Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Real-time support in adaptable middleware for heterogeneous sensor networks

The use of sensor networks in different kinds of sophisticated applications is emerging due to several advances in sensor/ embedded system technologies. However, the integration and coordination of heterogeneous sensors is still a challenge. especially when the target application environment is susceptible to changes. Such systems must adapt themselves in order to fulfil increasing requirements. Especially the handling of real-rime requirements is a challenge in this context in which different technologies are applied to build the overall system. Moreover. these changing scenarios require services located at different places during the system runtime. Thus a support for adaptability is needed. Timing and precision requirements play an important role in such scenarios. Besides. QoS management must provide the necessary support to offer the flexibility demanded in such scenarios. In this paper we present the real-time perspective of a middleware that aims at providing the support required by sophisticated heterogeneous sensor network applications. We propose to address the real-time concerns by using the OMG Data Distribution Service for Real-time Systems approach. but with a more flexible approach that firs in the heterogeneous environment in which the proposed middleware is intended to be used. We also present a coordination protocol to support the proposed approach.
A Case Study in Locating the Architectural Roots of Technical Debt

Our recent research has shown that, in large-scale software systems, defective files seldom exist alone. They are usually architecturally connected, and their architectural structures exhibit significant design flaws which propagate bugginess among files. We call these flawed structures the architecture roots, a type of technical debt that incurs high maintenance penalties. Removing the architecture roots of bugginess requires refactoring, but the benefits of refactoring have historically been difficult for architects to quantify or justify. In this paper, we present a case study of identifying and quantifying such architecture debts in a large-scale industrial software project. Our approach is to model and analyze software architecture as a set of design rule spaces (DRSpaces). Using data extracted from the project's development artifacts, we were able to identify the files implicated in architecture flaws and suggest refactorings based on removing these flaws. Then we built economic models of the before and (predicted) after states, which gave the organization confidence that doing the refactorings made business sense, in terms of a handsome return on investment.
Inhibition of Caspase-1 Activation in Endothelial Cells Improves Angiogenesis

Background: The interplay between dyslipidemia-induced inflammation and angiogenesis remains poorly understood. Results: Inhibition of caspase-1 improves VEGFR-2 signaling, tube formation, and blood perfusion in ischemic tissues. Conclusion: The suppression of caspase-1 improves angiogenesis and ischemia prognosis. Significance: Caspase-1 suppression is a novel therapeutic target for improvement of angiogenesis and ischemia under inflammatory environments. Deficient angiogenesis may contribute to worsen the prognosis of myocardial ischemia, peripheral arterial disease, ischemic stroke, etc. Dyslipidemic and inflammatory environments attenuate endothelial cell (EC) proliferation and angiogenesis, worsening the prognosis of ischemia. Under these dyslipidemic and inflammatory environments, EC-caspase-1 becomes activated and induces inflammatory cell death that is defined as pyroptosis. However, the underlying mechanism that correlates caspase-1 activation with angiogenic impairment and the prognosis of ischemia remains poorly defined. By using flow cytometric analysis, enzyme and receptor inhibitors, and hind limb ischemia model in caspase-1 knock-out (KO) mice, we examined our novel hypothesis, i.e. inhibition of caspase-1 in ECs under dyslipidemic and inflammatory environments attenuates EC pyroptosis, improves EC survival mediated by vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 (VEGFR-2), angiogenesis, and the prognosis of ischemia. We have made the following findings. Proatherogenic lipids induce higher caspase-1 activation in larger sizes of human aortic endothelial cells (HAECs) than in smaller sizes of HAECs. Proatherogenic lipids increase pyroptosis significantly more in smaller sizes of HAECs than in larger sizes of the cells. VEGFR-2 inhibition increases caspase-1 activation in HAECs induced by lysophosphatidylcholine treatment. Caspase-1 activation inhibits VEGFR-2 expression. Caspase-1 inhibition improves the tube formation of lysophosphatidylcholine-treated HAECs. Finally, caspase-1 depletion improves angiogenesis and blood flow in mouse hind limb ischemic tissues. Our results have demonstrated for the first time that inhibition of proatherogenic caspase-1 activation in ECs improves angiogenesis and the prognosis of ischemia.
Time based anomaly detection using residual polynomial fitting on aggregate traffic statistic

