Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
INTEGRATION, the VLSI journal

In this paper, we describe a repeater-free asynchronous serial link architecture targeting 1×FO4 bit time for on-chip communication. Non-Return To Zero (NRZ) Data/Strobe code is used in the channel to achieve the target speed. Timing pulse trains are generated locally and are employed to drive high speed ‘ transition latches ’ in the serializer and deserializer. A RLC line model is derived by the HFSS electromagnetic solver. Inverter-based transmitters and receivers are found to perform faster than other circuits. A prototype device having 30 links and fabricated in Tower Semiconductor 0.18 μm CMOS process is described. Measurement results show 3.73 Gb/s data rate over 6.1 mm wire interconnect, corresponding to 1.44×FO4 bit time.
Decidability of the Riemann Hypothesis

The Hamiltonian of a quantum mechanical system has an affiliated spectrum, and in order for this spectrum to be observable, the Hamiltonian should be Hermitian. Such quantum Riemann zeta function analogies have led to the Bender-Brody-M\"uller (BBM) conjecture, which involves a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian whose eigenvalues are the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function. If the BBM Hamiltonian can be shown to be Hermitian, then the Riemann Hypothesis follows. In this case, the Riemann zeta function is analogous to chaotic quantum systems, as the harmonic oscillator is for integrable quantum systems. As such, herein we perform a symmetrization procedure of the BBM Hamiltonian to obtain a Hermitian Hamiltonian using a similarity transformation, and provide an analytical expression for the eigenvalues of the results using Green's functions. A Gelfand triplet is then used to ensure that the eigenvalues are well defined. The holomorphicity of the resulting eigenvalues is demonstrated, and it is shown that that the expectation value of the Hamiltonian operator is also zero such that the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function are not observable, i.e., the Riemann Hypothesis is not decidable. Moreover, a second quantization of the resulting Schr\"odinger equation is performed, and a convergent solution for the nontrivial zeros of the analytic continuation of the Riemann zeta function is obtained. Finally, from the holomorphicity of the eigenvalues it is shown that the real part of every nontrivial zero of the Riemann zeta function exists at $\sigma=1/2$, and a general solution is obtained by performing an invariant similarity transformation.
Educational Environment in a Multicultural Society to Meet the Challenges of Diversity

ABSTRACT Educators in a multicultural-environment face complex-tasks in teaching for diversity. The objective of this study was to determine the educational environment in a Malaysian medical school, aimed to face the diversity. This cross-sectional study was conducted utilising “Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure”, a validated instrument that contained 50 items rated 0-4 with a maximum 200 score under five sub-scales. Sub-scales were perceptions of: learning, teacher, academic-self, atmosphere and social-self. Respondents were 193 year-5 medical students of session 2011-2012, comprised of Malays, Chinese, Indians and Other ethnic-group. The overall mean score perceived by all ethnicity was 130/200 (65%). All sub-scales perceived >60% scores except social-self and atmosphere. The social-self sub-scale perceived the lowest score (53.57%) by the Other ethnic group while interestingly social-self also perceived highest (75%) by the Indians. Atmosphere sub-scale perceived a score of 58.33% by Other ethnic-group. Positive perceptions of educational enviornment among the students of diverse ethnicity reflects that educational environment at the medical school is well equiped to meet the challenges of diversity. However, there is opportunity to increase further positivity in general and social-self and atmosphere sub-scales in particular. Educators in a multicultural-environment must work to avoid monocultural instructional methodoligies to promote a multicultrul society.
Apixaban in Dialysis Patients: A Review

Significantly, the risk of developing AF increases with the stage of CKD [2]. Patients with end stage renal failure (ESRF) are at a greater risk of having a stroke compared with the general population [3-5]. Subsequently, the decision to anticoagulate these patients poses a therapeutic dilemma. Balancing the increased risk of stroke, is the increased risk of bleeding. Dialysis patients have a high risk of bleeding due to uremia induced platelet dysfunction [6].
First beam test of Laser Engineered Surface Structures (LESS) at cryogenic temperature in CERN SPS accelerator

Electron cloud mitigation is an essential requirement for accelerators of positive particles with high intensity beams to guarantee beam stability and limited heat load in cryogenic systems. Laser Engineered Surface Structures (LESS) are being considered, within the High Luminosity upgrade of the LHC collider at CERN (HL-LHC), as an option to reduce the Secondary Electron Yield (SEY) of the surfaces facing the beam, thus suppressing the electron cloud phenomenon. As part of this study, a 2.2 m long Beam Screen (BS) with LESS has been tested at cryogenic temperature in the COLD bore EXperiment (COLDEX) facility in the SPS accelerator at CERN. In this paper, we describe the manufacturing procedure of the beam screen, the employed laser treatment technique and discuss our first observations in COLDEX confirming electron cloud suppression.
Introducing the SAPS system and a corresponding allocation mechanism for synchronous online reciprocal peer support activities

