Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
p-GaN Gate HEMT With Surface Reinforcement for Enhanced Gate Reliability

By deploying a surface reinforcement layer (SRL) at the interface between Schottky metal and p-GaN in the gate stack, a p-GaN gate high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT) with enhanced gate reliability is demonstrated. Prior to the gate metal deposition, the SRL is formed by an oxygen-plasma treatment and a subsequent high-temperature annealing process (at 800 °C) that enables surface reconstruction. Such a process converts several nanometers of p-GaN near the surface into a crystalline GaON layer, which exhibits stronger immunity to hot electron bombardment. With nearly identical threshold voltage and ON-resistance, the p-GaN gate HEMT with SRL yields two orders of magnitude reduction in gate leakage current at ON-state and an increase from 10.5 V to 12.7 V in forward gate breakdown voltage. Time-dependent gate breakdown measurement reveals an increase from 5.9 V to 7.8 V in the maximum ON-state gate drive voltage for a 10-year lifetime with a 1 % gate failure rate, which effectively expands the operating voltage margin of the p-GaN gate power HEMT.
Development of an RP‐HPLC Method for the Analysis of Phenolic Compounds in Achillea millefolium L.

Abstract Several major phenolic constituents present in yarrow (Achillea millefolium L. s.l.) were determined for a homogenized plant sample. In order to optimize the conditions for sample preparation of the botanical matrix two different solvent extraction methods (maceration and ultrasonic agitation) were assayed. The preliminary maceration studies were performed to determine the influence of extracting solvents on the recovery of phenolics by using a different concentration of aqueous ethanol (40–96%, v/v) as extractant. On the basis of these results, sonication extractions were carried out at different time intervals (5, 10, 20, 30, and 60 min) using optimum extractant concentration. Levels of seven constituents (chlorogenic acid, vicenin‐2, luteolin‐7‐O‐glucoside, rutin, apigenin‐7‐O‐glucoside, luteolin, and apigenin) were measured by means of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with ultraviolet and photodiode array detection systems. The main validation steps of the HPLC method were evaluated to demonstrate its selectivity, linearity, and precision. In addition, the method was applied to characterization of the flavonoid and phenolcarbonic acid complex in different samples of yarrow.
A Hybrid Multi-Class MAC Protocol for IoT-Enabled WBAN Systems

This study proposes a hybrid MAC protocol that can efficiently and effectively optimize the communication channel access of a WBAN multi-class system. The proposed protocol consists of two major processes that include the contention phase (CP) and the transmission phase (TP). In the CP, only the biomedical devices that have health packets to transmit randomly contend with equal probabilities using a slotted ALOHA scheme for transmission opportunities and the successful biomedical devices are allocated a transmission time-slot by employing a reservation-based time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme in the transmission phase. A multi-objective optimization problem was formulated to maximize the system sum-throughput, packet success-access-ratio, as well as the reservation ratio, and solved by the controller (i.e., access point) to determine the optimal length of the CP and the number of biomedical devices that can transmit in the TP. Monte Carlo simulation was performed and the optimization solution improved the proposed protocol’s performances. For validation purposes, the simulated results in MATLAB revealed that the proposed protocol performs better than the contemporary system in the context of the system sum-throughput, reservation ratio, and the average health packet delay with performance gains of about 9.2%, 9.5%, and 9.6% respectively.
Occurrence of Clostridium perfringens β2 toxin in healthy sheep from Kashmir valley

Clostridium perfringensis a rod shaped, Gram-positive, anaerobic spore forming bacterium, able to produce various toxins which are responsible for various lesions and clinical symptoms in livestock. Clostridium perfringens has the ability to produce many toxins viz., alpha, beta, theta, iota, epsilon and kappa. In addition to the above mentioned toxins, C. perfringens can also produce a novel beta2 (β2) toxin. In the present study 415 samples were collected from healthy sheep from Kashmir valley. The isolates were confirmed by 16S rRNA specific PCR that revealed, 265 (63.85%) samples positive for C. perfringens. These 265 isolates were further screened for four toxin genes viz., cpa, cpb, etx and cbp2 using a multiplex PCR. All C. perfringens isolates were positive for α toxin gene, but not forβ, or, therefore, all strains were identified as type A C. perfringens.72. 17% of the isolates harboured both α &β2 toxin gene. The high (100%) occurrence of C. perfringens was observed, even in day-old lambs. These findings clearly suggest that α- toxin and β2- toxin gene harbouring C. Perfringens genotype are widely distributed among animal species.
Phosphorus regulates osmotic potential and growth of African violet under in vitro‐induced water deficit

