Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DESIGN OF DISTRIBUTED ENGINE CONTROL SYSTEMS FOR STABILITY UNDER COMMUNICATION PACKET DROPOUTS (POSTPRINT)

In this paper, we address the issue of the stability of distributed engine control systems under communication constraints and, in particular, for packet dropouts. We propose a control design procedure, labeled decentralized distributedfull-authority digitalenginecontrol andbasedonatwo-leveldecentralized controlframework. Weshow that the packet dropping margin, which is a measure of stability robustness under packet dropouts, is largely dependent on the closed-loop controller structure and that, in particular, a block-diagonal structure is more desirable. Thus, we design a controller in a decentralized framework to improve the packet dropping margin. The effectofdifferentmathematicalpartitioningonthepacketdroppingmarginisstudied.Theproposedmethodologyis applied to an F100 gas turbine engine model, which clearly demonstrates the usefulness of decentralization in improving the stability of distributed control under packet dropouts.
Osteogenic protein-1 binds to activin type II receptors and induces certain activin-like effects

Proteins in the TGF-beta superfamily transduce their effects through binding to type I and type II serine/threonine kinase receptors. Osteogenic protein-1 (OP-1, also known as bone morphogenetic protein-7 or BMP-7), a member of the TGF-beta superfamily which belongs to the BMP subfamily, was found to bind activin receptor type I (ActR-I), and BMP receptors type IA (BMPR-IA) and type IB (BMPR-IB) in the presence of activin receptors type II (ActR-II) and type IIB (ActR-IIB). The binding affinity of OP-1 to ActR-II was two- to threefold lower than that of activin A. A transcriptional activation signal was transduced after binding of OP-1 to the complex of ActR-I and ActR-II, or that of BMPR-IB and ActR-II. These results indicate that ActR-II can act as a functional type II receptor for OP-1, as well as for activins. Some of the known biological effects of activin were observed for OP-1, including growth inhibition and erythroid differentiation induction. Compared to activin, OP-1 was shown to be a poor inducer of mesoderm in Xenopus embryos. Moreover, follistatin, an inhibitor of activins, was found to inhibit the effects of OP-1, if added at a 10-fold excess. However, certain effects of activin, like induction of follicle stimulating hormone secretion in rat pituitary cells were not observed for OP-1. OP-1 has overlapping binding specificities with activins, and shares certain but not all of the functional effects of activins. Thus, OP-1 may have broader effects in vivo than hitherto recognized.
Bio-based and recycled-waste materials in buildings: A study of energy performance of hemp-lime concrete and recycled-polyethylene terephthalate façades for office facilities in France and Italy

Global environmental issues are arising over the developed and developing world. Improving energy efficiency and reducing Green Gases emissions become the key issues in all the economic sectors and, in particular, the building sector that is one of the most energy-consuming. It is, therefore, important to find alternative building materials with low-environmental impact contributing to global sustainability. In that context, this study reports on the performance of sustainable materials produced from natural resources as hemp-concrete or from recycled-waste nonbiodegradable materials including recycled polyethylene terephthalate. Three façades employing three different materials (hemp-concrete, hemp-concrete with brick and recycled polyethylene terephthalate) were investigated in three cities in France (Nancy and Carpentras) and Italy (Perugia) with different climate. The energy performance of each façade was assessed in terms of cooling and heating demands, electrical consumption for a constant flow rate ventilation mode, considering different orientations. The study also shows the effect of window size (10%, 25%, and 40%) on the annual energy consumption.
Using Moving Total Mortality Counts to Obtain Improved Estimates for the Effect of Air Pollution on Mortality

In many cities of the United States, measurements of ambient particulate matter air pollution (PM) are available only once every 6 days. Time-series studies conducted in these cities that investigate the relationship between mortality and PM are restricted to using a single day’s PM as the measure of PM exposure. This is undesirable because current evidence suggests that the effects of PM on mortality are spread over multiple days. And studies have shown that using a single day’s PM as the measure of PM exposure can result in estimates that have a large negative bias. In this article, I introduce a new model for estimating the mortality effects of PM when only every-sixth-day PM data are available. This new model uses information available in the daily mortality time series to infer otherwise lost information about the effect of PM on mortality over a period of more than a single day. This new model typically offers an increase in both statistical estimation precision and accuracy compared with existing models.
Experimental infection of chickens with Campylobacter jejuni: strains differ in their capacity to colonize the intestine.

