cometadata/datacite-rtg-text-other-reclassification-records huggingface dataset:
Diverse metallicities of Fermi bubble clouds indicate dual origins in the disk and halo
Creators: name: Ashley, Trisha
name: Fox, Andrew J.
name: Cashman, Frances H.
name: Lockman, Felix J.
name: Bordoloi, Rongmon
name: Jenkins, Edward B.
name: Wakker, Bart P.
name: Karim, Tanveer
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: The Galactic Center is surrounded by two giant plasma lobes known as the Fermi Bubbles, extending ~10 kpc both above and below the Galactic plane. Spectroscopic observations of Fermi Bubble directions at radio, ultraviolet, and optical wavelengths have detected multi-phase gas clouds thought to be embedded within the bubbles referred to as Fermi Bubble high-velocity clouds (FB HVCs). While these clouds have kinematics that can be modeled by a biconical nuclear wind launched from the Galactic center, their exact origin is unknown because, until now, there has been little information on their heavy-metal abundance (metallicity). Here we show that FB HVCs have a wide range of metallicities from <20% solar to ~320% solar. This result is based on the first metallicity survey of FB HVCs. These metallicities challenge the previously accepted tenet that all FB HVCs are launched from the Galactic center into the Fermi Bubbles with solar or super-solar metallicities. Instead, we suggest that FB HVCs originate in both the Milky Way's disk and halo. As such, some of these clouds may characterize circumgalactic medium that the Fermi Bubbles expand into, rather than material carried outward by the nuclear wind, changing the canonical picture of FB HVCs. More broadly, these results reveal that nuclear outflows from spiral galaxies can operate by sweeping up gas in their halos while simultaneously removing gas from their disks.
description: This version of the article has been accepted for publication on Nature Astronomy after peer review. This version is not the Version of Record (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01720-0) and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections
Interior and edge magnetization in thin exfoliated CrGeTe3 films
Creators: name: Noah, Avia
name: Alpern, Hen
name: Singh, Sourabh
name: Gutfreund, Alon
name: Zisman, Gilad
name: Feld, Tomer D.
name: Vakahi, Atzmon
name: Remennik, Sergei
name: Paltiel, Yossi
name: Huber, Martin E.
name: Barrena, Victor
name: Suderow, Hermann
name: Steinberg, Hadar
name: Millo, Oded
name: Anahory, Yonathan
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: CrGeTe3 (CGT) is a semiconducting vdW ferromagnet shown to possess magnetism down to a two-layer thick sample. Although CGT is one of the leading candidates for spintronics devices, a comprehensive analysis of CGT thickness dependent magnetization is currently lacking. In this work, we employ scanning SQUID-on-tip (SOT) microscopy to resolve the magnetic properties of exfoliated CGT flakes at 4.2 K. Combining transport measurements of CGT/NbSe2 samples with SOT images, we present the magnetic texture and hysteretic magnetism of CGT, thereby matching the global behavior of CGT to the domain structure extracted from local SOT magnetic imaging. Using this method, we provide a thickness dependent magnetization state diagram of bare CGT films. No zero-field magnetic memory was found for films thicker than 10 nm and hard ferromagnetism was found below that critical thickness. Using scanning SOT microscopy, we identify a unique edge magnetism, contrasting the results attained in the CGT interior.
description: Main text: 15 pages, 5 figures. Supplementary information: 9 pages, 10 figures. Supplementary videos: 5
Hieracium laevigatum
Creators: name: Info Flora
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021
Subjects: Biodiversity
Taxonomy
Plantae
Tracheophyta
Magnoliopsida
Asterales
Asteraceae
Hieracium
Hieracium laevigatum

