Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Software debugging with dynamic instrumentation and test-based knowledge

Developing effective debugging strategies to guarantee the reliability of software is important. By analyzing the debugging process used by experienced programmers, we have found that four distinct tasks are consistently performed: (1) determining statements involved in program failures, (2) selecting suspicious statements that might contain faults, (3) making hypotheses about suspicious faults (variables and locations), and (4) restoring program state to a specific statement for verification. This dissertation focuses on the second task, reducing the search domain for faults, referred to as fault localization. A new approach to enhancing the process of fault localization is explored based on dynamic program slicing and mutation-based testing. In this new scenario, a set of heuristics was developed to enable debuggers to highlight suspicious statements and thus to confine the search domain to a small region. A prototype debugging tool, SPYDER, was previously constructed to support the first task by using dynamic program slicing and the fourth task by backward execution; some of the heuristics were integrated into SPYDER to demonstrate our approach. An experiment confirms the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed heuristics. Furthermore, a decision algorithm was constructed as a map to convey the idea of applying those heuristics. A new debugging paradigm equipped with our proposed fault localization strategies is expected to reduce human interaction time significantly and aid in the debugging of complex software.
Study on follicular characteristics, hormonal and biochemical profile in norgestomet+PMSG treated acyclic buffaloes

This research was conducted to study the follicular dynamics, hormonal, biochemical profile and fertility response in acyclic and norgestomet+PMSG treated acyclic buffaloes in summer. The study animals were divided into two groups: group I [control (n=8): no treatment] and II [treatment group (n=15)]. In group II, seven animals were used for follicular biochemical and hormonal profile and eight animals for fertility studies following Crestar® (Intervet, France) treatment (day 0: Crestar® insertion; day 8: 500 IU PMSG; day 9: Crestar® removal; day 11 AI). Follicular fluid stradiol (E2) and progesterone (P4) in acyclic and pre-ovulatory follicle in study groups was significantly (P<0.01) higher than peripheral level. Peripheral E2 concentration, during pre-ovulatory period in group II was higher (P<0.05) than group I. Significant correlation between serum and follicular E2 was deduced (r=0.888; P<0.01) as significant difference in serum cholesterol content was shown between groups. Lower follicular total protein (P<0.05) in acyclic animals and higher follicular glucose (P<0.05) in treated group were concluded. Significant correlation (r=-0.770; P<0.05) was observed between follicular cholesterol and triglycerides. Follicular characteristics, post PMSG administration, differed significantly (0.83 ± 0.20 vs 1.32 ± 0.12; P<0.01) in all buffaloes exhibiting estrus, out of which four conceived. In conclusion, follicular hormonal and biochemical profile exhibits alteration in protein and glucose level between summer acyclic and treated buffaloes. However, peripheral E2 along with fertility response showed significant difference (P<0.01) between the study groups with significant correlation in E2, cholesterol and triglycerides between peripheral and follicular compartment.
Stability of Motor Programs During a State of Meditation: Electrocortical Activity in a Pianist Playing ‘Vexations’ by Erik Satie Continuously for 28 Hours

Electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of an expert pianist playing Erik Satie’s ‘Vexations’ for a continuous period of 28 hours were used to explore the changes in electrocortical activity during a state of trance and the subsequent influence on executive motor function. According to the event protocol, the pianist experienced different states of consciousness throughout the performance ranging from alertness to trance and drowsiness. We then compared the stability of motor performance for those three states by measuring the length of one played sequence as well as the power of the spectrum of the pianist’s cerebral activity recorded over posterior regions of the brain. The results revealed no significant difference between the mean duration of a played sequence in the alert as compared to the trance state. A Fast Fourier Transformation of cerebral activity showed a significant increase in power of the alpha 1 spectrum (8.0-10.0 Hz) for the trance state of mind only. This effect occurred more markedly over the left hemisphere and is often referred to as equivalent to a meditative state of consciousness. In summary, one main finding was that in trance the performance of a demanding sensorimotor integration task remained constant. Hence, these results demonstrate the high degree of stability of executive function, even in changing levels of consciousness in expert pianists.
GABA Increases Electrical Excitability in a Subset of Human Unmyelinated Peripheral Axons

