Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two-Stage Consensus-Based Distributed MPC for Interconnected Microgrids

In this paper, we propose a model predictive control based two-stage energy management system that aims at increasing the renewable infeed in interconnected microgrids (MGs). In particular, the proposed approach ensures that each MG in the network benefits from power exchange. In the first stage, the optimal islanded operational cost of each MG is obtained. In the second stage, the power exchange is determined such that the operational cost of each MG is below the optimal islanded cost from the first stage. In this stage, a distributed augmented Lagrangian method is used to solve the optimisation problem and determine the power flow of the network without requiring a central entity. This algorithm has faster convergence and same information exchange at each iteration as the dual decomposition algorithm. The properties of the algorithm are illustrated in a numerical case study.
Multimodal Analysis of Central Nervous System Tumor Tissue Endogenous Fluorescence With Multiscale Excitation

The primary therapeutic approach for high-grade brain tumor is surgical resection. However, identifying tumor margins in vivo remains a major challenge. Biopsy analysis remains the standard diagnostic technique on tumor margins. This ex-vivo analysis is time consuming and delays treatment. The aim of this study is tissue discrimination using label free autofluorescence and application in intraoperative optical probe for optical biopsy. Biopsy samples from fifty-one patients who underwent brain tumor surgery (21 metastasis tumors, 17 glioblastoma tumors, GBM, and 13 control samples) were included in this study. The samples underwent a multiscale and multi-contrast optical analysis. The excitation were performed with a deep-UV synchrotron beam, at 275nm, and a near-infrared Ti:sapphire pulsed laser, from 690nm to 1040nm. The detection modalities were fluorescence imaging, spectroscopy and fluorescence lifetime. Using deep-UV excitation, and combining three molecular ratios (tyrosin-tryptophan, tryptophan-collagen, tryptophan-NADH) resulted in discrimination with a sensitivity of 90% and a specificity of 73%. Using a two-photon excitation, and combining average lifetime, NADH-FAD ratio and Porphyrin-NADH ratio, resulted in discrimination with a sensitivity of 97% and a specificity of 100%. A multiscale algorithm resulted in an overlap of only 1.8% between control and tumor samples.
Dietary material properties shape cranial suture morphology in the mouse calvarium

Cranial sutures are fibrous connective tissue articulations found between intramembranous bones of the vertebrate cranium. Growth and remodeling of these tissues is partially regulated by biomechanical loading patterns that include stresses related to chewing. Advances in oral processing structure and function of the cranium that enabled mammalian‐style chewing is commonly tied to the origins and evolution of this group. To what degree masticatory overuse or underuse shapes the complexity and ossification around these articulations can be predicted based on prior experimental and comparative work. Here, we report on a mouse model system that has been used to experimentally manipulate dietary material properties in order to investigate cranial suture morphology. Experimental groups were fed diets of contrasting material properties. A masticatory overuse group was fed pelleted rodent chow, nuts with shells, and given access to cotton bedding squares. An underuse group was deprived of cotton bedding as well as diverse textured food, and instead received gelatinized food continuously. Animals were raised from weaning to adulthood on these diets, and sagittal, coronal and lambdoid suture morphology was compared between groups. Predicted intergroup variation was observed in mandibular corpus size and calvarial suture morphology, suggesting that masticatory overuse is associated with jaw and suture growth. The anterior region of the sagittal suture where it intersects with the coronal suture (bregma) showed no effect from the experiment. The posterior sagittal suture where it intersects with the lambdoid sutures (lambda) was more complex in the overuse group. In other words, the posterior calvarium was responsive to dietary material property demands while the anterior calvarium was not. This probably resulted from the different strain magnitudes and/or strain frequencies that occurred during overuse diets with diverse material properties as compared with underuse diets deprived of such enrichment. This work highlights the contrasting pattern of the sutural response to loading differences within the calvarium as a result of diet.
Existing RC structures strengthened by ties under seismic sequences considering uncertainty

The probabilistic seismic analysis of existing reinforced concrete (RC) structures, which are strengthened by cable elements (tension‐ties), is numerically investigated. Emphasis is given to uncertainties for the estimation of structural input parameters, common to old RC structures, and to accumulative effects of seismic sequences on the structure response. Monte Carlo techniques are used and the unilateral behavior of the cable elements, which can undertake tension stresses only, is strictly taken into account.
Characterizing Deep-Learning I/O Workloads in TensorFlow

