Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dose-window dependence on Si crystal orientation in separation by implanted oxygen substrate formation

Separation by implemented oxygen (SIMOX)(111) substrates have been formed by oxygen-ion (^16O^+) implantation into Si(111), showing that a so-called “dose-window” at ^16O^+-implantation into Si differs from Si(100) to Si(111). In SIMOX(100), an oxygen dose of 4 × 10^17/cm^2 into Si(100) is widely recognized as the dose-window when the acceleration energy is 180 keV. For the first time, our work shows that an oxygen dose of 5 × 10^17/cm^2 into Si(111) is the dose-window for the formation of SIMOX(111) substrates when the acceleration energy is 180 keV. The difference between dose-windows is caused by anisotropy of the crystal orientation during growth of the faceted buried SiO_2. We also numerically analyzed the data at different oxidation velocities for each facet of the polyhedral SiO_2 islands. Numerical analysis results show good agreement with the experimental data.
Fast algorithm for rate-based optimal error protection of embedded codes

Embedded image codes are very sensitive to channel noise because a single bit error can lead to an irreversible loss of synchronization between the encoder and the decoder. P.G. Sherwood and K. Zeger (see IEEE Signal Processing Lett., vol.4, p.191-8, 1997) introduced a powerful system that protects an embedded wavelet image code with a concatenation of a cyclic redundancy check coder for error detection and a rate-compatible punctured convolutional coder for error correction. For such systems, V. Chande and N. Farvardin (see IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun., vol.18, p.850-60, 2000) proposed an unequal error protection strategy that maximizes the expected number of correctly received source bits subject to a target transmission rate. Noting that an optimal strategy protects successive source blocks with the same channel code, we give an algorithm that accelerates the computation of the optimal strategy of Chande and Farvardin by finding an explicit formula for the number of occurrences of the same channel code. Experimental results with two competitive channel coders and a binary symmetric channel showed that the speed-up factor over the approach of Chande and Farvardin ranged from 2.82 to 44.76 for transmission rates between 0.25 and 2 bits per pixel.
MMC01-5: Predictive Buffering for Multi-Source Video Streaming over the Internet

The current best-effort Internet does not guarantee the bandwidth availability between a receiver and a sender, and so renders any quality-of-service control difficult, if not impossible. This paper proposes a novel predictive buffering algorithm for streaming video not from one, but from multiple senders to a receiver over the best-effort Internet. In particular, the predictive buffering algorithm estimates the mean and variance of the aggregate throughput of multiple senders, and then use these estimated parameters to predict the future bandwidth availability. By appealing to the central limit theorem, the future bandwidth availability will tend to be normally distributed, irrespective of the distribution of the measurement bandwidth availability. This insight enables the buffering algorithm to predict, at runtime, the buffering time required to ensure playback continuity. Extensive trace-driven simulations show that this predictive buffering algorithm can achieve buffer delays that are remarkably close to the optimal buffer time.
Equilibrium and Disequilibrium Pricing for Spectrum Trading in Cognitive Radio: A Control-Theoretic Approach

Spectrum trading is a concept used to describe the economics of dynamic spectrum sharing in cognitive radio networks. In this paper, we consider the problem of spectrum trading between primary and secondary services. Multiple markets are established in this trading for the multiple available frequency bands. The primary service is considered as the seller and the secondary service is considered as a buyer in a dynamic spectrum trading market. The spectrum supply from the primary service is derived based on the revenue earned due to spectrum sharing and the cost due to QoS performance degradation of the connections served by the primary service. The spectrum demand of secondary service is obtained based on the utility from spectrum usage. We first obtain the equilibrium pricing which is the point where spectrum supply equals spectrum demand. Then, we consider the case where the spectrum sellers do not offer the equilibrium price. The impact of this disequilibrium pricing is investigated. We model the cases of equilibrium and disequilibrium pricing as feedback control systems in which the spectrum seller and buyer have their own transfer functions. By using classical control theory the stability of the model is analyzed.
The value of C-reactive protein in cardiovascular risk prediction: the Rotterdam Study.

