Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Harmonia: a high throughput B+tree for GPUs

B+tree is one of the most important data structures and has been widely used in different fields. With the increase of concurrent queries and data-scale in storage, designing an efficient B+tree structure has become critical. Due to abundant computation resources, GPUs provide potential opportunities to achieve high query throughput for B+tree. However, prior methods cannot achieve satisfactory performance results due to low resource utilization and poor memory performance. In this paper, we first identify the gaps between B+tree and GPUs. Concurrent B+tree queries involve many global memory accesses and different divergences, which mismatch with GPU features. Based on this observation, we propose Harmonia, a novel B+tree structure to bridge the gap. In Harmonia, a B+tree structure is divided into a key region and a child region. The key region stores the nodes with its keys in a breadth-first order. The child region is organized as a prefix-sum array, which only stores each node's first child index in the key region. Since the prefix-sum child region is small and the children's index can be retrieved through index computations, most of it can be stored in on-chip caches, which can achieve good cache locality. To make it more efficient, Harmonia also includes two optimizations: partially-sorted aggregation and narrowed thread-group traversal, which can mitigate memory and warp divergence and improve resource utilization. Evaluations on a TITAN V GPU show that Harmonia can achieve up to 3.6 billion queries per second, which is about 3.4X faster than that of HB+Tree [39], a recent state-of-the-art GPU solution.
A Reimagining of History Based on the Novel The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw

This article analyses the text, The Harmony Silk Factory, by Tash Aw and employs the novel to negate the idea of history as scientific and stable depiction of reality. The text specifically focuses on the central character, Johnny Lim, and utilises the character as an analogy to the act of historical writing. The article hypothesises that historical writing is an intellectual production with strong fictional elements embedded into it. The article also frames its argument based on ideas elucidated by Beverly Southgate about the fictional nature of history and the historical nature of fiction. The frame of argument presupposes that historical narration has more similarity to fictional writing than previously assumed. By analysing the central character in the novel and utilising him to symbolise our conception of history, the research strives to demystify the idea of history as scientific and objective narrative of our historical reality. The research concludes that the novel by Tash Aw can be considered as metaphorical allusions to the idea of history. The implication of the research allows us to view historical texts much more critically due to the inability of historians to write objectively and authentically about history/reality. Keywords: history; unreliability; fictional; reality; authorial domination DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2016-2202-13
SAR Level Reduction Based on Fractal Sausage Minkowski Square Patch Antenna

—The research and development of fractal antenna led to produce good multiple wireless applications. Fractal Sausage Minkowski Square Patch Antenna is promising as one of the popular fractal square patch antenna in modern applications. Both of civil and military applications in telecommunication witnessed high demand on fractal antenna. In our work, the proposed fractal antennas were designed to operate in Lband 1.575 GHz for Global Positioning System (GPS) applications. We present 0th, 1st, 2nd and 3rd iteration of new fractal sausage Minkowski design and simulation to reduce SAR levels using CST software 2014. Roger TMM4 is used as substrate with εr of 4.5 and thickness of 1.6 mm. Radiating patch is formed of PEC and a thickness of 0.6 mm. SAR level is measured for fractal antenna where the level of SAR is reduced by factor of 19.51 for 1 g and 11.30 for 10 gs for human head tissue. Furthermore, our calculations indicate that the patch antenna size is miniaturized by factor of 2.53. According to our knowledge RF performance is very good for the size miniaturization and SAR reduction for the four models of iterations so, antenna is efficient and can be used as candidate for GPS applications.
Lock-free channels for programming via communicating sequential processes: poster

Traditional concurrent programming involves manipulating shared mutable state. Alternatives to this programming style are communicating sequential processes (CSP) [1] and actor [2] models, which share data via explicit communication. Rendezvous channel is the common abstraction for communication between several processes, where senders and receivers perform a rendezvous handshake as a part of their protocol (senders wait for receivers and vice versa). Additionally to this, channels support the select expression. In this work, we present the first efficient lock-free channel algorithm, and compare it against Go [3] and Kotlin [4] baseline implementations.
A GPU memory efficient speed-up scheme for training ultra-deep neural networks: poster

