Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Geographic Routing Without Planarization

We present a new geographic routing algorithm, Greedy Distributed Spanning Tree Routing (GDSTR), that finds shorter routes and generates less maintenance traffic than previous algorithms. While geographic routing potentially scales well, it faces the problem of what to do at local dead ends where greedy forwarding fails. Existing geographic routing algorithms handle dead ends by planarizing the node connectivity graph and then using the right-hand rule to route around the resulting faces. GDSTR handles this situation differently by switching instead to routing on a spanning tree until it reaches a point where greedy forwarding can again make progress. In order to choose a direction on the tree that is most likely to make progress towards the destination, each GDSTR node maintains a summary of the area covered by the subtree below each of its tree neighbors. While GDSTR requires only one tree for correctness, it uses two for robustness and to give it an additional forwarding choice. Our simulations show that GDSTR finds shorter routes than geographic face routing algorithms: GDSTR's stretch is up to 20% less than the best existing algorithm in situations where dead ends are common. In addition, we show that GDSTR requires an order of magnitude less bandwidth to maintain its trees than CLDP, the only distributed planarization algorithm that is known to work with practical radio networks.
HEAVY-ELEMENT ENRICHMENT OF A JUPITER-MASS PROTOPLANET AS A FUNCTION OF ORBITAL LOCATION

One possible mechanism for giant planet formation is disk instability in which the planet is formed as a result of gravitational instability in the protoplanetary disk surrounding the young star. The final composition and core mass of the planet will depend on the planet's mass, environment, and the planetesimal accretion efficiency. We calculate heavy-element enrichment in a Jupiter-mass protoplanet formed by disk instability at various radial distances from the star, considering different disk masses and surface density distributions. Although the available mass for accretion increases with radial distance (a) for disk solid surface density (σ) functions σ = σ0a−α with α< 2, the accretion timescale is significantly longer at larger radial distances. Efficient accretion is limited to the first ∼105 years of planetary evolution, when the planet is extended and before gap opening and type II migration take place. The accreted mass is calculated for disk masses of 0.01, 0.05, and 0.1 M☉ with α = 1/2, 1, and 3/2. We show that a Jupiter-mass protoplanet can accrete 1–110 M⊕ of heavy elements, depending on the disk properties. Due to the limitation on the accretion timescale, our results provide lower bounds on heavy-element enrichment. Our results can explain the large variation in heavy-element enrichment found in extrasolar giant planets. Since higher disk surface density is found to lead to larger heavy-element enrichment, our model results are consistent with the correlation between heavy-element enrichment and stellar metallicity. Our calculations also suggest that Jupiter could have formed at a larger radial distance than its current location while still accreting the mass of heavy elements predicted by interior models. We conclude that in the disk instability model the final composition of a giant planet is strongly determined by its formation environment. The heavy-element abundance of a giant planet does not discriminate between its origin by either disk instability or core accretion.
IMM-based feature compensation robust to slowly time-varying noise and reverberation

In this paper, we propose a novel feature compensation approach based on the interacting multiple model (IMM) algorithm specially designed for joint processing of background noise and acoustic reverberation. Our approach to cope with the time-varying environmental parameters is to establish a switching linear dynamic model for the additive and convolutive distortions in the log-spectral domain. The proposed approach shows significant improvements in the Aurora-5 automatic speech recognition (ASR) task which was developed to investigate the influence on the performance of ASR for a hands-free speech input in noisy room environments.
Two (non-) islands in Slovenian: A study in Experimental Syntax