Flashcrowd and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) almost has similar symptom across network and server. But security element such Intrusion Detection System (IDS) must handle both differently. If IDS cannot differentiate flashcrowd and DDoS attack, Quality of Service of legal user traffic in flashcrowd will degraded. So it is important for IDS to differentiate between flashcrowd and DDoS. Many earlier comparison method could sense the anomalous event, but not pay much attention to identify which flow was the anomaly. We presented residual calculation between windowed aggregate traffic statistical value combination. With residual calculation among statistical percentile 10th and mean, a high accuracy of flashcrowd and DDoS differentiation of synthetic anomalous event gained. This method could directly identify the anomalous flow and perform visual analysis to detect the start to end of both event.
Extended Gradient Local Ternary Pattern for Vehicle Detection

In recent years, many vehicle detection algorithms have been proposed. However, a lot of challenges still remain. Local Binary Pattern (LBP) is one of the most popular texture descriptors which has shown its superiority in face recognition and pedestrian detection. But the original LBP pattern is sensitive to noise especially in flat region where gray levels change rarely. To solve this problem, Local Ternary Pattern (LTP) is proposed. Nevertheless, LBP and LTP are lack of gradient information. In this paper, after analysis and comparison, we propose a novel feature descriptor named Extended Gradient Local Ternary Pattern (EGLTP). The proposed descriptor, Extended Gradient Local Ternary Pattern (EGLTP), contains properties of other features, such as the original LTP being less sensitive to noise, Semantic Local Binary Patterns (S-LBP) having low complexity and good direction property, and HOG including lots of gradient information. Experiments showed that EGLTP feature is very discriminative and robust in comparison with other features.
PrivacyCanary: Privacy-Aware Recommenders with Adaptive Input Obfuscation

Recommender systems are widely used by online retailers to promote products and content that are most likely to be of interest to a specific customer. In such systems, users often implicitly or explicitly rate products they have consumed, and some form of collaborative filtering is used to find other users with similar tastes to whom the products can be recommended. While users can benefit from more targeted and relevant recommendations, they are also exposed to greater risks of privacy loss, which can lead to undesirable financial and social consequences. The use of obfuscation techniques to preserve the privacy of user ratings is well studied in the literature. However, works on obfuscation typically assume that all users uniformly apply the same level of obfuscation. In a heterogeneous environment, in which users adopt different levels of obfuscation based on their comfort level, the different levels of obfuscation may impact the users in the system in a different way. In this work we consider such a situation and make the following contributions: (a) using an offline dataset, we evaluate the privacy-utility trade-off in a system where a varying portion of users adopt the privacy preserving technique. Our study highlights the effects that each user's choices have, not only on their own experience but also on the utility that other users will gain from the system, and (b) we propose Privacy Canary, an interactive system that enables users to directly control the privacy-utility trade-off of the recommender system to achieve a desired accuracy while maximizing privacy protection, by probing the system via a private (i.e., undisclosed to the system) set of items. We evaluate the performance of our system with an off-line recommendations dataset, and show its effectiveness in balancing a target recommender accuracy with user privacy, compared to approaches that focus on a fixed privacy level.
Investigating issues influencing knowledge sharing in a research organization, using the Appreciative Inquiry Method

This research contributes to the literature on the subjective experience of knowledge sharing from the perspective of those actively engaged in it. The sharing of knowledge in organizations is influenced by interconnecting factors, including organizational mission, the use made of information technology, and the motivation of individuals. Much of the existing literature takes a reductionist approach to investigating these, treating knowledge as an asset and humans as rational beings. A research organization provides knowledge services to its clients, in which knowledge is viewed both as an asset and as praxis, both aspects being used to meet the organization’s remit and help justify its continued existence. An officially mandated culture of knowledge sharing is promoted to motivate staff to develop and exploit the organization’s knowledge capability. Despite this, knowledge sharing has not been optimised. The Appreciative Inquiry Method, an interpretivist action research method from the “enquiry” tradition, was deployed amongst participants from the organization to help them give up their thinking the effectiveness of their knowledge sharing practice and their ability to improve it. This made possible a synthesis of the situation based on their shared understanding. The PEArL framework was used throughout to reflect on the conduct of the research. The contribution of the research is in supporting and extending findings in the literature from an interpretivist perspective. The importance of knowledge-as-practice was affirmed, together with tacit knowledge possessed by individuals. Knowledge sharing is affected by the low value placed on knowledge-as-practice by the organization’s clients, which affects staff motivation and the way self-efficacy is expressed. The undervaluing of knowledge-as-practice influences pre-existing, informal knowledge subcultures, which subvert the formal knowledge sharing culture. The participants’ power in the situation is limited to providing the executive with a case for maintaining knowledge as practice, to encourage a culture of motivation to share knowledge and to increase access to sharing mechanisms. The contribution includes support for the importance of the “relationship” component of the PEArL framework.
On the Evaluation of Software Maintainability Using Automatic Test Case Generation

