Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Topological Taxonomy of Water Distribution Networks

Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) can be regarded as complex networks and modeled as graphs. In this paper, Complex Network Theory is applied to characterize the behavior of WDNs from a topological point of view, reviewing some basic metrics, exploring their fundamental properties and the relationship between them. The crucial aim is to understand and describe the topology of WDNs and their structural organization to provide a novel tool of analysis which could help to find new solutions to several arduous problems of WDNs. The aim is to understand the role of the topological structure in the WDNs functioning. The methodology is applied to 21 existing networks and 13 literature networks. The comparison highlights some topological peculiarities and the possibility to define a set of best design parameters for ex-novo WDNs that could also be used to build hypothetical benchmark networks retaining the typical structure of real WDNs. Two well-known types of network ((a) square grid; and (b) random graph) are used for comparison, aiming at defining a possible mathematical model for WDNs. Finally, the interplay between topology and some performance requirements of WDNs is discussed.
Effect of nicorandil in patients with heart failure: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE It is unclear whether nicorandil, a metabolic therapeutic drug, can be applied clinically to therapy of heart failure (HF). This meta-analysis evaluated therapeutic effects of nicorandil on HF patients. EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies evaluating effect of nicorandil on HF patients. Studies were stratified according to controlled versus uncontrolled designs and analyzed using random-effects meta-analysis models. KEY RESULTS We identified a total of 20 studies with a total of 1222 patients. In five randomized controlled studies, nicorandil treatment resulted in reduction in all-cause mortality and hospitalization for cardiac causes (HR: 0.35, P < 0.001) and improved cardiac pump function (SMD: 0.31, P = 0.02). In 15 observational studies, nicorandil therapy increases cardiac pump function (SMD: 0.75, P < 0.001), improves NYHA functional class (WMD: -1.33, P < 0.001), decreases PCWP (WMD: -6.86 mm Hg, P < 0.001), and pulmonary arterial pressure (SMD: -0.84, P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS The use of nicorandil in HF patients exerts substantial beneficial effects, suggesting that it may be an additional therapeutic agent for HF.
Hybrid Monopole-DRAs Using Hemispherical/ Conical-Shaped Dielectric Ring Resonators: Improved Ultrawideband Designs

Two geometries of dielectric ring resonator (DRR) have been investigated as new variants for designing ultrawideband hybrid monopole-DRAs (dielectric resonator antennas) with improved features. They are simply hemispherical and conical in shape and have been implemented individually. Hybrid monopole-DRA is actually a combined configuration using a grounded monopole surrounded by a small DRR touching the same ground plane. Compared to an earlier version using cylindrical DRR of same dielectric material, the proposed ones promise for about 25% larger impedance bandwidth maintaining identical gain and radiation properties. As much as 126% impedance bandwidth with consistent monopole type radiation and 2-4 dBi peak gain has been demonstrated using a set of prototypes shaped from dielectric rod with εr = 10. Physical insight in to the ultrawideband operation along with a comprehensive design guideline is presented.
Batched matrix computations on hardware accelerators based on GPUs

Scientific applications require solvers that work on many small size problems that are independent from each other. At the same time, the high-end hardware evolves rapidly and becomes ever more throughput-oriented and thus there is an increasing need for an effective approach to develop energy-efficient, high-performance codes for these small matrix problems that we call batched factorizations. The many applications that need this functionality could especially benefit from the use of GPUs, which currently are four to five times more energy efficient than multicore CPUs on important scientific workloads. This paper, consequently, describes the development of the most common, one-sided factorizations, Cholesky, LU, and QR, for a set of small dense matrices. The algorithms we present together with their implementations are, by design, inherently parallel. In particular, our approach is based on representing the process as a sequence of batched BLAS routines that are executed entirely on a GPU. Importantly, this is unlike the LAPACK and the hybrid MAGMA factorization algorithms that work under drastically different assumptions of hardware design and efficiency of execution of the various computational kernels involved in the implementation. Thus, our approach is more efficient than what works for a combination of multicore CPUs and GPUs for the problems sizes of interest of the application use cases. The paradigm where upon a single chip (a GPU or a CPU) factorizes a single problem at a time is not at all efficient in our applications’ context. We illustrate all of these claims through a detailed performance analysis. With the help of profiling and tracing tools, we guide our development of batched factorizations to achieve up to two-fold speedup and three-fold better energy efficiency as compared against our highly optimized batched CPU implementations based on MKL library. The tested system featured two sockets of Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs and we compared with a batched LU factorizations featured in the CUBLAS library for GPUs, we achieve as high as 2.5× speedup on the NVIDIA K40 GPU.
A phase II study of imatinib mesylate in children with refractory or relapsed solid tumors: A Children's Oncology Group study

