Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plastic intermittency during cyclic loading: From dislocation patterning to microcrack initiation

In metallic materials subjected to cyclic loading, strain hardening as well as fatigue crack initiation have been linked for a long time with the evolution of dislocation patterns and structures. In particular, the development of low-energy dislocation configurations such as persistent slip bands (PSBs) is considered as a precursor to crack initiation. However, the associated scenarios have been elaborated mainly from postmortem observations capturing only static pictures of dislocation patterns, while the dynamics of the problem has been somewhat overlooked. Here we analyze collective dislocation dynamics during cycling loading of aluminum using acoustic emission (AE). A strong link is revealed between dislocation patterning, cyclic hardening/softening, and the intermittency of plasticity: Plastic intermittency and dislocation avalanches rapidly decay during the initial hardening stage, in conjunction with the reduction of an internal length scale characterizing the dislocation structure. However, in nonannealed samples, a transient softening stage ensues, associated with a brutal reorganization of this structure. These initial stages of cyclic deformation illustrate the competition between two phenomena: collective dislocation dynamics, governed by long-ranged elastic interactions among dislocations, and the emergence of a self-organizing network controlled by short-range interactions and progressively inhibiting collective effects. Later on, the emergence of PSBs is accompanied by a reincrease of the AE intermittent activity. We propose that the associated AE bursts may be the signature of collective and coordinated dislocation motions along PSBs leading to the formation of incipient microcracks.
Investigating the robustness of ion beam therapy treatment plans to uncertainties in biological treatment parameters

Uncertainties in determining clinically used relative biological effectiveness (RBE) values for ion beam therapy carry the risk of absolute and relative misestimations of RBE-weighted doses for clinical scenarios. This study assesses the consequences of hypothetical misestimations of input parameters to the RBE modelling for carbon ion treatment plans by a variational approach. The impact of the variations on resulting cell survival and RBE values is evaluated as a function of the remaining ion range. In addition, the sensitivity to misestimations in RBE modelling is compared for single fields and two opposed fields using differing optimization criteria. It is demonstrated for single treatment fields that moderate variations (up to ±50%) of representative nominal input parameters for four tumours result mainly in a misestimation of the RBE-weighted dose in the planning target volume (PTV) by a constant factor and only smaller RBE-weighted dose gradients. Ensuring a more uniform radiation quality in the PTV eases the clinical importance of uncertainties in the radiobiological treatment parameters, as for such a condition uncertainties tend to result only in a systematic misestimation of RBE-weighted dose in the PTV by a constant factor. Two opposed carbon ion fields with a constant RBE in the PTV are found to result in rather robust conditions. Treatments using two ion species may be used to achieve a constant RBE in the PTV irrespective of the size and depth of the spread-out Bragg peak.
Stability Overlay for linear and nonlinear time-varying plants

This paper proposes a strategy referred to as Stability Overlay (SO) for linear and nonlinear time-varying plants, that provides input/output stability guarantees for a wide set of adaptive control schemes. We use this methodology to endow Multiple-Model Adaptive Control (MMAC) architectures with robust stability properties when the plant to be controlled is uncertain and time-varying. We emphasize that adaptive control strategies should be able to handle time-varying plants, since these methodologies are usually applied to plants with drifting parameters. The results presented herein clearly indicate that multiple-model strategies augmented with the SO for time-varying plants ensure stability of the closed-loop for a wide class of disturbances and model uncertainty, while providing high performance capabilities whenever the stabilizing controllers have been designed for performance-robustness.
Analysis of colonic histopathological images using pixel intensities and Hough Transform

Cancer of the colon is among the leading types of cancer. Worldwide, colorectal cancer is considered the third most common neoplasm. Similar to other types of cancers, early detection of colon cancer is the key to a successful treatment. Traditionally, pathologists use microscope to examine histopathological images of biopsy samples taken from patients and make judgments based on their professional expertise. Typically, a pathologist would make observations on some key features in the image and subsequently be able to classify whether or not the tissue under examination contains abnormality. Since this procedure is performed by a human expert, it is therefore subject to inconsistencies due to factors that might affect human performance. To overcome this problem, it has been proposed to use computers to aid in the analysis of medical images, such as histopathological images of colonic tissues. One of the C strongest signs of abnormal cellular growth is abundance of DNA material in the nuclei, a condition known as hyperchromasia. Another sign is a ‘chaotic’ appearance of tissue usually observed during histological viewing. Cancer is known to be characterized by abnormal and excessive proliferation of cells and larger-than-usual nuclei. These effects are visually manifested by a darkening of the regions with excess DNA due to reaction to staining and a loss of structural order in the tissue. In this paper, pixel intensity and the presence of circular formations are examined separately as discriminating image features to distinguish between normal and abnormal samples. The images used in this study were derived from slides and cases randomly chosen from surgical pathology files of a hospital, previously diagnosed by pathologists as colonic adenocarcinoma, adenomatous polyps from the colon, as well as resection planes of the colonic resections without tumor to serve as controls. All samples were stained with hematoxylin and eosin and were taken at 400x magnification. The results showed very promising results.
Anchoring games for parallel repetition