BACKGROUND Epidemiologic studies have shown that C-reactive protein (CRP) is a risk factor for coronary heart disease. Whether routine measurement of CRP has a role in the prediction of future coronary disease in everyday clinical practice has not yet been investigated. METHODS Within the Rotterdam Study, a population-based cohort study of 7983 men and women 55 years and older, we conducted a nested case-control study to investigate the value of CRP in coronary disease prediction. Data are based on 157 participants who experienced a myocardial infarction during follow-up and 500 randomly selected controls. High-sensitivity CRP and traditional cardiovascular risk factors were measured at baseline. RESULTS The age- and sex-adjusted relative risk of myocardial infarction for subjects in the highest quartile of the population distribution of CRP compared with the lowest quartile was 2.0 (95% confidence interval, 1.1-3.4). After additional adjustment for traditional cardiovascular risk factors, the increase in risk largely disappeared (odds ratio, 1.2; 95% confidence interval, 0.6-2.2). Adding CRP to a coronary disease risk function based on risk factors that are routinely assessed in clinical practice or to the Framingham risk function did not improve the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of these risk functions. Sensitivity and specificity of both risk functions, computed after dichotomizing the estimated disease probabilities using prespecified cutoff points, hardly improved when CRP was added. CONCLUSION Measurement of CRP in elderly people has no additional value in coronary disease risk prediction when traditional cardiovascular risk factors are known.
Developing a Web-Based Version of An Exercise-Based Rehabilitation Program for People With Chronic Knee and Hip Pain: A Mixed Methods Study

Background Osteoarthritis is highly prevalent and has enormous personal and socioeconomic impact. Enabling Self-management and Coping with Arthritic Pain through Exercise (ESCAPE-pain) is an integrated rehabilitation program that helps people understand how exercise can improve physical and psychosocial well-being. Unfortunately, its availability is limited. A Web-based version of the program could increase access for more people. Many Web-based resources are developed without end-user input and result in over-complex, unwanted, ineffective products with limited uptake. Objective The objective of this study was to codesign a Web-based version of ESCAPE-pain that people with chronic joint pain find engaging, informative, and useful. Methods To establish older persons' Internet use we conducted a postal survey of 200 people. To establish their opinions, likes or dislikes, and requirements for a Web-based version of the ESCAPE-pain program, we conducted two focus groups with 11 people who had participated in a program based on ESCAPE-pain and two with 13 people who had not. Information from the postal survey and focus groups was used to develop an online prototype website. People's opinions of the prototype website were gauged from thematic analysis of eight semistructured “think aloud” interviews. Results The survey response rate was 42% (83/200), of whom 67% (56/83) were female and mean age was 67 years. Eighty-three percent of the people had used the Internet, 69% described themselves as either very confident or confident Internet users, and 77% had looked online for health information. With regard to participating online, 34% had read a commentary or watched a video of someone else’s experience of a health problem and 23% had tracked a health issue. Key qualitative themes emerged that included engagement, acceptability and usability, and structure and content of the program. Conclusions Older people use the Internet as a source of health information but have concerns about safe use and quality of information. Users require a credible website that provides personalized information, support, monitoring, and feedback.
Nosocomial Rotavirus Gastroenteritis in Spain: A Multicenter Prospective Study

Background: The objective of this study was to assess the incidence of nosocomial rotavirus gastroenteritis among children <2 years of age. Methods: We conducted a prospective active surveillance for acute gastroenteritis (AGE) in the pediatric wards of 3 representative hospitals in Valencia (Spain) from October 2006 to March 2007, among children between 1 and 23 months of age with acute diarrhea. Children were followed up for 3 days after discharge. We obtained clinical and demographic information from participants and tested their stool specimens for rotavirus. Results: A total of 1576 children were hospitalized at the 3 hospitals and 1300 (82.5%) were followed up as the study cohort. In 69 children, AGE started 48 hours after admission and were considered nosocomial infections. In 35 of the 59 cases where stool samples were obtained, rotavirus (RV) was present (59%), and in 12 of them symptoms started after discharge. The accumulated incidence of nosocomial rotavirus disease during the study period was 2.8 cases per 100 inpatients (95% CI: 1.9–3.8), and the incidence rate was 4.8 cases per 1000 hospital days (95% CI: 3.2–6.5). The most commonly found genotype in nosocomial infection was G9P[8], in 23 cases (66%), followed by G1P[8] in 4 cases (11%). The total economic cost was &U20AC;883 per case. Conclusion: Active surveillance demonstrated that the burden of nosocomial rotavirus disease is substantial, and G9P [8] was the genotype found most frequently. Following up children after discharge from hospital allowed the discovery of cases of nosocomial RVAGE which are missed in most other studies.
Making Black Lives Matter in the Information Technology Profession

The phrase "social change is a beautiful thing," appeared in a tweet from a student during demonstrations at the University of Missouri in November 2015. The events that motivated this tweet point to the work that still needs to occur to bring greater racial equality to American society. In this regard, a question for IT professionals, both academics and practitioners, is: "What can the SIGMIS CPR community do to foster greater inclusion of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups into our profession? " These panelists provide some answers to this question by discussing their research and interventions to diversify the IT field and promote greater racial and ethnic representation within it.
Analyzing Privacy in Enterprise Packet Trace Anonymization