Imatinib mesylate is a small molecule inhibitor of certain tyrosine kinases, most notably the chimeric bcr‐abl fusion protein found in CML. It also inhibits KIT and PDGF receptor tyrosine kinases in vitro. Ewing sarcoma, osteosarcoma, neuroblastoma, desmoplastic small round cell, and synovial sarcomas often overexpress KIT or the PDGF receptor. A phase II study of imatinib in children and young adults with select solid tumors was performed.
Integrative Transcriptome Analysis of mRNA and miRNA in Pepper’s Response to Phytophthora capsici Infection

Simple Summary MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play important roles in the regulation of a plant’s response to a variety of pathogens. However, the regulatory networks of miRNAs and their targets in pepper’s response to P. capsici are largely unknown. Herein, integrative miRNA-seq and mRNA-seq analysis were performed to identify miRNAs and their target genes in pepper during P. capsici infection, and the results provide a valuable resource for better understanding the regulatory mechanisms between miRNAs and their targets in pepper’s defense against P. capsici. Abstract Phytophthora blight of pepper is a notorious disease caused by the oomycete pathogen Phytophthora capsici, which poses a great threat to global pepper production. MicroRNA (miRNA) is a class of non-coding small RNAs that regulate gene expressions by altering the translation efficiency or stability of targeted mRNAs, which play important roles in the regulation of a plant’s response to pathogens. Herein, time-series mRNA-seq libraries and small RNA-seq libraries were constructed using pepper roots from the resistant line CM334 and the susceptible line EC01 inoculated with P. capsici at 0, 6, 24, and 48 h post-inoculation, respectively. For mRNA-seq analysis, a total of 2159 and 2971 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified in CM334 and EC01, respectively. For miRNA-seq analysis, 491 pepper miRNAs were identified, including 330 known miRNAs and 161 novel miRNAs. Among them, 69 and 88 differentially expressed miRNAs (DEMs) were identified in CM334 and EC01, respectively. Examination of DEMs and their targets revealed 22 regulatory networks, predominantly featuring up-regulated miRNAs corresponding to down-regulated target genes. Notably, these DEM-DEG regulatory networks exhibited significant overlap between CM334 and EC01, suggesting that they might contribute to pepper’s basal defense against P. capsici. Furthermore, five selected DEMs (miR166, miR1171, miR395, miR530 and miRN2) and their target genes underwent qRT-PCR validation, confirming a consistent negative correlation in the expression patterns of miRNAs and their targets. This comprehensive analysis provides novel insights into the regulatory networks of miRNAs and their targets, offering valuable contributions to our understanding of pepper’s defense mechanisms against P. capsici.
Transformation of an Uncertain Video Search Pipeline to a Sketch-Based Visual Analytics Loop

Traditional sketch-based image or video search systems rely on machine learning concepts as their core technology. However, in many applications, machine learning alone is impractical since videos may not be semantically annotated sufficiently, there may be a lack of suitable training data, and the search requirements of the user may frequently change for different tasks. In this work, we develop a visual analytics systems that overcomes the shortcomings of the traditional approach. We make use of a sketch-based interface to enable users to specify search requirement in a flexible manner without depending on semantic annotation. We employ active machine learning to train different analytical models for different types of search requirements. We use visualization to facilitate knowledge discovery at the different stages of visual analytics. This includes visualizing the parameter space of the trained model, visualizing the search space to support interactive browsing, visualizing candidature search results to support rapid interaction for active learning while minimizing watching videos, and visualizing aggregated information of the search results. We demonstrate the system for searching spatiotemporal attributes from sports video to identify key instances of the team and player performance.
The Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching EFL in Revolution 4.0 Era

This research aims to investigate the challenges and opportunities to teach English in the fourth industrial revolution, and improved the researcher's understanding and expertise about teaching English in the 4.0 industry revolution and researched issues educators face while teaching English of EFL. This study using qualitative method. 3 Englsih teachers as the participants in this research from level of school SD/MI, SMP/MTs, SMA/K/MA especially in BBC Tlogosari. Interviews and questionnaires were used as collecting data techniques. Twenty questions from the questionnaires were used, and three questions from the interview were about the opportunities and difficulties of teaching EFL in the context of Revolution 4.0. In addition, difficulties in the process of teaching and learning exist, especially with modern technology and more innovation. Mostly students will access the internet without assistance, which will have positive or even negative impact, for this reason the role and strategy of educators and facilitators is important.
Design and Verification of a Low-Cost Multispectral Camera for Precision Agriculture Application

