Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Controlled Islanding Solution for Large-Scale Power Systems

Intentional Controlled Islanding (ICI) has been proposed as a corrective measure of last resort to split the power system into several sustainable islands and prevent cascading outages. This paper proposes a novel ICI algorithm based on a linear programming (LP) formulation that directly determines an islanding solution with minimal power-flow disruption for any given number of islands, while ensuring that each island contains only coherent generators. In addition, the proposed algorithm enables operators to constrain any transmission line to be excluded from the solution, allows the control of the size of islands and ensures their connectivity. The basis of the proposed LP formulation is an exact mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation. A search space reduction procedure that generates additional constraints for reducing the search space of the MILP is also proposed. In most cases, these additional constraints are enough for the relaxed MILP formulation (LP formulation) to generate optimal solutions. Nonetheless, the proposed LP formulation is executed as a part of a recursive linearization procedure, which ensures that optimal solutions are always obtained. Multiple simulation results demonstrate the ability of the proposed LP ICI algorithm to meet the requirement of real-time controlled islanding in large-scale power systems.
Faces, people and the brain: The 45th Sir Frederic Bartlett Lecture

The fact that the face is a source of diverse social signals allows us to use face and person perception as a model system for asking important psychological questions about how our brains are organised. A key issue concerns whether we rely primarily on some form of generic representation of the common physical source of these social signals (the face) to interpret them, or instead create multiple representations by assigning different aspects of the task to different specialist components. Variants of the specialist components hypothesis have formed the dominant theoretical perspective on face perception for more than three decades, but despite this dominance of formally and informally expressed theories, the underlying principles and extent of any division of labour remain uncertain. Here, I discuss three important sources of constraint: first, the evolved structure of the brain; second, the need to optimise responses to different everyday tasks; and third, the statistical structure of faces in the perceiver’s environment. I show how these constraints interact to determine the underlying functional organisation of face and person perception.
Arabidopsis BRASSINOSTEROID INACTIVATOR2 is a typical BAHD acyltransferase involved in brassinosteroid homeostasis

Brassinosteroids (BRs) are plant-specific steroidal hormones; BR homeostasis is crucial for various aspects of plant growth and development. However, to date, the BR inactivation process has not been thoroughly elucidated. In this study, we identified and characterized a novel BAHD family acyltransferase gene, BRASSINOSTEROID INACTIVATOR2 (BIA2), involved in BR inactivation. BIA2-overexpressing (OE-BIA2) plants displayed typical BR-deficient phenotypes, which were rescued by exogenous BR treatment. Real-time qRT-PCR and transcriptome analyses showed that expression levels of virtually all of the BR biosynthetic genes were increased, whereas the expression of many BR inactivation genes was reduced in OE-BIA2 plants. Root inhibition assays showed that the root growth of OE-BIA2 plants was inhibited. We obtained plants with an intermediate phenotype by crossing the OE-BIA2 plants with BRASSINOSTEROID-INSENSITIVE1 (BRI1)-overexpressing plants. The null BIA2 mutants had longer hypocotyls in the dark. BIA2 was predominantly expressed in roots, and its expression was induced by 24-epibrassinolide or dark treatment, but it exhibited a differential expression pattern compared with its homologue, BIA1. Furthermore, genetic transformation with point-mutant and deleted-BIA2 constructs confirmed that the HXXXD motif is essential for the function of BIA2. Taken together, these findings indicate that BIA2 is a typical BAHD acyltransferase that is involved in BR homeostasis and may inactivate bioactive BRs by esterification, particularly in roots and hypocotyls under dark conditions.
Compact fiber laser-pumped mid-infrared source based on orientation-patterned gallium arsenide

Among quasi-phase matching (QPM) materials, PPLN suffers from a limited transparency, strongly limiting both the output power and the beam quality above 4 μm. We are developing a new QPM technology based on Orientation- Patterned Gallium Arsenide (OP-GaAs) crystals, transparent up to 16 μm and showing excellent nonlinear and thermal properties and very low losses (<0.02 cm-1). We demonstrated with such samples a high-repetition rate tunable OPO attractively pumped by a remote Thulium fiber laser and integrated in a 25×30×6 cm transportable head. A 3 W level output in the 3-5 μm range was obtained with a 53% efficiency and an unprecedented beam quality (M2=1.4), making this module most suited to study directed infrared countermeasures (DIRCM).
Melatonin and human reproduction: Shedding light on the darkness hormone