Accurate network measurement through trace collection is critical for advancing network design and for maintaining secure, reliable networks. Unfortunately, the release of network traces to analysts is highly constrained by privacy concerns. Several host anonymization schemes have been proposed to address this issue. Preservation of prefix relationships among anonymized addresses is an important aspect of trace utility, but also causes a number of vulnerabilities in trace anonymization. In this work we present an efficient host fingerprint attack targeting prefix-preserving anonymized traces. The attack is general (encompassing a range of fingerprinting host de-anonymization attacks proposed by others) and flexible (it can be adapted to emerging variants of prefix-preserving anonymization). Perhaps most importantly, we develop analysis tools that allow data publishers to quantify the worst-case vulnerability of their traces given assumptions about the kind of external information that is available to the adversary. Using this analysis we quantify the trade-off between privacy and utility of alternatives to full prefix-preserving anonymization.
Evolutionary Framework for Protein Sequence Evolution and Gene Pleiotropy

In this article, we develop an evolutionary model for protein sequence evolution. Gene pleiotropy is characterized by K distinct but correlated components (molecular phenotypes) that affect the organismal fitness. These K molecular phenotypes are under stabilizing selection with microadaptation (SM) due to random optima shifts, the SM model. Random coding mutations generate a correlated distribution of K molecular phenotypes. Under this SM model, we further develop a statistical method to estimate the “effective” number of molecular phenotypes (Ke) of the gene. Therefore, for the first time we can empirically evaluate gene pleiotropy from the protein sequence analysis. Case studies of vertebrate proteins indicate that Ke is typically ∼6–9. We demonstrate that the newly developed SM model of protein evolution may provide a basis for exploring genomic evolution and correlations.
Slip and twinning dislocations in sapphire (α-Al2O3)

Abstract The 1/3 (1010) partial dislocation plays a crucial role in the plastic deformation of sapphire (α-Al2O3). During deformation at high temperatures, basal slip (1/3(1120) (0001)) has the lowest critical resolved shear stress; 1/3 (1120) perfect dislocations undergo dissociation (which is probably restricted to the dislocation core) to 1/3(1010) and 1/3 (0110) half-partial dislocations. These partials glide on an electrically neutral motion plane within a puckered cation array. The 1/3(1010) partial also acts as the twinning partial when basal twinning occurs at intermediate temperatures, say 600–1000°C. Twinning occurs when a pinned screw partial sweeps out on this same motion plane, forms a complete loop of a microtwin and then cross-slips onto the next available motion plane to permit twin thickening. New transmission electron microscopy evidence is presented, confirming several predictions of this new model of basal twinning. Prism plane slip ((1010) {1210}) is actually the preferred slip system.
Effect of fiber surface modification on the mechanical properties of sisal fiber‐reinforced benzoxazine/epoxy composites based on aliphatic diamine benzoxazine

Sisal fibers were incorporated into a mixture of benzoxazine and bisphenol A type epoxy resins to form a uni- directionally reinforced composite. Surface modifications of the sisal fibers were carried out with sodium hydroxide, g-amino- propyltrimethoxysilane, and g-glycidoxypropyltrimethoxysi- lane. The surface treatments led to changes in the morphology, chemical groups, and hydrophilicity of the fibers. The effect of the fiber surface treatments on the fiber-matrix interfacial adhe- sion and mechanical properties of the composites were also studied. The results showed that surface treatments with so- dium hydroxide and a silane coupling agent led to improved fiber-matrix adhesion; this could be seen in the scanning elec- tron micrographs of the fractured surfaces from mechanical testing and the reduction in the impact strength of the compo- sites made from treated fibers. 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 106: 2925-2935, 2007
Local Rank Distance

Researchers have developed a wide variety of methods for string data, that can be applied with success in different fields such as computational biology, natural language processing and so on. Such methods range from clustering techniques used to analyze the phylogenetic trees of different organisms, to kernel methods used to identify authorship or native language from text. Results of such methods are not perfect and can always be improved. Some of these methods are based on a distance or similarity measure for strings, such as Hamming, Levenshtein, Kendall-tau, rank distance, or string kernel. This paper aims to introduce a new distance measure, termed Local Rank Distance (LRD), inspired from the recently introduced Local Patch Dissimilarity for images. Designed to conform to more general principles and adapted to DNA strings, LRD comes to improve over state of the art methods for phylogenetic analysis. This paper shows two applications of LRD. The first application is the phylogenetic analysis of mammals. Experiments show that phylogenetic trees produced by LRD are better or at least similar to those reported in the literature. The second application is to identify native language of English learners. By working at character level, the proposed method is completely language independent and theory neutral. In conclusion, LRD can be used as a general approach to measure string similarity, despite being designed for DNA.
A super-resolution method for recognition of license plate character using LBP and RBF