With the rapid increase of the world population, climate changes, and the slow expansion of cultivated areas, only precision agriculture (PA) can provide enough food or resources. PA requires flexible instruments for measuring the spectral signatures of the crops to understand their conditions. Unfortunately, the high initial costs of multispectral (MS) cameras reduce the implementation of PA in small farms, which constitute a large portion of arable land in Europe and contribute with social bonds, local know-how, and cultural legacy. With the objective to speed up the use of MS imaging, in this article, we present a novel low-cost imaging device consisting of an MS camera with nine bands and a thermal imager, whose price is several times lower than commercially available ones. This article describes the design and the calibration of the imaging device based on the off-the-shelf components: Raspberry Pi, dedicated quad camera kit, thermal core, and multiband optical filters. The spectral reconstruction accuracy has a high average R2 score of 0.986. Finally, images from multiple sensors are aligned using phase-only correlation and dense optical flow, providing a method that can be implemented on all platforms. The presented solution is open source, permitting one to modify and expand the capabilities of the described device and adapt to specific needs. Moreover, the device is flexible as the thermal camera can be removed to reduce the total system cost if its usage is not required. Even if its primary application is PA, the proposed solution can be used for other applications.
When Is Perception Top-Down and When Is It Not? Culture, Narrative, and Attention

Previous findings in cultural psychology indicated that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be attentive to contextual information (e.g., Nisbett & Masuda, ). However, to what extent and in which conditions culture influences patterns of attention has not been fully examined. As a result, universal patterns of attention may be obscured, and culturally unique patterns may be wrongly assumed to be constant across situations. By carrying out two cross-cultural studies, we demonstrated that (a) both European Canadians and Japanese attended to moving objects similarly when the task was to simply observe the visual information; however, (b) there were cultural variations in patterns of attention when participants actively engaged in the task by constructing narratives of their observation (narrative construction). These findings suggest that cultural effects are most pronounced in narrative construction conditions, where the need to act in accordance with a culturally shared meaning system is elicited.
Are lock-free concurrent algorithms practically wait-free?

Lock-free concurrent algorithms guarantee that some concurrent operation will always make progress in a finite number of steps. Yet programmers prefer to treat concurrent code as if it were wait-free, guaranteeing that all operations always make progress. Unfortunately, designing wait-free algorithms is generally a very complex task, and the resulting algorithms are not always efficient. While obtaining efficient wait-free algorithms has been a long-time goal for the theory community, most non-blocking commercial code is only lock-free. This paper suggests a simple solution to this problem. We show that, for a large class of lock-free algorithms, under scheduling conditions which approximate those found in commercial hardware architectures, lock-free algorithms behave as if they are wait-free. In other words, programmers can keep on designing simple lock-free algorithms instead of complex wait-free ones, and in practice, they will get wait-free progress. Our main contribution is a new way of analyzing a general class of lock-free algorithms under a stochastic scheduler. Our analysis relates the individual performance of processes with the global performance of the system using Markov chain lifting between a complex per-process chain and a simpler system progress chain. We show that lock-free algorithms are not only wait-free with probability 1, but that in fact a general subset of lock-free algorithms can be closely bounded in terms of the average number of steps required until an operation completes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyze progress conditions, typically stated in relation to a worst case adversary, in a stochastic model capturing their expected asymptotic behavior.
A multimedia workflow-based collaborative engineering environment for oil & gas industry

In this paper we discuss the scenario of Petroleum Engineering projects of Petrobras, a large Brazilian governmental oil & gas company. Based on this scenario, we propose a set of application requirements and system architecture to guide the construction of a Collaborative Engineering Environment (CEE) for assisting the control and execution of large and complex industrial projects in oil and gas industry. The environment is composed by the integration of three different technologies of distributed group work: Workflow Management System (WfMS), Multimedia Collaborative System (MMCS) and Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE).
Grouper: A Compact, Streamable Triangle Mesh Data Structure

We present Grouper: an all-in-one compact file format, random-access data structure, and streamable representation for large triangle meshes. Similarly to the recently published SQuad representation, Grouper represents the geometry and connectivity of a mesh by grouping vertices and triangles into fixed-size records, most of which store two adjacent triangles and a shared vertex. Unlike SQuad, however, Grouper interleaves geometry with connectivity and uses a new connectivity representation to ensure that vertices and triangles can be stored in a coherent order that enables memory-efficient sequential stream processing. We present a linear-time construction algorithm that allows streaming out Grouper meshes using a small memory footprint while preserving the initial ordering of vertices. As a part of this construction, we show how the problem of assigning vertices and triangles to groups reduces to a well-known NP-hard optimization problem, and present a simple yet effective heuristic solution that performs well in practice. Our array-based Grouper representation also doubles as a triangle mesh data structure that allows direct access to vertices and triangles. Storing only about two integer references per triangleâi.e., less than the three vertex references stored with each triangle in a conventional indexed mesh format-Grouper answers both incidence and adjacency queries in amortized constant time. Our compact representation enables data-parallel processing on multicore computers, instant partitioning and fast transmission for distributed processing, as well as efficient out-of-core access. We demonstrate the versatility and performance benefits of Grouper using a suite of example meshes and processing kernels.
The Effect of the Periodic Drying Method on the Drying Time of Hazelnuts and Energy Utilization