description: Hieracium laevigatum aggr.
Glattes Habichtskraut
Art ISFS: 202300 Checklist: 1023050 Asteraceae Hieracium Hieracium laevigatum aggr.
Bestimmungsschlüssel
Zusammenfassung
Artbeschreibung (nach Lauber & al. 2018): Ähnlich wie H. umbellatum, aber meist nur 6-20(-25) blättrig (H. umbellatum meist 20-60 blättrig), Köpfe meist rispig oder traubig angeordnet, untere Blätter in einen geflügelten Stiel verschmälert, mittlere mit keilförmig verschmälertem Grund sitzend (vgl. H. sabaudum. Hüllen und Kopfstiele mit einzelnen Drüsen, die äusseren Hüllblätter kaum zurückgebogen.
Blütezeit (nach Lauber & al. 2018): 6-8
Standort und Verbreitung in der Schweiz (nach Lauber & al. 2018): Waldränder, Gebüsche / kollin-subalpin / CH
Verbreitung global (nach Lauber & al. 2018): Eurosibirisch-nordamerikanisch
Ökologische Zeigerwerte (nach Landolt & al. 2010) 2 + w22-333.h.2n=27
Status
Status IUCN: Nicht gefährdet
Ökologie
Lebensraum Lebensraumnach Delarze & al. 2015
6.3.6 - Saurer Eichenmischwald (Quercion robori-petraeae)6.3.7 - Kastanienwald
fett Dominante Art, welche das Aussehen des Lebensraumes mitprägt Charakterart Weniger strikt an den Lebensraum gebundene Art
Ökologische Zeigerwerte nach Landolt & al. (2010)
BodenfaktorenKlimafaktorenSalztoleranzFeuchtezahl F--Lichtzahl L--Salzzeichen--Reaktionszahl R--Temperaturzahl T--Nährstoffzahl N--Kontinentalitätszahl K--
Nomenklatur
Gültiger Name (Checklist 2017):Hieracium laevigatumaggr.
Volksname Deutscher Name: Glattes Habichtskraut Nom français: Epervière lisse Nome italiano: Sparviere allungato
Übereinstimmung mit anderen Referenzwerken
RelationNomReferenzwerkeNo=Hieracium laevigatum aggr.Checklist 2017202300=Hieracium laevigatum aggr.Flora Helvetica 20182362=Hieracium laevigatum aggr.Index synonymique 1996202300=Hieracium laevigatum aggr.SISF/ISFS 2202300<Hieracium laevigatum Willd.SISF/ISFS 2202200
= Taxon stimmt mit akzeptiertem Taxon überein (Checklist 2017)  Taxon enthält (neben anderen) auch das akzeptierte Taxon (Checklist 2017)
Status Indigenat: Indigen
Liste der gefährdeten Pflanzen IUCN(nach Walter & Gillett 1997): Nein
Status Rote Liste national 2016
Status IUCN: Nicht gefährdet
Zusätzliche InformationenKriterien IUCN: --
Status Rote Liste regional 2019
Biogeografische RegionenStatusKriterien IUCNJura (JU)potenziell gefährdet (Near Threatened)A4cMittelland (MP)potenziell gefährdet (Near Threatened)A4cAlpennordflanke (NA)nicht gefährdet (Least Concern)Alpensüdflanke (SA)ungenügende Datengrundlage (Data Deficient)Östliche Zentralalpen (EA)nicht gefährdet (Least Concern)Westliche Zentralalpen (WA)nicht gefährdet (Least Concern)
Status nationale Priorität /Verantwortung
Keine nationale Priorität oder internationale Verantwortung
Schutzstatus
International (Berner Konvention)NeinGEVollständig geschützt(25.07.2007)
Schweiz--
description: Published as part of Info Flora, 2021,
Prior-Guided Adversarial Initialization for Fast Adversarial Training
Creators: name: Jia, Xiaojun
name: Zhang, Yong
name: Wei, Xingxing
name: Wu, Baoyuan
name: Ma, Ke
name: Wang, Jue
name: Cao, Xiaochun
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: Fast adversarial training (FAT) effectively improves the efficiency of standard adversarial training (SAT). However, initial FAT encounters catastrophic overfitting, i.e.,the robust accuracy against adversarial attacks suddenly and dramatically decreases. Though several FAT variants spare no effort to prevent overfitting, they sacrifice much calculation cost. In this paper, we explore the difference between the training processes of SAT and FAT and observe that the attack success rate of adversarial examples (AEs) of FAT gets worse gradually in the late training stage, resulting in overfitting. The AEs are generated by the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) with a zero or random initialization. Based on the observation, we propose a prior-guided FGSM initialization method to avoid overfitting after investigating several initialization strategies, improving the quality of the AEs during the whole training process. The initialization is formed by leveraging historically generated AEs without additional calculation cost. We further provide a theoretical analysis for the proposed initialization method. We also propose a simple yet effective regularizer based on the prior-guided initialization,i.e., the currently generated perturbation should not deviate too much from the prior-guided initialization. The regularizer adopts both historical and current adversarial perturbations to guide the model learning. Evaluations on four datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can prevent catastrophic overfitting and outperform state-of-the-art FAT methods. The code is released at https://github.com/jiaxiaojunQAQ/FGSM-PGI.
description: ECCV 2022
Hieracium lawsonii Vill.
Creators: name: Info Flora
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021
Subjects: Biodiversity
Taxonomy
Plantae
Tracheophyta
Magnoliopsida
Asterales
Asteraceae
Hieracium
Hieracium lawsonii

description: Hieracium lawsonii Vill.
Art ISFS: 202400 Checklist: 1023070 Asteraceae Hieracium Hieracium lawsonii Vill.
Bestimmungsschlüssel
ZusammenfassungKEINE ANGABE
Ökologie
Lebensraum Lebensraumnach Delarze & al. 2015
KEINE ANGABE
Ökologische Zeigerwerte nach Landolt & al. (2010)
BodenfaktorenKlimafaktorenSalztoleranzFeuchtezahl F--Lichtzahl L--Salzzeichen--Reaktionszahl R--Temperaturzahl T--Nährstoffzahl N--Kontinentalitätszahl K--
Nomenklatur
Gültiger Name (Checklist 2017):Hieracium lawsoniiVill.
Volksname
Deutscher Name: -- Nom français: -- Nome italiano: --
Übereinstimmung mit anderen Referenzwerken
RelationNomReferenzwerkeNo=Hieracium lawsonii Vill.Checklist 2017202400=Hieracium lawsonii Vill.Index synonymique 1996202400=Hieracium lawsonii Vill.Landolt 19773355=Hieracium lawsonii Vill.SISF/ISFS 2202400
= Taxon stimmt mit akzeptiertem Taxon überein (Checklist 2017)  Taxon enthält (neben anderen) auch das akzeptierte Taxon (Checklist 2017)
Status Indigenat: -
Liste der gefährdeten Pflanzen IUCN(nach Walter & Gillett 1997): Nein
description: Published as part of Info Flora, 2021,
Neurosurgical team acceptability of brain-computer interfaces: a two-stage international cross-sectional survey.
Creators: name: Williams, Simon C
name: Horsfall, Hugo Layard
name: Funnell, Jonathan P
name: Hanrahan, John G
name: Schaefer, Andreas T
name: Muirhead, William
name: Marcus, Hani J
Publisher: name: The Francis Crick Institute
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Neurosciences
subject: FOS: Clinical medicine
subject: Ecology,Evolution & Ethology
subject: Microfabrication & Bioengineering
subject: Computational & Systems Biology

