Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Max-Variance Convolutional Neural Network Model Compression

In this paper, we present a method for convolutional neural network model compression which is based on the removal of filter banks that correspond to unimportant weights. To do this, we depart from the relationship between consecutive layers so as to obtain a factor that can be used to assess the degree upon which each pair of filters are coupled to each other. This allows us to use the unit-response of the coupling between two layers so as to remove pathways int he network that are negligible. Moreover, since the back-propagation gradients tend to diminish as the chain rule is applied from the output to the input layer, here we maximise the variance on the coupling factors while enforcing a monotonicity constraint that assures the most relevant pathways are preserved. We show results on widely used networks employing classification and facial expression recognition datasets. In our experiments, our approach delivers a very competitive trade-off between compression rates and performance as compared to both, the uncompressed models and alternatives elsewhere in the literature. pages = 271–279
Tone Realization in Mandarin Speech: A Large Corpus Based Study of Disyllabic Words

This study aims to increase our knowledge about tone realization in disyllabic words in continuous Mandarin speech. Automatic alignments of large speech corpora were carried out to enable the study of potential tone variants, with a special focus on variation factors such as prosodic position and right tonal context. The alignments without tone variants (V0, phonological representation) show that Tone 4 is more frequent in phrase-final position than in other prosodic positions, supporting the "declination line" pattern often observed in speech production. Tone 4 is also the most frequent lexical tone (>50%) in all prosodic positions. Alignments permitting tone variants (V1, phonetic realization) show an increase of Tone 1 in phrase-initial position, compared to V0. Tone realization is observed to be related not only to the prosodic position, but also to the within-word right tonal context. Unsurprisingly, the most notable change in tone realization happens for Tone 3 in the first syllable of disyllabic words when followed by another Tone 3 because of the well-known "tone sandhi rule" in which T3T3 disyllabic words become T2T3. Cross-word right tonal context is found to impact only Tone 3. However, the results in this study show that Tone 3 sandhi rule is more a tendency than an absolute rule.
Geometrical Optics-Based Advanced Design of an Open Cavity Resonant Antenna

This letter explores geometrical optics-based raytracing in combination with modal analysis to realize an open cavity structure as an advanced variant of the resonant cavity antenna (RCA). Additional ray confinement has been ensured by determining accurate phase-locking conditions as demonstrated for the first time. Its combination with the analysis of the cavity mode has also been introduced to determine the optimum design parameters, achieving improved radiation properties. With respect to a reference RCA reported earlier, the proposed approach exhibits a remarkable improvement in gain by 4–9 dB, resulting in about 17 dBi peak value consistently over the full 18% matching bandwidth. This is resultant from an increase in aperture efficiency, typically from 27% to 74%. This is achieved without any compromise with the cross-polarization property. The sidelobe level improves over the band except in higher frequency in H-plane. The proposed concept is commercially viable, showing significantly advantageous features.
Dockerfile Changes in Practice: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of 4,110 Projects on GitHub

Docker is one of the most popular containerization tools in current DevOps practice. Particularly, Dockerfile plays an important role in the Docker-based software development process by specifying the commands and build environment of Docker containers. As a project progresses through its development stages, the content of the Dockerfile may be revised many times. Previous studies have examined Dockerfile usage in open-source projects. However, little is known about the details of Dockerfile changes in practice. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on Dockerfile changes for 4,110 open-source projects hosted on GitHub. Based on the Dockerfile data, we measure the frequency, magnitude, and instructions of Dockerfile changes and report how Dockerfile co-changed with other files. To explore the relationship between Dockerfile changes and project outcomes, i.e., popularity, success, and productivity, we also develop regression models, by controlling for various confounds. Our findings help to characterize and understand Dockerfile changes and motivate the need for collecting more empirical evidence.
A 2–20-GHz Ultralow Phase Noise Signal Source Using a Microwave Oscillator Locked to a Mode-Locked Laser

