Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering A voyage through the deformed Earth with the self-consistent model

The viscoplastic self-consistent (VPSC) large strain polycrystal plasticity theory proved to be very useful for modelling the deformation in Earth materials. In contrast to most metals, rocks are composed of low-symmetry minerals with few slip systems. Also, most minerals have a high strain-rate sensitivity. Consequently, different orientations deform at different rates, contrary to the assumptions of the traditional Taylor model. The self-consistent method has been applied to predict textures and microstructures in many mineral systems and some highlights will be reviewed. Starting at the surface of the Earth, ice deforms mainly by basal slip. Texture patterns observed in experiments and in the large polar ice sheets are well predicted with the VPSC model. In sediments, concentrations of salt ( halite) deform by buoyant upwelling into salt domes. When VPSC was applied to halite, entirely different textures were predicted than those with the Taylor model, in better accordance with low temperature deformation experiments where {110}〈11̄0〉 is the prevalent slip system. Calcitehas been an excellent example to illustrate how textures measured in natural rocks can be used to infer the deformation history in the Earth’s crust. In calcite, VPSC automatically simulates the effects of ‘curling’ in axial compression, producing plane strain deformation at the microscopic scale. Many minerals are recrystallized. VPSC has been used as the basis of a model for dynamic recrystallization which balances nucleation of highly deformed grains and growth of less deformed grains. Applying it to quartzmade it possible to explain textures in naturally deformed quartzites, particularly those deformed in simple shear. The upper mantle of the Earth is largely composed of livine and deforms in large convection cells that extend over thousands of kilometres. Polycrystal plasticity predicts a highly heterogeneous texture evolution along streamlines with strong development of preferred orientation. Since single crystals of olivine are elastically anisotropic, oriented polycrystals also display anisotropy. Predicted anisotropies of seismic wave velocities of 5–10% in the model mantle agree well with those observed by seismologists. Finally the still highly enigmatic inner core is composed of solid ε-iron (hexagonal close packed) and seismologists have observed that wave velocities are slightly higher parallel to the Earth’s axis than in the equatorial plane. Again, VPSC simulations suggest that this anisotropy in the centre of the Earth could be due to deformation during convection. The examples illustrate, on a grand scale, that VPSC has not only helped us to unravel the deformation history of the Earth but also contributes towards to a better understanding of the deformation behaviour of complex and anisotropic materials.
Who Needs Release and DevOps Engineers, and Why?

The recent surge in interest in continuous delivery has opened up the job market for release and DevOps engineers. However, despite an increasing number of conferences and publications on continuous delivery, smaller companies and start-ups still have a hard time determining the core tasks their future release and DevOps engineers should be responsible for (and what the differences between those two roles are), while universities are not sure what essential techniques and skills they should teach to their students. This paper performs an empirical analysis of online job postings to determine and compare the main tasks of release and DevOps engineers, globally and across countries. Our qualitative analysis shows that automation is the most important activity across the three roles, as articulated in job posting description data, and that the release engineer role combines the top activities of the DevOps and more traditional build engineer roles. Finally, different countries have a moderate degree of similarity between their ads, although each country has its specific focus.
Multiparametric MRI prostate cancer analysis via a hybrid morphological-textural model

Multiparametric MRI has shown considerable promise as a diagnostic tool for prostate cancer grading. Diffusion-weighted MRI (DWI) has shown particularly strong potential for improving the delineation between cancerous and healthy tissue in the prostate gland. Current automated diagnostic methods using multiparametric MRI, however, tend to either use low-level features, which are difficult to interpret by radiologists and clinicians, or use highly subjective heuristic methods. We propose a novel strategy comprising a tumor candidate identification scheme and a hybrid textural-morphological feature model for delineating between cancerous and non-cancerous tumor candidates in the prostate gland via multiparametric MRI. Experimental results using clinical multiparametric MRI datasets show that the proposed strategy has strong potential as a diagnostic tool to aid radiologists and clinicians identify and detect prostate cancer more efficiently and effectively.
Data-Driven Robust Approximate Optimal Tracking Control for Unknown General Nonlinear Systems Using Adaptive Dynamic Programming Method

In this paper, a novel data-driven robust approximate optimal tracking control scheme is proposed for unknown general nonlinear systems by using the adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) method. In the design of the controller, only available input-output data is required instead of known system dynamics. A data-driven model is established by a recurrent neural network (NN) to reconstruct the unknown system dynamics using available input-output data. By adding a novel adjustable term related to the modeling error, the resultant modeling error is first guaranteed to converge to zero. Then, based on the obtained data-driven model, the ADP method is utilized to design the approximate optimal tracking controller, which consists of the steady-state controller and the optimal feedback controller. Further, a robustifying term is developed to compensate for the NN approximation errors introduced by implementing the ADP method. Based on Lyapunov approach, stability analysis of the closed-loop system is performed to show that the proposed controller guarantees the system state asymptotically tracking the desired trajectory. Additionally, the obtained control input is proven to be close to the optimal control input within a small bound. Finally, two numerical examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.
A closed-loop phase-locked interferometer for wide bandwidth position sensing