Character recognition is the key of three steps in license plate recognition. Although many methods have been proposed to deal with this problem, there is less work dealing with exploration of effective feature to represent license plate characters and recognize characters in low-resolution (LR) images. In this paper, we propose a method that uses the feature based on local binary pattern (LBP) to describe characters and uses radial basis function (RBF) to establish the relationship between features of HR and LR images. The experimental results show that the LBP feature is effective and our method has a good recognition performance.
Understanding the relationship of information need specificity to search query length

When searching, people's information needs flowthrough to expressing an information retrieval request posed to asearch engine. We hypothesise that the degree of specificity of anIR request might correspond to the length of a search query. Ourresults show a strong correlation between decreasing query lengthand increasing broadness or generality of the IR request. We foundan average cross-over point of specificity from broad to narrow of 3words in the query. These results have implications for searchengines in responding to queries of differing lengths.
Modeling Redundancy-Based Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are usually in- termittently connected mobile wireless networks. Routing in delay tolerant networks is challenging because many well-known assumptions of traditional networks do not hold in DTNs. Various routing schemes have been proposed in literature which exploit redundancy to improve the message delivery. However, there lacks a systematical analytic work on modeling the redundancy- based routing schemes for delay tolerant networks. This mo- tivates us to develop a unified model to analyze the various redundancy-based routing schemes. In this paper, we model the message delivering process in DTNs as a continuous time Markov random process with absorbing state. With this model, we have derived the probability distribution functions of the message delivery delay for different routing schemes, including direct transmission routing, source forward, and binary forward schemes. We conduct simulations to validate our model and our analytic results. The simulations show that our model can precisely capture the characteristics of those redundancy-based routing schemes.
The failure of CSMA in emerging wireless network scenarios

The current family of 802.11 protocols are based on the Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) mechanism which is a simple and robust means of sharing a channel. However, two current trends in wireless networks point towards a situation where CSMA fails to perform better than pure random access solutions such as ALOHA. The first trend is the ever increasing raw data rate in each generation of 802.11 which is set to continue with the current 802.11ax standardisation. The second is the move towards smaller frames as end users increasingly use mobile devices instead of desktop computers. We show that as the ratio of propagation delay to packet transmission time increases, the performance of CSMA degrades correspondingly, to the point where ALOHA outperforms CSMA.
Temporal qualitative coalitional games

Qualitative Coalitional Games (QCGs) are a version of coalitional games in which an agent's desires are represented as goals which are either satisfied or unsatisfied, and each choice available to a coalition is a set of goals, which would be jointly satisfied if the coalition made that choice. A coalition in a QCG will typically form in order to bring about a set of goals that will satisfy all members of the coalition. In this paper, we introduce and study Temporal QCGs (TQCGs), i.e., games in which a sequence of QCGs is played. In order to represent and reason about such games, we introduce a linear time temporal logic of QCGs, known as £ (TQCG). We give a complete axiomatization of £ (TQCG), use it to investigate the properties of TQCGs in a small example, identify its expressive power, establish its complexity, characterise classes of TQGCs with formulas from our logical language, and formulate several (temporal) solution concepts for TQCGs.
Towards context-oriented programming in wireless sensor networks

We present our ongoing work towards applying the context-oriented programming (COP) paradigm to wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Context---as a representation of the environment where the system operates---plays a key role in WSN applications, which must often adapt their operation depending on environmental conditions. We argue that promoting a notion of context as a first-class citizen in WSN programming facilitates the design and implementation of context-dependent functionality. To this end, we conceive a context-oriented programming model expressly tailored to WSNs, coupled with dedicated language constructs. Unlike the existing literature on COP, we embed the latter within low-level C-like languages that do not rely on resource-intensive features such as dynamic memory management. To make our design concrete, we describe a context-oriented extension of nesC---a widely used WSN programming language---and report on a preliminary assessment of our design.
Programming Mobile Robots by Demonstration through System Identification

For certain mass-marked robot applications it is essential to have cheap, efficient and reliable methods of sensormotor code generation, hand-programming is not a viable option in such cases. We present a new method to program mobile robots — “code identification by demonstration” — which algorithmically transfers human behaviours directly to robot control code, using transparent mathematical functions. In contrast to traditional robot programming techniques, our method does not require specialised technical or programming skills, but translates demonstrated behaviour immediately into executable code. This has obvious implications for the widespread use of personal service robots. The proposed method is fast and computationally cheap, and has the additional advantage of generating transparent, i.e. analysable controllers using polynomials, which permits hypothesis formation and theoretical analysis of robot behaviour, for example for stability and safety analyses. We demonstrate the viability of this approach by teaching a Scitos G5 mobile robot to achieve corridor following behaviour.