31,963 research outputs found
An experimental evaluation of error seeding as a program validation technique
A previously reported experiment in error seeding as a program validation technique is summarized. The experiment was designed to test the validity of three assumptions on which the alleged effectiveness of error seeding is based. Errors were seeded into 17 functionally identical but independently programmed Pascal programs in such a way as to produce 408 programs, each with one seeded error. Using mean time to failure as a metric, results indicated that it is possible to generate seeded errors that are arbitrarily but not equally difficult to locate. Examination of indigenous errors demonstrated that these are also arbitrarily difficult to locate. These two results support the assumption that seeded and indigenous errors are approximately equally difficult to locate. However, the assumption that, for each type of error, all errors are equally difficult to locate was not borne out. Finally, since a seeded error occasionally corrected an indigenous error, the assumption that errors do not interfere with each other was proven wrong. Error seeding can be made useful by taking these results into account in modifying the underlying model
Faster K-Means Cluster Estimation
There has been considerable work on improving popular clustering algorithm
`K-means' in terms of mean squared error (MSE) and speed, both. However, most
of the k-means variants tend to compute distance of each data point to each
cluster centroid for every iteration. We propose a fast heuristic to overcome
this bottleneck with only marginal increase in MSE. We observe that across all
iterations of K-means, a data point changes its membership only among a small
subset of clusters. Our heuristic predicts such clusters for each data point by
looking at nearby clusters after the first iteration of k-means. We augment
well known variants of k-means with our heuristic to demonstrate effectiveness
of our heuristic. For various synthetic and real-world datasets, our heuristic
achieves speed-up of up-to 3 times when compared to efficient variants of
k-means.Comment: 6 pages, Accepted at ECIR 201
Porcine bone scaffolds adsorb growth factors secreted by MSCs and improve bone tissue repair
An ideal tissue-engineered bone graft should have both excellent pro-osteogenesis and
pro-angiogenesis properties to rapidly realize the bone regeneration
in vivo
. To meet this goal, in
this work a porcine bone scaffold was successfully used as a Trojan horse to store growth factors
produced by mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). This new scaffold showed a time-dependent release
of bioactive growth factors, such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and basic fibroblast
growth factor (bFGF),
in vitro
. The biological effect of the growth factors-adsorbed scaffold on the
in vitro
commitment of MSCs into osteogenic and endothelial cell phenotypes has been evaluated.
In addition, we have investigated the activity of growth factor-impregnated granules in the repair of
critical-size defects in rat calvaria by means of histological, immunohistochemical, and molecular
biology analyses. Based on the results of our work bone tissue formation and markers for bone
and vascularization were significantly increased by the growth factor-enriched bone granules after
implantation. This suggests that the controlled release of active growth factors from porcine bone
granules can enhance and promote bone regeneratio
Contextual Centrality: Going Beyond Network Structures
Centrality is a fundamental network property which ranks nodes by their
structural importance. However, structural importance may not suffice to
predict successful diffusions in a wide range of applications, such as
word-of-mouth marketing and political campaigns. In particular, nodes with high
structural importance may contribute negatively to the objective of the
diffusion. To address this problem, we propose contextual centrality, which
integrates structural positions, the diffusion process, and, most importantly,
nodal contributions to the objective of the diffusion. We perform an empirical
analysis of the adoption of microfinance in Indian villages and weather
insurance in Chinese villages. Results show that contextual centrality of the
first-informed individuals has higher predictive power towards the eventual
adoption outcomes than other standard centrality measures. Interestingly, when
the product of diffusion rate and the largest eigenvalue is
larger than one and diffusion period is long, contextual centrality linearly
scales with eigenvector centrality. This approximation reveals that contextual
centrality identifies scenarios where a higher diffusion rate of individuals
may negatively influence the cascade payoff. Further simulations on the
synthetic and real-world networks show that contextual centrality has the
advantage of selecting an individual whose local neighborhood generates a high
cascade payoff when . Under this condition, stronger homophily
leads to higher cascade payoff. Our results suggest that contextual centrality
captures more complicated dynamics on networks and has significant implications
for applications, such as information diffusion, viral marketing, and political
campaigns
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