This article describes a position sensitive interferometer with closed-loop control of the reference mirror. A calibrated nanopositioner is used to lock the interferometer phase to the most sensitive point in the interferogram. In this configuration, large low-frequency movements of the sensor mirror can be detected from the control signal applied to the nanopositioner and high-frequency short-range signals can be measured directly from the photodiode. It is demonstrated that these two signals are complementary and can be summed to find the total displacement. The resulting interferometer has a number of desirable characteristics, it is optically simple, does not require polarization or modulation to detect the direction of motion, does not require fringe-counting or interpolation electronics, and has an effectively unlimited bandwidth. Experimental results demonstrate the frequency response analysis of a high-speed positioning stage. The proposed instrument is ideal for measuring the frequency response of nanopositioners, electro-optical components, MEMs devices, Ultrasonic devices, and sensors such as surface acoustic wave detectors.
Novel insights into genome plasticity in Eukaryotes: mosaic aneuploidy in Leishmania

Leishmania are unicellular eukaryotes that have many markedly original molecular features compared with other uni‐ or multicellular eukaryotes like yeasts or mammals. Genome plasticity in this parasite has been the subject of many publications, and has been associated with drug resistance or adaptability. Aneuploidy has been suspected by several authors and it is now confirmed using state‐of‐the‐art technologies such as high‐throughput DNA sequencing. The analysis of genome contents at the single cell level using fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) has brought a new light on the genome organization: within a cell population, every chromosome, in every cell, may be present in at least two ploidy states (being either monosomic, disomic or trisomic), and the chromosomal content varies greatly from cell to cell, thus generating a constitutive intra‐strain genomic heterogeneity, here termed ‘mosaic aneuploidy’. Mosaic aneuploidy deeply affects the genetics of these organisms, leading, for example, to an extreme degree of intra‐strain genomic diversity, as well as to a clearance of heterozygous cells in the population without however affecting genetic heterogeneity. Second, mosaic aneuploidy might be considered as a powerful strategy evolved by the parasite for adapting to modifications of environment conditions as well as for the emergence of drug resistance. On the whole, mosaic aneuploidy may be considered as a novel mechanism for generating phenotypic diversity driven by genomic plasticity.
Terms over LOAD: Leveraging Named Entities for Cross-Document Extraction and Summarization of Events

Real world events, such as historic incidents, typically contain both spatial and temporal aspects and involve a specific group of persons. This is reflected in the descriptions of events in textual sources, which contain mentions of named entities and dates. Given a large collection of documents, however, such descriptions may be incomplete in a single document, or spread across multiple documents. In these cases, it is beneficial to leverage partial information about the entities that are involved in an event to extract missing information. In this paper, we introduce the LOAD model for cross-document event extraction in large-scale document collections. The graph-based model relies on co-occurrences of named entities belonging to the classes locations, organizations, actors, and dates and puts them in the context of surrounding terms. As such, the model allows for efficient queries and can be updated incrementally in negligible time to reflect changes to the underlying document collection. We discuss the versatility of this approach for event summarization, the completion of partial event information, and the extraction of descriptions for named entities and dates. We create and provide a LOAD graph for the documents in the English Wikipedia from named entities extracted by state-of-the-art NER tools. Based on an evaluation set of historic data that include summaries of diverse events, we evaluate the resulting graph. We find that the model not only allows for near real-time retrieval of information from the underlying document collection, but also provides a comprehensive framework for browsing and summarizing event data.
Application of Software design patterns to DSP library design

The design of a hardware data path library is one of the harder problems in design for reuse. Due to the appearance of hardware modeling libraries based on C++, it is possible to apply advanced software techniques to design such a library. This paper shows how software design patterns can be applied to hardware design. Design patterns yield a twofold advantage: a faster design process, and a library that is more extensible and modular than an equivalent HDL counterpart. From a VHDL-C++ design comparison we found that those factors might result in a reduction of the code size by a factor of two.
Development of a Speaker Diarization System for Speaker Tracking in Audio Broadcast News: a Case Study

