Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Agent-based control of VSC-HVDC transmission grid - A Cyber Physical System perspective

This paper proposes a control scheme to coordinate the DC voltage of converters in a HVDC grid using a Multi-agent System concept. Such interactions between agents, converters, and communication units are approached from a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) perspective. The Multi-agent based control scheme tries to update the DC voltage set-points of the converters based on local and neighboring information. The information exchange between the agents and communication delay tolerance of the control scheme is studied by means of graph theory. The multi-agent control scheme has been implemented for a seven-terminal HVDC grid in a real time simulator and the impact of communication delay on this distributed control approach has been studied and is presented in the result.
A technique to improve the transconductance in amplifiers

This paper presents a technique for improving the response of amplifier implemented with multiple inputs floating gate transistor for processing input signals of very small amplitude. With the technique presented here, it is possible to improve the transconductance of the amplifier, maintaining all the positive features of the device as variable threshold voltage and very-low voltages applications. This document shows the proposed technique and its implementation in SPICE using CMOS technological parameters for 0.35 μm process. Additionally, the results obtained using a common source amplifier to validate the feasibility of the proposed technique are included.
Towards autonomous locomotion: Slithering gait design of a snake-like robot for target observation and tracking

In this paper, a biologically inspired 3D slithering gait for a snake-like robot is designed and implemented for the purpose of target tracking. First, by balancing the forward speed and the stability of the robot, a straight slithering gait is modelled, under which the robot can march straight, fast, and stably. Then, for the purpose of steering, the straight slithering gait is modified into a biased slithering gait. The relationship between turning radius and gait parameters is analyzed by the resistive force theory. With the head composition algorithm, we investigate the orientation problem of the snake robot's head module to obtain stable visual information during the locomotion process. Finally, with the guidance of the vision sensor mounted in the head module, target tracking simulations and prototype experiments are conducted to demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of the slithering gait in autonomous locomotion scenarios.
Bmc Medical Research Methodology Open Access Analysis of Neonatal Clinical Trials with Twin Births

Background: In neonatal trials of pre-term or low-birth-weight infants, twins may represent 10– 20% of the study sample. Mixed-effects models and generalized estimating equations are common approaches for handling correlated continuous or binary data. However, the operating characteristics of these methods for mixes of correlated and independent data are not well established.
Convergence analysis of a deterministic discrete time system of feng's MCA learning algorithm

The convergence of minor-component analysis (MCA) algorithms is an important issue with bearing on the use of these methods in practical applications. This correspondence studies the convergence of Feng's MCA learning algorithm via a corresponding deterministic discrete-time (DDT) system. Some sufficient convergence conditions are obtained for Feng's MCA learning algorithm with constant learning rate. Simulations are carried out to illustrate the theory
Performance analysis of cryptographic protocols on handheld devices

The past few years have witnessed an explosive growth in the use of wireless mobile handheld devices as the enabling technology for accessing Internet-based services, as well as for personal communication needs in ad hoc networking environments. Most studies indicate that it is impossible to utilize strong cryptographic functions for implementing security protocols on handheld devices. Our work refutes this. Specifically, we present a performance analysis focused on three of the most commonly used security protocols for networking applications, namely SSL, S/MIME and IPsec. Our results show that the time taken to perform cryptographic functions is small enough not to significantly impact real-time mobile transactions and that there is no obstacle to the use of quite sophisticated cryptographic protocols on handheld mobile devices.
A Computational Cognitive Model of Novel Word Generalization

A key challenge in vocabulary acquisition is learning which of the many possible meanings is appropriate for a word. The word generalization problem refers to how children associate a word such as dog with a meaning at the appropriate category level in a taxonomy of objects, such as Dalmatians, dogs, or animals. We present the first computational study of word generalization integrated within a word-learning model. The model simulates child and adult patterns of word generalization in a word-learning task. These patterns arise due to the interaction of type and token frequencies in the input data, an influence often observed in people’s generalization of linguistic categories.
Identification of conserved regulatory motif signatures in human miRNA upstream regions

Discovering and characterizing regulatory elements of miRNA genes are fundamental problems in bioinformatics field. An upstream regulatory motif can be described as a sequence element designated for binding of various protein factors imparting their subsequent effects on the transcription of the genes. For example, the transcription factors often bind to cis-acting conserved motif to regulate transcription, which typically are located upstream of transcriptional start sites. This work focuses on the identification of upstream regulatory elements of human microRNA genes by screening of their Kullback Liebler distance.
FTP access as a user-defined file system