Abstract There exists a controversy in the literature and among the speakers of Slovenian concerning the grammaticality of wh-island and subject island constructions in this language. We conducted an acceptability rating study of wh-islands and subject islands in Slovenian, using the factorial definition of island. This definition provides for a possibility to isolate a true island effect while controlling for two complexity factors that potentially interfere in speakers’ evaluation of the relevant sentences: the length of the respective movement dependency and the presence of an island structure itself. We found that (i) Slovenian speakers do judge the wh-island sentences worse than the respective controls, but the observed degradation cannot be attributed to a true island effect; (ii) subject extraction out of a wh-island leads to a so called reverse island effect whereby the acceptability is higher than expected even if the above two complexity factors are taken into consideration; and (iii) speakers are sensitive to the subject island effect, as predicted by the mainstream theories of syntactic locality. The results of our study contribute to establishing a solid empirical base for further theoretical investigations of the island effects and raise new questions about the role of processing factors in speakers’ evaluations of island constructions.
Optimal prevention and background risk in a two-period model

In this paper, we look at the impact of background risk on optimal prevention with respect to another risk. We carry out our analysis in a two-period framework and use various configurations of background risks defined either in the first or second period, as state-independent or state-dependent. We show that results differ depending on both the nature of the background risk and the properties of the utility function.
Evidencia de procesos asociativos en la extinción de la memoria espacial en humanos

Se investigó la participación de procesos asociativos en la extinción de la memoria espacial en humanos. Tres grupos de participantes fueron entrenados para aprender la localización de una plataforma oculta, cuya ubicación fue señalada por un conjunto de claves distales. Durante un ensayo de prueba sin plataforma, los grupos mostraron una preferencia por el cuadrante reforzado, la cual fue disminuyendo gradualmente y sin diferencias entre ellos. La pérdida de dicha preferencia se ajustó adecuadamente a una función exponencial. Esto es consistente con un efecto de extinción, el cual ocurrió tal y como lo predicen algunos modelos de aprendizaje asociativo. Se discuten las implicaciones teóricas y aplicadas de dicho resultado.
Clinical efficacy of serum human epididymis protein 4 as a diagnostic biomarker of ovarian cancer: A pilot study

Objective To compare accuracy of serum human epididymis protein 4 (HE4) levels with cancer antigen 125 (CA-125) levels as biomarkers for ovarian cancer. Methods The study population included 94 Korean women, including 32 patients with a diagnosis of ovarian cancer and 62 patients with a diagnosis of benign ovarian tumor. All diagnoses were confirmed by histopathological analysis. Serum HE4 levels were assessed using an HE4 enzyme immunoassay, which were performed according to the manufacturer's instructions. Serum CA-125 levels were determined using a Modular analytics E170 module. Results The median serum CA-125 and HE4 levels were significantly higher in patients with ovarian cancer than those with other benign tumors (CA-125, 394.1 U/mL vs. 22.7 U/mL; HE4, 56.7 pM vs. 18.5 pM; P < 0.05 in both). An additional comparison revealed that the patients with endometriosis had greater median serum CA-125 levels than those with other benign ovarian tumors (32.0 U/mL vs. 17.9 U/mL, P = 0.03). Conversely, the median serum HE4 levels were similar among the two benign ovarian tumor groups, with no statistically significant difference observed (19.0 pM vs. 18.2 pM, P = 0.49). The receiver operating characteristics curve analysis for the benign ovarian tumor and ovarian cancer patients showed that HE4 showed a greater area under the curve with borderline significance when compared with CA-125 in both groups (0.93 vs. 0.85). Conclusion Serum HE4 levels may not only allow for the detection of ovarian cancer, but also allow for better differentiation of cases of ovarian cancer versus other benign ovarian tumors compared with serum CA-125.
CHAPTER 3 Bistability Dynamics in Structured Ecological Models

