Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coalitional Planning for Energy Efficiency of HetNets Powered by Hybrid Energy Sources

In this paper, we focus on the problem of planning heterogeneous cellular networks powered by renewable energy sources, which are a good alternative for dealing with the growth of mobile data traffic while minimizing energy consumption. The paper proposes a method based on a coalitional game in which small cells are players, with the Shapley value determining the contribution of each potential small cell to the global performance of the system. The characteristic function of the game is based on three key performance indicators: percentage of users served, reduction of grid consumption, and average transmission rate. The success of the coalitional game-based planning process is considered from an energy efficiency perspective, which means a reduction of on-grid consumption and an improvement of network performance according to renewable energy availability. The efficiency of the coalitional design is compared with other heuristic and optimal alternatives in two simulation examples. Our results show that the proposed coalitional planning scheme produces an efficient use of energy compared to other strategies.
Robust and automatic motion-capture data recovery using soft skeleton constraints and model averaging

Motion capture allows accurate recording of human motion, with applications in many fields, including entertainment, medicine, sports science and human computer interaction. A common difficulty with this technology is the occurrence of missing data, due to occlusions, or recording conditions. Various models have been proposed to estimate missing data. Some are based on interpolation, low-rank properties or inter-correlations. Others involve dataset matching or skeleton constraints. While the latter have the advantage of promoting a realistic motion estimation, they require prior knowledge of skeleton constraints, or the availability of a prerecorded dataset. In this article, we propose a probabilistic averaging method of several recovery models (referred to as Probabilistic Model Averaging (PMA) in this paper), based on the likelihoods of the distances between body points. This method has the advantage of being automatic, while allowing an efficient gap data recovery. To support and validate the proposed method, we use a set of four individual recovery models, based on linear/nonlinear regression in local coordinate systems. Finally, we propose two heuristic algorithms to enforce skeleton constraints in the reconstructed motion, which can be used on any individual recovery model. For validation purposes, random gaps were introduced into motion-capture sequences, and the effects of factors such as the number of simultaneous gaps, gap length and sequence duration were analyzed. Results show that the proposed probabilistic averaging method yields better recovery than (i) each of the four individual models and (ii) two recent state-of-the-art models, regardless of gap length, sequence duration and number of simultaneous gaps. Moreover, both of our heuristic skeleton-constraint algorithms significantly improve the recovery for 7 out of 8 tested motion-capture sequences (p < 0.05), for 10 simultaneous gaps of 5 seconds. The code is available for free download at: https://github.com/numediart/MocapRecovery.
Traffic-Adaptive Spectrum Leasing Between Primary and Secondary Networks

Spectrum leasing has been widely regarded as one of the most effective ways to improve the utilization of limited spectrum resources. In this paper, we propose a novel traffic-adaptive spectrum leasing (TASL) scheme by allowing secondary users (SUs) to lease part of licensed spectrum channels from primary users (PUs) temporarily for transmitting the dynamically generated secondary packets. As the time length of each leasing period is variable according to the dynamic generation of secondary packets, the proposed TASL can effectively satisfy the quality-of-service requirement of SUs and also benefit PUs with the financial payoff provided by SUs. By establishing a three-dimensional continuous Markov chain for the proposed TASL, we formulate the average utilities of PUs and SUs in terms of the expected buffering time of primary and secondary packets, as well as the expected transmission throughput of PUs and SUs. Moreover, to coordinate the interests of PUs and SUs in a noncooperative manner, we also propose a Stackelberg game model for PUs and SUs to negotiate various spectrum leasing parameters and further apply two specific rules to guarantee the existence of a unique equilibrium solution. Numerical simulation shows that, compared with those existing spectrum leasing schemes that preset a fixed-time length for leasing periods, the proposed TASL can effectively improve the utilization of the leased channels, increase the average utilities of both PUs and SUs, and be more suitable for newly emerging applications that are sensitive to packet transmission delay and buffering overhead.
Xiao-Xu-Ming Decoction Reduced Mitophagy Activation and Improved Mitochondrial Function in Cerebral Ischemia and Reperfusion Injury