Current methods of accessing services provided in the internet require users to know several interfaces. We show that integrating these services into the file naming spaces brings considerable benefits: users are able to use different services by a simple file access. This mechanism is general enough so that all applications can use the available services. Our idea is demonstrated by the implementation of a file server which handles ftp access transparently. This server was integrated into the regular file name space by using the NFS interface, thus avoiding the need to relink the kernel and ensuring portability.
An ontology of online user feedback in software engineering

Online user feedback is principally used as an information source for evaluating customers' satisfaction for a given goods, service or software application. The increasing attitude of people towards sharing comments through the social media is making online user feedback a resource containing different types of valuable information. The huge amount of available user feedback has drawn the attention of researchers from different fields. For instance, data mining techniques have been developed to enable information extraction for different purposes, or the use of social techniques for involving users in the innovation of services and processes. Specifically, current research and technological efforts are put into the definition of platforms to gather and/or analyze multi-modal feedback. But we believe that the understanding of the type of concepts instantiated as information contained in user feedback would be beneficial to define new methods for its better exploitation. In our research, we focus on online explicit user feedback that can be considered as a powerful means for user-driven evolution of software services and applications. Up to our knowledge, a conceptualization of user feedback is still missing. With the purpose of contributing to fill up this gap we propose an ontology, for explicit online user feedback that is founded on a foundational ontology and has been proposed to describe artifacts and processes in software engineering. Our contribution in this paper concerns a novel user feedback ontology founded on a Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) that supports the description of analysis processes of user feedback in software engineering. We describe the ontology together with an evaluation of its quality, and discuss some application scenarios.
Exaggerated inflammation, impaired host defense, and neuropathology in progranulin-deficient mice

Progranulin (PGRN) is a widely expressed protein involved in diverse biological processes. Haploinsufficiency of PGRN in the human causes tau-negative, ubiquitin-positive frontotemporal dementia (FTD). However, the mechanisms are unknown. To explore the role of PGRN in vivo, we generated PGRN-deficient mice. Macrophages from these mice released less interleukin-10 and more inflammatory cytokines than wild type (WT) when exposed to bacterial lipopolysaccharide. PGRN-deficient mice failed to clear Listeria monocytogenes infection as quickly as WT and allowed bacteria to proliferate in the brain, with correspondingly greater inflammation than in WT. PGRN-deficient macrophages and microglia were cytotoxic to hippocampal cells in vitro, and PGRN-deficient hippocampal slices were hypersusceptible to deprivation of oxygen and glucose. With age, brains of PGRN-deficient mice displayed greater activation of microglia and astrocytes than WT, and their hippocampal and thalamic neurons accumulated cytosolic phosphorylated transactivation response element DNA binding protein–43. Thus, PGRN is a key regulator of inflammation and plays critical roles in both host defense and neuronal integrity. FTD associated with PGRN insufficiency may result from many years of reduced neutrotrophic support together with cumulative damage in association with dysregulated inflammation.
A Big Data Architecture for Security Data and Its Application to Phishing Characterization

As the Internet grows, cybersecurity problems also arise. Different types of malicious activities have been explored by attackers. However, the existent defense mechanisms are not able to completely end the malicious threats, perpetuating this continuous arms race. The development of applications to mitigate those threats presents some complicating factors such as the growth in the amount of data, and the variety of data, that can come from different sources. In this paper we present an architecture built on top of Big Data frameworks that aims to mitigate cybersecurity problems such as spam and phishing and we show how it is being used to study spam and phishing collected using a global honeynet.
Two-channel electrotactile stimulation for sensory feedback of fingers of prosthesis

Electrotactile stimulation has been used to provide sensory information of forearm prosthesis to users. Although conventional sensory feedback method, where one electrode expresses sensory information of only one finger, could provide force information of three fingers by using three electrodes, it showed less cognitive accuracy when more than two electrodes were stimulated simultaneously compared to individual stimulation. To improve the cognitive accuracy, we presented a sensory feedback method called two-channel electrotactile stimulation for the thumb, index and middle fingers using only two electrodes. The force information of the index and middle fingers was delivered into two electrodes, respectively, by intermittent stimulation. The information of the thumb was delivered to the user by inserting additional offset pulses onto the channel of the index finger based on an assumption that the force of thumb is proportional to the sum of the forces of the index and middle fingers. The presence of offset pulses in the channel indicates the binary state of thumb if it contacts with an object or not. We conducted two psychophysical experiments where healthy subjects classified the binary states of each finger and identified intensity from two-channel stimuli. The cognitive accuracies for intensity identification were 78.8% and 62.2% for the intermittent stimulation and conventional method, respectively, and accuracy for classifying the fingers was 93.1% for every combination of the three fingers. The results demonstrated that the proposed two-channel electrotactile stimulation could be an attractive method to express the information of fingers of prosthesis with high accuracy.
Analysis of the communication between colluding applications on modern smartphones