Ultra-deep neural network(UDNN) tends to yield higher-quality model but its training process is often difficult to handle. Scarce GPU DRAM capacity is the primary bottleneck that limits the depth of neural network and the range of trainable minibatch size. In this paper, we present a scheme that dedicates to make the utmost use of finite GPU memory resource to speed up the training process for UDNN. Firstly, a performance-model guided dynamic swap out/in strategy between GPU and host memory is carefully orchestrated to tackle the out-of-memory problem without introducing performance penalty. Then, a hyperparameter (minibatch size, learning rate) tuning policy is designed to explore the optimal configuration after applying the swap strategy from the perspectives of training time and final accuracy simultaneously. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of our scheme in both single and distributed GPU mode.
A coordinated tiling and batching framework for efficient GEMM on GPUs

General matrix multiplication (GEMM) plays a paramount role in a broad range of domains such as deep learning, scientific computing, and image processing. The primary optimization method is to partition the matrix into many tiles and exploit the parallelism within and between tiles. The tiling hierarchy closely mirrors the thread hierarchy on GPUs. In practice, GPUs can fully unleash its computing power only when the matrix size is large and there are sufficient number of tiles and workload for each tile. However, in many real-world applications especially deep learning domain, the matrix size is small. To this end, prior work proposes batched GEMM to process a group of small independent GEMMs together by designing a single CUDA kernel for all of these GEMMs. However, the current support for batched GEMM is still rudimentary. Tiling and batching are tightly correlated. A large tile size can increase the data reuse, but it will decrease the thread-level parallelism, which further decrease the optimization space for the batching. A small tile size can increase the thread-level parallelism and then provide larger optimization space for the batching, but at the cost of sacrificing data reuse. In this paper, we propose a coordinated tiling and batching framework for accelerating GEMMs on GPUs. It is a two-phase framework, which consists of a tiling engine and a batching engine to perform efficient batched GEMM on GPUs. Tiling engine partitions the GEMMs into independent tiles and batching engine assigns the tiles to thread blocks. Moreover, we propose a general programming interface for the coordinated tiling and batching solution. Finally, experiment evaluation results on synthetic batched GEMM cases show that our framework can achieve about 1.40X performance speedup on average over the state-of-the-art technique. We also use GoogleNet as a real-world case study and our framework can achieve 1.23X speedup.
A general test for SSD portfolio efficiency

We develop and implement a Linear Programming test to analyze whether a given investment portfolio is efficient in terms of second-order stochastic dominance relative to all possible portfolios formed from a set of base assets. In case of efficiency, the primal model identifies a sub-gradient vector of a utility function that rationalizes the evaluated portfolio. In case of inefficiency, the dual model identifies a second, efficient portfolio that dominates the evaluated portfolio. The test gives a general necessary and sufficient condition, and can deal with general linear portfolio restrictions, inefficiency degree measures, and scenarios with unequal probabilities. We also develop a compact version of the test that substantially reduces computational burden at the cost of losing information about the dual dominating portfolio in case of inefficiency. An application to US investment benchmark data qualifies a broad stock market index as significantly inefficient, and suggests that no risk-averse investor would hold the market index in the face of attractive premiums offered by some more concentrated investment portfolios.
Now for the hard ones: is there a limit on CRISPR genome editing in crops?