Alternative stable states exist in many important ecosyst em , and gradual change of the environment can lead to dramatic regime shift in these sy tems (Beisner et.al. (2003), May (1977), Klausmeier (1999), Rietkerk et.al. (2004), and Scheffer et.al. (2001)). Examples have been observed in the desertification of Sahara regi on, shift in Caribbean coral reefs, and the shallow lake eutrophication (Carpenter et.a l. (1999), Scheffer et.al. (2003), and Scheffer et.al. (2001)). It is well-known that a socialeconomical system is sustainable if the life-support ecosystem is resilient (Holling (1 973) and Folke et.al. (2004)). Here resilience is a measure of the magnitude of disturbance s that can be absorbed before a system centered at one locally stable equilibrium flips to a n ther. Mathematical models have been established to explain the phenomena of bistab ility nd hysteresis, which provide qualitative and quantitative information for ecos ystem managements and policy making (Carpenter et.al. (1999) and Peters et.al. (2004)). However most of these models of catastrophic shifts are non-spatial ones. A theory for sp atially extensive, heterogeneous ecosystems is needed for sustainable management and recove ry strategies, which requires a good understanding of the relation between system feedback and spatial scales (Folke et.al. (2004), Walker et.al. (2004) and Rietkerk et.al. (2004)). I n this chapter, we survey some recent results on structured evolutionary dynamics includ ing reaction-diffusion equations and systems, and discuss their applications to structured e cological models which display bistability and hysteresis. In Section 1, we review several classical non-spatial models with
Optimal Emission Pricing in the Presence of International Spillovers: Decomposing Leakage and Terms-of-Trade Motives

Carbon control policies in OECD countries commonly differentiate emission prices in favor of energy-intensive industries. While leakage provides a efficiency argument for differential emission pricing, the latter may be a disguised beggar-thy-neighbor policy to exploit terms of trade. Using an optimal tax framework, we propose a method to decompose the leakage motive and the terms-of-trade motive for emission price differentiation. We illustrate our method with a quantitative impact assessment of unilateral climate policies for the U.S. and EU economies. We conclude in these instances that complex optimal emission price differentiation does not substantially reduce the overall economic costs of carbon abatement compared with a simple rule of uniform emission pricing.
Neuro-forum Submission: Review of the Paper of Lomber and Collaborators: Cross-modal Plasticity Title: Functional Selectivity in Sensory Deprived Cortices

NEURO-FORUM SUBMISSION: Review of the paper of Lomber and collaborators: Cross-modal plasticity 2 in specific auditory cortices underlies visual compensations in the deaf. (2010) Nature Neuroscience 3 3(11): 1421-7. 4 5 Title: Functional selectivity in sensory deprived cortices 6 7 Author: Giulia Dormal & Olivier Collignon 8 9 Addresses: 10 Centre de Recherche en Neuropsychologie et Cognition (CERNEC), Université de Montréal, Montreal, 11 Canada 12 Institut de neuroscience, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgique 13 Centre de Recherche du CHU Sainte-Justine, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada 14 15 16 Corresponding author : 17 Olivier Collignon 18 Université de Montréal, Département de psychologie, CERNEC 19 90 Vincent d'Indy, CP 6128, succ. Centre-Ville 20 Montréal (Québec) H3C 3J7 21 Phone: 514.343. 6111 #2667 22 Fax: 514.343. 5787 23 E-mail: olivier.collignon@umontreal.ca 24 25 26 Number of words in the main text: 2374 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 Articles in PresS. J Neurophysiol (March 23, 2011). doi:10.1152/jn.00109. 2011
A review of Simi Linton (1998) claiming disability: knowledge and identity

In Claiming disability knowledge and identity Simi Linton invites us to reconsider the meanings we give to disability and to elaborate more on their origins She consistently demonstrates how society and academia take a narrow devaluing construction of disability This limited view affects our language and academic curriculum and therefore serves to increase both marginalization and discrimination of persons with disabilities Linton advocates a vision that she states as a new field of thought called Disability Studies In my opinion a more in depth and comprehensive incorporation and inclusion of research on disability studies in social sciences society studies and academic fields would definitely increase the role and effectiveness of society and academia in decreasing the gap between disabled and non disabled increasing the level of people rsquo s awareness and perception of disability and in providing a better understanding of disability across the cultures through the promotion of appropriate educational practices and behaviors
The Globular Cluster Systems of Five Nearby Spiral Galaxies: New Insights from Hubble Space Telescope Imaging