We investigated whether Xiao-Xu-Ming decoction reduced mitophagy activation and kept mitochondrial function in cerebral ischemia-reperfusion injury. Rats were randomly divided into 5 groups: sham, ischemia and reperfusion (IR), IR plus XXMD (60 g/kg/day) (XXMD60), IR plus cyclosporin A (10 mg/kg/day) (CsA), and IR plus vehicle (Vehicle). Focal cerebral ischemia and reperfusion models were induced by middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO). Cerebral infarct areas were measured by triphenyl tetrazolium chloride staining. Cerebral ischemic injury was evaluated by hematoxylin and eosin staining (HE) and Nissl staining. Ultrastructural features of mitochondria and mitophagy in the penumbra of the ischemic cortex were observed by transmission electron microscopy. Mitophagy was detected by immunofluorescence labeled with LC3B and VDAC1. Autophagy lysosome formation was observed by immunofluorescence labeled with LC3B and Lamp1. The expression of LC3B, Beclin1, and Lamp1 was analyzed by Western blot. The rats subjected to MCAO showed worsened neurological score and cell ischemic damage. These were all significantly reversed by XXMD or CsA. Moreover, XXMD/CsA notably downregulated mitophagy and reduced the increase in LC3, Beclin1, and Lamp1 expression induced by cerebral ischemia and reperfusion. The findings demonstrated that XXMD exerted neuroprotective effect via downregulating LC3, Beclin1, Lamp1, and mitochondrial p62 expression level, thus leading to the inhibition of mitophagy.
Global Stabilization of Boolean Networks to Control the Heterogeneity of Cellular Responses

Boolean networks (BNs) have been widely used as a useful model for molecular regulatory networks in systems biology. In the state space of BNs, attractors represent particular cell phenotypes. For targeted therapy of cancer, there is a pressing need to control the heterogeneity of cellular responses to the targeted drug by reducing the number of attractors associated with the ill phenotypes of cancer cells. Here, we present a novel control scheme for global stabilization of BNs to a unique fixed point. Using a sufficient condition of global stabilization with respect to the adjacency matrix, we can determine a set of constant controls so that the controlled BN is steered toward an unspecified fixed point which can then be further transformed to a desired attractor by subsequent control. Our method is efficient in that it has polynomial complexity with respect to the number of state variables, while having exponential complexity with respect to in-degree of BNs. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed control scheme, we conduct simulation studies using a regulation influence network describing the metastatic process of cells and the Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling network that is crucial in cancer cell fate determination.
Joint Optimization of Caching and Association in Energy-Harvesting-Powered Small-Cell Networks

The rapidly growing mobile traffic calls for higher quality of service (QoS) and lower on-grid energy cost. Integrating energy harvesting to small-cell networks (SCNs) with caching has been regarded as a promising solution. However, considering the limited resources of the small-cell base stations (SBSs), how to cache contents and serve the mobile users (MUs) is a crucial problem. In this paper, we jointly design a green content caching and mobile user–base station (MU-BS) association mechanism in the SCNs, where the number of MUs’ content requests served by the SBSs is maximized. This mechanism maximizes the number of requests handled by the SBSs under the constraints of the available energy and backhaul capacity of the SBSs, while concurrently ensures the QoS of the MUs. First, the joint optimization problem is formulated, which is NP-hard. To decrease the complexity of the problem, we divide it into two subproblems: MU-BS association and content caching. But when the number of SBSs is large, these two subproblems cannot be efficiently solved by the conventional centralized approaches. Thus, we construct a two-dimensional-action weakly acyclic game to optimize these two subproblems distributedly and iteratively, in which the existence of the two-dimensional-action Nash equilibrium has been proved. Finally, we propose a two-dimensional iteration algorithm to solve the problem. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better performance when compared with the other existing algorithms.
Design and verification of large-scale optical circuit switch using ULCF AWGs for datacenter application

