Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A data-driven QoT decision approach for multicast connections in metro optical networks

A data-driven technique for analyzing Quality-of-Transmission (QoT) data of previously established connections is proposed for accurately deciding the QoT of the newly arriving multicast requests in metro optical networks. The proposed approach is self-adaptive, it is a function of data that are independent from the physical layer impairment (PLIs) and thus does not require specific measurement equipment, and it does not assume the existence of a system with extensive processing and storage capabilities. It is also fast in processing new data, and fast in finding a near-accurate QoT model provided that such a model exists. The proposed technique can replace the existing Q-factor models that are not self-adaptive, they are a function of the PLIs, and their evaluation requires time-consuming simulations, lab experiments, specific measurement equipment, and considerable human effort. The proposed data-driven QoT approach is based on the utilization of a feed-forward neural network that is trained on a dataset previously generated from a known Q-factor model. The dataset fed to the neural network is represented in a way that specifically describes the QoT of the multicast connections requesting to be established in the network but it is independent from the PLIs. The validity of the proposed approach is examined for two distinct networks, exhibiting a high accuracy when compared to the results of the Q-factor model utilized for generating the QoT data.
Energy-efficient precoding matrix design for relay-aided multiuser downlink networks

This paper considers the energy-efficient precoding matrix design for relay-aided multiuser downlink multiple-input single-output wireless systems. The precoders of the base station (BS) and the relay station (RS) are designed to maximize the transmit energy efficiency, defined as the ratio between the system sum rate and the total power consumption, under the quality-of-service constraints of the users and the transmit power constraints on the BS and the RS. In view of the fact that this precoder design problem is a nonconvex fractional programming, a successive Dinkelbach and convex approximation (SDCA) algorithm is proposed to handle this problem. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SDCA algorithm, and significant EE improvement as the number of antennas at the BS and the RS increases.
Feature space normalization in adverse acoustic conditions

We study the effect of different feature space normalization techniques in adverse acoustic conditions. Recognition tests are reported for cepstral mean and variance normalization, histogram normalization, feature space rotation, and vocal tract length normalization on a German isolated word recognition task with large acoustic mismatch. The training data was recorded in a clean office environment and the test data in cars. Speech recognition failed completely without normalization on the highway dataset, whereas the word error rate could be reduced to 17% using an online setup and to 10% with an offline setup.
Endoscopic capsule localization with unknown signal propagation coefficients

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) localization techniques have gained increasing popularity for medical diagnostics and treatments, particularly in gastro-intestinal (GI) track, in recent years. In these localization techniques, some parameters such as relative permittivity and path loss coefficients in the human body have significant effects on the accuracy of the capsule localization. Hence, these coefficients need to be accurately known or estimated for the effectiveness of the localization algorithm. This paper proposes a new adaptive biomedical capsule localization scheme utilizing a recent geometric cooperative sensor technique to estimate the path loss coefficient for received signal strength (RSS) and the relative permittivity for time-of-flight (TOF) based range sensors. This cooperative environmental coefficient estimation technique involves use of a mobile sensor triplet in place of a single sensor, and provides instantaneous estimates. The proposed capsule localization scheme is combination of a discrete time recursive least squares (RLS) based adaptive localization scheme and the aforementioned coefficient estimation technique, with design parameters specific for the particular WCE localization application. The accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed scheme is successfully demonstrated via a set of simulation tests.
Practitioner review: Psychosocial interventions for children with selective mutism: a critical evaluation of the literature from 1990-2005.

BACKGROUND There have been several reports of successful psychosocial interventions for children with selective mutism (SM), a disorder in which a child consistently fails to speak in one or more social settings (e.g., school) despite speaking normally in other settings (e.g., home). The present literature review was undertaken in order to provide an up-to-date summary and critique of the SM treatment literature published in the past fifteen years. METHODS PubMed, PsycINFO, and Web of Science databases were searched to identify SM treatment studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 1990 and 2005. RESULTS A total of 23 studies were included in the present review. Of these, ten used a behavioral/cognitive behavioral approach, one used a behavioral language training approach, one used a family systems approach, five used a psychodynamic approach, and six used multimodal approaches to SM treatment. CONCLUSIONS Although much of this literature is limited by methodological weaknesses, the existing research provides support for the use of behavioral and cognitive-behavioral interventions. Multimodal treatments also appear promising, but the essential components of these interventions have yet to be established. An outline of a cognitive-behavioral treatment package for a typical SM child is provided and the review concludes with suggestions for future research.
Examining the Influence of Risk Factors Across Rural and Urban Communities