The measurement of external software attributes and the analysis of how those attributes have evolved through the software's releases are challenging activities. This is particularly evident when we discuss the maintainability of Object-Oriented (OO) systems which, due to their specific characteristics, hide information that cannot be gathered through static analysis. As maintainability can be defined as the "speed and ease with which a program can be corrected or changed", we believe that test data are reflective of the changes performed during maintenance. Moreover, empirical observations allow to speculate about the relationships between maintainability and the behaviour of the software when executed by test cases (e.g., coverage values) and the test cases' characteristics (e.g., generation time). Our aim is to complement the state-of-the art by proposing a new approach for understanding and characterizing the maintainability of OO systems, which makes use of test data and of the information gathered from the tests' execution.
Gangliogenesis in leech embryos: migration of neural precursor cells

In the metameric CNS of leeches, identified neurons occupy highly stereotyped positions in each segmental ganglion. Although many of the neural precursor cells arise near their definitive positions, some arise outside the prospective domain of the segmental ganglia and thus must migrate into the CNS. Here, we report the results of an analysis of the role of cell migration in gangliogenesis in the leech Theromyzon rude. Segmental ganglia of the ventral nerve cord arise as laterally thickened sheets of tissue lying astride the ventral midline. Particular identified circular and longitudinal muscle fibers, visualized by indirect immunofluorescence using a monoclonal antibody against leech muscle, outline the presumptive ganglionic territories even before the ganglionic rudiments become morphologically distinct and serve as anatomical landmarks to which the cell movements are related. Cell lineage tracers microinjected into precursor blastomeres are used to visualize migratory cells. Small groups of neural precursor cells that arise outside the prospective ganglionic territories migrate with stereotyped timing along stereotyped pathways to reach their definitive positions, and each group of migratory cells gives rise to a stereotyped subset of the cells in a ganglion. No segmental or regional differences are observed in any aspect of cell migration studied here, supporting the view that segmental differences in the architecture of the leech CNS arise only after the initial condensation of the ganglionic rudiments.
MAN1B1 Deficiency: An Unexpected CDG-II

Congenital disorders of glycosylation (CDG) are a group of rare metabolic diseases, due to impaired protein and lipid glycosylation. In the present study, exome sequencing was used to identify MAN1B1 as the culprit gene in an unsolved CDG-II patient. Subsequently, 6 additional cases with MAN1B1-CDG were found. All individuals presented slight facial dysmorphism, psychomotor retardation and truncal obesity. Generally, MAN1B1 is believed to be an ER resident alpha-1,2-mannosidase acting as a key factor in glycoprotein quality control by targeting misfolded proteins for ER-associated degradation (ERAD). However, recent studies indicated a Golgi localization of the endogenous MAN1B1, suggesting a more complex role for MAN1B1 in quality control. We were able to confirm that MAN1B1 is indeed localized to the Golgi complex instead of the ER. Furthermore, we observed an altered Golgi morphology in all patients' cells, with marked dilatation and fragmentation. We hypothesize that part of the phenotype is associated to this Golgi disruption. In conclusion, we linked mutations in MAN1B1 to a Golgi glycosylation disorder. Additionally, our results support the recent findings on MAN1B1 localization. However, more work is needed to pinpoint the exact function of MAN1B1 in glycoprotein quality control, and to understand the pathophysiology of its deficiency.
AODV Based Congestion Control Protocols: Review

Adhoc network is defined as the network in which the users communicate with each other by forming a temporary network without any centralized administration. Here each node acts both as a host as well as a router. They have highly deployable, dynamic and self-configurable topologies. Various routing protocols are defined for MANETs. These protocols may follow proactive, reactive or hybrid approach. Due to many number of nodes transmitting packets over the network, the chances of losing the packets over the network increases to a great extent. Also, with the increase in size of data packets, the congestion over the network increases which may lead to packet loses. The existing routing protocols for MANETs do not support congestion control as they are not congestion adaptive. There are many proposed protocols that are congestion adaptive and deals with the congestion over the network. This paper discusses congestion control protocols in MANETs. Also, three congestion control protocols, EDAODV, AODV-I and CRP, are discussed. Simulation results are gathered for AODV by varying the number of nodes and size of the data packets for four performance metrics, namely, throughput, routing overhead, packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay. KeywordsMANET; AODV; congestion; congestion control;
The two sample problem with censored data