In this article, we develop the theory of a special type of optoelectronic phase-locked loop (PLL). The output signal of this type of PLL is in the electrical domain and its reference oscillator, typically a mode-locked laser, operates in the optical domain. The PLL uses a balanced optical microwave phase detector (BOMPD). In order to model the optoelectronic PLL, the nonlinear characteristic function and the gain of the BOMPD are derived analytically. Using the results of the phase detector analysis, the theory of an optoelectronic PLL using such a phase detector is developed. Based on the theoretical analysis, a broadband optoelectronic frequency synthesizer with a programmable frequency range from 2 to 20 GHz is designed and implemented. Phase noise measurements show that the optoelectronic PLL frequency synthesizer achieves an integrated rms-jitter (1 kHz–100 MHz) of less than 4 fs in the frequency range from 5 to 20 GHz with a typical value of 4 fs and a minimum of 3 fs. This is the first reported wideband PLL frequency synthesizer achieving sub-10-fs integrated rms-jitter (1 kHz–100 MHz) in the frequency range from 3 to 20 GHz. A comparison with best-in-class laboratory-grade frequency synthesizers in this frequency range shows that this synthesizer achieves lower phase noise than any electronic frequency synthesizer for offset frequencies larger than 2 kHz.
Highly birefringent fiber grating laser sensors based on femtosecond laser-inscribed in-fiber stressors

We propose a novel dual-polarization distributed feedback fiber laser (DFB-FL) sensor based on femtosecond laser-inscribed in-fiber stressors. Simultaneous strain and temperature measurement was demonstrated by detecting the polarization beat frequency and lasing wavelength of the DFB-FL. Experimental results exhibit strain sensitivities of 34.5 kHz/µε 1.25 pm/µε and temperature sensitivities of 684.6 kHz/°C 11.5 pm/°C respectively. © 2020 The Author(s)
Entanglement Sustainability Improvement Using Optoelectronic Converter in Quantum Radar (Interferometric Object-Sensing)

In this study, the main focus is laid on the design of an optoelectronic converter as a part of the quantum radar to enhance the entanglement between retained and returned modes at high temperatures. The electro-opto-mechanical converter has been widely studied, and the results showed that the operation at high temperature is so crucial to generate and preserve the entanglement between modes. The main problem arises because the mechanical part operating at a low frequency leads to a large number of thermally excited photons, and eventually, the entanglement between modes becomes lost. To solve the problem, we replace the mechanical part with the optoelectronic components. The optical cavity is coupled to the microwave cavity in the newly designed system through a Varactor diode excited by a photodetector. As the main goal, to improve the entanglement sustainability, the effect of the coupling factor of the microwave cavity to photodetector is investigated. The results show that the mentioned factor creates some degrees of freedom to enhance the entanglement at high temperatures compared to the electro-opto-mechanical converter. At some specific values of the coupling factor, the retained and returned fields remained completely entangled up to 5.5 K and partially entangled around 50 K.
GAS-TO-PARTICLE HEAT TRANSFER IN THE DRAFT TUBE OF A SPOUTED BED

The gas-to-particle heat transfer coefficients in the spout region of draft tube spouting beds of 2.6 mm glass beads were determined during continuous operation with particle fed through the base. For this purpose, detailed profiles of the gas temperature were measured in both spout and annular regions, as well as the temperature of the particles in the annulus. Fluid dynamic data were used to determine the volumetric solids concentration in the spout region. The effects of the spouting air flow rate, the particles feed rate, the height of the bed and the solids volumetric concentration, β v , on the heat transfer coefficients were also determined. The data obtained was compared with the predictions of equations for spouted beds and vertical pneumatic conveying.
Ultralow Timing Jitter Pulses from a SESAM Mode-locked Yb-fiber Laser

We demonstrate 199-attosecond timing jitter [10 kHz-21.25 MHz] pulses from an ultrashort SESAM mode-locked Yb-fiber laser. This timing jitter is the lowest for fiber lasers mode-locked by real saturable absorbers. © 2020 The Author(s)
Distributed Observer-Based H∞ Fault-Tolerant Control for DC Microgrids With Sensor Fault

