Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
LCC : Un réseau de recouvrement multipoint passant à l'échelle

Les propositions recentes de construction de reseaux de recouvrement (overlay) pour la transmission multipoint ont demontre l'importance d'exploiter les informations de la topologie du reseau sous-jacent. Toutefois, ces propositions reposent souvent sur des processus de raffinement incrementaux pour ameliorer les performances du systeme. Ces approches ne passent pas de ce fait a l'echelle, induisant un surcout de communication eleve, et necessitent un temps de convergence important avant d'atteindre une structure stable. Dans cet article, nous proposons un algorithme de localisation qui dirige graduellement les nouveaux venus vers les noeuds les plus proches sans pour cela induire un surcout eleve. En nous basant sur cette localisation, nous proposons un reseau overlay, nomme "LCC", a la fois robuste, passant a l'echelle et prenant en compte la topologie physique. Nous avons mene des experimentations reelles sur PlanetLab ainsi que des simulations afin d'evaluer les performances de LCC. Les resultats prouvent d'une part que le processus de localisation necessite des ressources modestes en termes de delais et de bande passante, et d'autre part que LCC est un overlay efficace pour supporter des applications multipoints a tres grande echelle.
Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems ( MCIS ) 2009 Understanding Online Reputation Of Mediterranean Destinations

Destination managers are investing considerable efforts (i.e. time, resources and money) to market their destinations on the internet, often not considering the fact that unofficial information sources are gaining more and more popularity among internet users. Long tail players (such as blogs, wikis, reviews, etc.) are actually appearing in the ranking of search engines, spreading almost the same contents as the official sources, but with very different strategies, goals and styles. Starting from a log files analysis of a given Mediterranean destination, nine keywords have been used to perform search activities on two major search engines (Google and Yahoo! ). A content analysis study has been performed on search results in order to examine topics and arguments of the retrieved results, which are shaping the web reputation of the destination. The paper shows that destinations need to manage their brand and online reputation holistically, by listening all players providing information about them, and trying to leverage on their contributions.
Serum calcium is an independent prognostic factor of overall survival in Mexican patients with multiple myeloma.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the impact of different prognostic factors that has been suggested to be useful in predicting the survival of patients with multiple myeloma (MM). MATERIALS AND METHODS A longitudinal prospective study was conducted on 24 adult Mexican patients diagnosed with primary MM. The levels of expression of CD38, CD138 and cyclin D1 were analyzed in plasma cells (PCs) from patients and mononuclear cells from healthy donors. Serum levels of lactate dehydrogenase, creatinine, calcium, beta2 microglobulin and interleukin-6 (IL-6) as well as hemoglobin and platelet count were taken into consideration. RESULTS; CD138 and cyclin D1 levels in absolute numbers were significantly overexpressed in malignant PCs. A positive correlation was noted between cyclin D1 and CD38 expression levels in malignant PCs. IL-6 and serum calcium were also positively correlated in MM patients. Cyclin D1 overexpression was not associated with better overall survival (OS). Normal calcium levels were associated with better overall survival (OS). Serum calcium was the only variable correlating with better OS in Cox regression analysis. CONCLUSION Serum calcium is an independent prognostic factor of OS in a population of Mexican patients with MM.
Lecture 19,20 (Nov 15&17, 2011): Hardness of Approximation, PCP theorem

So far we have been mostly talking about designing approximation algorithms and proving upper bounds. From no until the end of the course we will be talking about proving lower bounds (i.e. hardness of approximation). We are familiar with the theory of NP-completeness. When we prove that a problem is NP-hard it implies that, assuming P 6=NP there is no polynomail time algorithm that solves the problem (exactly). For example, for SAT, deciding between Yes/No is hard (again assuming P 6=NP). We would like to show that even deciding between those instances that are (almost) satisfiable and those that are far from being satisfiable is also hard. In other words, create a gap between Yes instances and No instances. These kinds of gaps imply hardness of approximation for optimization version of NP-hard problems. In fact the PCP theorem (that we will see next lecture) is equivalent to the statement that MAX-SAT is NPhard to approximate within a factor of (1 + ǫ), for some fixed ǫ > 0. Most of hardness of approximation results rely on PCP theorem. For proving a hardness, for example for vertex cover, PCP shows that the existence of following reduction: Given a formula φ for SAT, we build a graph G(V,E) in polytime such that:
Anatomical variations in the extra hepatic biliary system: a cross sectional study

