solvent in recovering phenolics from chlorogenate-rich agri-food solid wastes, including potato peels (PPs), eggplant peels (EPPs), and spent filter coffee (SFC). The efficacy of this solvent was compared with other eco-friendly solvents, including aqueous glycerol, aqueous ethanol, and water. The LTTM was demonstrated to be by far the most efficient in extracting chlorogenates and superior or equally efficient with the other solvents in recovering flavonoids. LTTM extracts produced from waste were also more potent radical scavengers, but results on the reducing power were inconclusive. Liquid chromatography-diode array-mass spectrometry analysis showed that the polyphenolic profiles of all waste extracts obtained with the LTTM were rich in caffeoylquinic and p-coumaroylquinic acid conjugates.
ATP–Binding Cassette Transporter Structure Changes Detected by Intramolecular Fluorescence Energy Transfer for High-Throughput Screening

Multidrug resistance protein 1 (MRP1) actively transports a wide variety of drugs out of cells. To quantify MRP1 structural dynamics, we engineered a “two-color MRP1” construct by fusing green fluorescent protein (GFP) and TagRFP to MRP1 nucleotide–binding domains NBD1 and NBD2, respectively. The recombinant MRP1 protein expressed and trafficked normally to the plasma membrane. Two-color MRP1 transport activity was normal, as shown by vesicular transport of [3H]17β-estradiol-17-β-(d-glucuronide) and doxorubicin efflux in AAV-293 cells. We quantified fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) from GFP to TagRFP as an index of NBD conformational changes. Our results show that ATP binding induces a large-amplitude conformational change that brings the NBDs into closer proximity. FRET was further increased by substrate in the presence of ATP but not by substrate alone. The data suggest that substrate binding is required to achieve a fully closed and compact structure. ATP analogs bind MRP1 with reduced apparent affinity, inducing a partially closed conformation. The results demonstrate the utility of the two-color MRP1 construct for investigating ATP-binding cassette transporter structural dynamics, and it holds great promise for high-throughput screening of chemical libraries for unknown activators, inhibitors, or transportable substrates of MRP1.
Real-time comparison of quality of interfaces (QoI) by mobile devices over heterogeneous radio networks

Emerging mobile devices are equipped with multiple interfaces allowing users to take advantage of heterogeneous radio technologies (e.g., cellular networks and wireless LANs). To support mobility and quality of service (QoS) for such multi-interface mobile devices, it is important to dynamically determine which interface or interfaces a mobile should use and when to switch from one interface to another. To make such decisions, it is critical for the mobile to compare the "qualities of the interfaces (QoI)", which may be measured by a variety of metrics, in real time so that the mobile can switch from one interface to another without user perceivable interruptions to on-going applications. This paper presents and analyzes new techniques for a mobile device to make rapid comparison of the quality of the interfaces using quickest sequential change detection and sequential two-sample hypotheses tests.
Risk Sensitivity and Hunter Perceptions of Chronic Wasting Disease Risk and Other Hunting, Wildlife, and Health Risks

ABSTRACT This article examined relationships among hunter perceptions of personal health risks from chronic wasting disease (CWD), knowledge and information about CWD, and perceptions of other hunting, wildlife, and health risks. Data were obtained from surveys of 2,725 deer and elk hunters in Colorado. Cluster analysis grouped hunters into no (42%), slight (44%), and moderate (14%) risk groups based on perceptions of personal health risks from CWD (e.g., concern about health, become ill from CWD). There were minimal differences among groups in demographics, information sources, and knowledge about CWD. Hunters who perceived higher health risks from CWD (i.e., moderate risk), however, perceived greater risks associated with CWD to other humans, CWD to wildlife, hunting to personal health, other diseases to health, and the future of hunting. These findings illustrated the concept of risk sensitivity where hunters who perceived higher risks from CWD were predisposed to rate all other risks as large.
Co-Tracking with a Manifold Anchor