The performance of Deep-Learning (DL) computing frameworks rely on the performance of data ingestion and checkpointing. In fact, during the training, a considerable high number of relatively small files are first loaded and pre-processed on CPUs and then moved to accelerator for computation. In addition, checkpointing and restart operations are carried out to allow DL computing frameworks to restart quickly from a checkpoint. Because of this, I/O affects the performance of DL applications. In this work, we characterize the I/O performance and scaling of TensorFlow, an open-source programming framework developed by Google and specifically designed for solving DL problems. To measure TensorFlow I/O performance, we first design a micro-benchmark to measure TensorFlow reads, and then use a TensorFlow mini-application based on AlexNet to measure the performance cost of I/O and checkpointing in TensorFlow. To improve the checkpointing performance, we design and implement a burst buffer. We find that increasing the number of threads increases TensorFlow bandwidth by a maximum of 2.3× and 7.8× on our benchmark environments. The use of the tensorFlow prefetcher results in a complete overlap of computation on accelerator and input pipeline on CPU eliminating the effective cost of I/O on the overall performance. The use of a burst buffer to checkpoint to a fast small capacity storage and copy asynchronously the checkpoints to a slower large capacity storage resulted in a performance improvement of 2.6× with respect to checkpointing directly to slower storage on our benchmark environment.
Patients with revised surgical resection margins are best studied as a distinct group

4262 Cancer November 1, 2018 assessing the adequacy of resection margin revision, but in a retrospective study clearly defining a group of patients with revised resection margins may suffice and local control data would indicate how (un)successful revisions were. The literature regarding the subject of resection margin revision does not indicate that re-excisions improve local control. This international collaborative study may in reality support the same conclusion, depending on the specifics of additional data outlined above. Additional information regarding resection margin re-excision may explain why in this report patients falling in the “close” margin category had outcomes that were worse or comparable to those of patients with “positive” resection margins. Rather than relying on a predetermined cutoff value of 5 mm to distinguish close from clear resection margins, the authors may want to reanalyze resection margin clearance as a continuous variable and offer a more relevant threshold reflective of the studied population. Fridman et al suggest that intraoperative resection margin assessment should be promoted to improve the achievement of adequate margins. This study was not designed to address such a hypothesis, and does not specify how often and by what method intraoperative resection margin assessment (macroscopic only, complete microscopic resection margin evaluation, or variations of the two) was performed. Some of the requirements for such a study have been described previously. Data with which to answer the question of whether the identification of a positive resection margin intraoperatively and its relocalization and re-excision improve patient outcomes were not presented within the study by Fridman et al. Although the authors appear to reference prior studies in support of routine intraoperative resection margin assessment, these reports actually raise questions regarding the clinical usefulness of intraoperative surgical resection margin assessment and highlight the challenges of adequate resection margin revision. Overall, it is difficult to go further and make sense of the data regarding adjuvant treatments in these gray areas, such as patients who have undergone resection margin revision. Prospective studies with standardized margin assessment and reporting clearly are needed to clarify important questions in this area.
Multi-Stream Opportunistic Network Decoupling: Relay Selection and Interference Management

We study multi-stream transmission in the $K \times N \times K$K×N×K channel with interfering relay nodes, consisting of $K$K multi-antenna source–destination (S–D) pairs and $N$N single-antenna half-duplex relay nodes between the S–D pairs. We propose a new achievable scheme operating with partial effective channel gain, termed multi-stream opportunistic network decoupling (MS-OND), which achieves the optimal degrees of freedom (DoF) under a certain relay scaling law. Our protocol is built upon the conventional OND that leads to virtual full-duplex mode with one data stream transmission per S–D pair, generalizing the idea of OND to multi-stream scenarios by leveraging relay selection and interference management. Specifically, two subsets of relay nodes are opportunistically selected using alternate relaying in terms of producing or receiving the minimum total interference level. For interference management, each source node sends $S \,(1 \leq S \leq M)$S(1≤S≤M) data streams to selected relay nodes with random beamforming for the first hop, while each destination node receives its desired $S$S streams from the selected relay nodes via opportunistic interference alignment for the second hop, where $M$M is the number of antennas at each source or destination node. Our analytical results are validated by numerical evaluation.
Effects of face and voice deformation on participant emotion in video-mediated communication

This research investigates the effectiveness of speech audio and facial image deformation tools that make conversation participants appear more positive. By conducting an experiment, we revealed that participants' feelings became more positive when using the deformation tools, and this caused conversations to be more active. It was also found that voice deformation was equally effective compared to a combination of voice and facial image deformations. Moreover, participants were more likely to activate the tool as a listener and with a less positive feeling. Finally, we discuss how these findings can be applied to design a remote communication support system that helps to shift a conversation to a positive mood.
Prospective Study of Endogenous Hormones and Incidence of Venous Thromboembolism: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study