Modern smartphones that implement permission-based security mechanisms suffer from attacks by colluding applications. Users are not made aware of possible implications of application collusion attacks---quite the contrary---on existing platforms, users are implicitly led to believe that by approving the installation of each application independently, they can limit the damage that an application can cause. We implement and analyze a number of covert and overt communication channels that enable applications to collude and therefore indirectly escalate their permissions. Furthermore, we present and implement a covert channel between an installed application and a web page loaded in the system browser. We measure the throughput of all these channels as well as their bit-error rate and required synchronization for successful data transmission. The measured throughput of covert channels ranges from 3.7 bps to 3.27 kbps on a Nexus One phone and from 0.47 bps to 4.22 kbps on a Samsung Galaxy S phone; such throughputs are sufficient to efficiently exchange users' sensitive information (e.g., GPS coordinates or contacts). We test two popular research tools that track information flow or detect communication channels on mobile platforms, and confirm that even if they detect some channels, they still do not detect all the channels and therefore fail to fully prevent application collusion. Attacks using covert communication channels remain, therefore, a real threat to smartphone security and an open problem for the research community.
The Acculturation of Parenting Cognitions

A three-culture comparison—native South Korean, Korean immigrants to the United States, and native European American mothers—of two types of parenting cognitions—attributions and self-perceptions—was undertaken to explore cultural contributions to parenting cognitions and their adaptability among immigrant mothers. Attributions and self-perceptions of parenting were chosen because they influence parenting behavior and children’s development and vary cross-culturally. One hundred seventy-nine mothers of 20-month-old children participated: 73 South Korean, 50 Korean immigrant, and 56 European American. Korean mothers differed from European American mothers on four of the five types of attributions studied and on all four self-perceptions of parenting, and these differences were largely consistent with the distinct cultural values of South Korea and the United States. Generally, Korean immigrant mothers’ attributions for parenting more closely resembled those of mothers in the United States, whereas their self-perceptions of parenting more closely resembled those of mothers in South Korea. This study provides insights into similarities and differences in cultural models of parenting, and information about the acculturation of parenting cognitions among immigrants from South Korea.
A fully functional Ramsey-CPT atomic clock

The abstract presents a fully functional Ramsey-CPT atomic clock, which has the characteristics of compact structure, small volume, low cost, strong adaptability, high stability, convenient for adjustment, unique design, and easy-to-commercialization. The Ramsey-CPT atomic clock combines the method of separated oscillatory fields and the phenomenon of coherent population trapping, so as to obtain narrower line width and better signal-to-noise ratio of the resonance signal for improving the frequency stability. It not only keeps the advantages of miniaturization and low power of the CPT atomic clock, but also can obtain higher frequency stability than CPT atomic clock about one order of magnitude.
Mechanisms of Texture Development in Lead-Free Piezoelectric Ceramics with Perovskite Structure Made by the Templated Grain Growth Process

The mechanisms of texture development were examined for BaTiO3 and a (K,Na,Li)(Nb,Ta)O3 solid solution made by the templated grain growth method, and compared with the mechanism in Bi0.5(Na,K)0.5TiO3. The dominant mechanism was different in each material; grain boundary migration in BaTiO3, solid state spreading in Bi0.5(Na,K)0.5TiO3, and abnormal grain growth in the (K,Na,Li)(Nb,Ta)O3 solid solution. The factor determining the dominant mechanism is the degree of smoothness of surface structure at an atomic level.
Orientation alignment-based formation control with reference node

This paper presents orientation-alignment based formation control of multi-agent dynamic systems with a reference node. The formation control problem studied in this paper is so-called distance-based approach. So, only bearing measurements and pure distance information are used when controlling agents with respect to local coordinate frame. The main idea is to align the orientations of agents to a common direction, which is the direction of the reference node in this paper. While aligning the orientations, agents also attempt to control the absolute distances with respect to neighboring agents. Two problems are presented. First, for a simplicity, the case with static reference node is addressed. Second, using the result of the first case, the case with constantly moving reference node is studied. It is shown that, even with delays in velocity propagation, the desired formation while matching the velocities among agents can be achieved.
Assessing calcium absorption from fortified soymilk and fermented fortified soymilk in osteopenic post menopausal women