description: OBJECTIVE: Invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) require neurosurgical implantation, which confers a range of risks. Despite this, no studies have assessed the acceptability of invasive BCIs amongst the neurosurgical team. This study aims to establish baseline knowledge of BCIs within the neurosurgical team and identify attitudes towards different applications of invasive BCI. METHOD: A two-stage cross-sectional international survey of the neurosurgical team (neurosurgeons, anaesthetists, and operating room nurses) was conducted. Results from the first, qualitative, survey were used to guide the second stage quantitative survey, which assessed acceptability of invasive BCI applications. 5-part Likert Scales were used to collect quantitative data. Surveys were distributed internationally via social media and collaborators. RESULTS: 108 qualitative responses were collected. Themes included the promise of BCIs positively impacting disease targets, concerns regarding stability, and an overall positive emotional reaction to BCI technology. The quantitative survey generated 538 responses from 32 countries. Baseline knowledge of BCI technology was poor, with 9% claiming to have a 'good' or 'expert' knowledge of BCIs. Acceptability of invasive BCI for rehabilitative purposes was >80%. Invasive BCI for augmentation in healthy populations divided opinion. CONCLUSION: The neurosurgical team's view of the acceptability of BCI was divided across a range of indications. Some applications (for example stroke rehabilitation) were viewed as more appropriate than other applications (such as augmentation for military use). This range in views highlights the need for stakeholder consultation on acceptable use cases along with regulation and guidance to govern initial BCI implantations if patients are to realise the potential benefits.
Apéndice. Modelado Conceptual en Industria 4.0: Mapeo sistemático de la literatura.
Creators: name: Panizzi, Marisa Daniela
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: 89999 Information and Computing Sciences not elsewhere classified
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: Apéndice. Modelado Conceptual en Industria 4.0: Mapeo sistemático de la literatura.
Solid-State 17O NMR Spectroscopy of Fmoc-Protected Amino Acids
Creators: Klein, Brittney A.
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2022

Enhancing our understanding of the local structure and dynamics for different components  within a biological system is key to unraveling their overall function. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has become an unparalleled technique for exploring both the structure and dynamics within these types of systems. Traditional NMR experiments have focused on investigating the hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen chemical environments comprising these systems which has provided us with invaluable information relating biological functions to physiological processes and has led to more targeted development of pharmaceuticals.  However, oxygen, which is another essential element found in all biomolecules, has largely evaded incorporation into biomolecular NMR studies due to the only stable, NMR-active isotope of oxygen (17O) having comparatively unfavourable NMR properties. Past solid-state NMR (ssNMR) studies investigating 17O nuclei within biomolecules have faced significant hurdles trying to address the poor resolution and insensitivity associated with detection of this nucleus. Both these problems stem from the fact that 17O has a very low natural abundance (0.034%), a small magnetogyric ratio (γ= -5.774 MHz T-1) and is a quadrupolar nucleus (I = 5/2). To address these challenges a combination of isotopic enrichment, ultra-high magnetic fields, multidimensional and/or population transfer techniques have been used but implementing these solutions often translates to higher costs and/or longer experimental times. Despite these drawbacks, 17O NMR data has helped to address some of the more intricate issues surrounding the chemical bonding and structural environments in biological systems that are unable to be resolved using traditional methods.

