Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis of LTE and DC-HSDPA performance with variable number of users per TTI in macro cellular network

Data traffic has significantly increased in the past years, and it is expected to grow even at higher pace. Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology and the concept of Dual-Cell High Speed Downlink Packet Access (DC-HSDPA) were introduced to serve the data users. The target of this paper is to analyse the impact of serving variable number of users per Transmission Time Interval (TTI) on the performance of LTE along with different antenna configuration and DC-HSDPA system with and without Power Control (PC). In this paper average cell throughput, relative throughput gain, and user's probability of no data transfer with different Intersite Distance (ISD) was analyzed in macro cellular environment. Simulation results revealed that average cell throughput decreases with the increase in both ISD and active number of users per TTI. But, LTE throughput was found to be more sensitive with the change in ISD, whereas DC-HSDPA throughput affects more with the change in serving number of users per TTI. DC-HSDPA with PC was found to offer lower probability of no data transfer compared to LTE regardless of ISD and active number of users.
Parallel Montgomery multiplication in GF(2/sup k/) using trinomial residue arithmetic

We propose the first general multiplication algorithm in GF(2/sup k/) with a subquadratic area complexity of O(k/sup 8/5/) = O(k/sup 1.6/). Using the Chinese remainder theorem, we represent the elements of GF(2/sup k/); i.e. the polynomials in GF(2) [X] of degree at most k-1, by their remainder modulo a set of n pairwise prime trinomials, T/sub 1/,. ,T/sub n/, of degree d and such that nd /spl ges/ k. Our algorithm is based on Montgomery's multiplication applied to the ring formed by the direct product of the trinomials.
Holmium:YAG vs thulium fiber laser dusting of calcium oxalate monohydrate stones

Recent advances in Holmium and Thulium fiber lasers (TFL) enable operation at similar parameters for comparison. A ‘dusting’ lithotripsy mode with low energy per pulse (0.2-0.4 J) and high pulse rates (50-80 Hz), is preferred to produce smaller residual stone fragments for natural passage through the urinary tract. Holmium and TFL were compared for dusting using three groups, G1: 0.2 J/50 Hz/10 W; G2: 0.2 J/80 Hz/16 W; and G3: 0.4 J/80 Hz/32 W. A setup with 1 x 1 cm cuvette and 1.0 mm sieve was used with total laser operation time limited to ≤ 5 min. Calcium oxalate monohydrate (COM) stones with average initial stone mass of 216-297 mg between groups were used. Holmium ablation rates were lower than for TFL at all settings (G1: 0.3 ± 0.2 vs. 0.8 ± 0.2; G2: 0.6 ± 0.1 vs. 1.0 ± 0.4; G3: 0.7 ± 0.2 vs. 1.3 ± 0.9 mg/s). TFL also produced a greater percentage by mass of stone dust (< 0.5 mm) than Holmium. For all three settings, 1/15 (7%) stones treated with Holmium were fragmented in ≤ 5 min vs. 9/15 (60%) stones treated with TFL. These preliminary studies demonstrate that TFL is a viable laser for stone dusting, producing higher stone ablation rates and smaller stone fragments than Holmium laser.
Enhancing the Data Collection Rate of Tree-Based Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

What is the fastest rate at which we can collect a stream of aggregated data from a set of wireless sensors organized as a tree? We explore a hierarchy of techniques using realistic simulation models to address this question. We begin by considering TDMA scheduling on a single channel, reducing the original problem to minimizing the number of time slots needed to schedule each link of the aggregation tree. The second technique is to combine the scheduling with transmission power control to reduce the effects of interference. To better cope with interference, we then study the impact of utilizing multiple frequency channels by introducing a simple receiver-based frequency and time scheduling approach. We find that for networks of about a hundred nodes, the use of multi-frequency scheduling can suffice to eliminate most of the interference. The data collection rate then becomes limited not by interference, but by the maximum degree of the routing tree. Therefore we consider finally how the data collection rate can be further enhanced by the use of degree-constrained routing trees. Considering deployments at different densities, we show that these enhancements can improve the streaming aggregated data collection by as much as 10 times compared to the baseline of single-channel data collection over non-degree constrained routing trees. Addition to our primary conclusion, in the frequency scheduling domain we evaluate the impact of different interference models on the scheduling performance and give topology-specific bounds on time slot and frequency channel requirements.
Health care costs of formula-feeding in the first year of life.