Two major open problems regarding the parallel repetition of games are whether an analogue of Raz's parallel-repetition theorem holds for (a) games with more than two players, and (b) games with quantum players using entanglement. We make progress on both problems: we introduce a class of games we call anchored, and prove exponential-decay parallel repetition theorems for anchored games in the multiplayer and entangled-player settings. We introduce a simple transformation on games called anchoring and show that this transformation turns any game into an anchored game. Together, our parallel repetition theorem and our anchoring transformation provide a simple and efficient hardness-amplification technique in both the classical multiplayer and quantum settings.
Surface modification of Mg2B2O5 whisker and its effect on the mechanical properties and thermostability of polycarbonate/Mg2B2O5w composites

Abstract The Mg2B2O5 whiskers (Mg2B2O5w) were modified by boric acid ester (BE) coupling agent and used to prepare polycarbonate (PC) composites. Surface wettability test and evaluation of dispersibility of BE-modified Mg2B2O5w (BE-Mg2B2O5w) in n-heptane were carried out by water contact angle measurement and polarizing microscopy, respectively. The surface chemical characteristics of BE-Mg2B2O5w and estimation of the amount of tightly bonded organic modifier were examined by Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FT-IR) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), respectively. The influence of BE-Mg2B2O5w on the mechanical property, morphology and thermostability of PC composites was investigated by using universal testing machine, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) and TGA, respectively. It was found that BE was successfully grafted to the surface of Mg2B2O5w, and the hydrophobic BE-Mg2B2O5w leads to high ratio of adhesion work to interfacial tension between PC and BE-Mg2B2O5w, and its better dispersibility in n-heptane. Furthermore, the incorporation of BE-Mg2B2O5w into PC matrix resulted in higher tensile properties of PC/BE-Mg2B2O5w than that of PC/Mg2B2O5w composites and lower maximum weight loss rate than that of PC. The storage modulus of the PC/Mg2B2O5w composites increased obviously as a function of whisker content, especially for the composites with BE-Mg2B2O5w, but the Tg value changed little. Graphical Abstract • A new-style boric acid ester (BE) coupling agent with boron-oxygen skeleton has been applied to surface modification of Mg2B2O5 whisker (Mg2B2O5w). • BE modified Mg2B2O5 whiskers (BE-Mg2B2O5w) exhibited a higher ratio of adhesion work to interfacial tension, indicating that a greater adhesion between polycarbonate (PC) and whiskers was generated by the surface modification. • The incorporation of BE-Mg2B2O5w into PC matrix resulted in better mechanical properties and thermosability of PC/BE-Mg2B2O5w than that of PC/Mg2B2O5w composites.
Colorectal Cancer in Northwestern Iran

Background. Colorectal cancer is the third most prevalent cancer worldwide, which is less common in the Middle East; its prevalence demonstrated to be 7 persons per 100,000 populations in Iran. In this study, we aimed to investigate the clinicopathologic features of CRC patients in West Azerbaijan province of Iran. Methods. In this crosssectional study, 546 patients who underwent surgical procedures with the pathologic diagnosis of colorectal cancer in both academic and private hospitals of Urmia were enrolled. Results. The mean age at diagnosis was 55.2 ± 11.5 years. 23% had an age lower than forty years old. Rectal bleeding (26%), abdominal pain (25%), and large bowel obstruction (23%) were three most common presenting symptoms. 26% of patients presented with acute abdomen. 95% of tumors were adenocarcinoma, 4% were lymphoma, and 1% was other rare tumors. Regarding the stage of cancer according to TNM staging system, 6% of patients were in stage I, followed by 37% in stage II, 33% in stage III, and 24% in stage IV. In 44.5% of patients, the tumor was located in rectum. Conclusion. In west Azerbaijan province of Iran, patients with colorectal cancer present in younger age and more advanced stages in comparison with the developed countries.
A Synthesis of Evaluation Criteria for Software Specifications and Specification Techniques