Background: The anatomy of the biliary system has been the subject of extended research for many years. Largely because of their surgical importance in cholecystectomies and the ease with which they may be studied. Though, interest has been focused on the extrahepatic bile ducts very few studies have been carried out in the Indian subcontinent. Objectives was to study the anatomical variations in extrahepatic biliary system in sample of Indian cadaveric specimens. Methods: The study material consisted of 20 adult dissection room cadavers and 30 enbloc post-mortem specimens. Cadaver specimens were studied from dissection room. Post-mortem enbloc specimens were collected from the Department of Forensic Medicine, Madurai Medical College, Madurai. They were studied by conventional dissection method. Results: The key abnormalities found in all bladder were Hartman's pouch shape and neck in 2 (4%) subjects each. Gallstones were present in 2 (4%) subject. The length of the common Bile duct was ranging from as short as 6.5 cm in 24% of the subjects to 9cm in 4% of the subjects. High level of the cystic duct union with the common hepatic duct was noted in16% of specimens and in remaining 2% it was low union. Abnormal arrangement of structures in hepatoduodenal duct was normal in 98% but was abnormal in 2% of subjects. A total of 14% of the specimens had accessory ducts. Double and accessory cystic artery was found in 2% of the subjects each. In 8% of the subjects, cystic artery had abnormal course and division. The right hepatic artery was had shown abnormal course and division in 4% of the subjects. Abnormal boundaries of Calot’s triangle was found in 2% of the subjects. Abnormal contents of Calot’s triangle include Accessory hepatic ducts in 10% of subjects. Conclusions: Anatomical variations of the extrahepatic biliary system are very common and a through an understanding of them is essential for surgeons to avoid damage to vital structures during surgical procedures and better surgical outcomes.
Enhancing Nutt-Based Time-to-Digital Converter Performance With Internal Systematic Averaging

A time-to-digital converter (TDC) often consists of sophisticated, multilevel, subgate delay structures, when time intervals need to be measured precisely. The resolution improvement is rewarding until integral nonlinearity (INL) and random jitter begins to limit the measurement performance. INL can then be minimized with calibration techniques and result postprocessing. The TDC architecture based on a counter and timing signal interpolation (the Nutt method) makes it possible to measure long time intervals precisely. It also offers an effective means of improving precision by averaging. Traditional averaging, however, demands several successive measurements, which increases the measurement time and power consumption. It is shown here that by using several interpolators that are sampled homogeneously over the clock period, the effects of limited resolution, interpolation nonlinearities, and random noise can be markedly reduced. The designed CMOS TDC utilizing internal systematic sampling technique achieves 3.0-ps root mean square (RMS) single-shot precision without any additional calibration or nonlinearity correction.
Improving GPU Performance through Instruction Redistribution and Diversification