OBJECTIVE To determine the excess cost of health care services for three illnesses in formula-fed infants in the first year of life, after adjusting for potential confounders. METHODS Frequency of health service utilization for three illnesses (lower respiratory tract illnesses, otitis media, and gastrointestinal illness) in the first year of life was assessed in relation to duration of exclusive breastfeeding in the Tucson Children's Respiratory Study (n = 944) and the Dundee Community Study (Scottish study, n = 644). Infants in both studies were healthy at birth and represented nonselected, population-based samples. Children were classified as never breastfed, partially breastfed, or exclusively breastfed, based on their feeding status during the first 3 months of life. Frequency of office visits and hospitalizations for the three illnesses was adjusted for maternal education and maternal smoking, using analysis of variance. Cost estimates, from the perspective of the health care provider/payer, were based on the direct medical costs during 1995 within a large managed care health care system. RESULTS In the first year of life, after adjusting for confounders, there were 2033 excess office visits, 212 excess days of hospitalization, and 609 excess prescriptions for these three illnesses per 1000 never-breastfed infants compared with 1000 infants exclusively breastfed for at least 3 months. These additional health care services cost the managed care health system between $331 and $475 per never-breastfed infant during the first year of life. CONCLUSIONS In addition to having more illnesses, formula-fed infants cost the health care system money. Health care plans will likely realize substantial savings, as well as providing improved care, by supporting and promoting exclusive breastfeeding.
CRL/Brandeis: Description of the 
 Diderot System as Used for MUC-5

This report describes the major developments over the last six months in completing the Diderot information extraction system for the MUC-5 evaluation.Diderot is an information extraction system built at CRL and Brandeis University over the past two years. It was produced as part of our efforts in the Tipster project. The same overall system architecture has been used for English and Japanese and for the micro-electronics and joint venture domains.The past history of the system is discussed and the operation of its major components described. A summary of scores at the 24 month workshop is given and the performance of the system on the texts selected for the system walkthrough is discussed.
Real and imaginary truth in complex fuzzy implication

This paper examines the use of a parameterized family of implication operators based on Schweizer-Sklar T-norms. Removing a restriction imposed by Schweizer and Sklar when the parameter p is negative leads to improper implication operators for which the truth value can take values outside the unit interval, including complex values. Inferences using increasingly positive p produce inferences increasingly biased toward binary switching (“selectivity”), while inferences based on improper implication operators with increasingly negative p produce inferences increasingly biased to unweighted averaging (“consensus”).
Learning Bilingual Lexicons Using the Visual Similarity of Labeled Web Images

Speakers of many different languages use the Internet. A common activity among these users is uploading images and associating these images with words (in their own language) as captions, filenames, or surrounding text. We use these explicit, monolingual, image-to-word connections to successfully learn implicit, bilingual, word-to-word translations. Bilingual pairs of words are proposed as translations if their corresponding images have similar visual features. We generate bilingual lexicons in 15 language pairs, focusing on words that have been automatically identified as physical objects. The use of visual similarity substantially improves performance over standard approaches based on string similarity: for generated lexicons with 1000 translations, including visual information leads to an absolute improvement in accuracy of 8-12% over string edit distance alone.
NapkinVis: Rapid Pen-Centric Authoring of Improvisational Visualizations

This paper designs and implements a web-based, pen-centric front end for the Protovis toolkit, allowing users to quickly create visualizations for improvisational purposes. The design of this system is constrained to the scope of visualizations that you would be able to sketch on a paper napkin. Even within this limited canvas size, it is shown that by creating visual interactions for authoring visualizations as a combination of separable marks, one can produce a wide variety of visualizations in a matter of seconds without needing to write a single line of code.
Ten years of transcriptomics in wild populations: what have we learned about their ecology and evolution?

Molecular ecology has moved beyond the use of a relatively small number of markers, often noncoding, and it is now possible to use whole‐genome measures of gene expression with microarrays and RNAseq (i.e. transcriptomics) to capture molecular response to environmental challenges. While transcriptome studies are shedding light on the mechanistic basis of traits as complex as personality or physiological response to catastrophic events, these approaches are still challenging because of the required technical expertise, difficulties with analysis and cost. Still, we found that in the last 10 years, 575 studies used microarrays or RNAseq in ecology. These studies broadly address three questions that reflect the progression of the field: (i) How much variation in gene expression is there and how is it structured? (ii) How do environmental stimuli affect gene expression? (iii) How does gene expression affect phenotype? We discuss technical aspects of RNAseq and microarray technology, and a framework that leverages the advantages of both. Further, we highlight future directions of research, particularly related to moving beyond correlation and the development of additional annotation resources. Measuring gene expression across an array of taxa in ecological settings promises to enrich our understanding of ecology and genome function.
Char_align: A Program for Aligning Parallel Texts at the Character Level

