Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Approximate pole placement with dominance for continuous delay systems by pid controllers

It is well known that a continuous-time feedback system with time delay has infinite spectrum and it is not possible to assign such infinite spectrum with a finite-dimensional controller. In such a case, only the partial pole placement may be feasible and hopefully some of the assigned poles are dominant. But there is no easy way to guarantee dominance of the desired poles. In this paper, an analytical PID design method is proposed for continuous-time delay systems to achieve approximate pole placement with dominance. Its idea is to bypass continuous infinite spectrum problem by converting a delay process to a rational discrete model and getting back continuous PID controller from its discrete form designed for the model with pole placement. Simulation results are included to illustrate the effectiveness of this method. Il est bien etabli qu'un systeme de retroalimentation continu dans le temps avec retard a un spectre infini et qu'il n'est pas possible d'assigner un tel spectre a un controleur a dimensions finies. Dans un tel cas, seul le placement de poles partiels peut etre realisable, et heureusement, certains des poles assignes sont dominants. Mais il n'y a pas de maniere facile de garantir la dominance des poles desires. Dans cet article, on propose une methode de conception PID analytique pour les systemes avec retard continu dans le temps, afin d'effectuer le placement de poles approximatif avec dominance. L'idee est de contourner le probleme des spectres infinis continus en convertissant le procede de retard en un modele discret rationnel et de recuperer le controleur PID continu de sa forme discrete concue pour le modele avec placement de poles. Les resultats des simulations sont inclus pour illustrer l'efficacite de cette methode.
Impaired damping of cerebral blood flow velocity pulsatility is associated with the number of perivascular spaces as measured with 7T MRI

Arterial walls stiffen with age, cardiovascular risk factors, and various vascular diseases, which may lead to less damping of the arterial blood flow pulse, subsequent microvascular damage, and enlarged perivascular spaces (PVS). However, the exact interplay between these processes is unclear. This study aimed to investigate the relation between blood flow velocity pulsatility in the small lenticulostriate arteries and their supplying middle cerebral artery and the respective damping factor (DF), with the number of MRI-visible PVS in elderly subjects. Blood flow velocity waveforms were obtained in 45 subjects (median age [range]: 64 [48–81] years, 47% male) using 7T MRI. PVS were scored in the basal ganglia (BG) and centrum semiovale (CSO). Spearman correlation analyses were used to determine associations of the blood flow pulsatility and the DF, with PVS score, adjusted for age and sex. We found a significant association between a lower DF and a higher number of PVS in the BG (rs = −0.352, P = 0.021), but not in the CSO. This finding supports the supposed pathophysiological mechanism in which excessive kinetic energy deposition leads to damage of small perforating arteries and contributes to the enlargement of PVS at the level of the BG, but possible other pathways might also be of influence.
Parental anxiety/incompliance and patients’ complications during COVID-19 pandemic regarding nasoalveolar molding treatment of infants with cleft lip/palate

Objectives The ideal time for nasoalveolar molding (NAM) of infants with cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) is the first weeks after birth. The burden and responsibility that this method of treatment imposes on parents may result in incompliance. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the redirection of health resources can make the situation worse. Therefore, this study evaluated the anxiety, complications, and incompliance of parents undergoing NAM during the COVID-19 pandemic. Materials and methods Demographic data of 35 infants with CLP treated during the COVID-19 pandemic, compliance and level of anxiety of both parents in addition to their complications were reported. The association between different variables and incompliance was evaluated by simple and multiple logistic regressions. The level of significance was considered at P value less than 0.05. Results The highest level of parental anxiety related to the NAM process was the delay in ending the treatment. Meanwhile, the reason for the highest level of anxiety related to attending the treatment sessions was the probability of the infant's COVID-19 infection. Fathers expressed lower levels of anxiety than mothers, significantly. The most prevalent NAM complication was skin irritation. Parents of younger infants (≤28 days) and those with a history of COVID-19 infection were more compliant. Conclusions COVID-19 pandemic caused a significant increase in the level of anxiety in both parents, mainly due to the delay in treatment ending and the possibility of infant's infection. Moreover, considering the importance of treatment time, parents of younger infants were more compliant with the NAM process.
Human neutralizing antibodies to cold linear epitopes and subdomain 1 of the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein

Emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants diminishes the efficacy of vaccines and antiviral monoclonal antibodies. Continued development of immunotherapies and vaccine immunogens resilient to viral evolution is therefore necessary. Using coldspot-guided antibody discovery, a screening approach that focuses on portions of the virus spike glycoprotein that are both functionally relevant and averse to change, we identified human neutralizing antibodies to highly conserved viral epitopes. Antibody fp.006 binds the fusion peptide and cross-reacts against coronaviruses of the four genera, including the nine human coronaviruses, through recognition of a conserved motif that includes the S2′ site of proteolytic cleavage. Antibody hr2.016 targets the stem helix and neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 variants. Antibody sd1.040 binds to subdomain 1, synergizes with antibody rbd.042 for neutralization, and, similar to fp.006 and hr2.016, protects mice expressing human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 against infection when present as a bispecific antibody. Thus, coldspot-guided antibody discovery reveals donor-derived neutralizing antibodies that are cross-reactive with Orthocoronavirinae, including SARS-CoV-2 variants. Description Virus coldspot-driven discovery reveals broadly cross-reactive antibodies that protect from SARS-CoV-2 variants.
Supplementary nucleosides improve the performance through enhanced enzyme activity, intestinal development and transporter genes in broiler chickens

Abstract A biological experiment was carried out to evaluate dietary nucleoside supplementation on growth performance, digestive enzymes activities, immune response, and intestinal transporter genes expression in broiler chicken. A total of 720 newly hatched CARIBRO VISHAL broiler chicks were weighed and randomly divided into eight groups with nine replicates. The dietary treatments were as follows: Group I: diet without antibiotic supplement (control), group II: diet supplemented with antibiotic (positive control), groups III, IV and V: diet supplemented with combination of nucleosides at 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 g/kg feed, respectively, for 14 days, groups VI, VII and VIII: diet supplemented with nucleosides at 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 g/kg feed, respectively, for 21 days. The combination of nucleosides (equal proportion (1:1:1:1) adenosine, guanosine, cytosine, and uridine with 99% purity) were used in the study. Body weight was significantly higher in the birds fed diets containing antibiotics and 1.5 g/kg nucleosides fed groups. The supplementation had positive effect on the activity of amylase and lipase enzymes and the absorptive surface (villi length). It could be concluded that, the dietary supplementation of nucleosides improved the performance of broilers with better cellular and humoral immunity than control. The study further confirmed that nucleosides supplementation improved gut development and could be an alternative to antibiotic growth promoters in broiler production.
Seasonal fluxes across the sediment-water interface, and processes within sediments

Measurements of oxygen uptake across the sediment-water interface suggested that between 17-45% of the net primary production in the southern North Sea was degraded in the bottom sediments. Similar measurements of nutrient exchange fluxes showed that the sediments were significant sources of nutrients transferred to the water column. The sediments are, therefore, important sites of organic matter degradation and nutrient recycling, and must be included in any models for the North Sea. The sediments are also accumulators of radionuclides, particularly associated with the silt/clay fraction. At one site in the more central area of the North Sea where the water column stratifies during summer, vertical profiles of radionuclides (137Cs, 239,240Pu, 210Pb) suggested a deposition rate of sediment of 0.3-0.6 cm a-1, but at other sites vertical sediment profiles were unsuitable to measure deposition.
The phenotype of type 1 diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa

The phenotype of type 1 diabetes in Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, is poorly understood. Most previously conducted studies have suggested that type 1 diabetes may have a different phenotype from the classical form of the disease described in western literature. Making an accurate diagnosis of type 1 diabetes in Africa is challenging, given the predominance of atypical diabetes forms and limited resources. The peak age of onset of type 1 diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa seems to occur after 18–20 years. Multiple studies have reported lower rates of islet autoantibodies ranging from 20 to 60% amongst people with type 1 diabetes in African populations, lower than that reported in other populations. Some studies have reported much higher levels of retained endogenous insulin secretion than in type 1 diabetes elsewhere, with lower rates of type 1 diabetes genetic susceptibility and HLA haplotypes. The HLA DR3 appears to be the most predominant HLA haplotype amongst people with type 1 diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa than the HLA DR4 haplotype. Some type 1 diabetes studies in sub-Saharan Africa have been limited by small sample sizes and diverse methods employed. Robust studies close to diabetes onset are sparse. Large prospective studies with well-standardized methodologies in people at or close to diabetes diagnosis in different population groups will be paramount to provide further insight into the phenotype of type 1 diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa.
Structural school characteristics and neighborhood risk factors: Associations with student-reported school climate in a large, urban public school district in the United States