Abstract Interactive effects of phosphorus (P) with in vitro‐induced water deficit (using sorbitol and mannitol) were studied on African violet (Saintpaulia ionantha) whole‐plant microculture. Sorbitol and mannitol significantly reduced (more negative) the cell sap osmotic potential. Increased P was very effective in increasing (less negative) the osmotic potential of cell sap under the imposed water deficit treatments. On the other hand, induced water deficit significantly reduced shoot growth (shoot height and dry mass), and root number and length, whereas P mitigated these adverse effects and improved shoot and root growth. Cultures exposed to water deficit at 150mM sorbitol and mannitol experienced some physiological disorders (about 10% shoot tip browning, 15% stem basal‐end browning) and 20% chlorosis. Physiological disorders and chlorosis were totally mitigated with increased P to 1.0 or 2.0 mM. Phosphorus concentration in shoot tissues was decreased with water deficit in the medium and enhanced by elevated P in the medium. Ex vitro survival percentages increased in plantlets that experienced in vitro water deficit with sorbitol and mannitol at 50 to 100 mM and P at 1.0 to 2.0 mM. We conclude that P is a key factor to regulate cell osmotic potential and growth under in vitro induced water deficit. On the other hand, microculture level is a very effective alternative for the study of plant response and tolerance to water deficit and its interaction with nutrient availability in the root zone.
Linear Network Coded Wireless Caching in Cloud Radio Access Network

This paper investigates a cache-aided cloud radio access network (C-RAN), comprising a central unit, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> base stations (BSs) each with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N_{T}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> antennas, and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula> users each with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N_{R}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> antennas, where each BS and user have local caches to store some popular contents from the central unit. For this cache-aided network, we propose the linear network coded (NC) wireless caching that consists of linear wireless network coding assisted cache placement phase and signal-space alignment (SSA) enabled content delivery phase. In the cache placement phase, we design a joint NC caching function at the BSs to store linear combinations of messages from the central unit, as a form of linear wireless network coding. In the content delivery phase, we design the SSA pattern based on the NC caching to guide the precoding designs at BSs. Then, each user can reliably decode its requested messages by receiver shaping and reverse NC operation. The primary contribution of this work is to achieve the coding gain induced by the integration of linear wireless network coding and SSA, which has been not exploited in the field of wireless coded caching. In particular, to deal with high temporal variability of user requests, we show that the proposed cache placement is invariant to different user requests in the worst-case caching, without any shared caching messages at different BSs. Furthermore, we verify that the proposed scheme is also compatible with the insufficient caching scenario at the BSs. In addition, we analyze the achievable sum degrees of freedom (DoF) for the proposed caching network. Both analytical and numerical results verify that the proposed caching scheme achieves a higher sum DoF than the existing related works.
Exploring User-Generated Content for Improving Destination Knowledge: The Case of Two World Heritage Cities

This study explores two World Heritage Sites (WHS) as tourism destinations by applying several uncommon techniques in these settings: Smart Tourism Analytics, namely Text mining, Sentiment Analysis, and Market Basket Analysis, to highlight patterns according to attraction, nationality, and repeated visits. Salamanca (Spain) and Coimbra (Portugal) are analyzed and compared based on 8,638 online travel reviews (OTR), from TripAdvisor (2017–2018). Findings show that WHS reputation does not seem to be relevant to visitors-reviewers. Additionally, keyword extraction reveals that the reviews do not differ from language to language or from city to city, and it was also possible to identify several keywords related to history and heritage; in particular, architectural styles, names of kings, and places. The study identifies topics that could be used by destination management organizations to promote these cities, highlights the advantages of applying a data science approach, and confirms the rich information value of OTRs as a tool to (re)position the destination according to smart tourism design tenets.
Transition to a market economy: A retrospective comparison of China with countries of the former Soviet block

In the 1990s and early 2000s, comparison of transition strategies of China versus those in Central and Eastern Europe raised controversies in the economic and political science literature. However, differences between China and the countries of the former Soviet bloc in their transition strategies resulted not necessarily from a deliberate political choice but from different initial conditions. Low-income and largely rural China, after its first radical step (de-collectivisation of agriculture in 1978), could move more gradually due to its under-industrialisation and retaining administrative control over the economy. The over-industrialised Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and former Soviet Union (FSU) countries where the previous command system of economic management spontaneously collapsed at the end of 1980s, did not have such an option. They had to conduct market-oriented reforms as quickly as they could, with all the associated economic and social pain. Regardless of speed and strategy of transition, almost all previously centrally-planned economies, including China, completed building basic foundations of a market system by the early 2000s although the quality of economic and political institutions and policies differ between the sub-regional groups and individual countries.
Modeling Electron Transfer in Biochemistry: A Quantum Chemical Study of Charge Separation in Rhodobacter sphaeroides and Photosystem II