We use available multifilter Hubble Space Telescope (HST) WFPC2 imaging of five (M81, M83, NGC 6946, M101, and M51, in order of distance) low-inclination, nearby spiral galaxies to study ancient star cluster populations. Combining rigorous selection criteria to reject contaminants (individual stars, background galaxies, and blends) with optical photometry including the U bandpass, we unambiguously detect ancient globular cluster (GC) systems in each galaxy. We present luminosities, colors, and size (effective radius) measurements for our candidate GCs. These are used to estimate specific frequencies, to assess whether intrinsic color distributions are consistent with the presence of both metal-poor and metal-rich GCs, and to compare relative sizes of ancient clusters between different galaxy systems. M81 globulars have intrinsic color distributions that are very similar to those in the Milky Way and M31, with ~40% of sample clusters having colors expected for a metal-rich population. The GC system in M51 meanwhile, appears almost exclusively blue and metal-poor. This lack of metal-rich GCs associated with the M51 bulge indicates that the bulge formation history of this Sbc galaxy may have differed significantly from that of our own. Ancient clusters in M101 and possibly in NGC 6946, two of the three later type spirals in our sample, appear to have luminosity distributions that continue to rise to our detection limit (MV ~ -6.0), well beyond the expected turnover (MV ~ -7.4) in the luminosity function. This is reminiscent of the situation in M33, a Local Group galaxy of similar Hubble type. The faint ancient cluster candidates in M101 and NGC 6946 have properties (colors and reff) similar to their more luminous counterparts, and we suggest that these are either intermediate-age (3-9 Gyr) disk clusters or the low-mass end of the original GC population. Potentially, these lower mass clusters were not destroyed because of different dynamical conditions relative to those present in earlier type galaxies. If the faint, excess GC candidates are excluded, we find that the specific frequency (SN) of ancient clusters formed in later type spirals is roughly constant, with SN = 0.5 ± 0.2. If we consider only the blue, metal-poor clusters in the early-type spiral M81, this galaxy is also consistent with having formed a "universal" specific frequency of halo GC population, with a value of SN ~ 0.6. By combining the results of this study with literature values for other systems, we find that the total GC specific frequencies in spirals appear to correlate best with Hubble type and bulge/total ratio, rather than with galaxy luminosity or galaxy mass.
Graphene-based photonic nanostructures for linear and nonlinear devices

Graphene, a 2D carbon sheet with a honeycomb lattice, is a two-dimensional material with outstanding thermal, mechanical, electronic and optical properties. In particular, graphene is a gapless material with high mobility that exhibits remarkably high absorption values (~2.3%) for the visible and near-infrared wavelengths. In this paper, we will illustrate some applications of graphene photonics and plasmonics, reported in literature, in different research fields and we will investigate theoretically and experimentally the linear and nonlinear properties of graphene-based nanostructures such as one-dimensional (1D) photonic crystals (PhCs) and 1D gratings. In particular, we will show how to exploit the large nonlinear response and the saturation effects of graphene monolayers, sandwiched in the defect layer of an asymmetric 1D photonic crystal, to dynamically change the structure from a perfect absorber (100%) to a mirror. We will also show how it is possible to tune the working wavelength by tilting the angle of incidence of the impinging electromagnetic field for both TE and TM polarizations. Finally, we will report on a 1D dielectric grating, incorporating a graphene monolayer, that resembles the 1D PhC optical response exploiting guided mode resonances. Therefore, the proposed nanostructures could efficiently exploit the linear and nonlinear properties of the graphene monolayer for the realization of tunable absorbers or saturable mirrors improving and boosting the performance of optical devices such as photo-detectors and short-pulse lasers.
A Unified Multi-Faceted Video Summarization System