Disturbances, uncertainties, noises and device faults commonly exist in microgrids and often undermine the system stability. To meet these challenges, robust control methods have been recently employed in microgrids systems. In this paper, an active fault-tolerant control scheme is proposed for DC islanded microgrids subjected to sensor fault and external disturbance. Firstly, a distributed ${H_\infty }$ observer is designed to estimate the uncorrupted voltage and current with high accuracy. Then, an observer based state feedback controller is proposed to ensure stability of voltage regulation for the system. A consensus based control layer in the secondary level is provided to realize current sharing. For the plug-and-play operation of DC microgrids, decentralized parameters design approaches for the observer and controller are both discussed. Finally, simulation studies and experiments are carried out on a DC microgrid system to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed fault-tolerant control scheme. The simulation and experiment results show that compared with previous works, the proposed observer based control strategy can significantly improve the reliability and resilience of DC microgrid systems.
Learning Affordance Segmentation: An Investigative Study

Affordance segmentation aims at recognising, localising and segmenting affordances from images, enabling scene understanding of visual content in many applications in robotic perception. Supervised learning with deep networks has become very popular in affordance segmentation. However, very few studies have investigated the factors that contribute to improved learning of affordances. This investigation is essential to improve precision and balance cost-efficiency when learning affordance segmentation. In this paper, we address this task and identify two prime factors affecting precision of learning affordance segmentation: (1) The quality of features extracted from the classification module and (2) the dearth of information in the Region Proposal Network (RPN). Consequently, we replace the backbone classification model and introduce a novel multiple alignment strategy in the RPN. Our results obtained through extensive experimentation validate our contributions and outperform the state-of-the-art affordance segmentation models.
Phase Spectrum Recovery for Enhancing Low-Quality Speech Captured by Laser Microphones

This paper proposes a phase spectrum recovery method for enhancing the low-quality speech captured by laser micro-phones, which is degraded by non-additive distortions during signal acquisition. Our preliminary study shows that common speech enhancement methods based on amplitude spectrum estimation can not achieve a satisfactory performance on this task. Therefore, this paper designs a speech enhancement model which is comprised of an amplitude spectrum estimator (ASE) and a phase spectrum estimator (PSE). The ASE adopts autoregressive LSTMs and multi-target learning framework to predict clean amplitude spectra from noisy ones. The PSE first adopts a waveform-based model to enhance noisy speech in time domain, and then extracts phase spectra from the enhanced waveforms. Subsequently, the outputs of the two estimators are combined to reconstruct the final enhanced speech waveforms. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve higher PESQ score than the method using only ASE and the waveform-based speech enhancement methods, including UNet and TCNN.
Phytochemical Investigations of Tapinanthus Globiferus (Loranthaceae) from Two Hosts and the Taxonomic Implications

Tapinanthus globiferus is one of the mistletoes commonly consumed by the people of Akwa Ibom State as a herbal cure for ailments such as hypertension, diabetes, ulcer and heart disease. It is believed that their efficacy depends on the host plant. In this work, T. globiferus collected from different hosts; Pentaclethra macrophylla (African oil bean tree) and Cola acuminata have been screened for secondary metabolites, nutrients, anti-nutrients and minerals. The phytochemical investigation showed that alkaloids, saponins, tannins, flavonoids, phlobatannins and cardiac glycosides were present in T. globiferus from P. macrophylla while anthraquinones were absent. In T. globiferus from C. acuminata, alkaloids, saponins, tannins, flavonoids and cardiac glycosides were also present but phlobatannins and anthraquinones were absent. The nutrient analysis for the latter showed moisture content-11.70%, carbohydrate- 69.96%, crude protein- 9.88%, ash- 8.90% and crude fat-2.90%. In T. globiferus on P. macrophilla the nutrient analysis showed moisture content was 12.63%, carbohydrate was 68.80%, crude protein was 9.71%, ash was 9.20% and crude fat was 2.30%. Anti-nutrient analysis in the latter showed that hydrogen Cyanide was 13.99mg/100g, Phytic acid was 2.42mg/100g, oxalates were 38.88mg/100g, tannin content was 147.55mg/g. In T. globiferus on C. acuminata, anti-nutrient analysis showed that Hydrogen cyanide was 8.52mg/100g, phytic acid was 2.38mg/100g, oxalic acid was 39.46mg/100g and tannin content was 147.54mg/100g. The mineral content in the latter was 1.10mg/100g for Potassium, 0.43 mg/100g for Calcium, 0.12mg/100g for Phosphorus and 0.09mg/100g for Magnesium In T. globiferus from P. macrophylla, the mineral content was 0.12mg/100g for Potassium,0.37mg/100g for Calcium, 0.14mg/100g for phosphorus and 0.02mg/100g for Magnesium. Findings confirm its medicinal value in ethnobotany and chemical evidence confirms relationship at species level.
Board composition and firms’ profitability: Empirical evidence from pharmaceutical industry in India