There have been a number of recent papers on aligning parallel texts at the sentence level, e.g., Brown et al (1991), Gale and Church (to appear), Isabelle (1992), Kay and Rosenschein (to appear), Simard et al (1992), Warwick-Armstrong and Russell (1990). On clean inputs, such as the Canadian Hansards, these methods have been very successful (at least 96% correct by sentence). Unfortunately, if the input is noisy (due to OCR and/or unknown markup conventions), then these methods tend to break down because the noise can make it difficult to find paragraph boundaries, let alone sentences. This paper describes a new program, char_align, that aligns texts at the character level rather than at the sentence/paragraph level, based on the cognate approach proposed by Simard et al.
A reconfigurable time-domain comparator for multi-sensing applications

Wireless sensor network applications typically include various sensors (temperature, humidity, gas, etc.) and each sensor has different requirements of speed, noise, offset, and power consumption. In order to optimize the performance and allow long-time operation, reconfigurability is mostly desirable in the readout circuitry. In this paper, a reconfigurable time-domain comparator (RTDC) with low noise and low offset is proposed, mainly for reconfigurable SAR ADCs in wireless sensor nodes. With a supply voltage of 1.8 V, it can be dynamically reconfigured to operate in seven different modes for different sensing scenarios. From Mode 1 to Mode 7, the maximum operating speed of the comparator ranges from 182 MHz to 20 MHz with its input referred noise been reduced exponentially from 142 μV to 63.4 μV and its offset been reduced exponentially from 7.64 mV to 2.55 mV, respectively. The simulated energy efficiency is 1.27 pJ/conv in Mode 1 and it linearly increases to 9.48 pJ/conv in Mode 7. This wide operating range enables the best possible trade-off for the sensing node application at hand.
Transition systems over games

We describe a framework for game semantics combining operational and denotational accounts. A game is a bipartite graph of "passive" and "active" positions, or a categorical variant with morphisms between positions. The operational part of the framework is given by a labelled transition system in which each state sits in a particular position of the game. From a state in a passive position, transitions are labelled with a valid O-move from that position, and take us to a state over the updated position. Transitions from states in an active position are likewise labelled with a valid P-move, but silent transitions are allowed, which must take us to a state in the same position. The denotational part is given by a "transfer" from one game to another, a kind of program that converts moves between the two games, giving an operation on strategies. The agreement between the two parts is given by a relation called a "stepped bisimulation". The framework is illustrated by an example of substitution within a lambda-calculus.
Model transformation for robust speaker recognition from telephone data

In the context of automatic speaker recognition, we propose a model transformation technique that renders speaker models more robust to acoustic mismatches and to data scarcity by appropriately increasing their variances. We use a stereo database containing speech recorded simultaneously under different acoustic conditions to derive a synthetic variance distribution. This distribution is then used to modify the variances of other speaker models from other telephone databases. The technique is illustrated with experiments conducted on a locally collected database and on the NIST'95 and '96 subsets of the Switchboard corpus.
Modulation of Oligodendrocyte Differentiation by Mechanotransduction

Oligodendrocytes (OLs) are responsible for the myelination of axons in the central nervous system (CNS). The differentiation of OLs encompasses several stages, through which cells undergo dramatic biochemical and morphological changes. OL differentiation is modulated by soluble factors (SFs)—such as growth factors and hormones—, known to be essential for each maturation stage. Besides SFs, insoluble factors such as extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins and other microenvironmental elements also play a pivotal role during OL differentiation. Recently, a growing number of studies were published concerning the effect of biophysical properties of the extracellular milieu on OL differentiation and myelination, showing the importance of ECM stiffness and topography, strain forces and spatial constraints. For instance, it was shown in vitro that OL differentiation and maturation is enhanced by substrates within the reported range of stiffness of the brain and that this effect is potentiated by the presence of merosin, whereas the myelination process is influenced by the diameter of axonal-like fibers. In this mini review article, we will discuss the effect of mechanical cues during OL differentiation and the possible molecular mechanisms involved in such regulation.
Variational approximation of molecular kinetics from short off-equilibrium simulations

Hao Wu,∗ Feliks Nüske,† Fabian Paul,‡ Stefan Klus,§ Péter Koltai,¶ and Frank Noé∗∗ Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Arnimallee 6, 14195 Berlin, Germany Abstract Markov state models (MSMs) and Master equation models are popular approaches to approximate molecular kinetics, equilibria, metastable states, and reaction coordinates in terms of a state space discretization usually obtained by clustering. Recently, a powerful generalization of MSMs has been introduced, the variational approach of conformation dynamics (VAC) and its special case the timelagged independent component analysis (TICA), which allow us to approximate molecular kinetics and reaction coordinates by linear combinations of smooth basis functions or order parameters. While MSMs can be learned from trajectories whose starting points are not sampled from an equilibrium ensemble, TICA and VAC have as yet not enjoyed this property, and thus previous TICA/VAC estimates have been strongly biased when used with ensembles of short trajectories. Here, we employ Koopman operator theory and ideas from dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) to show how TICA/VAC can be used to estimate the unbiased equilibrium distribution from shorttrajectory data and further this result in order to construct unbiased estimators for expectations, covariance matrices, TICA/VAC eigenvectors, relaxation timescales, and reaction coordinates.
Validity of First-Order Approximations to Describe Parameter Uncertainty in Soil Hydrologic Models