Objective: Juvenile offending persists as a problem across geographic contexts, yet policymakers and social work practitioners have traditionally relied solely on urban research due to the lack of literature on rural delinquency. The purpose of this study is to examine the differential influence of demographic, behavioral, and school-related factors on juvenile offending in rural and urban settings. Method: The sample included kindergarten through 12th grade students (N = 615,297) who attended Louisiana public schools between 1996 and 2012. Data were obtained from state-wide administrative databases. Contact with the juvenile justice system, offense severity, and offending trajectory comparisons between youth in rural and urban environments were examined using multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression models and average adjusted predictive margins. Results: Factors that significantly increased the odds of juvenile justice contact in all models were African American race, male gender, grade retention, receiving free lunch (a proxy for poverty), birth year (cohort control), average yearly absences from school, and previous juvenile justice contact. The relative influences of these variables were similar across rural and urban contexts. In the overall model, odds were greater that rural students would encounter the juvenile justice system than urban students would. Conclusions: The increased odds of juvenile justice contact among rural youth contradicts much of the existing literature. Researchers must direct more attention to youth crime across geographic contexts to understand trends in rural areas and adapt interventions accordingly.
A multiple equivalent execution trace approach to secure cryptographic embedded software

We propose an efficient and effective method to secure software implementations of cryptographic primitives on low-end embedded systems, against passive side-channel attacks relying on the observation of power consumption or electro-magnetic emissions. The proposed approach exploits a modified LLVM compiler toolchain to automatically generate a secure binary characterized by a randomized execution flow. Also, we provide a new method to refresh the random values employed in the share splitting approaches to lookup table protection, addressing a currently open issue. We improve the current state-of-the-art in dynamic executable code countermeasures removing the requirement of a writeable code segment, and reducing the countermeasure overhead.
Experiments with Interactive Question-Answering

This paper describes a novel framework for interactive question-answering (Q/A) based on predictive questioning. Generated off-line from topic representations of complex scenarios, predictive questions represent requests for information that capture the most salient (and diverse) aspects of a topic. We present experimental results from large user studies (featuring a fully-implemented interactive Q/A system named FERRET) that demonstrates that surprising performance is achieved by integrating predictive questions into the context of a Q/A dialogue.
Exploiting long-range temporal dynamics of speech for noise-robust speaker recognition

Temporal dynamics is an important feature of speech that distinguishes speech from noise, as well as distinguishing between different speakers. In this paper, we present an approach to maximally extract this feature of speech to improve the robustness against background noise, for text-independent speaker recognition. The new approach identifies and compares the longest matching speech segments between the training and test speech to increase noise immunity. Experiments have been conducted on the NIST 2002 SRE database in the presence of various types of noise including fast-varying song and music. The new approach has shown significantly improved performance over conventional noise-robust techniques.
Let ’ s Talk Ethics : Privacy and Data Protection Framework for a Learning Analytics Toolbox

To find a balance between learning analytics research and individual privacy a learning analytics project needs to appropriately address privacy and data protection issues and comply with relevant legal regulations. A range of general guidelines, model codes, and principles for appropriate data and privacy protection exist that may serve the consideration of these topics in a learning analytics context. The importance and significance of data protection are also reflected in national and international laws and directives, where data protection is usually considered as a fundamental right. Existing ethics guidelines and approaches and relevant regulations served as a basis for elaborating a privacy and data protection framework for the LEA’s BOX project. A set of eight principles has been defined to derive implications to ensure an ethical treatment of personal data in the learning analytics platform and services.
Scientific Application Performance on HPC, Private and Public Cloud Resources: A Case Study Using Climate, Cardiac Model Codes and the NPB Benchmark Suite

The ubiquity of on-demand cloud computing resources enables scientific researchers to dynamically provision and consume compute and storage resources in response to science needs. Whereas traditional HPC compute resources are often centrally managed with a priori CPU-time allocations and use policies. A long term goal of our work is to assess the efficacy of preserving the user environment (compilers, support libraries, runtimes and application codes) available at a traditional HPC facility for deployment into a VM environment, which can then be subsequently used in both private and public scientific clouds. This would afford greater flexibility to users in choosing hardware resources that suit their science needs better, as well as aiding them in transitioning onto private/public cloud resources. In this paper we present work in-progress performance results for a set of benchmark kernels and scientific applications running in a traditional HPC environment, a private VM cluster and an Amazon HPC EC2 cluster. These are the OSU MPI micro-benchmark, the NAS Parallel macro-benchmarks and two large scientific application codes (the UK Met Office's MetUM global climate model and the Chaste multi-scale computational biology code) respectively. We discuss parallel scalability and runtime information obtained using the IPM performance monitoring framework for MPI applications. We were also able to successfully build application codes in a traditional HPC environment and package these into VMs which ran on both private and public cloud resources.
Role of TGF β and myofibroblasts in supporting the propagation of human embryonic stem cells in vitro