Background A proportion of small diameter primary sensory neurones innervating human skin are chemosensitive. They respond in a receptor dependent manner to chemical mediators of inflammation as well as naturally occurring algogens, thermogens and pruritogens. The neurotransmitter GABA is interesting in this respect because in animal models of neuropathic pain GABA pre-synaptically regulates nociceptive input to the spinal cord. However, the effect of GABA on human peripheral unmyelinated axons has not been established. Methodology/Principal Findings Electrical stimulation was used to assess the effect of GABA on the electrical excitability of unmyelinated axons in isolated fascicles of human sural nerve. GABA (0.1–100 µM) increased electrical excitability in a subset (ca. 40%) of C-fibres in human sural nerve fascicles suggesting that axonal GABA sensitivity is selectively restricted to a sub-population of human unmyelinated axons. The effects of GABA were mediated by GABAA receptors, being mimicked by bath application of the GABAA agonist muscimol (0.1–30 µM) while the GABAB agonist baclofen (10–30 µM) was without effect. Increases in excitability produced by GABA (10–30 µM) were blocked by the GABAA antagonists gabazine (10–20 µM), bicuculline (10–20 µM) and picrotoxin (10–20 µM). Conclusions/Significance Functional GABAA receptors are present on a subset of unmyelinated primary afferents in humans and their activation depolarizes these axons, an effect likely due to an elevated intra-axonal chloride concentration. GABAA receptor modulation may therefore regulate segmental and peripheral components of nociception.
Comparison Results for Reflected Jump-diffusions in the Orthant with Variable Reflection Directions and Stability Applications

We consider reflected jump-diffusions in the orthant $R_+^n$ with time- and state-dependent drift, diffusion and jump-amplitude coefficients. Directions of reflection upon hitting boundary faces are also allow to depend on time and state. Pathwise comparison results for this class of processes are provided, as well as absolute continuity properties for their associated regulator processes responsible of keeping the respective diffusions in the orthant. An important role is played by the boundary property in that regulators do not charge times spent by the reflected diffusion at the intersection of two or more boundary faces. The comparison results are then applied to provide an ergodicity condition for the state-dependent reflection directions case.
Populating the Semantic Web

Abstract : The vision of the Semantic Web is that a vast store of online information "meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities". Unfortunately, the vast majority of information on the Web is formatted to be easily read by human users, not computer applications. In order to make the vision of the Semantic Web a reality, tools for automatically annotating Web content with semantic labels will be required. We describe the ADEL system that automatically extracts records from Web sites and semantically labels the fields. The system exploits similarities in the layout of Web pages in order to learn the grammar that generated these pages. It then uses this grammar to extract structured records from these Web pages. ADEL system also exploits the fact that sites in the same domain will provide the same, or similar data. By collecting labeled examples of data during the training stage, we are able to learn structural descriptions of data fields and later use these descriptions to semantically label new data fields. We show that on a Used Car shopping domain, ADEL achieves precision of 64% and recall of 89% on extracting and labeling data columns.
Ecohydrology of water‐limited environments: A scientific vision

Water‐limited environments occupy about half of the Earth's land surface and contain some of the fastest growing population centers in the world. Scarcity or variable distributions of water and nutrients make these environments highly sensitive to change. Given the importance of water‐limited environments and the impacts of increasing demands on water supplies and other natural resources, this paper highlights important societal problems and scientific challenges germane to these environments and presents a vision on how to accelerate progress. We argue that improvements in our fundamental understanding of the links between hydrological, biogeochemical, and ecological processes are needed, and the way to accomplish this is by fostering integrated, interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving and hypothesis testing through place‐based science. Such an ecohydrological approach will create opportunities to develop new methodologies and ways of thinking about these complex environmental systems and help us improve forecasts of environmental change.
Enforced Expression of GATA-3 Severely Reduces Human Thymic Cellularity4

Following bone marrow transplantation, patients often suffer from immune incompetence by reduced or late T cell development. Moreover, adult bone marrow stem cells have a lower capacity to generate T cells compared with fetal liver- and umbilical cord blood-derived progenitors. Therefore, enhancing thymic-dependent T cell generation might hold great therapeutic potential. GATA-3 is a transcription factor that is essential in T cell development. In this study we examined the therapeutic potential of GATA-3 to enhance T cell generation by overexpressing GATA-3 in T cell progenitors followed by fetal thymic organ culture (FTOC). We observed that early during FTOC, there was an enhanced differentiation toward the double positive stage of T cell development. From day 10 of FTOC, however, overexpression of GATA-3 induced a severe reduction in thymic cellularity, which probably correlates with the absence of a functional TCR-β chain. We further show that the frequency of apoptosis was increased in GATA-3-transduced thymocytes. Despite the absence of a functional TCR-β chain, GATA-3 transduced progenitors were able to differentiate into CD8β+ double positive thymocytes. This study shows that a strictly regulated expression of GATA-3 is essential for normal T cell development and this puts severe restrictions on the potential therapeutic use of continuously overexpressed GATA-3.
New metric measure for the improvement of search results in microblogs