The current study aims to assess the effect of board of directors’ composition on the profitability of Indian pharmaceutical companies. The analysis is based on 82 companies, analyzed over ten years, from 2008 to 2017. The least squares regression model is used for analysing the data. One accountingbased measure (return on assets, ROA) and one marketing-based measure (Tobin Q) are used as proxies for firms’ profitability. Leverage, firms’ size and age are used as control variables. The findings reveal that board of directors’ composition as measured by the percentage of independent board members negatively and significantly affects firm’s profitability measured by ROA. On the other hand, board of directors’ composition positively and significantly affects profitability measured by Tobin Q. Furthermore, firms’ size and age positively and significantly impact profitability. This topic is largely neglected by researchers of Indian origin at home and abroad. The present study provides an insight for Received: September, 2019 1st Revision: March, 2020 Accepted: July, 2020 DOI: 10.14254/20718330.2020/13-3/12 Journal of International Studies S ci en ti fi c P a pe rs © Foundation of International Studies, 2020 © CSR, 2020 Najib H. S. Farhan, Mosab I. Tabash, Faozi A. Almaqtari, Ali T. Yahya Board composition and firms’ profitability: Empirical evidence from pharmaceutical. 181 pharmaceutical companies to consider a high level of professionalism of their board members. Greater board independence could bring more expertise, improving profitability. Accordingly, the current research has implications for board members of pharmaceutical companies, especially government-owned ones.
Solving Multi-Objective Problems Using Bird Swarm Algorithm

This paper introduces an effective method by combining the multi-objective technique with the bird swarm algorithm (BSA) to obtain a new method called MBSA. The MBSA obtains some of the different non-dominated techniques that maintain variety amongst the optimal solutions. To verify and evaluate the effectiveness of the MBSA, collections of constrained, unconstrained, and engineering problems are measured. These problems have various Pareto front (PF) properties, including non-convex, convex, and discrete PFs. The results show that the MBSA has a good ability to obtain both a better solution spread and better convergence near the true PF. Furthermore, the quantitative and qualitative results indicate that the MBSA provides high convergence and good results in all experiments and with real-world problems against well-known algorithms in the literature.
An 82fsrms-Jitter and 22.5mW-Power, 102GHz W-Band PLL Using a Power-Gating Injection-Locked Frequency-Multiplier- Based Phase Detector in 65nm CMOS