Model nonlinearity and parameter interdependence violate the use of a first-order approximation to obtain exact confidence intervals of parameters in soil hydrologic models. In this study, the posterior distribution of parameters in soil water retention and hydraulic conductivity functions is examined using observed water retention data and a laboratory transient multistep outflow experiment. Parameter uncertainties obtained with traditional first-order approximations and uniform grid sampling strategies were compared with those obtained using the Metropolis algorithm, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler. A diagnostic measure, based on multiple sequences generated in parallel, was used to test whether convergence of the Metropolis sampler to the posterior distribution had been achieved. Most significantly, as the Metropolis algorithm can cope with rough response surfaces generated by the objective function used, it not only successfully infers the multivariate posterior probability distribution of the model parameters, but also provides valuable insights in parameter interdependence in the full parameter space.
Web-based Supplementary Materials for: “Rediscovery of Good-Turing estimators via Bayesian nonparametrics”

Summary: This supplementary material contains: i) the proofs of Theorems 1, Theorem 2 and Proposition 1; ii) the explicit expressions for the alternative scaling factors r ∗ ( m, l ) and r ∗ ( m, l 1 , . . . , l τ ); iii) details on the fast rejection sampling by Hofert (2011); iv) a sensitivity analysis for the asymptotic credible intervals with respect to the choice of the parameter ( σ, θ ).
Design Issues in Division and Other Floating-Point Operations

Floating-point division is generally regarded as a low frequency, high latency operation in typical floating-point applications. However, in the worst case, a high latency hardware floating-point divider can contribute an additional 0.50 CPI to a system executing SPECfp92 applications. This paper presents the system performance impact of floating-point division latency for varying instruction issue rates. It also examines the performance implications of shared multiplication hardware, shared square root, on-the-fly rounding and conversion, and fused functional units. Using a system level study as a basis, it is shown how typical floating-point applications can guide the designer in making implementation decisions and trade-offs.
Ensuring Population Health: An Important Role for Pharmacy

There is no question that the United States health system is the best in the world when it comes to providing care to individual patients. Of course, having high quality health care outcomes when individuals get sick is not the same as having a healthy population. In fact, as a nation we rank thirty-seventh on the World Health Association’s listing that compares the overall health of nations’ populations.1 This disparity between the superb care we provide to individuals and the poor overall health of our population is a significant problem, especially since we spend more per capita on health care than any other industrialized nation. Health is defined by the World Health Association as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. ”2
Enabling scalable multicolor connectomics through expansion microscopy

Decades of work in computational power and high resolution imaging have made it possible to observe specific neurons and their connections at a microscopic level. This level of resolution is known as the connectomic level. While we have been able to observe the brain at such resolution for some time thanks to electron microscopy (EM), the analysis of the resulting data has proven to be a very challenging task, mainly because it relies only on membrane contrast to differentiate cells. Expansion microscopy (ExM) offers an exciting alternative to EM by expanding physical brain tissue, with the added benefits that regular optical microscopes can be used for image acquisition. This will enable a faster, cheaper, and multicolor approach to connectomics, and may have the potential to realistically tackle a nervous system as large and complex as a mammalian brain. Currently, the study and the development of Expansion Microscopy are limited by the rate at which experiments run, which can take weeks, and sometimes months. In a previous project, we described a pipeline to create synthetic ExM images (SimExM) and discussed the importance of ground truth data in experimenting with segmentation algorithms. One of the main bottlenecks in creating a full connectome is the need for these ground truth annotations which require a substantial amount of manual work. This work explores various reconstruction strategies based on ExM. We evaluate their dependency on manual annotations and their overall performance, and contribute, as such, to the development of a scalable connectomics pipeline. Thesis Supervisor: Edward S. Boyden Title: Associate Professor
Enhancing the transmission efficiency by edge deletion in scale-free networks.

How to improve the transmission efficiency of Internet-like packet switching networks is one of the most important problems in complex networks as well as for the Internet research community. In this paper we propose a convenient method to enhance the transmission efficiency of scale-free networks dramatically by kicking out the edges linking to nodes with large betweenness, which we called the "black sheep. " The advantages of our method are of facility and practical importance. Since the black sheep edges are very costly due to their large bandwidth, our method could decrease the cost as well as gain higher throughput of networks. Moreover, we analyze the curve of the largest betweenness on deleting more and more black sheep edges and find that there is a sharp transition at the critical point where the average degree of the nodes -->2 .