This article comments on the following paper: Martín-Pizarro C, Triviño JC, Posé D. 2019. Functional analysis of the TM6 MADS-box gene in the octoploid strawberry by CRISPR/Cas9-directed mutagenesis. Journal of Experimental Botany 70, 885–895.
Urban-rural differences in the association between blood lipids and characteristics of the built environment: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction The built environment defines opportunities for healthy eating and physical activity and may thus be related to blood lipids. The aim of this study is to systematically analyse the scientific evidence on associations between built-environment characteristics and blood lipid levels in adults. Methods PubMed, EMBASE and Web of Science were searched for peer-reviewed papers on population-based studies up to 9 October 2017. We included studies that reported on built-environment characteristics and blood lipid levels in adult populations (≥18 years). Two reviewers independently screened titles/abstracts and full-texts of papers and appraised the risk of bias of included studies using an adapted version of the Quality Assessment Tool for Quantitative Studies. We performed meta-analyses when five or more studies had sufficient homogeneity in determinant and outcome. Results After screening 6902 titles/abstracts and 141 potentially relevant full-text articles, we included 50 studies. Forty-seven studies explored associations between urban versus rural areas with blood lipid levels. Meta-analyses on urban versus rural areas included 133 966 subjects from 36 studies in total. Total cholesterol levels were significantly and consistently higher in urban areas as compared with rural areas (mean difference 0.37 mmol/L, 95% CI 0.27 to 0.48). Urban/rural differences in high density lipoprotein cholesterol were inconsistent across studies and the pooled estimate showed no difference (0.00 mmol/L 95% CI −0.03 to 0.04). Low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol and triglyceride levels were higher in urban than in rural areas (mean difference 0.28, 95% CI 0.17 to 0.39 and 0.09, 95% CI 0.03 to 0.14, respectively). Conclusions Total and LDL cholesterol levels and triglycerides were consistently higher in residents of urban areas than those of rural areas. These results indicate that residents of urban areas generally have less favourable lipid profiles as compared with residents of rural areas. Prospero registration number CRD42016043226.
The impact of age and sex on body composition and glucose sensitivity in C57BL/6J mice

A paucity of data exists regarding sex differences in age‐related obesity and insulin resistance, particularly in the preclinical murine model. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of age and sex on insulin action and body composition in C57BL/6J mice. Aged (AG, 18 months old) male C57BL/6J mice, glucose tolerance was diminished compared to young (YG, 6 months old) male mice (Area Under Curve: 95,103 ± 6818 vs. 64,005 ± 2031, P = 0.002). However, there was no age‐related decline in glucose or insulin tolerance in females. Body composition analysis revealed that AG males had significantly greater body mass (42.2 ± 1.9 vs. 30.0 ± 0.4 g, P < 0.0001), fat mass (18.7 ± 2.0 vs. 3.3 ± 0.4 g, P < 0.0001), body fat (43.0 ± 3.0 vs. 11.0 ± 1.5%, P < 0.0001) than YG males. In AG females, body mass (32.8 ± 1.6 vs. 26.3 ± 0.9 g, P = 0.02) was higher, but fat mass (13.3 ± 2.0 vs. 9.5 ± 1.3 g, P = 0.24) and body fat (37.8 ± 4.8 vs. 35.5 ± 3.8%, P = 0.67) were similar when compared to YG females. AG males had significantly higher body mass (42.2 ± 1.9 vs. 32.8 ± 1.6 g, P = 0.001) and fat mass (18.7 ± 2.0 vs. 13.3 ± 2.0 g, P = 0.04) compared to AG females; however, body fat (43.0 ± 3.0 vs. 37.8 ± 4.8%, P = 0.28) was similar. Six weeks of treatment with MitoQ, a mitochondrial‐targeted antioxidant, did not reverse age‐related obesity in male mice. Surprisingly, obesity and insulin resistance appear to be reversed in the oldest of the old male mice (28 vs. 20 months). Our findings indicate that female mice, unlike males, are protected from age‐related obesity and insulin resistance.
Recent advances in understanding necrotizing enterocolitis