The feeder layer constitutes a prerequisite for the undifferentiated proliferation of human embryonic stem (hES) cells in vitro. However, a few feeders have been reported to be nonsupportive in nature, suggesting that these feeders exhibit a different transcriptome and proteome, in comparison to their supportive counterparts. In an attempt to identify factors required for undifferentiated growth and many downstream applications of hES cells, transcriptomes of supportive (mouse fibroblasts derived from 13.5dpc embryos and human fetal fibroblasts) and non-supportive (mouse fibroblasts derived from 18.5dpc embryos) feeders were analyzed. Furthermore, the parallel correlation of data generated in the microarray study with the published proteome data of supportive feeder fibroblasts, helped us to focus on the proteins which seem to be likely candidates in supporting the undifferentiated expansion of ES cells in vitro. Our results indicated that TGFβ and its associated signaling molecules facilitate the undifferentiated proliferation of hES cells in vitro. The transient differentiation of feeder fibroblasts into myofibroblasts may be the decisive factor for a feeder layer to be supportive or non-supportive in nature. We propose that the microenvironment of feeder myofibroblasts dictates TGFβ to support proliferation and apparently plays the contradictory role of facilitating differentiation when feeder support is withdrawn, possibly by acting through different signaling mechanisms.
Electronic Reprint Biological Crystallography on the Development of Three New Tools for Organizing and Sharing Information in Three-dimensional Electron Microscopy Integrative Structural Biology Biological Crystallography on the Development of Three New Tools for Organizing and Sharing Information i

Author(s) of this paper may load this reprint on their own web site or institutional repository provided that this cover page is retained. Republication of this article or its storage in electronic databases other than as specified above is not permitted without prior permission in writing from the IUCr. Acta Crystallographica Section D: Biological Crystallography welcomes the submission of papers covering any aspect of structural biology, with a particular emphasis on the structures of biological macromolecules and the methods used to determine them. Reports on new protein structures are particularly encouraged, as are structure–function papers that could include crystallographic binding studies, or structural analysis of mutants or other modified forms of a known protein structure. The key criterion is that such papers should present new insights into biology, chemistry or structure. Papers on crystallographic methods should be oriented towards biological crystallography, and may include new approaches to any aspect of structure determination or analysis. Papers on the crys-tallization of biological molecules will be accepted providing that these focus on new methods or other features that are of general importance or applicability. Electron microscopy is a valuable tool for elucidating the three-dimensional structures of macromolecular complexes. As the field matures and the number of solved structures increases, the existence of infrastructures that keep this information organized and accessible is crucial. At the same time, standards and clearly described conventions facilitate software maintenance, benefit interoperability with other packages and allow data interchange. This work describes three developments promoting integrative biology, standardization and workflow processing, namely PeppeR, the EMX initiative and Scipion.
DOS AJUSTES SUPRAGLÓTICOS NA DISFONIA Perceptive and acoustic correlates of supraglottis adjustments in dysfonia

Purpose: to evaluate auditory perception (supraglottic adjustments) and acoustic (formants) of vocal quality in dysphonic individuals with glotic disorders, attended in a clinic a hospital in the city of São Paulo. Methods: the studied was represented by voice samples taken form from 20 dysphonic people aged between 30 and 65 of the female gender (attended in a hospital in the city of Sao Paulo) and the auditory perception judgment of the vocal quality was represented by samples previously evaluated by active judges in clinic activity. The samples were explored as for the frequency of the fi rst three formants (F1, F2 and F3). The values were considered as for their quality (compared to the data of auditory perception analysis) and their quantity (Qui-square test) Results: the more frequent adjustments of vocal quality were low larynx, closed jaw, lip rounding, lowered tongue body, retracted tongue body, labiodentalization. Statistically meaningful differences were found for the frequency value of F1 for the syllables “cata” (864 Hz) and “gata” (814Hz), p=0 and F3 for the syllables “cata” (2598 Hz) and “gata”(2660 Hz), p=0.17 for the subjects of the group studied with relation to the values of reference for Portuguese-Brazilian language. Conclusion: the identifi ed adjustments of vocal quality met correspondence with the reducing of values of F1 and F3 indicating trends for vocal treat adjustments.
A 500 PARSEC HALO SURROUNDING THE GALACTIC GLOBULAR NGC 1851