High-level quantum chemical methods (hybrid density-functional type) are applied to the light-driven charge-separation process in the photosynthetic reaction centers of both bacteria and photosystem II in green plants. Structural information on the bacterial system provides the basis for choosing the models used in the calculations. The energetics of the electron transfer from the (bacterio)chlorophyll to the quinone are calculated as well as those of the intermediate step involving the (bacterio)pheophytin. The surrounding protein is treated as a dielectric medium, and the cavities around the solute molecules are determined by isodensity surfaces. The dielectric effects on the charge-separation processes are calculated to be as large as 50 kcal/mol. It is shown that hydrogen bonding between the chromophores and certain peptide residues as well as the axial histidine ligand on the (bacterio)chlorophylls contributes substantially to the energetics. Good agreement with experimentally estimated driving force.
Influence des défauts de forme d'une électrode simple en optique électronique

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Influence des défauts de forme d’une électrode simple en optique électronique François Bertein
Analysis of Genotypic Diversity in the Starch Physicochemical Properties of Nonwaxy Rice: Apparent Amylose Content, Pasting Viscosity and Gel Texture

A total of 499 non-waxy rice lines including 172 landraces (the landrace set) and 327 cultivars and breeding lines (the breeding line set) were used to study the genetic diversity of starch physicochemical properties, and the differences between the landrace set and the breeding line set were compared. All the rice lines were planted in the same season and at the same location in Hainan province. Wide diversities of starch physicochemical properties were found, e.g. apparent amylose content ranged from 7.9% to 33% in normal rice and up to 39.8% in an amylose extender mutant; peak viscosity ranged from 90.1 to 305.4 RVU, hot paste viscosity from 77.5 to 248.1 RVU, and cold paste viscosity from 111.4 to 412.6 RVU; gel hardness ranged from 9.4 to 61.1 g. The breeding line set had a wider range of physicochemical properties than the landrace set with a rare exception in gel hardness. The mean values of nearly all the parameters showed significant differences between the two sets of rice except for the setback ratio. The adhesiveness and cohesiveness of landrace starches were significantly lower than those of the breeding lines whereas the other parameters of the landrace set were higher than those of the breeding line set. Analysis of correlation among these parameters indicated that most of the traits were significantly correlated. The wide range of physicochemical properties among non-waxy rice lines allows breeders to obtain breeding lines with desirable grain quality and food processors to select unique rice materials for specialty food processing, in addition to the applications in other processing industries.
Deoxyribonucleic acid biotronics

Organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) currently utilize organic semiconductor materials with low electron mobilities and organic gate oxide materials with low dielectric constants. Compared to inorganic FETs, OFETs have slow operating speeds and high operating voltages. In this paper we discuss blending the conductive polymer polyethylene dioxythiophene (PEDOT) with deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), with minimal optimization to produce a new bio-conductive polymer complex potentially suitable for OFETs. The conductivity of this new bio-conductive polymer complex is tunable, ranging from 10-10 S/cm to 10-3 S/cm at room temperature.
Tunneling in thin MOS structures

Recent results on tunneling in thin MOS structures are described. Thermally grown SiO2 films in the thickness range of 22–40 A have been shown to be effectively uniform on an atomic scale and exhibit an extremely abrupt oxide-silicon interface. Resonant reflections are observed at this interface for Fowler-Nordheim tunneling and are shown to agree with the exact theory for a trapezoidal barrier. Tunneling at lower fields is consistent with elastic tunneling into the silicon direct conduction band and, at still lower fields, inelastic tunneling into the indirect conduction band. Approximate dispersion relations (E-k, E-κ) are obtained over portions of the silicon-dioxide energy gap and conduction band.
A Universal Power Flow Model for Dual Active Bridge-Based Converters With Phase Shift Modulation

In this article, a universal power flow model for the dual active bridge (DAB)-based dc–dc converters with phase-shift modulation is derived. The model considers the lossy components, the dead time, and the resonant commutations of the converters. A power flow model for the partial parallel dual active bridge (P<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula> DAB) converter is generated from the universal power flow model. Based on the calculations, the power plateau phenomenon and the antipower phenomenon, as well as their causes and influences are discussed. Because of the zero-reactive power loss in the lagging full bridge, the zero-voltage turn <sc>on</sc> of all of the switches, and the zero-current commutation of the switches in the lagging full bridge during the power plateau, a hypothesis, which claims that the converter is more efficient in the power plateau operation than in other operation modes, is made. A laboratory prototype of the P<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula> DAB converter is constructed. The analysis about the power plateau and the antipower phenomenon is verified, as well as the proposed hypothesis is proved. Compared against the measured power, the model for the (P<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula> DAB) converter has the maximum error less than 10%. Therefore, the validity of the universal power flow model is verified.
Automatic Segmentation and Enhancement of Latent Fingerprints Using Deep Nested UNets