of the Dissertation Improving GPU Performance through Instruction Redistribution and Diversification by Xiang Gong Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Engineering Northeastern University, August 2018 Professor David Kaeli, Advisor As throughput-oriented accelerators, GPUs provide tremendous processing power by executing a massive number of threads in parallel. However, exploiting high degrees of thread-level parallelism (TLP) does not always translate to the peak performance that GPUs can offer, leaving the GPUs resources often under-utilized. Compared to compute resources, memory resources can tolerate considerably lower levels of TLP due to hardware bottlenecks. Unfortunately, this tolerance is not effectively exploited by the Single Instruction Multiple Thread (SIMT) execution model employed by current GPU compute frameworks. Assuming a SIMT execution model, GPU applications frequently send bursts of memory requests that compete for GPU memory resources. Traditionally, hardware units, such as the wavefront scheduler, are used to manage such requests. Compute-bound threads can be scheduled to utilize compute resources while memory requests are serviced. However, the scheduler struggles when the number of memory operations dominates execution, unable to effectively hide the long latency of memory operations. The degree of instruction diversity present in a single application may also be insufficient to fully utilize the resources on a GPU. GPU workloads tend to stress a particular hardware resource, but can leave others under-utilized. Using coarse-grained hardware resource sharing techniques, such as concurrent kernel execution, fails to guarantee that GPU hardware resources are truly shared by different kernels. Introducing additional kernels that utilize similar resources may introduce more contention to the system, especially if kernel candidates fail to use hardware resources collaboratively. Most previous studies considered the goal of achieving GPU peak performance as a hardware issue. Extensive efforts have been made to remove hardware bottlenecks to improve efficiency. In this thesis, we argue that software plays an equal, if not more important, role. We
A study on the prevalence of Salmonella species in Yola North Local Govt. area of Adamawa State, Nigeria

A total of three hundred stool samples collected from' one hundred and twenty six patients (attending Federal Medical Centre; Bamaiyi Hospital, Peace hospital, Yola Biomedics Laboratory and Beta Laboratory) and one hundred and seventy four volunteers (students of Daubeli Secondary School) were examined. Twenty of the samples analyzed were non-lactose fermenters and were subjected to serotyping. The results of the serotyping identified II S. typhi iso lates (3.7%), 3 S. paratyphi A isolates ( 1.0%) and 2 S. panttyphi l3 isolates (0 67°o) and -1 non- SalmoneliCI isolates. Antibiotic sensitivity test on the elevenS. tyrhi IStJiatcs sllOIIS that ge11tamicin has the highest ef"fica'c~ (90.9°-o) followed b; olloxacin (63.6%) and colistin sulfate (27 . 3'~o) t-cspcctl\cly. \"he el'lic~lcles ol· streptomycin. chloramphenicol and tetracycline ag
Pericardium-6 Acupressure for the Prevention of Postoperative Nausea and Vomiting

Abstract : Postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV) are common problems after general anesthesia. Pharmacological advances have reduced the incidence of PONV however; nausea and vomiting remain the most common postoperative complications of anesthesia. Persistent nausea and vomiting may result in dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, and delayed discharge. Traditional western medicine has been unable to definitively explain why this phenomenon continues to occur. Acupressure at the pericardium-six meridian has been studied in various patient populations and found to be without side effects, however its effectiveness has not been shown. The purpose of this study was to set up a pilot study to retest the claim that acupressure at the pericardium-six meridian can reduce PONV. Ten patients undergoing laparotomy, laparoscopic, or general surgery for gynecological procedures were studied. Acupressure's effectiveness was compared to sham acupressure of the control group. Patients, anesthesia providers, and data collectors were blinded to the control and study groups. Non-invasive acupressure wristbands were applied to both wrists prior to surgery and worn for 24 hours after. Post anesthesia care unit personnel recorded data while the patient was in the hospital. The patient's recorded and quantified nausea and vomiting at home using a visual analogue scale. An anesthesia provider called the patient after surgery to collect data. All data were analyzed using SPSS 8.0. No statistical significance was found in nausea and vomiting scores between the two groups.
Cold Atmospheric Plasma: A Powerful Tool for Modern Medicine