The exponential increase in the volume of traffic being processed by datacenters demands massive electrical switches and complicated interconnections. The power consumption will soon become critical, and the problem is expected to be resolved by introducing large-port-count optical circuit switches that connect many server racks or pods. In this paper, we propose a novel optical-circuit-switch architecture that uses n × N uniformloss and cyclic-frequency (ULCF) arrayed-waveguide gratings (AWGs) as low-loss wavelength routers. To confirm the effectiveness of our proposal, a pair of 12 × 48 ULCF AWGs is fabricated using planar-lightwave-circuit technology. Part of a 1536 × 1536 optical circuit switch is constructed, and its good transmission performance is experimentally confirmed through 96-wavelength 100-Gbps signal transmission in the full C-band. The switch throughput reaches 153.6 Tbps.
Cryptic “royal” subfamilies in honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies

During emergency queen rearing, worker honey bees (Apis mellifera) select several otherwise worker-destined larvae to instead rear as candidates to replace their dead or failing queen. This choice is crucial as the queen is the sole reproductive in the colony and her quality is essential to its success. Because honey bee queens mate with and store sperm from multiple drones, emergency queen selection presents workers with an opportunity to increase fitness by selecting full- (0.75 relatedness), rather than half- (0.25 relatedness), sisters as new queen candidates. Through patriline analysis of colonies along with large numbers of emergency queens reared by each we affirm the purported “royal” patriline theory that, instead of competing nepotistically, workers exhibit bias towards selecting individuals from particular “royal” subfamilies during emergency queen rearing events, Further, we show that these “royal” patrilines are cryptic in honey bee colonies; occurring in such low frequency in the overall colony population that they are frequently undetected in traditional tests of queen mating number and colony composition. The identification of these cryptic “royal” subfamilies reveals that honey bee queens, already considered “hyperpolyandrous,” are mating with even more males than has been previously recognized. These results alter our understanding of reproductive behavior in honey bees, raising questions about the evolutionary implications of this phenomenon.
Sentiment and Politeness Analysis Tools on Developer Discussions Are Unreliable, but So Are People

Many software engineering researchers use sentiment and politeness analysis tools to study the emotional environment within collaborative software development. However, papers that use these tools rarely establish their reliability. In this paper, we evaluate popular existing tools for sentiment and politeness detection over a dataset of 589 manually rated GitHub comments that represent developer discussions. We also develop a coding scheme on how to quantify politeness for conversational texts found on collaborative platforms. We find that not only do the tools have a low agreement with human ratings on sentiment and politeness, human raters also have a low agreement among themselves.
Cell detection by surface imprinted polymers (SIPs) — A study of the sensor surface by optical and dielectric relaxation spectroscopy

Cell imprinting on polymer layers produces synthetic receptors, so called surface imprinted polymers (SIPs) that are suitable for specific and selective cellular recognition. However, their recognition mechanisms are not yet fully understood. Therefore, various factors that influence cell recognition were explored using different spectroscopic techniques. Specifically, the molecular dynamics of surface-imprinted and non-imprinted polyurethane layers was studied with focus on the dielectric relaxation signatures of proteins and lipids by dielectric relaxation spectroscopy. Furthermore, we have tested an interdigitated comb electrode (IDE) structure placed beneath the cell recognition layer. It was shown that both plane and IDE configurations sense the molecular dynamics of the PU layer correctly, and also reveal specific information about the polymer/cell interface.
Data mining techniques and nature-inspired algorithms for query expansion

Data mining techniques and nature-inspired algorithms are currently among the most frequently used soft computing techniques for knowledge discovery, optimization, and computational intelligence. In this paper, we propose the application of both data mining techniques and nature-inspired algorithms to overcome the problem of generating the optimum expanded query in web information retrieval. We first use data mining techniques to group similar expansion term candidates into clusters. Next, we use nature-inspired algorithms to extract expansion term candidates from clusters and generate the suitable expanded query. We empirically assess the proposed approach using MEDLINE, the large online medical repository. Numerical experiments show that the proposed approach attains higher effectiveness and efficiency compared to conventional and recently published methods.
Improving the Sunscreen Properties of TiO2 through an Understanding of Its Catalytic Properties