Necrotizing enterocolitis is a devastating intestinal disease affecting preterm infants. In spite of ongoing research and advancement in neonatal care, mortality remains high, especially in infants with advanced disease. The mechanism of disease development, the progression of intestinal injury, and management remain areas of ongoing research and controversy. In this review, we examine our current understanding of the disease, its epidemiology, the risk factors associated with the development of the disease, and its pathophysiology. We also describe current management and new emerging research highlighting potential future directions.
Effect of Early Breast Milk Nutrition on Serum Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1 in Preterm Infants

BACKGROUND: Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) is one of the essential intrauterine hormonal mediators of growth, and its serum values are often low after preterm delivery. AIM: To evaluate the influence of immediate breast milk feeding on serum IGF-1 in preterm newborns. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: This prospective, observational cohort study included 60 premature infants born < 32 weeks of gestation, divided into group A and B regarding breastfeeding or formula feeding. Growth measurements were taken at birth. The standard deviation of each measurement was calculated. Serum IGF-I was measured one day postnatal and at a time equivalent to 40 weeks of gestation. RESULTS: Significant higher level of mean serum IGF-1 was detected in group A than B at postnatal age equivalent to 40 weeks of gestation. In group A, the higher significant level was detected in mean serum IGF-1 at an age equivalent to 40 weeks of gestation than at birth (25.21 ± 6.69 and 20.13 ± 5.46 p < 0.05). Multiple linear regression analysis showed that high birth weight, increased age of gestation and breastfeeding were correlated to the elevated serum level of IGF-1 at a postnatal age corresponding to 40 weeks gestational age. CONCLUSION: Immediate breast milk feeding was accompanied by elevated IGF-1 in the serum of preterm infants.
LiBiNorm: an htseq-count analogue with improved normalisation of Smart-seq2 data and library preparation diagnostics

Protocols for preparing RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) libraries, most prominently “Smart-seq” variations, introduce global biases that can have a significant impact on the quantification of gene expression levels. This global bias can lead to drastic over- or under-representation of RNA in non-linear length-dependent fashion due to enzymatic reactions during cDNA production. It is currently not corrected by any RNA-seq software, which mostly focus on local bias in coverage along RNAs. This paper describes LiBiNorm, a simple command line program that mimics the popular htseq-count software and allows diagnostics, quantification, and global bias removal. LiBiNorm outputs gene expression data that has been normalized to correct for global bias introduced by the Smart-seq2 protocol. In addition, it produces data and several plots that allow insights into the experimental history underlying library preparation. The LiBiNorm package includes an R script that allows visualization of the main results. LiBiNorm is the first software application to correct for the global bias that is introduced by the Smart-seq2 protocol. It is freely downloadable at http://www2.warwick. ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/research/libinorm.
Low-carbohydrate diets differing in carbohydrate restriction improve cardiometabolic and anthropometric markers in healthy adults: A randomised clinical trial

Background Low-carbohydrate, high-fat (LCHF) diets are useful for treating a range of health conditions, but there is little research evaluating the degree of carbohydrate restriction on outcome measures. This study compares anthropometric and cardiometabolic outcomes between differing carbohydrate-restricted diets. Objective Our hypothesis was that moderate carbohydrate restriction is easier to maintain and more effective for improving cardiometabolic health markers than greater restriction. Design A total of 77 healthy participants were randomised to a very low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet (VLCKD), low-carbohydrate diet (LCD), or moderate-low carbohydrate diet (MCD), containing 5%, 15% and 25% total energy from carbohydrate, respectively, for 12-weeks. Anthropometric and metabolic health measures were taken at baseline and at 12 weeks. Using ANOVA, both within and between-group outcomes were analysed. Results Of 77 participants, 39 (51%) completed the study. In these completers overall, significant reductions in weight and body mass index occurred ((mean change) 3.7 kg/m2; 95% confidence limits (CL): 3.8, 1.8), along with increases in high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, (0.49 mmol/L; 95% CL; 0.06, 0.92; p = 0.03), and total cholesterol concentrations (0.11 mmol/L; 95% CL; 0.00, 0.23; p = 0.05). Triglyceride (TG) levels were reduced by 0.12 mmol/L (95% CL; −0.20, 0.02; p = 0.02). No significant changes occurred between groups. The largest improvements in high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-c) and TG and anthropometric changes occurred for the VLCKD group. Conclusions Low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets have a positive effect on markers of health. Adherence to the allocation of carbohydrate was more easily achieved in MCD, and LCD groups compared to VLCKD and there were comparable improvements in weight loss and waist circumference and greater improvements in HDL-c and TG with greater carbohydrate restriction.
Interleukin-10 is increased in successful drug desensitization regardless of the hypersensitivity reaction type