The overall objectives of this thesis were to assess the calcium absorption of calcium fortified soymilk (CFSM) compared to cows’ milk in post menopausal women, and to investigate ways of optimising the calcium bioavailability from commercially available CFSM. The project consisted of two parts: in vitro studies and the in vivo clinical studies.
Resistive Address Decoder

Hardwired dynamic NAND address decoders are widely used in random access memories to decode parts of the address. Replacing wires by resistive elements allows storing and reprogramming the addresses and matching them to an input address. The resistive address decoder thus becomes a content addressable memory, while the read latency and dynamic energy remain almost identical to those of a hardwired address decoder. One application of the resistive address decoder is a fully associative TLB with read latency and energy consumption similar to those of a one-way associative TLB. Another application is a many-way associative cache with read latency and energy consumption similar to those of a direct mapped one. A third application is elimination of physical addressing and using virtual addresses throughout the entire memory hierarchy by introducing the resistive address decoder into the main memory.
Guidelines for Inspiratory Flow Setting When Measuring the Pressure-Volume Relationship

Acquisition of pressure-volume (PV) curves to improve ventilation strategy is time consuming when using static methods. Low-flow techniques use less time, but compliance values can be decreased by the resistance to flow in airways and tracheal tube (P-t). In this study, we determined the impact of three flows on the resistive component of airway pressure during anesthesia. We studied 10 ASA status P1/P2 patients with normal respiratory function. Airway and esophageal pressures were measured while volume-control ventilated with 6, 12, and 30 L/min continuous flows. PV curves, lower inflection point, respiratory system, and chest wall compliances at 250, 500, 750, and 1000 mL tidal volume were established before and after removing P-t. Data were submitted to analysis of variance. The inflection point was lower for the lower flow when comparing 6 and 12 with 30 L/min (P < 0.001). No difference was found between 6 and 12 L/min. Removal of P-t showed a difference only for 30 L/min (P = 0.004). Higher flows generated lower compliances. P-t subtraction reduced compliances only for 30 L/min. Chest wall compliances showed no difference between flows. We concluded that flows ≤12 L/min minimize P-t during intraoperative PV curves acquisition. Compliances suggest 6 L/min as the most adequate flow.
The role of endoscopic ultrasound in a case of lung cancer with jaundice

Lung cancer is one of the major causes of death in the world. Small cell carcinoma is the most aggressive type and can spread rapidly. The association of a small cell carcinoma with hepatic hilar metastasis and biliary obstruction is rare. Endoscopic ultrasound allows the aspiration of a cytology sample from adenopathies for diagnostic purpose. We present the case of a patient with lung cancer, with lymph node metastasis to the hepatic hilum and extrinsic biliary tree compression. Endoscopic ultrasound allowed the definitive diagnosis of hepatic hilar metastasis of a lung small cell carcinoma. To the author's knowledge it was the first time that endoscopic ultrasound was used for the diagnosis of hepatic hilar lymph node metastasis of lung cancer.
Integrated System for Hydraulic Simulations

The work described in this paper is aimed at applying and co-operating of modern information technologies and mathematical modeling to make a risk analysis of the water-supply in big cities. It is instrumental in the investigation of the hydraulics of water-supply systems using the simulation model EPANET executed on the underlying high-performance computing infrastructure. The simulation process is integrated with the GIS environment in order to correct input data and visualize the simulation output. Input data for the model can be modified directly within the designed scientific gateway which enables hydraulic domain experts to interact comfortably with the HPC capacity. Furthermore, the system includes some data mining capabilities forming bridges between the hydraulic data storage and available hydrological measurements focused on water consumption modeling and predictions. In simulating the main emphasis is given to optimize the measure of a similarity between the mathematical model and the real system in order to obtain reliable results.
Relative Impact of Nucleotide and Copy Number Variation on Gene Expression Phenotypes

Extensive studies are currently being performed to associate disease susceptibility with one form of genetic variation, namely, single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). In recent years, another type of common genetic variation has been characterized, namely, structural variation, including copy number variants (CNVs). To determine the overall contribution of CNVs to complex phenotypes, we have performed association analyses of expression levels of 14,925 transcripts with SNPs and CNVs in individuals who are part of the International HapMap project. SNPs and CNVs captured 83.6% and 17.7% of the total detected genetic variation in gene expression, respectively, but the signals from the two types of variation had little overlap. Interrogation of the genome for both types of variants may be an effective way to elucidate the causes of complex phenotypes and disease in humans.