In this thesis, the 17O NMR parameters for the carboxylic acid moieties in a selection of N-α-fluoren-9-yl-methoxycarbonyl-O-t-butyl (Fmoc)-protected amino acids are investigated using a combination of isotopic enrichment and ultra-high magnetic fields for the first time. A “one-pot” multiple turnover reaction is utilized to introduce 17O labels into both the carbonyl (CO) and hydroxyl (COH) sites of Fmoc-L-isoleucine, Fmoc-L-tryptophan, Fmoc-L-proline, Fmoc-L-tyrosine and Fmoc-L-threonine. Both non-spinning and magic-angle spinning (MAS) 17O NMR spectra were acquired at 14.1 and 21.1 T and used to extract the relevant quadrupolar and chemical shift parameters. These experimental parameters are then compared with computed NMR parameters determined from density functional theory (DFT) computations. This work demonstrates key insights that can be gleamed from 17O NMR studies of small molecules including how 17O NMR spectroscopy can be utilized to monitor the protonation of labelled sites and highlights the importance of developing 17O NMR to enable the study of complex biological systems.
Romanus: Robust Task Offloading in Modular Multi-Sensor Autonomous Driving Systems
Creators: name: Chen, Luke
name: Odema, Mohanad
name: Faruque, Mohammad Abdullah Al
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: Due to the high performance and safety requirements of self-driving applications, the complexity of modern autonomous driving systems (ADS) has been growing, instigating the need for more sophisticated hardware which could add to the energy footprint of the ADS platform. Addressing this, edge computing is poised to encompass self-driving applications, enabling the compute-intensive autonomy-related tasks to be offloaded for processing at compute-capable edge servers. Nonetheless, the intricate hardware architecture of ADS platforms, in addition to the stringent robustness demands, set forth complications for task offloading which are unique to autonomous driving. Hence, we present $ROMANUS$, a methodology for robust and efficient task offloading for modular ADS platforms with multi-sensor processing pipelines. Our methodology entails two phases: (i) the introduction of efficient offloading points along the execution path of the involved deep learning models, and (ii) the implementation of a runtime solution based on Deep Reinforcement Learning to adapt the operating mode according to variations in the perceived road scene complexity, network connectivity, and server load. Experiments on the object detection use case demonstrated that our approach is 14.99% more energy-efficient than pure local execution while achieving a 77.06% reduction in risky behavior from a robust-agnostic offloading baseline.
description: This paper has been accepted to the 2022 International Conference On Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD 2022)
Sequence Labeling for Citation Field Extraction from Cyrillic Script References
Creators: name: Shapiro, Igor
name: Saier, Tarek
name: Färber, Michael
Publisher: name: CEUR-WS.org
Year: 2022
Subjects: reference extraction
reference parsing
sequence labeling
Cyrillic script

description: Extracting structured data from bibliographic references is a crucial task for the creation of scholarly databases. While approaches, tools, and evaluation data sets for the task exist, there is a distinct lack of support for languages other than English and scripts other than the Latin alphabet. A significant portion of the scientific literature that is thereby excluded consists of publications written in Cyrillic script languages. To address this problem, we introduce a new multilingual and multidisciplinary data set of over 100,000 labeled reference strings. The data set covers multiple Cyrillic languages and contains over 700 manually labeled references, while the remaining are generated synthetically. With random samples of varying size of this data, we train multiple well performing sequence labeling BERT models and thus show the usability of our proposed data set. To this end, we showcase an implementation of a multilingual BERT model trained on the synthetic data and evaluated on the manually labeled references. Our model achieves an F1 score of 0.93 and thereby significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art model we retrain and evaluate on our data.
Second-order analysis of an optimal control problem in a phase field tumor growth model with singular potentials and chemotaxis
Creators: name: Colli, Pierluigi
name: Signori, Andrea
name: Sprekels, Jürgen
Publisher: name: Weierstrass Institute
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: Optimal control
subject: tumor growth models
subject: singular potentials
subject: optimality conditions
subject: second-order analysis
subject: 49J20
subject: 49K20
subject: 49K40
subject: 35K57
subject: 37N2

description: This paper concerns a distributed optimal control problem for a tumor growth model of Cahn--Hilliard type including chemotaxis with possibly singular anpotentials, where the control and state variables are nonlinearly coupled. First, we discuss the weak well-posedness of the system under very general assumptions for the potentials, which may be singular and nonsmooth. Then, we establish the strong well-posedness of the system in a reduced setting, which however admits the logarithmic potential: this analysis will lay the foundation for the study of the corresponding optimal control problem. Concerning the optimization problem, we address the existence of minimizers and establish both first-order necessary and second-order sufficient conditions for optimality. The mathematically challenging second-order analysis is completely performed here, after showing that the solution mapping is twice continuously differentiable between suitable Banach spaces via the implicit function theorem. Then, we completely identify the second-order Fréchet derivative of the control-to-state operator and carry out a thorough and detailed investigation about the related properties.
Magnetoelectric effects in Josephson junctions
Creators: name: Bobkova, I. V.
name: Bobkov, A. M.
name: Silaev, M. A.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con)
subject: Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: The review is devoted to the fundamental aspects and characteristic features of the magnetoelectric effects, reported in the literature on Josephson junctions (JJs). The main focus of the review is on the manifestations of the direct and inverse magnetoelectric effects in various types of Josephson systems. They provide a coupling of the magnetization in superconductor/ferromagnet/superconductor JJs to the Josephson current. The direct magnetoelectric effect is a driving force of spin torques acting on the ferromagnet inside the JJ. Therefore it is of key importance for the electrical control of the magnetization. The inverse magnetoelectric effect accounts for the back action of the magnetization dynamics on the Josephson subsystem, in particular, making the JJ to be in the resistive state in the presence of the magnetization dynamics of any origin. The perspectives of the coupling of the magnetization in JJs with ferromagnetic interlayers to the Josephson current via the magnetoelectric effects are discussed.
Deep Sequence Models for Text Classification Tasks
Creators: name: Abdullahi, Saheed Salahudeen
name: Yiming, Sun
name: Muhammad, Shamsuddeen Hassan
name: Mustapha, Abdulrasheed
name: Aminu, Ahmad Muhammad
name: Abdullahi, Abdulkadir
name: Bello, Musa
name: Aliyu, Saminu Mohammad
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
subject: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
subject: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: I.2.7