A system for speaker tracking in broadcast-news audio data is presented and the impacts of the main components of the system to the overall speaker-tracking performance are evaluated. The process of speaker tracking in continuous audio streams involves several processing tasks and is therefore treated as a multistage process. The main building blocks of such system include the components for audio segmentation, speech detection, speaker clustering and speaker identification. The aim of the first three processes is to find homogeneous regions in continuous audio streams that belong to one speaker and to join each region of the same speaker together. The task of organizing the audio data in this way is known as speaker diarization and plays an important role in various speech-processing applications. In our case the impact of speaker diarization was assessed in a speaker-tracking system by performing a comparative study of how each of the component influenced the overall speaker-detection results. The evaluation experiments were performed on broadcast-news audio data with a speaker-tracking system, which was capable of detecting 41 target speakers. We implemented several different approaches in each component of the system and compared their performances by inspecting the final speaker-tracking results. The evaluation results indicate the importance of the audio-segmentation and speech-detection components, while no significant improvement of the overall results was achieved by additionally including a speaker-clustering component to the speaker-tracking system.
Collision Detection for Deformable Objects

Interactive environments for dynamically deforming objects play an important role in surgery simulation and entertainment technology. These environments require fast deformable models and very efficient collision handling techniques. While collision detection for rigid bodies is well investigated, collision detection for deformable objects introduces additional challenging problems. This paper focuses on these aspects and summarizes recent research in the area of deformable collision detection. Various approaches based on bounding volume hierarchies, distance fields and spatial partitioning are discussed. In addition, image‐space techniques and stochastic methods are considered. Applications in cloth modeling and surgical simulation are presented.
SIVELESTAT (SELECTIVE NEUTROPHIL ELASTASE INHIBITOR) IMPROVES THE MORTALITY RATE OF SEPSIS ASSOCIATED WITH BOTH ACUTE RESPIRATORY DISTRESS SYNDROME AND DISSEMINATED INTRAVASCULAR COAGULATION PATIENTS

Neutrophil elastase plays an important role in the development of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) in sepsis. Sivelestat is a selective neutrophil elastase inhibitor. It is possible that sivelestat improves the outcome of septic patients associated with ARDS and DIC. A retrospective data analysis of septic patients associated with ARDS and DIC was conducted to investigate the effects of sivelestat. Observational period was 5 days after admission to intensive care unit (ICU). The study included 167 septic patients associated with ARDS and DIC. Control group included 133 patients without sivelestat, and sivelestat group included 34 patients started to deadministered sivelestat on the admission to ICU. The lung injury scores and PaO2/FiO2 ratio of the sivelestat group were significantly more severe than those of the control group from days 1 to 4. On day 5, the lung injury score and PaO2/FiO2 ratio of the sivelestat group improved to the same levels of those of the control group. The DIC score of sivelestat group improved on day 3 in comparison to day 1, and those of control group remained unchanged until day 4. The length of ICU stay of the sivelestat group was significantly shorter than that of the control group. A stepwise multiple logistic-regression analysis showed the sivelestat administration to be an independent predictor of survival of the septic patients associated with both ARDS and DIC. The length of ICU stay of the sivelestat group was significantly shorter than that of the control group. In addition, sivelestat administration was found to be an independent predictor of survival of those patients.
Chapter 4 Predictors of Pain and Function Following Total Joint Replacement

Osteoarthritis (OA) is one of the most disabling diseases in developed countries and is re‐ sponsible for significant disability in over 43 million people worldwide, 27 million of whom are 60 years of age or older [1]. Age is the strongest predictor of the development and pro‐ gression of osteoarthritis, as such the number of people suffering with OA is expected to continue to increase over the coming years due to the ageing population [2]. Other predic‐ tors associated with OA include; gender, obesity, physical inactivity, smoking, excess alco‐ hol and injuries [2].
Power efficient FIR folding transformation for wireline digital communications

A new algorithm is introduced for power efficient implementation of the folding algorithm transformation for the adaptive FIR filters. The algorithm is based on the known minimum spanning tree problem which is a modification of the traveling sales person NP-hard problem. A sub-optimal solution can be obtained leading to dramatic reduction in the folded architecture switching activities. The optimum ordering within the folding sets is done in the steady state condition of the filtering operation. For a typical word length, and for large enough folding factor, the projected reduction in switching activity can be as large as 60%. The hierarchical energy analysis too (HEAT) was used to simulate the effect of this reduction on a typical Baugh-Wooley (1973) multiplier and reduction in power consumption for a typical wireline equalization implementation was found to be between 25% and 60%. The new algorithm is based on a simple breadth first search approach and can be easily performed for one time only when the filter is geared to the steady state mode. Dramatic improvement in power consumption can be achieved with minimal overhead.
Comparison of Dry Medium Culture Plates for Mesophilic Aerobic Bacteria in Milk, Ice Cream, Ham, and Codfish Fillet Products