The use of particulate titanium dioxide (TiO2) as an active sunscreen ingredient has raised concerns about potential risks from TiO2-mediated free radical formation. To date, remediation attempts have concentrated on reducing the yield of free radical generation by TiO2 upon sunlight exposure. The problem with this approach is that given the band gap in TiO2, production of radical and the ensuing reactive oxygen species (ROS) is completely normal. Our strategy is based on a nontoxic, biocompatible shell that neutralizes the free radicals by scavenging them with natural antioxidants before they exit the particle. The new lignin@TiO2 composites preserve the scattering and absorption properties of TiO2 because the particles retain their nanoscale dimensions as preferred by the cosmetic industry. Although the target properties for photocatalysis and sun-protection applications are opposite, we argue that exactly the same knowledge is required to optimize either one.
Speciation among sympatric lineages in the genus Palythoa (Cnidaria: Anthozoa: Zoantharia) revealed by morphological comparison, phylogenetic analyses and investigation of spawning period

Zoantharians are sessile marine invertebrates and colonial organisms possessing sexual and asexual reproductive ability. The zooxanthellate zoantharian genus Palythoa is widely distributed in coral reef ecosystems. In the Ryukyu Archipelago, Japan, sympatric Palythoa tuberculosa and P. mutuki are the dominant species of this genus in the intertidal zone. Previous phylogenetic analyses have shown that these two species are closely related, and additionally revealed a putative sympatric hybrid species (designated as Palythoa sp. yoron). In this study, we attempted to delineate Palythoa species boundaries and to clarify the relationships among these three groups plus another additional putative sympatric species (P. aff. mutuki) by multiple independent criteria. The morphology of these four lineages was clearly different; for example the number of tentacles was significantly different for each species group in all pairwise comparisons. From observations of gonadal development conducted in 2010 and 2011, P. sp. yoron and P. aff. mutuki appear to be reproductively isolated from P. tuberculosa. In the phylogenetic tree resulting from maximum likelihood analyses of the ITS-rDNA sequence alignment, P. tuberculosa and P. sp. yoron formed a very well supported monophyletic clade (NJ = 100%, ML = 95%, Bayes = 0.99). This study demonstrates that despite clear morphological and/or reproductive differences, P. tuberculosa and P. sp. yoron are phylogenetically entangled and closely related to each other, as are P. mutuki and P. aff. mutuki. Additionally, no single molecular marker was able to divide these four lineages into monophyletic clades by themselves, and a marker that has enough resolution to solve this molecular phylogenetic species complex is required. In summary, the morphological and reproductive results suggest these lineages are four separate species, and that incomplete genetic lineage sorting may prevent the accurate phylogenetic detection of distinct species with the DNA markers utilized in this study, demonstrating the value of morphological and reproductive data when examining closely related lineages.
Molecular characterization of clonal lineage and staphylococcal toxin genes from S. aureus in Southern Nigeria