Introduction School climate consistently predicts youth academic success, social–emotional well-being, and substance use, and positive school climate can buffer the negative effects of community violence exposure on youth development. Various structural school and neighborhood factors have been associated with school climate, but prior research has not examined these relations comprehensively. Methods We examined the relation between 18 school building and school neighborhood factors with student-reported school climate among 15,833 students in 124 public schools in a large, urban district in the United States. Results In this sample, attendance rate was most consistently associated with school climate (β = 0.015; p < 0.001). Teacher years of experience, mobility rate, number of students in special education, adult arrests in the school neighborhood, and service calls for shootings and dirty streets and alleys in the school neighborhood were also significantly associated with various domains of school climate. Conclusions These findings highlight the need for future longitudinal research on the influence of both school building and school neighborhood factors on school climate for public schools. Schools in our sample had a wide range of school climate scores despite consistently high crime rates and other structural risk factors such as low socioeconomic status throughout the city, so there are implications for researchers and education leaders to work together to identify opportunities for schools to foster positive school climate despite systemic school and/or neighborhood risk factors.
An Analysis of the Quality of Model Driven Development Solutions Applied to Cyber-Physical Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm that provides an ecosystem for a fast-growing quantity of connected devices, also defined as cyber-physical devices. The creation of Internet of Things solutions is fairly complex, integrating and communicating between sensors, devices, and larger systems. The Model Driven Development (MDD), a software development methodology that allows the generation of software solutions through abstract models, may help to create quality Internet of Things solutions. Thus, this study aims to evaluate the quality of cyber-physical solutions developed from an MDD platform. For this purpose, we performed an quasi-experiment, comparing a well-stable cyber-physical solution with the same solution implemented in an MDD tool. To compare the solutions, we explored several characteristics of ISO/IEC 25010 standard using qualitative and quantitative analysis. The results show the code generated from the MDD tool presented better maintainability and provided the same performance and functional suitability as the original code.
Probing the Efficacy of Hardware-Aware Weight Pruning to Optimize the SpMM Routine on Ampere GPUs

The Deep Learning (DL) community found in pruning techniques a good way to reduce the models' resource and energy consumption. These techniques lead to smaller sparse models, but sparse computations in GPUs only outperform their dense counterparts for extremely high levels of sparsity. However, pruning up to such sparsity levels can seriously harm the accuracy of the Neural Networks (NNs). To alleviate this, novel performance-aware pruning techniques favor the generation of more regular sparse matrices that can improve the exploitation of the underlying hardware. Nevertheless, an important drawback is that these techniques heavily condition the location of the non-pruned values, which can strongly degrade the accuracy of the models. This paper focuses on improving the performance of the SpMM routine on DL workloads by combining performance-aware pruning with pruning-independent SpMM kernels to relax input-format constraints. We start with a microarchitecture-level performance study of SOTA SpMM implementations to identify their main bottlenecks and flaws. Then, the paper centers on maximizing the performance of the routine by adjusting the parameters of performance-aware pruning techniques to the hardware properties. This second study explains the intrinsic causes of the observed performance results. We show that, following this approach, a generic SpMM routine can perform up to 49% and 77% better for half and single precision, respectively, than using non-performance-aware pruning, providing speedups over cuBlas of up to 1.87× and 4.20×, respectively. Additionally, the performance achieved on half precision is boosted with a new Ampere-ready specialized implementation for the column-vector sparse format, CLASP, which achieves a 2.42× speedup over cuBlas. Finally, we also introduce ad-colPrune, a novel pruning technique that widens the design space of possible trade-offs between performance and accuracy.
Automatic Refactoring Method to Remove Eager Test Smell

Unit tests are artifacts generated during the development process to identify software errors early. Unit tests can be affected by Test Smells (TS), which are defined as poorly designed tests due to bad programming practices implemented in unit test code. Problems caused by TS negatively impact the efficiency of developers and the understanding and maintenance of unit tests. Reducing the problems caused by TS can occur through refactoring activities. Despite the existence of studies that seek to identify the occurrence of TS in unit tests and proposals for semi-automatic refactoring, there are no studies related to the automatic removal of TS from the test repository. In this context, this study presents a method for automatic TS removal called Eager Test, which occurs when a test verifies more than one method of the code. The proposed method was evaluated through experiments, comparing the original version of a unit tests repository with its automatically refactored version. The results are promising, showing an Eager Test removal rate of 99,4% of unit tests in the repository without causing test errors or test fails. However, there was an increase in test execution time and of lines of code, resulting from the quantity of tests that were extracted. The proposed method supports improving the quality of unit tests and reduces the effort required by developers to remove Eager Test.
FlexPointer: Fast Address Translation Based on Range TLB and Tagged Pointers

Page-based virtual memory relies on TLBs to accelerate the address translation. Nowadays, the gap between application workloads and the capacity of TLB continues to grow, bringing many costly TLB misses and making the TLB a performance bottleneck. Previous studies seek to narrow the gap by exploiting the contiguity of physical pages. One promising solution is to group pages that are both virtually and physically contiguous into a memory range. Recording range translations can greatly increase the TLB reach, but ranges are also hard to index because they have arbitrary bounds. The processor has to compare against all the boundaries to determine which range an address falls in, which restricts the usage of memory ranges. In this article, we propose a tagged-pointer-based scheme, FlexPointer, to solve the range indexing problem. The core insight of FlexPointer is that large memory objects are rare, so we can create memory ranges based on such objects and assign each of them a unique ID. With the range ID integrated into pointers, we can index the range TLB with IDs and greatly simplify its structure. Moreover, because the ID is stored in the unused bits of a pointer and is not manipulated by the address generation, we can shift the range lookup to an earlier stage, working in parallel with the address generation. According to our trace-based simulation results, FlexPointer can reduce nearly all the L1 TLB misses, and page walks for a variety of memory-intensive workloads. Compared with a 4K-page baseline system, FlexPointer shows a 14% performance improvement on average and up to 2.8x speedup in the best case. For other workloads, FlexPointer shows no performance degradation.
A Heuristic Approach to Product Design