• A submitted manuscript is the author's version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers.
Decreased Appetite is Associated with Sarcopenia-Related Outcomes in Acute Hospitalized Older Adults

Decreased appetite is one of the main risk factors of malnutrition. Little is known on how appetite changes during hospitalization and after discharge and how it relates with sarcopenia-related outcomes. We analyzed data of the Hospital-ADL study, a multicenter prospective cohort study that followed 400 acutely hospitalized older adults (≥70 year). Appetite (SNAQ), handgrip strength (Jamar), muscle mass (BIA), mobility (DEMMI), and physical performance (SPPB) were assessed within 48 h of admission, at discharge, and at one and three months post-discharge. The course of decreased appetite was analysed by Generalised Estimating Equations. Linear Mixed Model was used to analyse the associations between decreased appetite and the sarcopenia-related outcomes. Decreased appetite was reported by 51% at hospital admission, 34% at discharge, 28% one month post-discharge, and 17% three months post-discharge. Overall, decreased appetite was associated with lower muscle strength (β = −1.089, p = 0.001), lower mobility skills (β = −3.893, p < 0.001), and lower physical performance (β = −0.706, p < 0.001) but not with muscle mass (β = −0.023, p = 0.920). In conclusion, decreased appetite was highly prevalent among acute hospitalized older adults and remained prevalent, although less, after discharge. Decreased appetite was significantly associated with negative sarcopenia-related outcomes, which underlines the need for assessment and monitoring of decreased appetite during and post hospitalization.
School Values: A Comparison of Academic Motivation, Mental Health Promotion, and School Belonging With Student Achievement

School vision and mission statements are an explicit indication of a school's priorities. Research has found academic motivation, mental health promotion, and school belonging to be the most frequently cited themes in these statements. The present study sought to examine whether these themes relate to student academic achievement, as indicated by National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) scores. A stratified sample of 287 secondary schools in Victoria, Australia was analysed using two language analytic approaches: qualitative emergent coding and supervised lexical analysis. The highest academic scores occurred when mental health promotion was included, though results depended to some extent on the analytic approach and the level of aggregation. Results do suggest that explicitly prioritising both academic performance and mental health is beneficial. Further, the study provides an approach for using language analysis to investigate multilevel constructs in schools.
The African

While there is substantial literature on the adoption of IT innovations based on utility computing, there is a dearth of studies on cloud computing adoption by business organizations. Given that cloud computing adoption has been steadily increasing in Kenya, this study aim to investigate the determinants of cloud computing adoption from an institutional perspective. The relationship between institutional pressures and cloud computing adoption was evaluated and tested using structural equation modelling (PLS SEM). A firm level cross sectional survey was conducted on a sample of 93 firms in the financial, manufacturing, and ICT sectors. The results indicate that coercive and normative pressures have a significant positive relationship with cloud computing adoption. The hypothesis that mimetic pressures have a relationship with cloud computing adoption was not supported. A major implication of this study is that professional and standards bodies do influence technology adoption through normative pressures.
RTI Federate Before Federation Initialisation RTI Federate Federate Federation

Large, experimental Multi-Agent System (MAS) simulations are highly demanding tasks, both computationally and developmentally. Agent-toolkits provide reliable templates for the design of even the largest MAS simulations, without offering a solution to computational limitations. Conversely, Distributed Simulation architectures offer performance benefits but the introduction of parallel logic can complicate the design process significantly. The motivations of distribution are not limited to this question of processing power. True interoperation of sequential agent-simulation platforms would allow agents designed using different toolkits to transparently interact in common abstract domains. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a system capable of harnessing the computational power of a distributed simulation infrastructure with the design efficiency of an agent-toolkit. The system permits integration, through an HLA federation, of multiple instances of the Java-based lightweight-agent simulation toolkit RePast. The paper defines abstractly the engineering process necessary in creating such middleware, and reports on the experience in the specific case of the RePast toolkit. The paper also presents performance results that illustrate that significant speedup can be achieved through the integration of RePast with HLA.
Autonomous Ground Vehicle Path Planning in Urban Environments using GNSS and Cellular Signals Reliability Maps – Part I : Models and Algorithms

Autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) path planning is considered. The AGV is assumed to be equipped with receivers capable of producing pseudorange measurements to overhead global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) satellites and to cellular towers in its environment. The AGV fuses these psuedoranges to produce an estimate about its own states. The AGV is also equipped with a three-dimensional (3–D) building map of the environment. Starting from a known starting point, the AGV desires to reach a known target point by taking the shortest distance, while minimizing the AGV’s position estimation error and guaranteeing that the AGV’s position estimation uncertainty is below a desired threshold. Towards this objective, a socalled signal reliability map is first generated, which provides information about regions where large errors due to poor GNSS line-of-sight (LOS) or cellular signal multipath are expected. The vehicle uses the signal reliability map to calculate the position mean-squared error (MSE). An analytical expression for the AGV’s state estimates is derived, which is used to find an upper bound on the position bias due to multipath. An optimal path planning generation approach, which is based on Dijkstra’s algorithm, is developed to optimize the AGV’s path while minimizing the path length and position MSE, subject to keeping the position estimation uncertainty and position estimation bias due to multipath below desired thresholds. The path planning approach yields the optimal path together with a list of feasible paths and reliable GNSS satellites and cellular towers to use along these paths. Keywords—Path planning, trajectory optimization, GNSS, cellular signals, signals of opportunity, ground vehicles, geographic information systems (GIS).
Using online text books and in-class quizzes to predict in class performance

National failure rates seen in undergraduate introductory CS courses are quite high. In this paper, we develop a predictive model for student in-class performance in an introductory CS course. The model can serve as an early warning system, flagging struggling students who might benefit from additional support. We use a variety of features from the first few weeks of the course such as scores on assignments, interaction with the online textbook, and participation with the in-class polling system in order to train our models. We compare the performance of a number of machine learning algorithms on predicting final exam scores as well as final course grade. We find that the Support Vector Machine and AdaBoost are the most effective, and that we can achieve increasingly accurate predictions as we use data from further into the course. The regression coefficients give us insights into which features are most correlated with student success, suggesting that certain types of assignments are more indicative of learning than others.
AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)

The advent of e-commerce puts traditional retail companies under a lot of pressure. A way retailers try to attract more customers to their physical stores is by offering online services on the retail sales floor. Such services are enabled through pervasive retail systems. These systems, however, do not only offer new opportunities but also bear risks for retailers because they heavily depend on privacy-related data, which customers could perceive as a potential privacy threat. In the present paper, we thus investigate the antecedents of customers’ usage intention towards such systems and the trade-off between the perceived benefits and the perceived privacy costs that are associated with their use. To this end, we propose a model based on the most recent version of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) and the Extended Privacy Calculus Theory. We validate our model considering a smart fitting room application and show that the model is able to explain 67.1% of the variance in the behavioral intention to use the system and 43.1% of the variance in a person’s willingness to disclose private information. Our results can be leveraged to design pervasive systems that are perceived as valuable instead of privacy threatening.
Individual differences in human retinotopic maps revealed by Bayesian analysis of retinotopic organization

A major question in human neuroscience is how cortical function is mapped onto surface anatomy. Retinotopic maps, which tile about a quarter of the cortical surface, have served as a testbed to address this question. Prior work has shown that the location and retinotopic organization of posterior visual field maps, V1-V3, tend to broadly align to the cortical folding pattern. Here, we develop a new Bayesian method to accurately model retinotopic organization in individual subjects, and demonstrate that there are substantial individual differences in the mapping between function (retinotopic organization) and structure, even after co-registration of the surface anatomies. The Bayesian method combines observation–a subject’s retinotopic measurements from small amounts of fMRI time–with a prior–a retinotopic atlas produced from group-average measurements. This process, which we apply to human V1, V2, and V3, automatically draws areal boundaries, corrects discontinuities in the measured maps, and predicts validation retinotopy data more accurately than an atlas alone or, in most cases, an independent retinotopic dataset alone. The model accurately predicts map organization in the periphery, well beyond the region of visual space used for training the model. We use the Bayesian fits to characterize map properties, such as cortical magnification and the size of population receptive fields, and to assess the degree to which structure-function relationships differ between individuals. Further, we show how the method can be extended to 9 additional visual field maps. We propose that the Bayesian maps are more accurate than previous maps because they account for both regularities across subjects and individual differences in the relationship between anatomy and function.
Social Influence in Mobile Phone Adoption : Evidence from the Bottom of the Pyramid in Emerging Asia

This article attempts to quantitatively measure the various inouences on mobile phone adoption at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Thailand. Based on an existing theoretical framework, adoption is modeled by atting a logit model to a large sixcountry dataset. The study ands evidence for the importance of social inouence in mobile adoption in two modes: one that exerts pressure on individuals to adopt, and another that helps to generate beneats via social networks that are tied in with economic and business networks. The article elaborates on the resulting social policy implications for using mobile telephone services to aght poverty at the BoP in these and similar countries.
Promoting Sales of Online Games through Customer Engagement

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.
Fault tolerant computing on the grid: what are my options?