Several evaluation criteria exist in the literature for both specification and specification techniques. These evaluation criteria identify a list of desired properties in specifications and specification techniques for judging their goodness. This paper presents a detailed analysis of several specification and specification technique evaluation criteria. Detailed analysis of these criteria identified that there is a lack of consistency in the property definition among criteria. The implication of this lack of differentiation between the two concepts is that the criteria for both specification and specification techniques are intermingled. Since the concept of specification is different from specification technique, the criteria used for one might not be applicable for the other. For example, "completeness" and "consistency" are specification criteria. A specification can be complete and consistent regardless of the medium used to represent the specification, the process used in its construction, the degree/extent of tools and automation used, or whether it is formal or informal. However, there is meaning to denote that a technique can be used to produce "consistent" or "complete" specifications. Hence, for proper applicability of these criteria, this paper separates specification criteria from that of the specification technique criteria. This paper also presents a unified criteria terminology and uses a table to list each criterion property from various researchers mapped to the unified terminology. The paper also identifies and presents a mapping from technique criteria to the specification criteria that shows which technique criteria satisfies specification criteria. The applicability of the mapping is then demonstrated by applying the mapping to a specification language and its support environment.
Unimodal Bandits

We consider multiarmed bandit problems where the expected reward is unimodal over partially ordered arms. In particular, the arms may belong to a continuous interval or correspond to vertices in a graph, where the graph structure represents similarity in rewards. The unimodality assumption has an important advantage: we can determine if a given arm is optimal by sampling the possible directions around it. This property allows us to quickly and efficiently find the optimal arm and detect abrupt changes in the reward distributions. For the case of bandits on graphs, we incur a regret proportional to the maximal degree and the diameter of the graph, instead of the total number of vertices.
Genetic Polymorphism of Gastric cancer in Korea

Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection is an established risk factor for the development of gastric cancer, and other environmental factors such as dietary habits and smoking are known to play a role in gastric carcinogenesis. A multifactorial model of human gastric carcinogenesis is currently accepted. Recent studies have shown that particular genetic changes may influence the susceptibility to cancer. Individual variation in cancer rates has been associated with specific variant alleles (polymorphism) of different genes that are present in a significant proportion of the normal population. Polymorphisms in a wide variety of genes may modify the effect of environmental exposures. The p53 gene, located on the short arm of chromosome 17, encodes a protein that plays a critical role in DNA transcription, cell cycle regulation, and tumor suppression. The p53 expression is stimulated in certain cellular environments such as DNA damage, hypoxia, irradiation, and other cellular stress. Mutation of the p53 gene represents one of the most common genetic alternations in human cancers, and the acquisition of such defects is strongly related to cancer formation and progression. The codon 72 polymorphism on exon 4 of the p53 gene,which produces variant proteins with arginine (Arg) or proline (Pro), has been reported to be associated with the risk p53 Genetic Polymorphism of Gastric cancer in Korea
The Effect of Catastrophizing Self-Statements on Pain Perception and the Nociceptive Flexor Reflex (RIII Reflex)

Objectives:Pain catastrophizing, an excessively negative cognitive and emotional orientation toward pain, is one of the most important psychological determinants of the individual pain experience. The neural basis of the association between catastrophizing and enhanced pain perception is only incompletely understood. Recently, several forms of pain modulation by cognitive and emotional factors have been found to at least partly rely on descending pain modulatory pathways that govern spinal gating mechanisms. We used the spinally mediated nociceptive flexor reflex (RIII reflex) to investigate whether spinal nociceptive transmission is affected when participants engage in catastrophizing self-statements. Methods:The effect of catastrophizing self-statements on basal RIII reflex areas, their temporal summation, and the concomitant pain perception was determined in 27 young healthy participants. Results:Catastrophizing self-statement reversibly enhanced both basal pain perception and RIII reflex areas. Effect sizes for the effect on pain perception were considerably larger than for the effect on spinal nociception. Catastrophizing self-statements did not affect temporal summation of pain perception or temporal summation of the RIII reflex. Discussion:The results of present study suggest that the effect of catastrophizing self-statements on pain is predominantly supraspinal, with a smaller but significant contribution from descending pathways. In addition, catastrophizing self-statements seem to predominantly affect mechanisms involved in the processing of single nociceptive stimuli, not their temporal summation.
A Synchronous Multimedia Annotation System for Secure Collaboratories