Melatonin, N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine, is a molecule with diverse physiological functions. This neuro-hormone affects reproductive performance in a wide variety of species. In most animals, but not exclusively all, melatonin has an antigonadotrophic effect. The seasonal changes in the number of hours per day that melatonin is secreted mediate the temporal coupling of reproductive activity to seasonal changes in day-length. These observations stimulated a search for a role for the pineal gland and melatonin in human reproduction. Clinical experience related to this issue has yielded inconclusive and sometimes conflicting results. This article reviews the current available evidence concerning the effects of melatonin on human reproductive processes (e.g., puberty, ovulation, pregnancy, and fertility). Possible reasons for the vagueness and elusiveness of the clinical effects are discussed.
An oscillatory correlation model of object-based attention

Attention is a critical mechanism for visual scene analysis. By means of attention, it is possible to break down the analysis of a complex scene to the analysis of its parts through a selection process. Empirical studies demonstrate that attentional selection is conducted on visual objects as a whole. We present a neurocomputational model of object-based selection in the framework of oscillatory correlation. By segmenting an input scene and integrating the segments with their conspicuity obtained from a saliency map, the model selects salient objects rather than salient locations. The proposed system is composed of three modules: a saliency map providing saliency values of image locations, image segmentation for breaking the input scene into a set of objects, and object selection which allows one of the objects of the scene to be selected at a time. This object selection system has been applied to real images and the simulation results show its effectiveness.
Direct Power Control of DFIG System Without Phase-Locked Loop Under Unbalanced and Harmonically Distorted Voltage

This paper proposes an improved direct power control (DPC) strategy for the rotor-side converter (RSC) and grid-side converter (GSC) of the doubly fed induction generator under unbalanced and distorted voltage conditions. The proposed scheme is implemented in a synchronous reference frame with the fixed angular speed, so that the phase-locked loop can be removed and relevant potential instability issues can be avoided. Besides, the sequential separations and complex calculations of the power compensating items can be eliminated with the direct-resonant method based on a dual-frequency frequency adaptive vector PI. Thus, the negative and harmonic components can be directly eliminated, achieving balanced and sinusoidal current injected into the power grid. Meanwhile, the control strategy can achieve self-adaptive to the grid frequency variation in the practical situation with the proposed frequency estimation scheme. Finally, the experimental results validate the availability of the proposed DPC strategy.
Thioester-Containing Proteins 2 and 4 Affect the Metabolic Activity and Inflammation Response in Drosophila

ABSTRACT Drosophila melanogaster is an outstanding model for studying host antipathogen defense. Although substantial progress has been made in understanding how metabolism and immunity are interrelated in flies, little information has been obtained on the molecular players that regulate metabolism and inflammation in Drosophila during pathogenic infection. Recently, we reported that the inactivation of thioester-containing protein 2 (Tep2) and Tep4 promotes survival and decreases the bacterial burden in flies upon infection with the virulent pathogens Photorhabdus luminescens and Photorhabdus asymbiotica. Here, we investigated physiological and pathological defects in tep mutant flies in response to Photorhabdus challenge. We find that tep2 and tep4 loss-of-function mutant flies contain increased levels of carbohydrates and triglycerides in the presence or absence of Photorhabdus infection. We also report that Photorhabdus infection leads to higher levels of nitric oxide and reduced transcript levels of the apical caspase-encoding gene Dronc in tep2 and tep4 mutants. We show that Tep2 and Tep4 are upregulated mainly in the fat body rather than the gut in Photorhabdus-infected wild-type flies and that tep mutants contain decreased numbers of Photorhabdus bacteria in both tissue types. We propose that the inactivation of Tep2 or Tep4 in adult Drosophila flies results in lower levels of inflammation and increased energy reserves in response to Photorhabdus, which could confer a survival-protective effect during the initial hours of infection.
Multimodal cross-context recognition of negative interactions

Negative emotions and stress can impact human-human interactions and eventually lead to aggression. From the perspective of surveillance systems, it is of high importance to recognize as soon as an interaction escalates and human intervention is needed. One of the limitations of deploying a system in real life is that in practice it can only be trained on a limited number of situations. In this paper we examined the generalization capabilities of a trained system given context change. For this purpose we developed scenarios and made audio-visual recordings in four different contexts in which negative interactions might occur. To obtain a quantification of cross-context performance we kept the test context fixed and performed training on itself (cross-validation) and on all the other contexts. To explore whether multiple examples in the training set are beneficial, we also trained the classifier on a merged corpus of the three contexts that were not used for testing. These experiments were done with audio features, video features and audio-visual feature level fusion to investigate which modality generalizes best. We found that context change generates a decrease in performance that is varying with within-contexts similarities. Merging multiple contexts for training in most cases results in performance just below the best predictive single context. Audio is the most robust modality and in most cases the performance of audio-visual fusion is very close to the one of audio.
Analysis of the reputation system and user contributions on a question answering website: StackOverflow