Latent fingerprints are one of the most important evidences used to identify criminals in the law enforcement and forensic agencies. Automated recognition of latent fingerprints is still challenging due to their poor image quality caused by unclear ridge structure and various overlapping patterns. Segmentation and enhancement are important to identify valid fingerprint regions, reduce the noise and improve the clarity of ridge structure for more accurate fingerprint recognition. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture with the nested UNets for automatic segmentation and enhancement of latent fingerprints. First, to prepare training data, we synthetically generate the latent fingerprints and their segmentation and enhancement ground truth data for training. Then, a deep architecture of nested UNets is proposed to transform low-quality latent image into the segmentation mask and high-quality fingerprint through the pixels-to-pixels and end-to-end training. Finally, the test latent fingerprint is segmented and enhanced with the deep nested UNets to improve the image quality in one shot. The enhancement network is optimized by combining the local and global losses, which not only helps reconstruct the global structure, but also enhance the local ridge details of latent fingerprints. The proposed network can make use of multi-level feature maps in a pyramid way of nested UNets for segmentation and enhancement. Experimental results and comparison on NIST SD27 and IIITD-MOLF latent fingerprint databases demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed method.
Multigranularity Multiclass-Layer Markov Random Field Model for Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images

Semantic segmentation is one of the most important tasks in remote sensing. However, as spatial resolution increases, distinguishing the homogeneity of each land class and the heterogeneity between different land classes are challenging. The Markov random field model (MRF) is a widely used method for semantic segmentation due to its effective spatial context description. To improve segmentation accuracy, some MRF-based methods extract more image information by constructing the probability graph with pixel or object granularity units, and some other methods interpret the image from different semantic perspectives by building multilayer semantic classes. However, these MRF-based methods fail to capture the relationship between different granularity features extracted from the image and hierarchical semantic classes that need to be interpreted. In this article, a new MRF-based method is proposed to incorporate the multigranularity information and the multilayer semantic classes together for semantic segmentation of remote sensing images. The proposed method develops a framework that builds a hybrid probability graph on both pixel and object granularities and defines a multiclass-layer label field with hierarchical semantic over the hybrid probability graph. A generative alternating granularity inference is suggested to provide the result by iteratively passing and updating information between different granularities and hierarchical semantics. The proposed method is tested on texture images, different remote sensing images obtained by the SPOT5, Gaofen-2, GeoEye, and aerial sensors, and Pavia University hyperspectral image. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method shows a better segmentation performance than other state-of-the-art methods.
Fractionation of soil fulvic acids using polyvinyl -pyrrolidone and their lonization difference spectra

Abstract Fulvic acids were divided into adsorbed brown fractions and non-adsorbed. pale-yellow fractions using insoluble polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) as an adsorbent. The distribution pattern of the two fractions varied with the types of soils. The yield of the PVP-adsorbed fraction was higher in the order of brown forest soils, ando soils, and lowland paddy soils and red-yellow soils. The difference spectra between pH 12 and pH 7 (ΔE 7-12 spectra) and those between pH 7 and pH 3 (ΔE 3-7 spectra) of the PVP-adsorbed fractions were classified into three types corresponding to the types of soils. The ΔE 7-12 spectra of the PVP-adsorbed fractions and humic acids obtained from the same soil were similar. In the PVP-non-adsorbed fractions, both the ΔE 7-12 and ΔE 3-7 spectra did not clearly differ among all soils.
Electrical response of the Summit‐Greenland ice core to ammonium, sulphuric acid, and hydrochloric acid

Electrical and chemical analysis of the GRIP ice core from Summit in central Greenland confirms that the ECM current is controlled solely by acids in the ice, though there could be different responses for different acids. The dielectric conductivity is dependent on strong acid, on sea salt chloride, and also on ammonium concentrations in the ice. The response to NH4+ is similar to that of sea salt chloride, as they both conduct only at AC frequencies, but NH4+ is approximately twice as conductive per mole. The response to the strong acids shows results consistent with earlier work, with similar responses throughout the length of the core. It seems as if all the thousands of electrical peaks in the GRIP core may be explained by the response to just three chemical species: acidity, ammonium salts, and a third component which is probably chloride.