Using imaging that shows 4 mag of main-sequence stars, we have discovered that the Galactic globular cluster NGC 1851 is surrounded by a halo that is visible from the tidal radius of 700 arcsec (41 pc) to more than 4500 arcsec (>250 pc). This halo is symmetric and falls in density as a power law of r−1.24. It contains approximately 0.1% of the dynamical mass of NGC 1851. There is no evidence for tidal tails. Current models of globular cluster evolution do not explain this feature, although simulations of tidal influences on dwarf spheroidal galaxies qualitatively mimic these results. Given the state of published models, it is not possible to decide between creation of this halo from either isolated cluster evaporation or from tidal or disk shocking, or from destruction of a dwarf galaxy in which this object may have once been embedded.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-plus syndrome with TAR DNA-binding protein-43 pathology.

BACKGROUND Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)-Plus syndromes meet clinical criteria for ALS but also include 1 or more additional features such as dementia, geographic clustering, extrapyramidal signs, objective sensory loss, autonomic dysfunction, cerebellar degeneration, or ocular motility disturbance. METHODS We performed a whole-brain and spinal cord pathologic analysis in a patient with an ALS-Plus syndrome that included repetitive behaviors along with extrapyramidal and supranuclear ocular motility disturbances resembling the clinical phenotype of progressive supranuclear palsy. RESULTS There was motoneuron cell loss and degeneration of the corticospinal tracts. Bunina bodies were present. TAR DNA-binding protein-43 pathology was diffuse. Significant tau pathology was absent. CONCLUSIONS TAR DNA-binding protein-43 disorders can produce a clinical spectrum of neurodegeneration that includes ALS, frontotemporal lobar degeneration, and ALS with frontotemporal lobar degeneration. The present case illustrates that isolated TAR DNA-binding protein-43 disorders can produce an ALS-Plus syndrome with extrapyramidal features and supranuclear gaze palsy resembling progressive supranuclear palsy.
The early origins of human charity: developmental changes in preschoolers’ sharing with poor and wealthy individuals

Recent studies have provided evidence that young children already engage in sharing behavior. The underlying social-cognitive mechanisms, however, are still under debate. In particular, it is unclear whether or not young children’s sharing is motivated by an appreciation of others’ wealth. Manipulating the material needs of recipients in a sharing task (Experiment 1) and a resource allocation task (Experiment 2), we show that 5- but not 3-year-old children share more with poor than wealthy individuals. The 3-year-old children even showed a tendency to behave less selfishly towards the rich, yet not the poor recipient. This suggests that very early instances of sharing behavior are not motivated by a consideration of others’ material needs. Moreover, the results show that 5-year-old children were rather inclined to give more to the poor individual than distributing the resources equally, demonstrating that their wish to support the poor overruled the otherwise very prominent inclination to share resources equally. This indicates that charity has strong developmental roots in preschool children.
Recurrent Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis: A Discrete Clinical Entity

Focal segmental glomerulosclerosis refers to a set of particular histopathologic lesions in which steroid-resistant podocyte injury leads to patchy adhesions between the glomerular tuft and Bowman's capsule, followed by progressive glomerulosclerosis and proteinuric renal failure. Because of the nonspecific nature of this lesion, it has been difficult to classify the various forms of primary nephrotic syndrome in children. However, with the recognition of hereditary FSGS caused by mutations podocyte slit diaphragm genes, it is increasingly clear that the steroid-resistant form of FSGS that recurs in the renal allografts (R-FSGS) constitutes a distinct clinical entity. Capitalizing on recent studies in which patients have been screened for slit diaphragm gene mutations, this review focuses on the natural history and pathogenesis of R-FSGS.
Growth and Reforms in Latin America: A Survey of Facts and Arguments

This paper presents a number of facts about growth in Latin America, and shows how critical correlates of growth have evolved over time. In comparison with other regions, Latin America has consistently exhibited higher macroeconomic volatility, lower openness, and higher income inequality, though openness and macroeconomic stability have improved since the early 1990s. The paper then discusses three views of why reforms have not led to higher growth in Latin America: that reforms have gone too far; that reforms have not gone far enough; and that reforms have missed the point.
Special Cinematographic Effects with Virtual Movie Cameras

The term "virtual camera" is often used in computer graphics, but it usually represents a mere abstraction for labeling the projection mechanism from 2D to 3D. We believe that a virtual camera should be a software entity that can be manipulated in the same way as cameramen manipulate real cameras. This article presents a model of a virtual movie camera and describes typical effects used by cameramen, including panning, tilting, tracking, zooming and spinning. Matte effects are introduced using an actorbased polygonal clipping method, and practical examples of such multiple-image effects as fades and wipes are presented.