In this paper, we describe the Vannotea system - an application designed to enable collaborating groups to discuss and annotate collections of high quality images, video, audio or 3D objects. The system has been designed specifically to capture and share scholarly discourse and annotations about multimedia research data by teams of trusted colleagues within a research or academic environment. As such, it provides: authenticated access to a web browser search interface for discovering and retrieving media objects; a media replay window that can incorporate a variety of embedded plug-ins to render different scientific media formats; an annotation authoring, editing, searching and browsing tool; and session logging and replay capabilities. Annotations are personal remarks, interpretations, questions or references that can be attached to whole files, segments or regions. Vannotea enables annotations to be attached either synchronously (using jabber message passing and audio/video conferencing) or asynchronously and stand-alone. The annotations are stored on an Annotea server, extended for multimedia content. Their access, retrieval and re-use is controlled via Shibboleth identity management and XACML access policies.
VOCs Air Pollutant Cleaning with Polyacrylonitrile/Fly Ash Nanocomposite Electrospun Nanofibrous Membranes

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as an environmental pollution, which have many kinds of chemical structures, and many of them are very toxic. Therefore, controlling and reducing the presence of VOCs has become a hot topic among researchers for many years. In this study, the VOCs adsorption capacity of polyacrylonitrile/fly ash (PAN/FA) nanocomposite electrospun nanofibrous membranes were investigated. The results indicated that the PAN with different contents of FA powder (20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, and 100% compared with PAN by weight) could be spun well by electrospinning. The diameter of the fiber was very fine and its arrangement was irregular. The PAN nanofibrous membrane containing 60 wt% FA powder had the highest VOCs absorption capacity compared with other nanofibrous membranes due to its large specific surface area.
A characterization of independence for competing Markov chains with applications to stochastic Petri nets

It is shown that recently obtained product form results for stochastic Petri nets can immediately be obtained as a special case of a simple exclusion mechanism for the product process of a collection of Markov chains. The model is described, and several examples of exclusion/competition mechanisms that can be modeled in the framework of this paper are given. <<ETX>>
C-Brain: A deep learning accelerator that tames the diversity of CNNs through adaptive data-level parallelization

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) accelerators have been proposed as an efficient hardware solution for deep learning based applications, which are known to be both compute-and-memory intensive. Although the most advanced CNN accelerators can deliver high computational throughput, the performance is highly unstable. Once changed to accommodate a new network with different parameters like layers and kernel size, the fixed hardware structure, may no longer well match the data flows. Consequently, the accelerator will fail to deliver high performance due to the underutilization of either logic resource or memory bandwidth. To overcome this problem, we proposed a novel deep learning accelerator, which offers multiple types of data-level parallelism: inter-kernel, intra-kernel and hybrid. Our design can adaptively switch among the three types of parallelism and the corresponding data tiling schemes to dynamically match different networks or even different layers of a single network. No matter how we change the hardware configurations or network types, the proposed network mapping strategy ensures the optimal performance and energy-efficiency. Compared with previous state-of-the-art NN accelerators, it is possible to achieve a speedup of 4.0x-8.3x for some layers of the well-known large scale CNNs. For the whole phase of network forward-propagation, our design achieves 28.04% PE energy saving, 90.3% on-chip memory energy saving on average.
Automated Spatiotemporal Landslide Mapping over Large Areas Using RapidEye Time Series Data

In the past, different approaches for automated landslide identification based on multispectral satellite remote sensing were developed to focus on the analysis of the spatial distribution of landslide occurrences related to distinct triggering events. However, many regions, including southern Kyrgyzstan, experience ongoing process activity requiring continual multi-temporal analysis. For this purpose, an automated object-oriented landslide mapping approach has been developed based on RapidEye time series data complemented by relief information. The approach builds on analyzing temporal NDVI-trajectories for the separation between landslide-related surface changes and other land cover changes. To accommodate the variety of landslide phenomena occurring in the 7500 km2 study area, a combination of pixel-based multiple thresholds and object-oriented analysis has been implemented including the discrimination of uncertainty-related landslide likelihood classes. Applying the approach to the whole study area for the time period between 2009 and 2013 has resulted in the multi-temporal identification of 471 landslide objects. A quantitative accuracy assessment for two independent validation sites has revealed overall high mapping accuracy (Quality Percentage: 80%), proving the suitability of the developed approach for efficient spatiotemporal landslide mapping over large areas, representing an important prerequisite for objective landslide hazard and risk assessment at the regional scale.
Toward supporting data parallel programming on clusters of symmetric multiprocessors

The paper reports the design of a runtime library for data-parallel programming on clusters of symmetric multiprocessors (SMP clusters). Our design algorithms exploit a hybrid methodology which maps directly to the underlying hierarchical memory system in SMP clusters, by combining two styles of programming methodologies-threads (shared memory programming) within a SMP node and message passing between SMP nodes. This hybrid approach has been used in the implementation of a library for collective communications. The prototype library is implemented based on standard interfaces for threads (pthread) and message passing (MPI). Experimental results on a cluster of Sun UltraSparc-II workstations are reported.