Question answering (Q&A) communities have been gaining popularity in the past few years. The success of such sites depends mainly on the contribution of a small number of expert users who provide a significant portion of the helpful answers, and so identifying users that have the potential of becoming strong contributers is an important task for owners of such communities. We present a study of the popular Q&A website StackOverflow (SO), in which users ask and answer questions about software development, algorithms, math and other technical topics. The dataset includes information on 3.5 million questions and 6.9 million answers created by 1.3 million users in the years 2008-2012. Participation in activities on the site (such as asking and answering questions) earns users reputation, which is an indicator of the value of that user to the site. We describe an analysis of the SO reputation system, and the participation patterns of high and low reputation users. The contributions of very high reputation users to the site indicate that they are the primary source of answers, and especially of high quality answers. Interestingly, we find that while the majority of questions on the site are asked by low reputation users, on average a high reputation user asks more questions than a user with low reputation. We consider a number of graph analysis methods for detecting influential and anomalous users in the underlying user interaction network, and find they are effective in detecting extreme behaviors such as those of spam users. Lastly, we show an application of our analysis: by considering user contributions over first months of activity on the site, we predict who will become influential long-term contributors.
Hunting promotes sexual conflict in brown bears

Summary The removal of individuals through hunting can destabilize social structure, potentially affecting population dynamics. Although previous studies have shown that hunting can indirectly reduce juvenile survival through increased sexually selected infanticide (SSI), very little is known about the spatiotemporal effects of male hunting on juvenile survival. Using detailed individual monitoring of a hunted population of brown bears (Ursus arctos) in Sweden (1991–2011), we assessed the spatiotemporal effect of male removal on cub survival. We modelled cub survival before, during and after the mating season. We used three proxies to evaluate spatial and temporal variation in male turnover; distance and timing of the closest male killed and number of males that died around a female's home range centre. Male removal decreased cub survival only during the mating season, as expected in seasonal breeders with SSI. Cub survival increased with distance to the closest male killed within the previous 1·5 years, and it was lower when the closest male killed was removed 1·5 instead of 0·5 year earlier. We did not detect an effect of the number of males killed. Our results support the hypothesis that social restructuring due to hunting can reduce recruitment and suggest that the distribution of the male deaths might be more important than the overall number of males that die. As the removal of individuals through hunting is typically not homogenously distributed across the landscape, spatial heterogeneity in hunting pressure may cause source–sink dynamics, with lower recruitment in areas of high human‐induced mortality.
Prediction of Stock Market by Principal Component Analysis

The categorization of high dimensional data present a fascinating challenge to machine learning models as frequent number of highly correlated dimensions or attributes can affect the accuracy of classification model. In this paper, the problem of high dimensionality of stock exchange is investigated to predict the market trends by applying the principal component analysis (PCA) with linear regression. PCA can help to improve the predictive performance of machine learning methods while reducing the redundancy among the data. Experiments are carried out on a high dimensional spectral of 3 stock exchanges such as: New York Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange and Karachi Stock Exchange. The accuracy of linear regression classification model is compared before and after applying PCA. The experiments show that PCA can improve the performance of machine learning in general if and only if relative correlation among input features is investigated and careful selection is done while choosing principal components. Root mean square error (RMSE) is used as an evaluation metric to evaluate the classification model.
Identifying and Evaluating Field Indicators of Urogenital Schistosomiasis-Related Morbidity in Preschool-Aged Children

Background Several studies have been conducted quantifying the impact of schistosome infections on health and development in school-aged children. In contrast, relatively little is known about morbidity levels in preschool-aged children (≤5 years) who have been neglected in terms of schistosome research and control. The aim of this study was to compare the utility of available point-of-care (POC) morbidity diagnostic tools in preschool versus primary school-aged children (6–10 years) and determine markers which can be used in the field to identify and quantify Schistosoma haematobium-related morbidity. Methods/Principal Findings A comparative cross-sectional study was conducted to evaluate the performance of currently available POC morbidity diagnostic tools on Zimbabwean children aged 1–5 years (n=104) and 6–10 years (n=194). Morbidity was determined using the POC diagnostics questionnaire-based reporting of haematuria and dysuria, clinical examination, urinalysis by dipsticks, and urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR). Attributable fractions were used to quantify the proportion of morbidity attributable to S. haematobium infection. Based on results of attributable fractions, UACR was identified as the most reliable tool for detecting schistosome-related morbidity, followed by dipsticks, visual urine inspection, questionnaires, and lastly clinical examination. The results of urine dipstick attributes showed that proteinuria and microhaematuria accounted for most differences between schistosome egg-positive and negative children (T=-50.1; p<0.001). These observations were consistent in preschool vs. primary school-aged children. Conclusions/Significance Preschool-aged children in endemic areas can be effectively screened for schistosome-related morbidity using the same currently available diagnostic tools applicable to older children. UACR for detecting albuminuria is recommended as the best choice for rapid assessment of morbidity attributed to S. haematobium infection in children in the field. The use of dipstick microhaematuria and proteinuria as additional indicators of schistosome-related morbidity would improve the estimation of disease burden in young children.
Exploring the History of Chloroplast Capture in Arabis Using Whole Chloroplast Genome Sequencing