Cold atmospheric plasma use in clinical studies is mainly limited to the treatment of chronic wounds, but its application in a wide range of medical fields is now the goal of many analyses. It is therefore likely that its application spectrum will be expanded in the future. Cold atmospheric plasma has been shown to reduce microbial load without any known significant negative effects on healthy tissues, and this should enhance its possible application to any microbial infection site. It has also been shown to have anti-tumour effects. In addition, it acts proliferatively on stem cells and other cultivated cells, and the highly increased nitric oxide levels have a very important effect on this proliferation. Cold atmospheric plasma use may also have a beneficial effect on immunotherapy in cancer patients. Finally, it is possible that the use of plasma devices will not remain limited to surface structures, because current endeavours to develop sufficiently miniature microplasma devices could very likely lead to its application in subcutaneous and internal structures. This study summarises the available literature on cold plasma action mechanisms and analyses of its current in vivo and in vitro use, primarily in the fields of regenerative and dental medicine and oncology.
Preface

The history of mathematical and numerical finance starts in 1900, with the seminal thesis of Louis Bachelier, Théorie de la Spéculation, which introduced Brownian motion in order to model stock price movements and evaluate options. Not only did this remarkable work modeled the randomness of stock prices in a mathematical framework germane to the popular Nobel Prize in Economics winning solution proposed by Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton in 1973, but it also laid the foundation for some key concepts of stochastic analysis. The celebrated Black-Scholes-Merton pricing paradigm which took the financial industry by storm, is not limited to the Samuelson’s geometric Brownian motion model. However, it is based on a series of unrealistic assumptions, including Gaussian return fluctuations, constant volatility, risk-free interest rates, full liquidity, absence of frictions, no price impact from large or frequent trades, . , and the list could go on. Furthermore, the original pricing arguments do not directly apply to derivatives with non-European exercises such as American options, without another level of sophistication and approximation. The last two decades have seen a rapid development of increasingly realistic and sophisticated stochastic models and methods for pricing, hedging and risk management in rapidly growing markets, with more unfathomable financial products. Modern finance is becoming increasingly technical, requiring the use of complicated mathematical models, and involving numerical techniques based on theoretical results from subfields of mathematics ranging from stochastic analysis, dynamical system theory, nonlinear integro-differential equations, game theory, optimal control and dynamic programming, to statistical learning and information theory. Situated at the confluence of applied mathematics, computer sciences and economics, quantitative finance distinguishes itself through its wide range of themes, and its interaction with a broad spectrum of scientific domains. Any attempt at capturing all the fundamental developments which occurred in quantitative finance would simply be an impossible undertaking. With this volume, we aim at something less ambitious, more focused, and hopefully more useful, offering a collection of representative articles in the area of computational finance. Our objective is to bring financial professionals, economists and mathematicians
Unsupervised Image-Adapted Local Fisher Discriminant Analysis to Reduce Hyperspectral Images Without Ground Truth

Local Fisher discriminant analysis (LFDA) is a feature extraction technique that proved efficient to reduce several types of data and succeeded to outperform many state-of-the-art methods. However, due to its supervised nature, LFDA’s efficiency depends on the available labeled samples and declines dramatically when the latter are very few. Hence, we assume that we cannot resort to LFDA to reduce unlabeled data. In this article, we studied to what extent this assumption is true and questioned the possibility of using LFDA to reduce hyperspectral images (HSIs) with no available ground truth. To study the real impact of the labeled information on LFDA’s performance, we replaced the costly expert-made ground truth by different sets of labeled samples that are generated based on the image’s offered spectral and/or spatial information, with no prior knowledge of the captured scene nor of its classes. Our proposed sets proved able to guide LFDA in extracting relevant discriminating features. This proved that LFDA does not depend only on expert-made labeled information and led us to define the unsupervised image-adapted LFDA (uiaLFDA) that can properly reduce an HSI without requiring its ground truth. To do so and to replace the ground truth that LFDA usually requires to reduce an HSI, uiaLFDA defines its own set of labeled samples by simply gridding the image into cells where each cell is considered a class. Our experiments ran on three HSIs proved that uiaLFDA is as efficient as LFDA and, even better, in reducing unlabeled HSIs.
In-Arrears Term Structure Products: No Arbitrage Pricing Bounds and the Convexity Adjustments