In recent years, microblogging services like Twitter, draws the attention of users. These micro-blogs attract more and more users due to the ease and the speed of information sharing especially in real time. Microbloggers, while posting microblogs, search for fresh information related to their interests. Finding good results concerning the given subjects needs to consider the features of microblogs. Several works have proposed criteria for tweets search, but, this area is still not well exploited, consequently, search results are irrelevant. In this paper, we propose new features (for example audience and RetweetRank). We investigate the impact of these criteria on the search's results for relevant information. Finally, we propose a new metric to improve the results of the searches in microblogs. More accurately, we propose a research model that combines content relevance, tweet relevance and author relevance. Each type of relevance is characterized by a set of criteria such as audience to assess the relevance of the author, OOV (Out Of Vobulary) to measure the relevance of content and others. To evaluate our model, we used a corpus of subjective tweets talking about Tunisian actualities in 2012.
Creativity, Surprise & Design: An Introduction and Investigation

This paper weaves together some of the basic ideas about surprise, and creativity, in the context of design. Situations in which design surprise might occur are identified, and a few are discussed in more detail. The goal is to identify areas where additional theoretical, experimental and computational research might be beneficial, leading to the ultimate goal of computational design systems which produce artifacts that are judged to be creative.
How well can People and Computers Recognize Emotions in Speech

The paper describes an experimental study on vocal emotion expression and recognition. Utterances expressing five emotions - happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and normal (unemotional) state - portrayed by thirty non-professional actors were recorded and then replayed to them for evaluation. The results on decoding emotions are consistent with earlier findings. The results on ability of humans to portray emotions and to recognize their own emotions in speech are presented. Computer algorithms for recognizing emotions in speech were developed and tested. Their accuracy is presented.
Application of activity-based costing to a land transportation company: A case study

Although there are many studies in the literature that explain modern costing approaches including activity-based costing (ABC), the number of studies that present real life applications is very few. This is especially true for logistics and transportation applications. One of the main difficulties in land transportation companies is to determine and evaluate true cost of their operations and services. If used and implemented properly, ABC can be very helpful for transportation companies to determine cost of their operations with higher correctness. In this paper, an application of ABC to a land transportation company that is located in Turkey is presented in detail. In order to improve the effectiveness of the ABC an integrated approach that combines ABC with business process modeling and analytical hierarchy approach is proposed. It is figured out that the proposed approach is quite effective in costing services of the land transportation company compared to the existing traditional costing system which is in use.
Overview: How Is Alcohol Metabolized by the Body?

Alcohol is eliminated from the body by various metabolic mechanisms. The primary enzymes involved are aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH), alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), cytochrome P450 (CYP2E1), and catalase. Variations in the genes for these enzymes have been found to influence alcohol consumption, alcohol-related tissue damage, and alcohol dependence. The consequences of alcohol metabolism include oxygen deficits (i.e., hypoxia) in the liver; interaction between alcohol metabolism byproducts and other cell components, resulting in the formation of harmful compounds (i.e., adducts); formation of highly reactive oxygen-containing molecules (i.e., reactive oxygen species [ROS]) that can damage other cell components; changes in the ratio of NADH to NAD+ (i.e., the cell’s redox state); tissue damage; fetal damage; impairment of other metabolic processes; cancer; and medication interactions. Several issues related to alcohol metabolism require further research.
Slowee: A Smart Eating-Speed Guide System with Light and Vibration Feedback

In this paper we introduce Slowee, a smart eating-speed guide system with light and vibration. Slowee aims to improve the user's eating habits by delivering right feedback in real time to the user while eating. We designed and implemented our system, Slowee, and conducted a pilot study to investigate the usability of Slowee and obtain feedbacks from the users. Although the number of the participants is rather small (n=10), the participants gave positive feedbacks on the potentials of Slowee. We expect that our device can help maintaining appropriate eating speed and chewing numbers for patients (e.g., those who have undergone esophageal resection) as well as for those who eat fast or chew less than the recommended number of times. As future work, we plan to conduct a long-term period study to evaluate the effectiveness of Slowee on the formation of an eating habit beyond immediate action improvements.
Tranilast Prevents Activation of Transforming Growth Factor-&bgr; System, Leukocyte Accumulation, and Neointimal Growth in Porcine Coronary Arteries After Stenting