Hazelnut is a shelled fruit that is stored by drying and used as a snack or in industry. Since the hazelnut drying process is energy-intensive, there is a need for drying methods that will reduce the energy cost without lengthening the drying time. In this study, the effects of periodic drying of hazelnuts’ energy recovery, oil, and protein content, as well as mass losses, were studied. Fresh Tombul hazelnuts (Corylus avellana L.) with a diameter of Ø 15–16 mm were dried in a tunnel dryer over 16 different periods by adjusting the drying time inside and waiting time outside the oven until the moisture content reached 6%. Drying experiments were carried out at 45 °C and three different air velocities. The increase in air velocity resulted in a reduction in the periodic drying time between 10% and 36%. The optimum drying in terms of drying time and energy utilization was realized at 0.5 m/s air velocity, with a 1.5 h working time and 0.5 h waiting time. During this period, drying time increased by 19% and energy utilization was 69%. For periodic drying, the increase in oven working time causes a decrease in energy utilization, while the increase in waiting time causes an increase in energy utilization and drying time. Periodic drying had no negative effect on hazelnut oil and protein content. Periodic drying is a suitable option for saving energy during hazelnut drying.
XMM-Newton observations of the supernova remnant IC 443: II. evidence of stellar ejecta in the inner regions.

Aims. We investigate the spatial distribution of the physical and chemical properties of the hot X-ray emitting plasma of the supernova remnant IC 443, in order to get important constraints on its ionization stage, on the progenitor supernova explosion, on the age of the remnant, and its physical association with a close pulsar wind nebula. Methods. We present XMM-Newton images of IC 443, median photon energymap, silicon and sulfur equivalent width maps, and a spatially resolved spectral analysis of a set of homogeneous regions. Results. The hard X-ray thermal emission (1.4‐5.0 keV) of IC 443 displays a centrally-peaked morphology, its brightness peaks being associated with hot (kT>1 keV) X-ray emitting plasma. A ring-shaped structure, characterized by high values of equivalent widths and median photon energy, encloses the PWN. Its hard X-ray emission is spectrally characterized by a collisional ionization equilibrium model, and strong emission lines of Mg, Si, and S, requiring oversolar metal abundances. Dynamically, the location of the ejecta ring suggests an SNR age of∼4,000 yr. The presence of overionized plasma in the inner regions of IC 443, addressed in previous works, is much less evident in our observations.
Targeting Malignant Brain Tumors with Antibodies

Antibodies have been shown to be a potent therapeutic tool. However, their use for targeting brain diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases and brain cancers, has been limited, particularly because the blood–brain barrier (BBB) makes brain tissue hard to access by conventional antibody-targeting strategies. In this review, we summarize new antibody therapeutic approaches to target brain tumors, especially malignant gliomas, as well as their potential drawbacks. Many different brain delivery platforms for antibodies have been studied such as liposomes, nanoparticle-based systems, cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs), and cell-based approaches. We have already shown the successful delivery of single-chain fragment variable (scFv) with CPP as a linker between two variable domains in the brain. Antibodies normally face poor penetration through the BBB, with some variants sufficiently passing the barrier on their own. A “Trojan horse” method allows passage of biomolecules, such as antibodies, through the BBB by receptor-mediated transcytosis (RMT). Such examples of therapeutic antibodies are the bispecific antibodies where one binding specificity recognizes and binds a BBB receptor, enabling RMT and where a second binding specificity recognizes an antigen as a therapeutic target. On the other hand, cell-based systems such as stem cells (SCs) are a promising delivery system because of their tumor tropism and ability to cross the BBB. Genetically engineered SCs can be used in gene therapy, where they express anti-tumor drugs, including antibodies. Different types and sources of SCs have been studied for the delivery of therapeutics to the brain; both mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and neural stem cells (NSCs) show great potential. Following the success in treatment of leukemias and lymphomas, the adoptive T-cell therapies, especially the chimeric antigen receptor-T cells (CAR-Ts), are making their way into glioma treatment as another type of cell-based therapy using the antibody to bind to the specific target(s). Finally, the current clinical trials are reviewed, showing the most recent progress of attractive approaches to deliver therapeutic antibodies across the BBB aiming at the specific antigen.