This study was performed to compare the performance of Sanita-Kun dry medium culture plate with those of traditional culture medium and Petrifilm dry medium culture plate for the enumeration of the mesophilic aerobic bacteria in milk, ice cream, ham, and codfish fillet. Mesophilic aerobic bacteria were comparatively evaluated in milk, ice cream, ham, and codfish fillet using Sanita-Kun aerobic count (SAC), Petrifilm aerobic count (PAC), and traditional plate count agar (PCA) media. According to the results, all methods showed high correlations of 0.989~1.000 and no significant differences were observed for enumerating the mesophilic aerobic bacteria in the tested food products. SAC method was easier to perform and count colonies efficiently as compared to the PCA and PAC methods. Therefore, we concluded that the SAC method offers an acceptable alternative to the PCA and PAC methods for counting the mesophilic aerobic bacteria in milk, ice cream, ham, and codfish fillet products.
The mechanism of black core formation

The 10mm diameter aggregates made of clay, carbon and were prepared to investigate the mechanism of black core formation. The specific gravity, absorption rate, percent of black core area, fracture strength, total Fe analysis, and XRF were measured at various compositions, sintering temperatures, sintering times, sintering atmospheres, and sintering methods. Small addition of did not affect physical properties of the aggregates; however, the percent of black core area increased with increasing carbon contents and increasing sintering temperature. Specific gravity of the aggregates decreased and the water absorption ratio increased with increasing percent of black core area. The aggregates sintered at oxidation atmosphere showed clear border between shell and black core area. Hence, the aggregates sintered at reduction atmosphere showed only black core area in the cross-section of the aggregates. The specific gravity of the aggregates sintered at reduction atmosphere increased with increasing carbon contents and that was the lowest of all comparing other aggregates sintered at different atmospheres. Adsorption rate increased with increasing carbon contents at all atmospheres. The fast sintered aggregates showed lower specific gravity, higher absorption rate, and more black core area than the normally sintered aggregates. It was turned out that the aggregates having more black core area showed higher fracture strength than that of aggregates with no black core area. From the total Fe analysis, the concentration of Fe and FeO was higher at black core area than at shell. Because the concentration of in the shell was higher than other area, the color of the shell appeared red. It was also turned out from the XRF analysis that carbon was exist only at black core area.
From participatory sensing to Mobile Crowd Sensing

The research on the efforts of combining human and machine intelligence has a long history. With the development of mobile sensing and mobile Internet techniques, a new sensing paradigm called Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS), which leverages the power of citizens for large-scale sensing has become popular in recent years. As an evolution of participatory sensing, MCS has two unique features: (1) it involves both implicit and explicit participation; (2) MCS collects data from two user-participant data sources: mobile social networks and mobile sensing. This paper presents the literary history of MCS and its unique issues. A reference framework for MCS systems is also proposed. We further clarify the potential fusion of human and machine intelligence in MCS. Finally, we discuss the future research trends as well as our efforts to MCS.
Synthesis of Ferromagnetic Filled Carbon Nanotubes and their Biomedical Application

Especially during last years, fundamental discoveries of various species and modifications of carbon nanotubes have stimulated research on their application including in human medicine. The success of these applications depends significantly on the physical, chemical and biological properties of the carbon nanotubes and their supplements. In our presentation we report on the synthesis of Fe-filled carbon nanotubes, their structural and magnetic properties and propose novel types of such functionalised and filled multiwalled carbon nanotubes with various advantages for an application in human medicine, especially in anti-tumour therapeutic concepts. These nanotube structures represent multi-functional nano-scaled containers for different medical treatments including magnetically guided hyperthermia. Furthermore these chemical inert and stable carbon nanocontainer can be act as a new drug delivery carrier system. In principle, both, a filling of nanotubes by an open-fill-close process or an attachment of argents on the outside of the carbon nanotube is possible.
Genetic disruptions of O/E2 and O/E3 genes reveal involvement in olfactory receptor neuron projection

The mammalian Olf1/EBF (O/E) family of repeated helix-loop-helix (rHLH) transcription factors has been implicated in olfactory system gene regulation, nervous system development and B-cell differentiation. Ebf (O/E1) mutant animals showed defects in B-cell lineage and brain regions where it is the only O/E family member expressed, but the olfactory epithelium appeared unaffected and olfactory marker expression was grossly normal in these animals. In order to further study the mammalian O/E proteins, we disrupted O/E2 and O/E3 genes in mouse and placed tau-lacZ and tau-GFP reporter genes under the control of the respective endogenous O/E promoters. Mice mutant for each of these genes display reduced viability and other gene-specific phenotypes. Interestingly, both O/E2 and O/E3 knockout mice as well as O/E2/O/E3 double heterozygous animals share a common phenotype: olfactory neurons (ORN) fail to project to dorsal olfactory bulb. We suggest that a decreased dose of O/E protein may alter expression of O/E target genes and underlie the ORN projection defect.