This paper addresses automatic summarization and search in visual data comprising of videos, live streams and image collections in a unified manner. In particular, we propose a framework for multi-faceted summarization which extracts key-frames (image summaries), skims (video summaries) and entity summaries (summarization at the level of entities like objects, scenes, humans and faces in the video). The user can either view these as extractive summarization, or query focused summarization. Our approach first pre-processes the video or image collection once, to extract all important visual features, following which we provide an interactive mechanism to the user to summarize the video based on their choice. We investigate several diversity, coverage and representation models for all these problems, and argue the utility of these different mod- els depending on the application. While most of the prior work on submodular summarization approaches has focused on combining several models and learning weighted mixtures, we focus on the explain-ability of different the diversity, coverage and representation models and their scalability. Most importantly, we also show that we can summarize hours of video data in a few seconds, and our system allows the user to generate summaries of various lengths and types interactively on the fly.
Best Response Games on Regular Graphs

With the growth of the internet it is becoming increasingly important to understand how the behaviour of players is affected by the topology of the network interconnecting them. Many models which involve networks of interacting players have been proposed and best response games are amongst the simplest. In best response games each vertex simultaneously updates to employ the best response to their current surroundings. We concentrate upon trying to understand the dynamics of best response games on regular graphs with many strategies. When more than two strategies are present highly complex dynamics can ensue. We focus upon trying to understand exactly how best response games on regular graphs sample from the space of possible cellular automata. To understand this issue we investigate convex divisions in high dimensional space and we prove that almost every division of k - 1 dimensional space into k convex regions includes a single point where all regions meet. We then find connections between the convex geometry of best response games and the theory of alternating circuits on graphs. Exploiting these unexpected connections allows us to gain an interesting answer to our question of when cellular automata are best response games.
International Network for Economic Research Working Paper 2011 . 1 The interdependence of Coffee spot and futures markets

Coffee is both an important source of export revenue for developing countries and the underlying asset for the largest futures markets in soft commodities. This paper examines the interdependence of these spot and futures markets, with particular emphasis on the effect futures trading activity, especially speculative behaviour, has on the price risk in spot markets. We identify change points associated with particularly poor harvests and modifications made to the underlying futures contract on one exchange. Findings indicate that spot and futures markets for coffee are indeed interdependent. However, futures markets for coffee appear to be increasingly driven by risks associated with the underlying spot markets.
Texas Hold ’ em Hand Recognition and Analysis

In this paper we present an algorithm for playing card detection and identification. This algorithm is robust to card orientation and photograph angle, and is achieved t hrough thresholding, corner detection, projective transformation, and template matching. We implement this algorithm in MATLAB, and demonstrate its capability with a mobile application that can capture photos of Texas Hold’em scenarios and give the user relevant statistics. Keywords-mobile image processing, playing card detection, template matching, corner detection, poker statistics
A security-focused engineering process for systems of embedded components

Development of systems based on embedded components is a challenging task because of the distributed, reactive and real-time nature of such systems. From a security point of view, it is essential to take into account that frequently embedded devices are basically system components owned by a certain entity, used as part of systems owned by other entities and operated in a potentially hostile environment. Currently, a security engineering process for systems with embedded components that takes these considerations into account does not exist. Although many individual mechanisms to solve specific security problems are already available, the integration of these mechanisms in order to form a coherent system that can satisfy more complex security requirements is not trivial. This paper presents a process, which aims to support embedded systems developers in considering security aspects in the overall engineering process. Particularly, the process provides means to identify and manage security properties and requirements. This security engineering process supports the representation of security aspects and mechanisms in a comprehensive and coherent modeling framework based on the UML metamodel. The process key characteristics are that (i) it's suited to the specific needs of systems with embedded components; (ii) it supports the developers in making sound security design decisions; (iii) it encourages the separation of responsibilities between security experts and system designers; and (iv) it integrates reusable security-focused models of embedded components. The main aspect to highlight in the process is that it's directed by security properties. We believe that the best approach is to base requirements on the positive expression of properties, as opposed to the negative expression by means of threats and attacks.