Background Little is known about the mechanism of desensitization in hypersensitivity drug reactions. Objective The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of drug desensitization on some cytokine levels in patients desensitized for drug hypersensitivity reactions. Methods Patients with a hypersensitivity reaction to any drug for whom desensitization was planned with the culprit drug, patients who could tolerate the same drugs and healthy subjects who were not exposed to these drugs were enrolled. Bead-based Milliplex MAP multiplex technology was used to determine interleukin (IL)-4, IL-5, interferon-γ and IL-10 levels in the sera of the subjects as a baseline and 24 hours after desensitization had been completed in the patients. Results A total of 26 patients (16 female [61.5%]; mean age 48.46 ± 15.97 years old), 10 control patients (5 female [50%]; mean age 47.4 ± 15.4 years old) and 5 healthy subjects (3 female [60%]; mean age 34.2 ± 5.6 years old) were enrolled. Four of the 26 patients did not tolerate the procedure and were grouped as the ‘unsuccessful desensitization group’ whereas 22 patients successfully completed the procedure and formed the ‘successful desensitization group. ’ Baseline cytokine levels in the 3 groups were not statistically different. Postdesensitization IL-10 levels in the successful desensitization group were significantly higher than their initial levels (p = 0.005) whereas none of the cytokine levels significantly changed in the unsuccessful desensitization group. The rise in IL-10 levels was greater in chemotherapeutic desensitizations when compared to other drugs (p = 0.006). Conclusion Successful desensitization independent of the hypersensitivity reaction type seems to be related to the increase of IL-10.
A Spherical Active Joint for Humanoids and Humans

Both humanoid robotics and prosthetics rely on the possibility of implementing spherical active joints to build dexterous robots and useful prostheses. There are three possible kinematic implementations of spherical joints: serial, parallel, and hybrid, each one with its own advantages and disadvantages. In this letter, we propose a hybrid active spherical joint, that combines the advantages of parallel and serial kinematics, to try and replicate some of the features of biological articulations: large workspace, compact size, dynamical behavior, and an overall spherical shape. We compare the workspace of the proposed joint to that of human joints, showing the possibility of an almost-complete coverage by the device workspace, which is limited only by kinematic singularities. A first prototype is developed and preliminarly tested as part of a robotic shoulder joint.
On the Joint Recovery of Community Structure and Community Features

We study the problem of recovering both K communities and their features from a labeled graph observation. We assume that the edges of an observed graph are generated as per the symmetric Stochastic Block Model (SBM), and that the label of each node is a noisy and partially-observed version of the corresponding community feature. We characterize the information-theoretic limit of this problem, and then propose a computationally efficient algorithm that achieves the information-theoretic limit.
Design and Development of a Self-Powered Wireless Wearable Activity Tracker

Human motion has gained a significant interest as a source of energy harvesting for wearable electronics. This paper proposes a low power management circuit for an electromagnetic energy harvester that utilizes human motion to power a wearable activity tracker. The power management circuit is based on Villard cascade circuit, a low power high efficiency DC/DC converter. It supplies power to a wireless transceiver serving as the activity tracking metric. Simulations and experimental validation of the proposed power management circuit are presented. The circuit successfully achieved an output voltage of 3.3V from the human motion, powering up a low-power wireless transceiver and hence constitutes a self-powered human activity tracker.