Morphological and Microsatellite DNA Diversity of Djallonké Sheep in Guinea-Bissau

Background: The present study aimed at characterizing the Djallonké Sheep (DS), the only local sheep breed raised in Guinea-Bissau. A total of 200 animals were sampled from four regions (Bafatá, Gabú, Oio and Cacheu) and described using 7 visual criteria and 8 measurements. These parameters have been studied by discriminant analysis and principal components analysis. The genetic diversity and population structure of 92 unrelated animals were studied using 12 microsatellite markers.Results: The values of quantitative characters in the Bafatá region were significantly higher than those obtained in the other three regions. A phenotypic diversity of the DS population was observed and three types of format distinguished: a “large format” in the region of Bafatá, an “intermediate format” in the regions of Gabú and Oio and a "small format" in the Cacheu region. The hair coat colors are dominated by the white color, the shape of the facial head profile is mainly convex and the ears "erected horizontally". Most of the morphobiometric characteristics were significantly influenced by the “region” and “sex of animals”.The average Polymorphism Information Content (PIC) of 0.65 ± 0.11 supports the use of markers in genetic characterization. Gabú subpopulation had the highest genetic diversity measures (He = 0.716 ± 0.089) while Cacheu DS subpopulation presented the smallest (He = 0.651 ± 0.157). Only Gabú and Bafatá subpopulations presented significant heterozygote deficiency across all loci indicating possible significant inbreeding. Mean values for FIT, FST, FIS and GST statistics across all loci were 0.09, 0.029, 0.063 and 0.043 respectively. The overall genetic differentiation observed between the four DS subpopulations studied was low. Bafatá and Gabú were the most closely related subpopulations (DS = 0.04, genetic identity = 0.96) while Bafatá and Cacheu were the most genetically distant subpopulations (DS = 0.14, genetic identity = 0.87), which is consistent with the morphological analysis and the factorial analysis of correspondence. Conclusions: The molecular results on DS population of Guinea-Bissau confirmed the ones obtained with morphological analysis. The three formats observed phenotypically might be due to a combination of the agro-ecological differences and the management of breeding rather than genetic factors.

Laurelin: Java-native ROOT I/O for Apache Spark

Apache Spark[1] is one of the predominant frameworks in the big data space, providing a fully-functional query processing engine, vendor support for hardware accelerators, and performant integrations with scientific computing libraries. One difficulty in adopting conventional big data frameworks to HEP workflows is the lack of support for the ROOT file format in these frameworks. Laurelin[6] implements ROOT I/O with a pure Java library, with no bindings to the C++ ROOT[2] implementation, and is readily installable via standard Java packaging tools. It provides a performant interface enabling Spark to read (and soon write) ROOT TTrees, enabling users to process these data without a pre-processing phase converting to an intermediate format.

SEMANTIC PACKET CONVERSION MODEL FOR INDUSTRIAL INTERNET OF THINGS HETEROGENEOUS GATEWAY

Рассматриваются вопросы семантического межпротокольного преобразования пакетов, поступающих на гетерогенный шлюз промышленного интернета вещей (ПИВ). Проведены эксперименты по измерению времени обслуживания сетевых пакетов при их приеме и конвертации в промежуточный формат гетерогенного шлюза, а также при обратном преобразовании и дальнейшей отправке из промежуточного формата в выбранный формат пакета. Исследованы следующие протоколы передачи данных: CoAP, MQTT, Modbus TCP, STOMP, OPC UA и HTTP. Получены аналитические модели семантического межпротокольного преобразования, использованные для разработки имитационной модели работы семантического шлюза ПИВ и протестированные на примере преобразований CoAP-MQTT и MQTT-CoAP. В ходе компьютерного моделирования разработанная модель была сопоставлена с моделью, описывающей работу шлюза, выполняющего инкапсуляцию заголовков и полезных данных прикладных протоколов в другие прикладные протоколы. The issues of semantic protocol conversion of incoming packets coming to the heterogeneous gateway of the Industrial Internet of Things are considered. A series of experiments were carried out to measure the processing time of network packets when they were received and converted to the IIoT conversion format on the heterogeneous gateway, as well as when they were converted back and then sent from the intermediate format to the selected packet format. The following data transfer protocols were studied: CoAP, MQTT, Modbus TCP, STOMP, OPC UA, and HTTP. Analytical models of semantic protocol conversion were obtained. These models were used to develop a simulation model of the IIoT semantic gateway, which was tested on the example of CoAP-MQTT and MQTT-CoAP transformations. During computer simulation, the developed model was compared with a model thatdescribes the operation of the gateway that encapsulates the headers and useful data of application protocols in other application protocols.