As the utilization of the mm-wave spectrum becomes active, designers’ interests are shifting to even higher frequencies in the W-band. Given their potential use as carrier frequencies for the next-generation mobiles (i.e., beyond 5G), these W-band signals must have ultra-low phase noise (PN). Currently, the most popular solution to generate such frequencies is with a cascaded architecture: a first-stage PLL generates a low-PN signal at a relatively low frequency at which the VCO LC tank has a high Q factor, and following frequency multipliers (FMs) increase the frequency to the W-band [1]. Although various FMs have been proposed, all of them are limited in their ability to achieve a high multiplication factor, M. Push-push or harmonic-selection circuits have high conversion losses. Injection-locked FMs (ILFMs) require multiple stages due to their narrow lock ranges, which increase power consumption and complexity. Thus, single-stage direct PLLs [2] –[4] would be preferred if they could have a sufficiently wide loop bandwidth to suppress the poor PN of a W-band VCO. Subsampling PLLs (SSPLLs) are suitable for extending the bandwidth since they have low in-band PN due to the high phase-error $\left(\phi_{\text {ERR}}\right)$ detection gain of a subsampling phase detector (PD). Nevertheless, when SSPLLs operate in the W-band, the degradation of PN is unavoidable because the $\phi_{\text {ERR}}$ detection gain decreases as the frequency of the VCO, $f_{\text {vco}}$, increases. As described at the left of Fig. 23.4. 1, when the switch of the $\mathrm{PD}, S W_{\mathrm{PD}}$, is closed, the output of the $\mathrm{PD}, S_{\mathrm{PD}}$, should track the signal of the VCO, $S_{\text {vco}}$, closely. However, when $f_{\text {vco}}$ increases to the W-band, the amplitude of $S_{\mathrm{PD}}$ is reduced significantly by a parasitic pole that is present due to the turned-on resistance of $S W_{\mathrm{PD}}, R_{\mathrm{ON}}$, and the sampling capacitor, $C_{\mathrm{S}}$ When $S W_{\mathrm{PD}}$ is turned off, $\phi_{\mathrm{ERR}}$ is detected in $S_{\mathrm{PD}}$, but its magnitude is already suppressed significantly relative to that in $S_{\mathrm{vCO}}$. This effect also can be interpreted in the frequency domain where $S_{\text {vco}}$ is suppressed by a low-pass filter before the information of $\phi_{\text {ERR}}$ is extracted at the baseband frequencies.
Reactive Wetting in the Liquid‐Silicon/Solid‐Carbon System

The wettability of glassy carbon by liquid silicon has been investigated at 1430°C in argon by using techniques of both in situ formation and capillary formation of sessile drops. Analyses of the results showed that there are three distinct contributions of reaction to wetting: (a) dissolution of solid substrate carbon in liquid silicon; (b) formation of a continuous SiC layer at the solid side of the interface, and (c) a contribution of the free energy released by the reaction localized at the interface between liquid silicon and solid carbon.
9.6 A 1/2.3inch 12.3Mpixel with On-Chip 4.97TOPS/W CNN Processor Back-Illuminated Stacked CMOS Image Sensor

Within the Internet of Things (IoT) market, retail, smart city, and so on, the need for camera products which have Artificial Intelligence (AI) processing capabilities is growing. AI processing capability on such edge devices solves some issues of cloud-only computing systems, such as latency, cloud communication, processing cost, and privacy concerns. The market demand for smart cameras with AI processing capabilities includes small size, low cost, low power and ease of installation. However, conventional CMOS Image Sensors (CIS) only output the raw data of the captured image. Therefore, when developing a smart camera that has AI processing capabilities, it is necessary to utilize ICs that include an image signal processor (ISP), CNN processing, DRAM and so on. Unfortunately, this results in system solution that is larger, higher power and more costly.
Revisiting the Statistics Pooling Layer in Deep Speaker Embedding Learning

The pooling function plays a vital role in the segment-level deep speaker embedding learning framework. One common method is to calculate the statistics of the temporal features, while the mean based temporal average pooling (TAP) and temporal statistics pooling (TSTP) which combine mean and standard deviation are two typical approaches. Empirically, researchers observe a big performance degradation in x-vector when removing the standard deviation. Based on this observation, in this paper, we designed a set of experiments to analyze the effectiveness of different statistics quantitatively, including the investigation and comparison on pooling functions based on standard deviation, covariance and ℓp-norm. Experiments are carried out on Vox-Celeb and SRE16, and the results show that the second-order statistics based pooling functions yield better performance than TAP, and only the simple standard deviation can achieve the best performance on all the evaluation conditions.