N (3,4-Dimethoxycinnamoyl) anthranilic acid (tranilast) prevents the synchronous upregulation of isoforms and receptors of the transforming growth factor (TGF)-&bgr; system after arterial injury and reduces restenosis after human coronary angioplasty. However, the effects of tranilast and the importance of the TGF-&bgr; system in stent restenosis, in which inward remodeling is unimportant but inflammatory cell stimulation of neointima formation is exaggerated, are uncertain. Boston minipigs, treated with tranilast or vehicle, were subjected to endoluminal stenting, and the expression of TGF-&bgr;1 and TGF-&bgr;3, the expression of their signaling receptors ALK-5 and T&bgr;R-II, leukocyte numbers around the stent struts, and neointima development were assessed over 28 days. Stenting greatly increased early (5-day) mRNA expression of the 2 TGF-&bgr; isoforms and their receptors. Immunohistochemical localization later showed that their concentrations were greatest in regions adjacent to stent struts, where leukocytes and collagen deposition were prevalent. Tranilast suppressed these elevations in TGF-&bgr; mRNAs and reduced their immunoreactive peptides detectable around stent struts. The accumulation of leukocytes and deposition of collagen in these regions was also greatly inhibited by tranilast. These effects were associated with a 48% reduction in maximal neointimal cross-sectional area and 43% reduction in mean neointimal cross-sectional area at 28 days (P <0.05). We conclude that tranilast suppresses neointima development after stenting, effects that can be at least partly attributed to its ability to attenuate the induction of the TGF-&bgr; system and leukocyte accumulation around stent struts.
Bovine Embryo Transfer

Introduction Bovine embryo transfer technology involves the selection and management, both physical and pharmacological, of donor and recipient animals, and the collection and transfer of embryos within a narrow window of time following estrus. This technology has been incorporated into large dairy and beef cattle operations, and often requires the participation of herd veterinarians. The following review is based extensively on handout material for a pre-conference seminar presented by the author for the annual meeting of the American Association of Bovine Practitioners (AABP). It also draws heavily on material contained in prior reviews, extensive literature of primary research on the topic, including reviews and reports from the author's laboratory.
Thermal Properties of the Hybrid Graphene-Metal Nano-Micro-Composites: Applications in Thermal Interface Materials

The authors report on synthesis and thermal properties of the electrically-conductive thermal interface materials with the hybrid graphene-metal particle fillers. The thermal conductivity of resulting composites was increased by ~500% in a temperature range from 300 K to 400 K at a small graphene loading fraction of 5-vol.-%. The unusually strong enhancement of thermal properties was attributed to the high intrinsic thermal conductivity of graphene, strong graphene coupling to matrix materials and the large range of the length-scale - from nanometers to micrometers - of the graphene and silver particle fillers. The obtained results are important for thermal management of advanced electronics and optoelectronics.
Multiple controllers sleeping management in green software defined wireless networking

Software Defined Networking (SDN) promises the formidable configuration, vigorous evolution, and satisfactory performance, which are helpful to network operators. Hence, researchers in the field of wireless are increasing their attentions in SDN-related orientation. SDN is still in its initial period. Some essential issues still remain not completely resolved, and the scalability of control plane is the most intractable one with the explosive increase of wireless network traffic. To address this issue, many researchers have proposed multiple controllers to realize logically centralized control layer. Along with the number of controllers increasing, the other problem appears, which is the energy consumption in SDN. Especially the energy consumption in the wireless network has been greatly serious. In this paper, taking advantage of multi-controller architecture called Hybridflow, we propose an M-N policy multiple controllers sleeping mode by switching off redundant controllers when system is in the light traffic condition. Simulation results reveal that the proposed M-N policy multiple controllers sleeping mode achieves superior energy efficiency compared to no sleeping mode.
TECHNOLOGICAL AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE IN THE EUROPEAN BANKING INDUSTRY

The world banking industry is undergoing a large-scale transformation. Banking systems and financial markets, both domestic and international, have been undergoing a series of profound changes. One of the main driving forces of these worldwide changes is the introduction of innovations in new information technologies. Against these trends, industrial structure in the banking industry and banking regulation have sometimes encouraged these trends and sometimes adapted to them. The aim of this paper is to present research findings and the main arguments in the literature on technological change and industrial organisation in the banking industry. The last section of the paper focuses on the role of information technologies in the banking industry. We present research findings of functional studies on IT investment in the banking industry. These studies have analysed the relationship between IT and corporate performance by examining specific IT applications in the context of corporate strategies.
Multi-Scale Image Registration Algorithm based on Improved SIFT

This paper proposes an image registration algorithm based on improved SIFT feature. In the feature detection, evenly distributed feature points are detected using non-maximum suppression and reduces detection times by dynamic adjustment of detecting step. While employs feature matching, the threshold of Euclidean distance ratio is adaptively determined according to the properties of images. Lastly, the error matching points are removed by geometric constraint consistency between the feature points through RANSAC algorithm. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.