A dynamic-programming heuristic is described to find approximate solutions to the problem of identifying a new, multi-attribute product profile associated with the highest share-of-choices in a competitive market. The input data consist of idiosyncratic multi-attribute preference functions estimated using conjoint or hybrid-conjoint analysis. An individual is assumed to choose a new product profile if he/she associates a higher utility with it than with a status-quo alternative. Importance weights are assigned to individuals to account for differences in their purchase and/or usage rates and the performance of a new product profile is evaluated after taking into account its cannibalization of a seller's existing brands. In a simulation with real-sized problems, the proposed heuristic strictly dominates an alternative lagrangian-relaxation heuristic in terms of both computational time and approximation of the optimal solution. Across 192 simulated problems, the dynamic-programming heuristic identifies product profiles whose share-of-choices, on average, are 98.2% of the share-of-choices of the optimal product profile, suggesting that it closely approximates the optimal solution.
Warm neutral halos around molecular clouds. V - OH (1665 and 1667 MHz) observations

Ten strip maps of 1665- and 1667-MHz OH emission, traversing the outer boundaries of five molecular clouds, were made. The OH emission is found to be significantly extended relative to CO, from which it inferred that OH is to be found in abundance in the shell of partly atomic, partly molecular gas surrounding the dense molecular clouds. The fractional OH abundance is calculated using existing H I and CO observations, and detailed source models which include a complete chemistry network and a radiative transfer code. It is concluded that the extended OH is formed, not by the exothermic reaction of O with H3(+), but by the endothermic reaction, H(+) + O yields H + O(+).
Lifelong olfactory deprivation‐dependent cortical reorganization restricted to orbitofrontal cortex

Prolonged sensory deprivation has repeatedly been linked to cortical reorganization. We recently demonstrated that individuals with congenital anosmia (CA, complete olfactory deprivation since birth) have seemingly normal morphology in piriform (olfactory) cortex despite profound morphological deviations in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a finding contradictory to both the known effects of blindness on visual cortex and to the sparse literature on brain morphology in anosmia. To establish whether these unexpected findings reflect the true brain morphology in CA, we first performed a direct replication of our previous study. Individuals with CA (n=30) were compared to age and sex matched controls (n=30) using voxel- and surface-based morphometry. The replication results were near identical to the original study: bilateral clusters of group differences in the OFC, including CA atrophy around the olfactory sulci and volume increases in the medial orbital gyri. Importantly, no group differences in piriform cortex were detected. Subsequently, to assess any subtle patterns of group differences not detectable by our mass-univariate analysis, we explored the data from a multivariate perspective. Combining the newly collected data with data from the replicated study (CA=49, Control=49) we performed support vector machine classification based on gray matter volume. In line with the mass-univariate analyses, the multivariate analysis could accurately differentiate between the groups in bilateral OFC (75-96% accuracy), whereas the classification accuracy in piriform cortex was at chance level. Our results suggest that despite lifelong olfactory deprivation, piriform (olfactory) cortex is morphologically unaltered and the morphological deviations in CA are confined to the OFC.
Θ-Net: Achieving Enhanced Phase-Modulated Optical Nanoscopy in silico through a computational ‘string of beads’ architecture

We present herein a triplet string of concatenated O-Net (‘bead’) architectures (formulated as discussed in our previous study) which we term ‘Θ-Net’ as a means of improving the viability of generated super-resolved (SR) images in silico. In the present study, we assess the quality of the afore-mentioned SR images with that obtained via other popular frameworks (such as ANNA-PALM, BSRGAN and 3D RCAN). Models developed from our proposed framework result in images which more closely approach the gold standard of the SEM-verified test sample as a means of resolution enhancement for optical microscopical imaging, unlike previous DNNs. In addition, cross-domain (transfer) learning was also utilized to enhance the capabilities of models trained on DIC datasets, where phasic variations are not as prominently manifested as amplitude/intensity differences in the individual pixels [unlike phase contrast microscopy (PCM)]. The present study thus demonstrates the viability of our current multi-paradigm architecture in attaining ultra-resolved images under poor signal-to-noise ratios, while eliminating the need for a priori PSF & OTF information. Due to the wide-scale use of optical microscopy for inspection & quality analysis in various industry sectors, the findings of this study would be anticipated to exhibit a far-ranging impact on several engineering fronts.