In its original form, co-training is a process by which multiple learners can boost classification accuracy using unlabeled data points. While co-training has been applied to problems such as visual detection [20] and web page identification [6], this paper describes its use in an application that tracks heads in video. The inherent problems with this approach are discussed, and a geometric solution is proposed. By creating a manifold representing possible poses and using the distance from this manifold as a regularization term, tracking accuracy can be improved. A series of nearest neighbor algorithms are presented, and empirical results using this manifold anchor are discussed.
Introduction to Special Issue of IP & M on Human-Computer Information Retrieval

Contemporary search engines are optimized for look-up scenarios where the information target is welldefined and human-machine interaction is limited to queries and search-result selections. In this role the search system serves as a cognitive prosthetic, temporarily enhancing people’s mental capabilities to provide access to additional information not known to the searcher or not readily accessible to them. However, this type support is insufficient for tasks requiring more involved information interaction (e.g., where cross-query learning may be important) and situations where information behavior encompasses more than just information seeking. People may often possess more aspirational goals such as augmenting their intellect (Englebart, 1962) and applying their knowledge to explore, learn, and make sense of the information they encounter (Marchionini, 2006a). To meet these demands search systems need to form a symbiotic relationship with their users, providing support for fluid and meaningful interaction between human and machine, and promoting critical thinking and increased interaction with information to facilitate cognitive development.
Care to comment?: recommendations for commenting on news stories

Many websites provide commenting facilities for users to express their opinions or sentiments with regards to content items, such as, videos, news stories, blog posts, etc. Previous studies have shown that user comments contain valuable information that can provide insight on Web documents and may be utilized for various tasks. This work presents a model that predicts, for a given user, suitable news stories for commenting. The model achieves encouraging results regarding the ability to connect users with stories they are likely to comment on. This provides grounds for personalized recommendations of stories to users who may want to take part in their discussion. We combine a content-based approach with a collaborative-filtering approach (utilizing users' co-commenting patterns) in a latent factor modeling framework. We experiment with several variations of the model's loss function in order to adjust it to the problem domain. We evaluate the results on two datasets and show that employing co-commenting patterns improves upon using content features alone, even with as few as two available comments per story. Finally, we try to incorporate available social network data into the model. Interestingly, the social data does not lead to substantial performance gains, suggesting that the value of social data for this task is quite negligible.
Lymphangiectatic Kaposi's sarcoma in a patient with AIDS*

Kaposi's sarcoma is a malignant disease that originates in the lymphatic endothelium. It has a broad spectrum of clinical manifestations. Its four distinct clinical forms are: classic, endemic, iatrogenic and epidemic Kaposi's sarcoma. In non-HIV-associated Kaposi's sarcoma, the disease is typically limited to the lower extremities, but in immunodeficient patients, it is a multifocal systemic disease. The clinical course of the disease differs among patients, ranging from a single or a few indolent lesions to an aggressive diffuse disease. Advanced Kaposi's sarcoma lesions, typically those on the lower extremities, are often associated with lymphedema. In this paper, we report a case of a patient with a rare form of AIDS-associated Kaposi sarcoma called lymphangiectatic Kaposis's sarcoma.
Language identification for Internet security in the Basque context

It is significant to highlight that the demand of multilingual systems in human-computer interfaces is growing and automatic language identification (LID) is becoming increasingly important for the speech community as a fundamental tool to enrich theses systems. Research in this field has been active for several years. LID becomes also a useful resource in Multilingual Security System (MSS) providing methodologies to improve the robustness and the effectiveness of these systems. The main goal of our project is the development of Multilingual LVCSR systems in the Basque context. Nowadays, our work is oriented to the use of Basque in internet. The present work describes the development of a Language Identification (LID) system oriented to robust Multilingual Speech Recognition for under-resourced languages in the Basque context.
A study of Interactional metadiscourse features in texts written by undergraduate students at the University of Botswana