Abstract Exogenous hormone treatments in women (oral contraceptives and hormone replacement therapy [HRT]) are established risk factors for venous thromboembolism (VTE), but less is known about associations between plasma levels of endogenous hormones and VTE risk. We examined the association of baseline dehydroepiandrosterone sulphate (DHEAS), testosterone and sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG) with risk of future VTE in men and post-menopausal women in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study. Testosterone, DHEAS and SHBG were measured in plasma samples collected in 1996 to 1998. Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate hazard ratios for incident VTE adjusting for age, race/ethnicity, body mass index, height, smoking, estimated glomerular filtration rate and C-reactive protein. All analyses were stratified by sex and by current HRT use in women. Among 3,051 non-HRT-using women, 1,414 HRT-using women and 3,925 men at risk at baseline, 184, 62 and 206 experienced incident VTE after a median follow-up of 17.6 years. Plasma hormones were not associated with incidence of VTE among men and non-HRT-using women, although lower plasma DHEAS, when modelled using quartiles or restricted cubic splines, was associated with higher risk of VTE among HRT-using women. This study does not support the existence of an important association between plasma concentrations of endogenous testosterone, DHEAS or SHBG with risk of VTE in middle-aged to older men or post-menopausal women not using HRT.
The effect of noise on software engineers' performance

Background: Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the commonest factors that could affect people's performance in their daily work activities. The software engineering research community has marginally investigated the effects of noise on software engineers' performance. Aims: We studied if noise affects software engineers' performance in: (i) comprehending functional requirements and (ii) fixing faults in source code. Method: We conducted two experiments with final-year undergraduate students in Computer Science. In the first experiment, we asked 55 students to comprehend functional requirements exposing them or not to noise, while in the second experiment 42 students were asked to fix faults in Java code. Results: The participants in the second experiment, when exposed to noise, had significantly worse performance in fixing faults in source code. On the other hand, we did not observe any statistically significant difference in the first experiment. Conclusions: Fixing faults in source code seems to be more vulnerable to noise than comprehending functional requirements.
LYRA: smart wearable in-flight service assistant

We present LYRA, a modular in-flight system that enhances service and assists flight attendants during their work. LYRA enables passengers to browse and order services from their smartphones. Smart glasses and a smart shoe-clip with RFID reader module provides flight attendants with situated information. We gained first insights into how flight attendants and passengers use of the system during a long distance flight from Frankfurt to Houston.
The Intuitive Power of Graph Pivots For User Exploration and Adaptive Data Abstraction

This paper reports on a simple visual technique that boils extracting a subgraph down to two operations—pivots and filters—that is agnostic to both the data abstraction and the size of the graph. The system’s design, as well as its qualitative evaluation with users, clarify exactly when and how the user’s intent in a series of pivots is ambiguous—and, more usefully, when it is not. Reflections on our results show how, in the event of an ambiguous case, this innately practical operation could be further extended into “smart pivots” that anticipate the user’s intent beyond the current step. They also reveal ways that a series of graph pivots can expose the semantics of the data from the user’s perspective, and how this information could be leveraged to create adaptive data abstractions that do not rely as heavily on a system designer to create a comprehensive abstraction that anticipates all the user’s tasks.
Artist-driven layering and user's behaviour impact on recommendations in a playlist continuation scenario

In this paper we provide an overview of the approach we used as team Creamy Fireflies for the ACM RecSys Challenge 2018. The competition, organized by Spotify, focuses on the problem of playlist continuation, that is suggesting which tracks the user may add to an existing playlist. The challenge addresses this issue in many use cases, from playlist cold start to playlists already composed by up to a hundred tracks. Our team proposes a solution based on a few well known models both content based and collaborative, whose predictions are aggregated via an ensembling step. Moreover by analyzing the underlying structure of the data, we propose a series of boosts to be applied on top of the final predictions and improve the recommendation quality. The proposed approach leverages well-known algorithms and is able to offer a high recommendation quality while requiring a limited amount of computational resources.
Reducing the Number of Unnecessary Thyroid Biopsies While Improving Diagnostic Accuracy: Toward the “Right” TIRADS