High-performance distributed computing across wide-area networks has become an active topic of research. Achieving large-scale distributed computing in a seamless manner introduces a number of difficult problems. This paper examines one of the most critical problems, fault tolerance. We have examined fault tolerance options for a common class of high-performance parallel applications, single-program-multiple-data (SPMD). Performance models for two fault tolerance methods, checkpoint-recovery (CR) and wide-area replication (WR), have been developed. These models enable quantitative comparisons of the two methods as applied to SPMD applications.
Investigation of deposition conditions and annealing treatments on sputtered ZnO:Al thin films: Material properties and application to microcristalline silicon solar cells

The Transparent Conductive Oxide (TCO) thin film used as a front electrode in microcrystalline silicon solar cells is a key material for the improvement of their efficiency. A promising TCO is aluminium doped zinc oxide (ZnO:Al) deposited by RF magnetron sputtering. A first part of the thesis is dedicated to the study of the influence of deposition conditions on microstructure, growth mechanisms, and opto-electronic properties of ZnO:Al thin films. We obtained an optimum in terms of maximal transparency in the visible range, and minimal resistivity, for films realized at a pressure of 0.12 Pa and at a temperature of 325 °C. A second part of the work is focused on the study of post-deposition annealing treatments, such as thermal or laser annealing processes, on the properties of the material deposited at room temperature. The influence of the annealing atmosphere (under vacuum, in N2/H2, or in pure N2) and temperature (from 400 to 500 °C) was studied. The thermal annealing step resulted in an improvement of the optical and electrical properties of the ZnO:Al thin film up to a resistivity of 3.5×10-4 Ohm.cm for a transmittance between 400 and 1000 nm of 81.2%. The laser annealing treatment influences particularly the morphological properties. The finale step of this thesis work is based on the study of the wet chemical etching of the TCO thin film, in order to create an optimal surface morphology for light confinement in the microcrystalline silicon layers without a degradation of the electrical properties. The integration of these ZnO:Al thin films as front electrodes in PIN silicon thin film solar cells was realized and investigated in depth.
Enhancement of wastewater treatment under low carbon/nitrogen ratio by using submerged membrane electro-bioreactor (SMEBR)

The submerged membrane electro-bioreactor (SMEBR) system has been proven to be effective for wastewater treatment, especially for nutrient removal. In this study, the SMEBR treatment efficiency was compared to conventional MBR treatment applied to the same municipal wastewater. The study was carried out in two side by side continuous flow reactors with the volume 14 liters over 6 months in lab. The changes in sludge quality, effluent quality and operational condition were recorded for both reactors while different C/N ratios (from 3 to 1) had been applied. The results proved that under an adequate dissolved oxygen and current density, the use of SMEBR under the low C/N ratio could improve total nitrogen and phosphorus removal by 30% (more than 50% of TN removal) and more than 99% respectively compared to MBR. Meanwhile, under the low C/N ratio, research has proven the SMEBR’s high tolerance and fast recovery from the shock loading condition, helped balancing pH in the sludge, reduced membrane fouling and improved sludge dewatering properties. The results from this study show the possibility of the application of SMEBR to a variety of municipal wastewater.
Action Categorisation in Multimodal Instructions

Situated agents interact both with their physical environment they are located in and with their conversational partners. As both the world and the language used in situated conversations are continuously changing, an agent must be able to adapt its grounded semantic representations by learning from new information. A pre-requisite for a dynamic, interactive approach to learning of grounded semantic representations is that an agent is equipped with a set of actions that deﬁne its strategies for identifying and connecting linguistic and perceptual information to its knowledge. In this talk we present our work on grounding spatial descriptions that argues that perceptual grounding is dynamic and adaptable to contexts. We describe a system called Kille which we use for interactive learning of objects and spatial relations from a human tutor. Finally, we describe our work on identifying interactive strategies of frame of reference assignment in spatial descriptions in a corpus of human-human dialogues and argue that there is no general preference for frame of reference assignment but this is linked to interaction strategies between agents that are adopted within a particular dialogue game.