description: The exponential growth of data generated on the Internet in the current information age is a driving force for the digital economy. Extraction of information is the major value in an accumulated big data. Big data dependency on statistical analysis and hand-engineered rules machine learning algorithms are overwhelmed with vast complexities inherent in human languages. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is equipping machines to understand these human diverse and complicated languages. Text Classification is an NLP task which automatically identifies patterns based on predefined or undefined labeled sets. Common text classification application includes information retrieval, modeling news topic, theme extraction, sentiment analysis, and spam detection. In texts, some sequences of words depend on the previous or next word sequences to make full meaning; this is a challenging dependency task that requires the machine to be able to store some previous important information to impact future meaning. Sequence models such as RNN, GRU, and LSTM is a breakthrough for tasks with long-range dependencies. As such, we applied these models to Binary and Multi-class classification. Results generated were excellent with most of the models performing within the range of 80% and 94%. However, this result is not exhaustive as we believe there is room for improvement if machines are to compete with humans.
Nuanced Effects of Decision Effort on Decision Confidence in Matters of Quality versus Matters of Taste
Creators: Ibrahim, Nahid
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2022

Consumers are largely considered cognitive misers because of their general aversion toward exerting mental effort in decision making. Prior research suggests that engaging in effortful decision tasks tends to undermine consumers’ decision confidence by increasing metacognitive difficulty. In the current research, we examine the circumstances under which the relationship among mental effort exertion, metacognitive difficulty, and decision confidence can be more nuanced. The key hypothesis is that whether exerting more mental effort in the decision process increases or decreases decision confidence is a function of consumers’ effort sensitivity in a particular domain and of the inferences that consumers draw from the decision effort they exert. We theorize that consumers’ effort sensitivity is higher in domains considered “matters of quality” than in domains considered “matters of taste” such that exerting more mental effort has a stronger positive impact on how difficult a decision is perceived to be in quality domains than in taste domains. This systematic difference in effort sensitivity between quality and taste domains differentially impacts two distinct aspects of decision confidence – preference clarity and preference correctness. Evidence from seven studies supports this theorizing, demonstrating that exerting more mental effort in quality domains reduces confidence by undermining preference correctness, whereas exerting more mental effort in taste domains increases confidence by enhancing preference clarity. In addition, disentangling instrumental and incidental experienced decision effort reveals that the former is the key driver of the predicted effects on decision confidence. Moreover, eye tracking evidence provides deeper insight into the information processing strategies (e.g., attribute-based vs. alternative-based processing) that consumers use when making decisions in quality and taste domains. Beyond advancing our conceptual understanding of the experience and consequences of decision effort, these findings have important practical implications for when firms and other choice architects should seek to promote versus discourage effort exertion in consumer decision making.
Performance Modelling and Optimization of Serverless Computing Platforms
Creators: Mahmoudi, Nima
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2022

During the past 10 years, we have witnessed the proliferation of cloud computing services and their adoption in the industry. This rapid growth has been mainly due to economies of scale, improving resource utilization, infinite computing resources on demand, and pay per use cost model. However, the abundance of cloud computing services and infrastructure has left us with lots of resources to manage, which could surpass the development effort for a product. Several new paradigms have emerged since the introduction of cloud computing services, which have tried to improve the services and address these shortcomings. The most promising paradigm shift for the newly emerging cloud services is serverless computing. As a result, we are currently amid an evolutionary paradigm shift in cloud computing towards serverless platforms. This change is due to several improvements over traditional cloud computing, like handling virtually all of the administrative tasks, improving resource utilization, potential operational cost savings, improved energy efficiency, and more straightforward application development. In addition, serverless computing can enable the rapid development of new cloud-based solutions in our current highly-dynamic environment, enabling new solutions for unforeseen circumstances, e.g., pandemic-era applications. However, the current implementations of serverless computing are far from perfect and have a long way to achieve the full potentials of this paradigm.

This thesis focuses on modelling and improving different aspects of serverless computing platforms. As mentioned above, in serverless computing, a large portion of operational tasks are delegated to the cloud operator, which frees the user from these tasks but leaves the operator to create a management system able to handle almost any type of workload. The current generations of serverless computing have emerged to sub-optimal management solutions, leading to underutilized infrastructure, exaggerated costs, and unsatisfactory latencies violating most Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. One of the major reasons behind these shortcomings is the fact that the current serverless computing management systems are workload-agnostic, i.e., they don't adapt to the type of workload being executed on them. Global effort and research is needed to develop management systems capable of running most types of workloads with near-optimal behaviour.