In recent years there has been an increased emphasis on the interpersonal function of metadiscourse features in academic texts. This means that research on writing in academic contexts began to focus on the rhetorical features, such as interactional metadiscourse, that writers use to present their voice in writing. These developments in academic writing have also considered the socio-cultural context in which specific genres are produced. Using a multiple-methods approach to genre analysis, this article compares students’ use of interactional metadiscourse features to present voice in two undergraduate courses, Media Studies and Primary Education at the University of Botswana. A total of 40 student essays were analysed. Interviews with students and lecturers) in the two departments were also done to understand the socio-cultural context in which the essays were produced. The comparison of interactional metadiscourse features in the two corpora indicated that interactional metadiscourse markers were present, but that there were variations in the use and distribution of these features by the learners. Contextual information shows that such variations reflect the different values and beliefs about academic writing of the discourse communities that students belong to. These values and beliefs can be problematic for EAP tutors who have to prepare students for writing in the various disciplines in L2 contexts.
Thermodynamic limits of hydrologic cycling within the Earth system: concepts, estimates and implications

Abstract. The hydrologic cycle results from the combination of energy conversions and atmospheric transport, and the laws of thermodynamics set limits to both. Here, we apply thermodynamics to derive the limits of the strength of hydrologic cycling within the Earth system and about the properties and processes that shape these limits. We set up simple models to derive analytical expressions of the limits of evaporation and precipitation in relation to vertical and horizontal differences in solar radiative forcing. These limits result from a fundamental trade-off by which a greater evaporation rate reduces the temperature gradient and thus the driver for atmospheric motion that exchanges moistened air from the surface with the drier air aloft. The limits on hydrologic cycling thus reflect the strong interaction between the hydrologic flux, motion, and the driving gradient. Despite the simplicity of the models, they yield estimates for the limits of hydrologic cycling that are within the observed magnitude, suggesting that the global hydrologic cycle operates near its maximum strength. We close with a discussion of how thermodynamic limits can provide a better characterization of the interaction of vegetation and human activity with hydrologic cycling.
Keeping Up with the (Pre-Teen) Joneses: The E(cid:11)ect of Friendship on Freemium Conversion

We study a massively multiplayer online (MMO) freemium educational game with an in-game social network to investigate the possible e(cid:11)ect of social contagion on user conversion. We (cid:12)nd that addition of new content is not linked to user conversion. In contrast, there is evidence linking certain characteristics of a user’s social network with their conversion. Chief among these is the local clustering coe(cid:14)cient among only those of their friends who have subscribed
Processing Bank Checks with Genetic Programming and Histograms

In spite of evolution of electronic techniques, a large number of applications continue to rely on the use of paper as the dominant medium. Bank checks are a widely known example. When filled by hand, the processing of the written information requires either a human or a special software which has intelligent abilities. This paper examines the issue of reading the amount of money written on the checks. Genetic Programming (GP) technique is used for dealing with this problem. A new type of input representation is proposed: histograms. Several numerical experiments with GP are performed by using large datasets taken from the MNIST benchmarking set. Preliminary results show a good behavior of the method.
Out of Print

In the 2000s an interconnected set of elite projects in the United States sought to digitize “all books in all languages” and make them available online. These mass digitization projects were efforts to absorb the print book infrastructure into a new one centered in computer networks. Mass book digitization has now faded from view, and here I trace its setbacks through a curious figure—the “orphan”—that emerged from within these projects and acted ultimately as an agent of impasse. In legal policy debates, an “orphan” refers to a copyrighted work whose owner cannot be found, but its history, range of meanings, and deployments reveal it to be considerably more complex. Based on fieldwork conducted at a digital library engaged in mass digitization, this paper analyzes the “orphan” as a personifying metaphor that digital library activists embraced in order to challenge and/or disrupt the social relations that adhere in and around books. The figure of the orphan haunts the techno-cultural infrastructural project of mass digitization, and stands, I argue, as a disenchanted emblem for “the book” in suspension between a disfavored past and a fantasized future.