Context The prevalence of thyroid nodules in the general population is increasingly high, and at least half of those biopsied prove to be benign. Sonographic risk-stratification systems are being proposed as "rule-out" tests that can identify nodules that do not require fine-needle aspiration (FNA) cytology. Objective To comparatively assess the performances of five internationally endorsed sonographic classification systems [those of the American Thyroid Association, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, the American College of Radiology (ACR), the European Thyroid Association, and the Korean Society of Thyroid Radiology] in identifying nodules whose FNAs can be safely deferred and to estimate their negative predictive values (NPVs). Design Prospective study of thyroid nodules referred for FNA. Setting Single academic referral center. Patients Four hundred seventy-seven patients (358 females, 75.2%); mean (SD) age, 55.9 (13.9) years. Main Outcome Measures Number of biopsies classified as unnecessary, false-negative rate (FNR), sensitivity, specificity, predictive values, and diagnostic ORs for each system. Results Application of the systems' FNA criteria would have reduced the number of biopsies performed by 17.1% to 53.4%. The ACR Thyroid Imaging Reporting and Data System (TIRADS) allowed the largest reduction (268 of 502) with the lowest FNR (NPV, 97.8%; 95% CI, 95.2% to 99.2%). Except for the Korean Society of Thyroid Radiology TIRADS, all other systems exhibited significant discriminatory performance but produced significantly smaller reductions in the number of procedures. Conclusions Internationally endorsed sonographic risk stratification systems vary widely in their ability to reduce the number of unnecessary thyroid nodule FNAs. The ACR TIRADS outperformed the others, classifying more than half the biopsies as unnecessary with a FNR of 2.2%.
Robust Hashing for Models

The increased adoption of model-driven engineering (MDE) in complex industrial environments highlights the value of a company's modeling artefacts. As such, any MDE ecosystem must provide mechanisms to both, protect, and take full advantage of these valuable assets. In this sense, we explore the adaptation of the Robust Hashing technique to the MDE domain. Indeed, robust hashing algorithms (i.e. hashing algorithms that generate similar outputs from similar input data), have been proved useful as a key building block in intellectual property protection, authenticity assessment and fast comparison and retrieval solutions for different application domains. We present a novel robust hashing mechanism for models based on the use of model fragmentation and locality sensitive hashing. We discuss the usefulness of this technique on a number of scenarios and its feasibility by providing a prototype implementation and corresponding experimental evaluation.
On specialized window lengths and detector based human activity recognition

Sliding window based activity recognition chains represent the state-of-the-art for many mobile and embedded scenarios as they are common in wearable computing. The length of the analysis frames is a crucial system parameter that directly influences the effectiveness of the overall approach. In this paper we present a method that optimizes the window length - individually for each target activity. Instead of employing a single, multi-class recognition system that is based on a generic window length, we combine individually optimized activity detectors into an Ensemble based recognition approach. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach through an experimental evaluation on eight benchmark datasets. The proposed method leads to significant improvements across a range of activity recognition application domains.
Pretreatment Cerebrospinal Fluid Bacterial Load Correlates With Inflammatory Response and Predicts Neurological Events During Tuberculous Meningitis Treatment

In tuberculous meningitis (TBM), a higher pretreatment CSF bacterial load was associated with increased disease severity and host inflammation. The bacterial load can be used to predict new neurological events but not death. Owing to the divergent pathogenesis of TBM-associated neurological complications and deaths, strategies to reduce them may need reassessment.
Multiple Sources for Sertoli Cells and Two Sertoli Phenotypes in the Adult Elasmobranch Testis: Insight from Two Species Belonging to Different Orders

Findings presented here for the chondrichthyans Prionace glauca and Isurus oxyrinchus show that the assembly of the spermatocyst and it's attached collecting duct are seamlessly connected developmental phenomena. The cyst's somatic cell component (i.e., Sertoli cells, SCs) and the duct's constituent cells derive both from a common precursor cell type (typically a large oblong cell) found among the A‐spermatogonia in the folliculogenic region. Novel findings show that the co‐developing collecting duct itself serves also as a source of either normal‐looking or basophilic atypical SCs (aSCs), depending on whether the duct–cyst transition remains mitotically active and open, or is sealed. The aSCs arise from accumulating slender basophilic cells at the duct–cyst interface after which the newly formed cyst is sealed. Quantitative analysis of the latter in P. glauca revealed a correlation between the appearance of this aSC in immature cysts and the degenerated testicular condition that displays a gradient of multinucleate cell (MNC) death among spermatogonial cysts. Findings seem to implicate these aSCs in the life–death balance in mature spermatogonial cohorts downstream in the spermatogenic sequence, rather than in newly formed cysts that exhibit low rates of apoptosis. Photomicrographs of developing spermatogonial cysts showing several aSCs interspersed among cytoplasmically linked spermatogonia that are proliferating or have died, seem to suggest that these small SCs may be involved in confining MNC death to a given cyst region under conditions of subthreshold levels of apoptosis such as to ensure cyst recovery in immature spermatogonial cysts. Anat Rec, 301:1944–1954, 2018. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.