This thesis strives to develop analytical and data-driven models and methods and leverage them to improve the status quo in current serverless computing platforms. We aim to develop several optimization modules using different techniques, complementing each other in different scenarios.
Morphological and Osteological Variation in Cichlids (Perciformes: Cichlidae)
Creators: Kaur, Jasdeep
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2022

The family Cichlidae is a species-rich family in the order Perciformes, with estimates of about 1,703 validly described species, which inhabit freshwater and marginal marine environments in Central and South America, Africa, Madagascar, the West Indies, Sri Lanka, and coastal areas of India and Iran. Cichlids are the classical examples of adaptive radiation which has led to an outstanding diversity of body shapes, color patterns, behavior, and an enormous variety of trophic and ecological specializations. Most of the recent work to determine phylogenetic relationships within this family are based on molecular data and neglect morphological characters, which are very important specifically for including fossils in phylogenies, and play a crucial role in identifying cichlid species in the field. My project is in part to rectify this situation, and will include morphological (including osteological) studies. An assessment of the variability of skeletons of extant cichlids within a single population and the variation of the skeleton that might occur with growth, will provide a baseline of the amount of variation that might be expected in a single species of extinct cichlid. This baseline would then allow us to indicate whether or not a sample of fossil cichlids is likely to represent more than a single species. I conducted the morphological and osteological studies within a sample (n=22) of a single population of Mesonauta festivus. The measurements and meristics for specimens are found to be normally distributed with the standard deviation ranges from 0.01-0.07. In the current study, the osteology of Mesonauta festivus has been described for the first time. I cleared and stained five specimens of Mesonauta festivus and used CT scans of the rest of the specimens for the analyses. All the bones examined were found to be morphological similar within the specimens. I reported the morphological analyses and osteological descriptions for a size series of Iranocichla hormuzensis (n=107). The standard deviation ranges from 0.01-0.09 among the measurements of the specimens. I documented isometric growth among the Iranocichla hormuzensis specimens Among the variable sized specimens of Iranocichla hormuzensis, the bones were found to be similar with the exception of cartilage being more in the juvenile samples. The osteology of the cichlid species in this thesis is found to be conserved. Consequently, if a sample of fossils shows any osteological variation, it is likely that the sample includes more than one different species. For future research, studies in my thesis can be combined with genetic data to determine if there is any variation among the DNA sequences in the individuals of the same species. Further, these morphological and osteological analysis can be included with the molecular studies along with the fossils to better understand the phylogenetic relationships of cichlids.
Experiments with Word Embeddings for Sequential Questioning
Creators: McDonald, Emma
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2022

As a student learns to program, there will be gaps in the student's knowledge that must be addressed for the student to gain a full understanding of the material. A student's answer to a single question may provide some insight into the student's level of understanding. However, a well-chosen sequence of questions might more accurately identify any misunderstandings. For example, the popular 20 Questions game relies on a sequence of well-chosen questions for one player to guess what another player is thinking.

Inspired by the 20 Questions game, we suggest a method to select the next question in a sequence to identify gaps in a student's understanding. We model introductory computing science terms with word embeddings trained from a collection of Python course notes and textbooks. We also introduce a test suite of computing science concepts. Each of the 17 tests is an algebraic equation and each term in the equation is represented by one of our word embeddings. Thus, a test can be evaluated to produce a result that corresponds to another word embedding in the model.

The test suite represents a collection of concepts and skills that an introductory computing science student must learn. We demonstrate that we can represent a computing science concept by adding relevant substituent concepts and removing irrelevant concepts. We then posit that this ability can be used to diagnose the gap in understanding and recommend a relevant next question based on a student's answers so far.
Principals' Self-Efficacy as Instructional Leaders of Literacy
Creators: Durance, Kathleen Rachel
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2022

This qualitative study was designed to address gaps in understandings of how school principals experience self-efficacy as instructional leaders of literacy in a context of standardized performance expectations.  Anchored in Bandura’s (1977; 1997; 2012) social cognitive theory of human agency, it explored principals’ experiences with self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and proxy efficacy through semi-structured interviews with eight participants. Utilizing principles of qualitative research (Cresswell, 2015) and constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), analysis of findings suggested school principals with varied backgrounds experience accountability pressure for the literacy performance of their students as they grapple for credibility, negotiate locus of control through instructional actions, and develop their sense of self-efficacy through successful creation of instructional climates to promote students’ measurable literacy growth.  Conclusions drawn from these findings are: (a) instructional leadership of literacy occurred across a spectrum and (b) self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and proxy efficacy can be developed and intersect with literacy leadership in various ways along an instructional leadership spectrum.  Recommendations include a process for utilizing the instructional leadership spectrum as a reflective tool for personal practice, policy analysis, and application of professional resources.  Future research is invited to analyze the potential uses of this process as well as the Instructional Leadership Spectrum Model and the Model of Intersections and Sources of Self-Efficacy.
Designing Efficient and Secure Algorithms for Payment Channel Networks
Creators: Rahimpour, Sonbol
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2022

Major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from scalability issues. For instance, Bitcoin can handle up to about 7 transactions per second, whereas custodian payment networks such as Visa can handle tens of thousands of transactions per second. One of the promising solutions to scale blockchains such as Bitcoin is Payment Channel Networks (PCNs). In this thesis, we propose new solutions to make the existing PCNs, such as the Bitcoin's Lightning network, more efficient and secure.