Background Staphylococcus aureus is a human colonizer with high potential for virulence, and the spread of the virulent strains from the colonized hosts to non-carriers in the community is on the increase. However, there are few reports on comprehensive analysis of staphylococcal enterotoxin (SE) genes with clonal lineage in S. aureus in Africa. This is essential because of diversity of cultures and habits of the people. This study analyzed spa types and enterotoxin genes in S. aureus strains previously isolated from the human nostrils, poultry and clinical samples in Southern Nigeria. Methods Forty-seven S. aureus isolates were obtained from humans nostrils (n = 13), clinical strains (n = 21) and poultry (n = 13) from previous studies in Southern Nigeria. The strains were analyzed for mecA gene, selected toxins genes (sea, seb, sec, sed, see, seg, seh, sei, sej, sek, sel, sem, sen, seo, sep, seq, ser, seu) and Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL) gene (lukS-PV/lukF-PV) by PCR. Population structures of the strains were detected by Staphylococcal protein A (spa) typing. Results Twenty different spa types were obtained with the highest percentages, 17% observed in spa type t091 from clinical, nasal and poultry samples while t069 was the most prevalent spa type in poultry. Two MRSA were only detected in human strains. The poultry strains had the highest occurrence of SE genes (18%) followed by nasal strains (15%) and clinical strains (10%). Eighty-nine percent of all tested isolates harbored at least one SE gene; seo was the most prevalent (34%) followed by seg (30%) and sea (21%), while sec, see and sej were absent in all strains. Spa type t355 was associated with lukS-PV/lukF-PV gene and complete absence of all studied SE. Sea, seq, seb, sek were associated with spa type t069; sea was associated with t127 while sep was associated with spa type t091. There were coexistences of seo/seg and sei/seg. Conclusions The higher carriage of staphylococci enterotoxin genes by the nasal and poultry S. aureus strains suggests a high potential of spread of staphylococcal food poisoning through poultry and healthy carriers in the community. This is the first report of high occurrence of staphylococcal enterotoxins genes in poultry from Nigeria.
Finite-State Map-Reduce Computation and Relational Algebra Queries

We introduce three formal models of distributed systems for query evaluation on massive databases: Distributed Streaming with Register Automata (DSAs), Distributed Streaming with Register Transducers (DSTs), and Distributed Streaming with Register Transducers and Joins (DSTJs). These models are based on the map-reduce paradigm where the input is transformed into a dataset of key-value pairs, and on each key a local computation is performed on the values associated with that key resulting in another set of key-value pairs. Computation proceeds in a constant number of rounds, where the result of the last round is the input to the next round, and transformation of key-value pairs is required to be generic. The difference between the three models is in the local computation part. In DSAs it is limited to making one pass over its input using a register automaton, while in DSTs it can make two passes: in the first pass it uses a finite state automaton and in the second it uses a register transducer. The third model DSTJs is an extension of DSTs, where local computations are capable of constructing the Cartesian product of two sets. We obtain the following results: (1) DSAs can evaluate first-order queries over bounded degree databases; (2) DSTs can evaluate semijoin algebra queries over arbitrary databases; (3) DSTJs can evaluate the whole relational algebra over arbitrary databases; (4) DSTJs are strictly stronger than DSTs, which in turn are strictly stronger than DSAs; (5) within DSAs, DSTs, and DSTJs, there is a strict hierarchy w.r. t. the number of rounds.
Convex Optimization Based Bit Allocation for Light Field Compression Under Weighting and Consistency Constraints

Compared with conventional image and video, light field images introduce the weight channel, as well as the visual consistency of rendered view, information that has to be taken into account when compressing the pseudo-temporal-sequence (PTS) created from light field images. In this paper, we propose a novel frame level bit allocation framework for PTS coding. A joint model that measures weighted distortion and visual consistency, combined with an iterative encoding system, yields the optimal bit allocation for each frame by solving a convex optimization problem. Experimental results show that the proposed framework is effective in producing desired distortion distribution based on weights, and achieves up to 24.7% BD-rate reduction comparing to the default rate control algorithm.
A New Methodology to Build the Internal Activity Block of ICEM-CE for Complex Integrated Circuits

End-users of integrated circuits need models to anticipate and solve conducted emission issues at board level in a short time. The standard IEC62433-2 integrated circuit emission model—conducted emissions (ICEM-CE) has been proposed to respond to this demand. Although the standard proposes methods to extract circuit models from measurements, they cannot provide activity-dependent models and may lead to inaccurate results for large and complex circuits. This paper describes a new methodology of construction of the internal activity block of an ICEM-CE model adapted to large digital integrated circuits and validated on a field-programmable gate array. The method is based on a predictive approach using the estimation tools of the dynamic power and the data path delays proposed by the manufacturer of the integrated circuit.