A medical investigator attempting to compare two different treatments for, say, prolongation of life among disease victims, often finds himself in the following situation: at time T, when it is necessary to end the experiment, or at least evaluate the results up to that time, a certain number of the patients in each treatment group will still be alive. His data will then be represented by two sets of numbers which might look like Xl, X2, X3+, X4, X5+, X6, . , Xm and yl, Y2+, Y3+, Y4, * *, y. Here xi and x2 would represent actual lifetimes, while X3+, a "censored" observation, represents a lifetime known only to exceed x3. If all the patients in both treatment groups were treated at time 0, then every + value would be equal to T, a situation that has been investigated by Halperin [1]. Frequently, however, patients enter the investigation at different times after it has begun, and the x+ and y+ values may range from 0 to T. Such a situation, of course, complicates the comparison of the two treatments, particularly if the mechanism censoring the x values is different from that censoring the y values. This may happen, for instance, if the x sequence was run some time ago, so that nearly all the patients have been observed to their death times, while the y sequence is begun later, and contains many censored observations. Gehan [2] and Gilbert [3] have independently proposed the same extension of the Wilcoxon statistic as a solution to the two sample problem with censored data. In this paper the problem is discussed further, and a different test statistic is proposed, which is shown to be, in some ways, superior to the GehanGilbert statistic.
A Reformulation of Certain Aspects of Welfare Economics

Assumptions, 310. — I. General conditions for maximum welfare, 311. — II. The Lemer conditions, 316; the Pareto-Barone-Cambridge conditions, 318; the Cambridge conditions, 320. III. Review and comparison of the relevant points of the various expositions, 323. —IV. The sign of dE, 330.
Death‐associated protein kinase (DAPK1) in cerebral cortex of late‐onset Alzheimer's disease patients and aged controls

A. H. Hainsworth, R. C. Allsopp, A. Jim, J. F. Potter, J. Lowe, C. J. Talbot and R. J. Prettyman (2010) Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology36, 17–24 Death‐associated protein kinase (DAPK1) in cerebral cortex of late‐onset Alzheimer's disease patients and aged controls
Cross-Layer Optimization for Power-Efficient and Robust Digital Circuits and Systems

With the increasing digital services demand, performance and power-efficiency become vital requirements for digital circuits and systems. However, the enabling CMOS technology scaling has been facing significant challenges of device uncertainties, such as process, voltage, and temperature variations. To ensure system reliability, worst-case corner assumptions are usually made in each design level. However, the over-pessimistic worst-case margin leads to unnecessary power waste and performance loss as high as 2.2x. Since optimizations are traditionally confined to each specific level, those safe margins can hardly be properly exploited. To tackle the challenge, it is therefore advised in this Ph.D. thesis to perform a cross-layer optimization for digital signal processing circuits and systems, to achieve a global balance of power consumption and output quality. To conclude, the traditional over-pessimistic worst-case approach leads to huge power waste. In contrast, the adaptive voltage scaling approach saves power (25% for the CORDIC application) by providing a just-needed supply voltage. The power saving is maximized (46% for CORDIC) when a more aggressive voltage over-scaling scheme is applied. These sparsely occurred circuit errors produced by aggressive voltage over-scaling are mitigated by higher level error resilient designs. For functions like FFT and CORDIC, smart error mitigation schemes were proposed to enhance reliability (soft-errors and timing-errors, respectively). Applications like Massive MIMO systems are robust against lower level errors, thanks to the intrinsically redundant antennas. This property makes it applicable to embrace digital hardware that trades quality for power savings.
Effects of Retinoids on Augmentation of Club Cell Secretory Protein.

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Upper-limb tremor suppression with a 7DOF exoskeleton power-assist robot

A tremor which is one of the involuntary motions is somewhat rhythmic motion that may occur in various body parts. Although there are several kinds of the tremor, an essential tremor is the most common tremor disorder of the arm. The essential tremor is a disorder of unknown cause, and it is common in the elderly. The essential tremor interferes with a patient's daily living activity, because it may occur during a voluntary motion. If a patient of an essential tremor uses an EMG-based controlled power-assist robot, the robot might misunderstand the user's motion intention because of the effect of the essential tremor. In that case, upper-limb power-assist robots must carry out tremor suppression as well as power-assist, since a person performs various precise tasks with certain tools by the upper-limb in daily living. Therefore, it is important to suppress the tremor at the hand and grasped tool. However, in the case of the tremor suppression control method which suppressed the vibrations of the hand and the tip of the tool, vibration of other part such as elbow might occur. In this paper, the tremor suppression control method for upper-limb power-assist robot is proposed. In the proposed method, the vibration of the elbow is suppressed in addition to the hand and the tip of the tool. The validity of the proposed method was verified by the experiments.