Chapter 3 studies watchtowers, which are entities that watch the blockchain on behalf of their offline clients to protect the clients’ payment channels. In practice, there is no trust between clients and watchtowers, and it is challenging to incentivize watchtowers to well-behave (e.g., to refuse bribery). To tackle this problem, Chapter 3 proposes a novel reputation system, and uses the system to incentivize watchtowers to not only deliver their promised service but also reduce their service fees in competition with each other.

Chapter 4 proposes Spear, a new multi-path payment method that can support redundant payments. We show that this redundant payments can significantly improve the success rate of payment transfers in the Lightning network. The challenge in supporting redundant payments is that the recipient may overdraw funds from the redundant paths. In Chapter 4, we explain how this can be done without requiring high computation or major changes to the Lightning network. Finally, Chapter 5 presents a powerful probing technique called Torrent to discover balances of channels in the Lightning network. Unlike the existing techniques, Torrent uses multi-path payments instead of single-path payments. This—together with a novel max flow algorithm designed for the Lightning Network—allows a single probing node to push a large flow of payments through a target channel, making it possible to discover balances of even remote channels. Another major advantage of Torrent is that it can speed up balance discovery through parallel payment transfers and pre-computation of payment paths.
Improving Security and Performance of the RPL Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks
Creators: Shabani Baghani, Ahmad
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2022

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that is connecting billions of otherwise ordinary devices to the Internet. A key component of IoT is Low- power and Lossy Networks (LLNs), composed of various resource-constrained devices with limited energy, memory, and processing power. To communicate with each other, devices (referred to as nodes) in LLNs require an efficient routing protocol. ROLL (Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks), a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF),  designed RPL, the standard IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks, to meet specific needs of LLNs.

RPL generates low control plane traffic and offers a range of interesting features for LLNs. However, RPL has several deficiencies with regard to security and point-to-point communications.

This thesis investigates and tackles some of these deficiencies.

Chapter 3 introduces and analyses the  DAO induction attack,  a new attack against RPL.

In the DAO induction attack, a compromised node in the network periodically transmits a special

control message. Each of these crafted control messages induces many nodes in the network to transmit in response.

This significantly increases the power consumption of nodes, hence reducing the lifetime of battery-operated IoT devices.

    In addition, the attack severely impacts end-to-end latency and packet delivery ratio, two important network performance metrics.

    The chapter proposes a lightweight solution to counter the attack.

    The proposed solution imposes no overhead when the network is in its normal operation (i.e., it is not under attack) and can quickly detect the attack even when the network experiences high packet loss rates.

Chapter 4 studies the sender's authentication problem in RPL and proposes a solution based on the Blom key pre-distribution scheme. The proposed solution has a significantly lower computation cost than the original Blom scheme, hence is more suitable for computationally constrained IoT devices.

Finally, Chapter 5 studies the quality of the RPL's Point-to-Point (P2P) paths.

In particular, it analyzes how much RPL's P2P paths ``stretch'' compared to the shortest paths.

It shows that the average stretch is a factor of at least two in any RPL network.

Furthermore, it shows that RPL's stretch factor can be considerably higher than two in some network topologies including linear networks and grid networks.

To improve the quality of RPL's P2P paths, the chapter proposes a solution that is simple to implement and fully compatible with RPL.
Examining the Potential for Bacterial Build-up on Apparel Fabrics with Repeated Use - A Laboratory Study
Creators: Brown, Skylar
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2022

When clothing is worn multiple times by a consumer, a build-up of oily soils, dirt, odours, and bacteria can transfer from the wearer to the garment. The bacteria that have been transferred to the garment may result in unwanted odours. Over time, this accumulation of bacteria may cause persistent odours that remain in clothing even after laundering. In addition, fibre type may influence how textiles retain and transfer bacteria. The purpose of this in vitro laboratory study was to examine if bacteria can accumulate in apparel fabrics with repeated use/laundering cycles. Three inoculation/wash levels were used (1, 2, 5). Cotton and polyester fabrics were inoculated with Staphylococcus aureus and later laundered. After laundering, bacterial counts from cotton and polyester fabric specimens were calculated in colony forming units (CFU) per sample. Three groups of fabric specimens were used in this study, baseline, treatment, and control. Baseline specimens were used to provide an initial bacterial count of the treatment fabrics to investigate if there was a build-up of bacteria after laundering the treatment specimens. The control fabrics were used to examine the transference of bacteria between fabrics during washing. No differences were found in log CFU per sample of S. aureus on treatment fabrics as the number of inoculation/laundering cycles increased. This suggests that bacteria did not accumulate on either cotton or polyester fabrics as the number of cycles increased. The transfer of bacteria between fabrics during the wash cycle was also examined in this research. It was found that bacteria transferred from the inoculated fabrics to the control fabrics during laundering. The transference of bacteria was minimal for cotton and polyester fabrics. Despite the expectation that bacteria would build-up as the number of inoculation/wash cycles increased, there was no evidence for this in the current study. While laundering can reduce the bacterial counts laundering was not sufficient in removing all S. aureus colonies from both cotton and polyester specimens.
Hieracium piliferum Hoppe
Creators: name: Info Flora
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021
Subjects: Biodiversity
Taxonomy
Plantae
Tracheophyta
Magnoliopsida
Asterales
Asteraceae
Hieracium
Hieracium piliferum