When pricing an in-arrears term structure product, the valuation usually boils down to determining the price of a vanilla product and of some additional part. To computer the price of the additional part, sometimes a specific term structure (like Gaussian or LIBOR) is assumed. Sometimes approximation methods are applied to achieve model-independent valuation formulae. In the present paper, we show that these valuation formulae (the price of vanilla products plus convexity adjustments resulting from approximation) are in effect model-independent pricing bounds in every arbitrage-free model. More specifically, they are proven to be a lower pricing bound for in-arrears payer swaps and in-arrears caps and an upper bound for in-arrears receiver swaps and in-arrears floors. To address the goodness/tightness issue of the bounds, convexity adjustments are compared with the exact pricing formulae obtained in LIBOR market model.
Molecular Risk Factors for Thrombosis

Introduction A diagnosis of venous thrombosis is made each year in about 0.1% of Western populations. In the majority of cases, the diagnosis is based on objective evidence for an obstruction of the circulation by a blood clot that either formed locally or developed elsewhere in the circulation. The interest in the pathogenesis of this hemostatic process has increased enormously during the past 20 years and, as a consequence, substantial progress has been made in understanding the multifactorial nature of the disease, where interactions between genetic and environmental factors result in the formation of an obstructive thrombus at a specific time and at a specific location. Frequently, these thrombi are found in the elderly in the superficial and deep veins of the legs. Thrombi may also occur in younger individuals and in the veins of the brain, mesentery, liver, or retina. The episodic nature of the disease points out the importance of acquired and/or environmental factors in thrombosis. The disease also has strong genetic components, given the many reports of familial clustering of thrombotic events1-3 and the fact that 20% to 30% of patients with a first thrombotic event report at least one first-degree relative with thrombosis.4 The search for molecular risk factors for venous thrombosis remains intensive. Over the years, this research has been facilitated by new insights in the regulation of blood coagulation and by the development of new research methods, especially in the field of molecular genetics. Today, at least one genetic defect can be found in about 70% of the families with thrombophilia.5 Initial studies focussed on patients and their relatives (family studies). Such studies are very useful but can be hampered by selection bias. In other words, we know these families because the proband and some of his/her relatives have experienced thrombosis. Therefore, later studies used groups of unrelated patients and healthy controls (patient-control studies). One of the limitations of these studies is that they need to be very large to identify the less common risk factors. The concept of venous thrombosis as a multifactorial disease has received much attention in recent years.6-8 One of the reasons is that some of the newly discovered genetic risk factors concern single point mutations that are quite common in the general population (e.g., factor V Leiden, prothrombin 20210A allele). 9,10 As a result, studies focussing on the interaction of these mutations with other relatively common risk factors (e.g., use of oral contraceptives,11,12 pregnancy,13 surgery,14 but also lupus anticoagulant15 or mild hyperhomocysteinemia16,17) have become feasible. In addition, researchers will continue to learn more about the relationship between these common molecular risk factors and the clinical phenotypes, namely deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, superficial thrombosis, and first versus recurrent events.
A radiographic follow-up study of stand-alone-cage and graft-plate constructs for single-level anterior cervical discectomy and fusion.

Background Anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) may be performed using an interbody cage or graft with an anterior plate or with a stand-alone (SA) interbody device without the anterior plate. The pros and cons of each vary. This study examined the radiographic outcome of the two techniques with a focus on implant subsidence. Methods A retrospective review of cases of singe level ACDF by a single surgeon was undertaken. Medical and radiographic records were reviewed to determine subsidence, pre- and post-operative segmental and total lordosis in cohorts of both stand-alone and graft-and-plate constructs. Results The post-operative radiographs of 35 patients with a SA cage were compared with 41 patients with an allograft block and anterior plate (graft and plate; GP). There was no significant difference in overall subsidence between the two groups although there was a trend toward less clinically significant subsidence (2 mm) in the SA group. For single level ACDF, a SA device appears to be comparable in terms of undesired subsidence. Conclusions Further studies with different implants and materials may offer further insight.