Chloroplast capture occurs when the chloroplast of one plant species is introgressed into another plant species. The phylogenies of nuclear and chloroplast markers from East Asian Arabis species are incongruent, which indicates hybrid origin and shows chloroplast capture. In the present study, the complete chloroplast genomes of A. hirsuta, A. nipponica, and A. flagellosa were sequenced in order to analyze their divergence and their relationships. The chloroplast genomes of A. nipponica and A. flagellosa were similar, which indicates chloroplast replacement. If hybridization causing chloroplast capture occurred once, divergence between recipient species would be lower than between donor species. However, the chloroplast genomes of species with possible hybrid origins, A. nipponica and A. stelleri, differ at similar levels to possible maternal donor species A. flagellosa, which suggests that multiple hybridization events have occurred in their respective histories. The mitochondrial genomes exhibited similar patterns, while A. nipponica and A. flagellosa were more similar to each other than to A. hirsuta. This suggests that the two organellar genomes were co-transferred during the hybridization history of the East Asian Arabis species.
What Would You Do With $500? Spending Responses to Gains, Losses, News, and Loans

We use survey questions about spending in hypothetical scenarios to investigate features of propensities to consume that are useful for distinguishing between consumption theories. We find that (1) responses to unanticipated gains are vastly heterogeneous (either zero or substantially positive); (2) responses increase in the size of the gain, driven by the extensive margin of spending adjustments; (3) responses to losses are much larger and more widespread than responses to gains; and (4) even those with large responses to gains do not respond to news about future gains. These four findings suggest that limited access to disposable resources, and frictions in adjusting consumption, are important determinants of consumption behaviour. We also find that (5) households do not respond to the offer of a one-year interest-free loan, suggesting that this is not a consequence of short-term credit constraints; and (6) people do cut spending in response to news about future losses, suggesting that neither is this a consequence of myopia. A calibrated precautionary savings model with utility costs of changing consumption, and a sufficient fraction of low-wealth households, can account for these features of propensities to consume on both the extensive and intensive margins.
An Efficient and Scalable Approach to CNN Queries in a Road Network

A continuous search in a road network retrieves the objects which satisfy a query condition at any point on a path. For example, return the three nearest restaurants from all locations on my route from point s to point e. In this paper, we deal with NN queries as well as continuous NN queries in the context of moving objects databases. The performance of existing approaches based on the network distance such as the shortest path length depends largely on the density of objects of interest. To overcome this problem, we propose UNICONS (a uni que con tinuous s earch algorithm) for NN queries and CNN queries performed on a network. We incorporate the use of precomputed NN lists into Dijkstra's algorithm for NN queries. A mathematical rationale is employed to produce the final results of CNN queries. Experimental results for real-life datasets of various sizes show that UNICONS outperforms its competitors by up to 3.5 times for NN queries and 5 times for CNN queries depending on the density of objects and the number of NNs required.
Chaining for securing data provenance in distributed information networks

Entities in an information communication network may use various types of collaborative networking for sharing information such as documents, sensing reports, datasets, etc. The derivation history (i.e., the provenance) of the information plays a very important role in such a networking environment. For example, provenance can be used for information trustworthiness assessment, copyright clearance, data reconciliation, and data replication. While substantial research efforts have focused on these usages of provenance, very limited work has focused on the security issues of the provenance, which is the prerequisite of any provenance-based information analysis systems. In this paper, we explore the security properties of provenance meta-data compared to other general user data in a distributed network environment. We introduce a “chain-structure” provenance scheme to provide security assurance for the provenance meta-data in three dimensions - confidentiality, integrity and availability. Our scheme outperforms the previously proposed “onion-structure” provenance security scheme in terms of the flexibility, protection capability as well as computational overhead.