description: Hieracium piliferum Hoppe
Gewöhnliches Grauzottiges Habichtskraut
Art ISFS: 203105 Checklist: 1023190 Asteraceae Hieracium Hieracium piliferum aggr. Hieracium piliferum Hoppe
Bestimmungsschlüssel
Zusammenfassung
Artbeschreibung (nach Lauber & al. 2018): Stängel reichlich langhaarig, aber Drüsenhaare nur spärlich vorhanden oder fehlend.
Ökologische Zeigerwerte (nach Landolt & al. 2010) 222-514.h
Status
Status IUCN: Nicht gefährdet
Ökologie
Lebensraum Lebensraumnach Delarze & al. 2015
KEINE ANGABE
Ökologische Zeigerwerte nach Landolt & al. (2010)
BodenfaktorenKlimafaktorenSalztoleranzFeuchtezahl Fmässig trockenLichtzahl Lsehr hellSalzzeichen--Reaktionszahl Rsauer (pH 3.5-6.5)Temperaturzahl Talpin und nival (von der Baumgrenze bis zur Schneegrenze)Nährstoffzahl NnährstoffarmKontinentalitätszahl Ksubkontinental (niedrige relative Luftfeuchtigkeit, grosse Temperaturschwankungen, eher kalte Winter)
Nomenklatur
Gültiger Name (Checklist 2017):Hieracium piliferumHoppe
Volksname Deutscher Name: Gewöhnliches Grauzottiges Habichtskraut Nom français: Epervière poilue
Nome italiano: --
Übereinstimmung mit anderen Referenzwerken
RelationNomReferenzwerkeNo=Hieracium piliferum HoppeChecklist 2017203105=Hieracium piliferum HoppeFlora Helvetica 20182353=Hieracium piliferum Hoppe s.str.SISF/ISFS 2203105
= Taxon stimmt mit akzeptiertem Taxon überein (Checklist 2017)  Taxon enthält (neben anderen) auch das akzeptierte Taxon (Checklist 2017)
Kommentare aus der Checklist 2017 Wegfall des Ausdrucks s.str.: Gemäss SISF-2 wurde das Taxon als Unterart dem Taxon H. piliferum subsp. glanduliferum (Hoppe) Schinz & R. Keller gegenübergestellt. Neu werden beide Unterarten als Arten aufgefasst und der Ausdruck «s.str.» erübrigt sich. Checklist
Status Indigenat: Indigen
Liste der gefährdeten Pflanzen IUCN(nach Walter & Gillett 1997): Nein
Status Rote Liste national 2016
Status IUCN: Nicht gefährdet
Zusätzliche InformationenKriterien IUCN: --
Status Rote Liste regional 2019
Biogeografische RegionenStatusKriterien IUCNJura (JU)--Mittelland (MP)--Alpennordflanke (NA)nicht gefährdet (Least Concern)Alpensüdflanke (SA)nicht gefährdet (Least Concern)Östliche Zentralalpen (EA)nicht gefährdet (Least Concern)Westliche Zentralalpen (WA)nicht gefährdet (Least Concern)
Status nationale Priorität /Verantwortung
Keine nationale Priorität oder internationale Verantwortung
Schutzstatus
Kein internationaler, nationaler oder kantonaler Schutz
description: Published as part of Info Flora, 2021,
CSI-COP Framework for Engaging Citizen Scientists
Creators: name: Stepankova, O.
name: Shah, H.
name: Özdemir, D.
name: Pierce, R.L.
name: Gialelis, Y.
name: Hinsenkamp, M.
name: Rigler, D
name: Celentano, U.
name: Zhitomirsky-Geffet, M.
name: Vallverdú, J.
name: Lantavou, K.
name: Evram, M.
name: Hriscu, A.
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020
Subjects: Android devices, apps, citizen science, cookies, data protection, digital divide, diversity, ethics, general data protection regulation, GDPR, human rights, inclusivity, online tracking, ePrivacy, privacy, tracking

description: This document provides the framework for the optimum method of applying ECSA’s (European Citizen Science Association) ten principles of citizen science engagement for quality assurance in ethical and inclusive citizen science engagement in the CSI-COP project for the purposes of investigating the extent of online tracking. Following a dynamic recruitment drive, a diverse community of citizen scientists will gain new knowledge and practical skills through informal education provided in workshops and a MOOC (massive open online course). The expertise gained will provide an impetus to join the CSI-COP project collaborating with researchers investigating compliance of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on websites and in apps. A series of activities, validating the outcomes of CSI-COP’s citizen scientists, will be essential to ensure the accuracy of the exploration and findings of cookies embedded in websites and in mobile device apps
description: A supplement (dataset) to this document will be uploaded as an excel spreadsheet listing organisations CSI-COP will approach to engage citizen scientists with the project.