Model Checking of WebRTC Peer to Peer System

The establishment of the multimedia session is crucial in the WebRTC architecture before media and data transmission. The preliminary bi-directional flow provides the network with all the information needed in order to control and manage the communication between end-users. This control includes the setup, management, and teardown of a session and the definition, and the modification of multiple features that will be enabled in the ongoing session. This is performed by a mechanism named Signaling. In this work, we will use the formal verification to increase confidence in our SDL model by checking the consistency and reliability of the WebRTC Peer to Peer system. The verification and validation are proved the most efficient tools to avoid errors and defects in the concurrent system designs. Indeed, by using model-checking techniques we will verify if the WebRTC system adheres to standards if it performs the selected functions in the correct manner. To achieve that, we will first translate the SDL model to an intermediate format IF that will be retranslated to a Promela Model. Second, using the SPIN model checker, we will verify the general correctness of the model before checking if the desired properties are satisfied using the Linear Temporal Logic (LTL).

An Educational Tool for Digital Electronic System Synthesis and Optimization

Considering the complexity of today's digital electronic systems, it is crucial to have open-source electronic design automation (EDA) tools specifically developed for educational purposes. Such tools can easily be modified to meet the demands of the course being taught and they can be configured to expose the intermediate steps during the design process. This chapter presents an educational EDA tool to help students better understand and implement fundamental concepts in digital electronic design and synthesis courses. The tool receives an intermediate format that represents the target system behavior and a set of constraints as input, and generates the representation of the actual circuit using high-level electronic components such as functional units, memory, and steering logic components available in its technology library. It considers execution delay, area, memory space consumption, and reliability constraints. The user is able to interact with the tool during the design process and select the algorithms to perform various synthesis and optimization tasks.

glactools: a command-line toolset for the management of genotype likelihoods and allele counts

MotivationResearch projects involving population genomics routinely need to store genotyping information, population allele frequencies, combine files from different samples, query the data and export it to various formats. This is often done using bespoke in-house scripts which cannot be easily adapted to new projects and seldom constitute reproducible workflows.ResultsWe introduce glactools, a set of command-line utilities which can import data from genotypes or population-wide allele frequencies into an intermediate representation, compute various operations on it and export the data to several file formats used by population genetics software. This intermediate format can take 2 forms, one to store per-individual genotype likelihoods and a second for allele counts from one or more individuals. glactools allows users to perform operations such as intersecting datasets, merging individuals into populations, creating subsets, perform queries (e.g. return sites where a given population does not share an allele with a second one) and compute summary statistics to answer biologically relevant questions.Availabilityglactools is freely available for use under the GPL. It requires a C++ compiler and the htslib library. (https://grenaud.github.io/glactools/)[email protected] informationSupplementary methods and results are available at Bioinformatics online.

AYSE

This paper presents an educational Electronic Design Automation tool called AYSE (Automated SYstem Synthesis Environment). AYSE is developed to help undergraduate and graduate students better understand and implement fundamental concepts in digital electronic design and synthesis courses. It receives an intermediate format that represents the system behavior and a set of constraints as input; and generates the representation of the actual circuit using the electronic components (functional units, memory and steering logic components) available in its technology library. A user can load the input from an external file or utilize the graphical user interface (GUI). Similarly, the output can be displayed using GUI or written to a file. The user is able to interact with the tool during the synthesis process and select the algorithms to perform three main synthesis tasks; namely, resource allocation, operation scheduling and resource binding/sharing. It is also possible to run the tool for the most efficient solution. The effectiveness of the tool was tested in a graduate level course.

A fixed-point implementation of tone mapping operation for HDR images expressed in floating-point format

A tone mapping operation (TMO) for HDR images with fixed-point arithmetic is proposed. A TMO generates a low dynamic range (LDR) image from a high dynamic range (HDR) image by compressing its dynamic range. Since HDR images are generally expressed in a floating-point data format, a TMO also deals with floating-point data even though resulting LDR images have integer data. As a result, conventional TMOs require many resources such as computational and memory cost. To reduce the resources, an integer TMO which treats a floating-point number as two 8-bit integer numbers was proposed. However, this method has the limitation of available input HDR image formats. The proposed method introduces an intermediate format to relieve the limitation of input formats, and expands the integer TMO for the intermediate format. The proposed integer TMO can be applied for multiple formats such as the RGBE and the OpenEXR. Moreover, the method can conduct all calculations in the TMO with fixed-point arithmetic. Using both integer data and fixed-point arithmetic, the method reduces not only the memory cost, but also the computational cost. The experimental and evaluation results show that the proposed method reduces the computational and memory cost, and gives almost same quality of LDR images, compared with the conventional method with floating-point arithmetic.

General Architecture for Generation of Slide Presentations, including PowerPoint, from arbitrary XML Documents

PowerPoint slide decks are often required for training content authored in XML. Until recently, this was difficult for many users. With the development of the Apache POI library, it is now possible to reliably generate PowerPoint documents with a minimum of implementation effort. This paper presents a general architecture for generating slide presentations of any format from XML of any sort through the use of an intermediate format that abstracts the general structure of PowerPoint-type presentations. This general architecture allows the same source to potentially produce PowerPoint, Slidey, PDF, or any other presentation-optimized format from the same source with a minimum of implementation effort. The paper focuses on the specific challenge of producing PowerPoint using this architecture.