Groups of broiler and layer type chickens (25 to 63 d.o.) were inoculated per os with separate isolates of 10 strains of Campylobacter jejuni. Nine of the 10 strains were originally isolated from chickens and one from a dog. The dog strain and five of the chicken isolates could be isolated after inoculation, but four strains were not recovered from cloacal swabs for up to 4 to 16 days after inoculation. However, it was possible to isolate C. jejuni from these birds, from cloacal swabs, when they were inoculated with organisms which had been previously shown to colonize other birds.
Explicit Context Matching in Content-Based Publish/Subscribe Systems

Although context could be exploited to improve performance, elasticity and adaptation in most distributed systems that adopt the publish/subscribe (P/S) communication model, only a few researchers have focused on the area of context-aware matching in P/S systems and have explored its implications in domains with highly dynamic context like wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and IoT-enabled applications. Most adopted P/S models are context agnostic or do not differentiate context from the other application data. In this article, we present a novel context-aware P/S model. SilboPS manages context explicitly, focusing on the minimization of network overhead in domains with recurrent context changes related, for example, to mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Our approach represents a solution that helps to efficiently share and use sensor data coming from ubiquitous WSNs across a plethora of applications intent on using these data to build context awareness. Specifically, we empirically demonstrate that decoupling a subscription from the changing context in which it is produced and leveraging contextual scoping in the filtering process notably reduces (un)subscription cost per node, while improving the global performance/throughput of the network of brokers without altering the cost of SIENA-like topology changes.
Effects of the IGF-1/PTEN/Akt/FoxO signaling pathway on male reproduction in rats subjected to water immersion and restraint stress

The aim of the present study was to determine the effects of the insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1)/phosphatase and tensin homologue deleted on chromosome 10 (PTEN)/Akt/forkhead box (FoxO) signaling pathway on male reproduction in rats subjected to water immersion and restraint stress (WRS). Sperm morphology, sperm malformation rate, and serum testosterone concentration were analyzed following WRS. In addition, the expression levels and immunolocalization of IGF-1, PTEN, Akt and FoxO proteins, as well as the rate of cell apoptosis in rat testes, were investigated. The results indicated that sperm malformation rate, serum testosterone concentration, and the number of terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labeling-positive cells were increased in the testes after WRS. Furthermore, IGF-1 and FoxO1 proteins were predominantly localized in the sperm cytoplasm during the late stages of spermatogenesis. FoxO1 protein was also localized in Leydig cell cytoplasm. PTEN and total Akt proteins were predominantly expressed in the cytoplasm of Leydig cells and spermatogonia. PTEN protein was also detected in vascular endothelial cells. In addition, IGF-1, PTEN, Akt1, Akt2, FoxO3 and FoxO4 gene expression levels were upregulated following WRS, and peaked after 7 h of WRS. During the recovery period, the expression levels of these genes gradually returned to normal levels. The present study demonstrated that WRS induced sperm damage in the testes. In addition, the results indicated that the IGF-1/PTEN/Akt/FoxO signaling pathway may serve an anti-stress role in the testes of rats subjected to WRS.
Moving Target Detection Based on the Spreading Characteristics of SAR Interferograms in the Magnitude-Phase Plane

We propose a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) algorithm for moving target detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images based on the spreading characteristics of interferograms on the magnitude-phase (M-P) plane. This method is based on the observation that, in practice, both moving and stationary targets along with clutter are located at different regions in the M-P plane, and hence reasonable partitions of the M-P plane can help in detecting moving targets. To ensure efficient CFAR detection and to resolve the effect of factors that influence detection results, the proposed algorithm is divided into three distinct stages: coarse detection, fine detection, and post-processing. First, to accurately describe the statistical behavior of clutter, a global censoring strategy, called coarse detection, is introduced to adaptively eliminate the influences of the moving and stationary target points from the given data. Then, to acquire fine detection results, a novel CFAR detector is developed on the basis of the fits of a known theoretical M-P joint probability density function (PDF) against the two-dimensional (2-D) histogram of the censored clutter. The joint PDF’s projected contour line that satisfies the desirable probability of false alarm (PFA) corresponds to the required threshold of detection in the M-P plane. Finally, two filters, the magnitude and phase filters, are applied to reduce the false alarms generated from the previous procedures. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is validated through experimental results obtained from a two-channel SAR complex image.
A Data Warehouse Conceptual Data Model for Multidimensional Aggregation

This paper presents a proposal for a Data Warehouse Conceptual Data (CDWDM) Model which allows for the description of both the relevant aggregated entities of the domain—together with their properties and their relationships with other relevant entities—and the relevant dimensions involved in building the aggregated entities. The proposed CDWDM is able to capture the database schemata expressed in an extended version of the Entity-Relationship Data Model; it is able to introduce complex descriptions of the structure of aggregated entities and multiply hierarchically organised dimensions; it is based on Description Logics, a class of formalisms for which it is possible to study the expressivity in relation with decidability of reasoning problems and completeness of algorithms.
Ship Classification in Single-Pol SAR Images Based on Fuzzy Logic

This paper presents a new ship classification methodology that uses single-pol synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images to categorize targets based on a fuzzy logic (FL) decision rule. As such, the method tries to overcome the lack of an operational solution that is able to reliably classify ships with one SAR channel. The method has the following three main stages: (1) radar signature isolation; (2) parametric vector (P) estimation; and (3) decision rule. The first part analyzes the reflectivity histogram of the ship signature to iteratively cluster the pixels of interest. Then, P is calculated by estimating the values of some macroscale features such as length, breadth, and radar cross section profile along the ship signature. Finally, the decision rule is evaluated with FL so that the measured vector P is correlated with the vectors associated with a set of reference categories. These categories have been defined based on user feedback and have been characterized with accurate simulation studies. Specifically, the values of P for each reference ship have been derived with the SAR simulator GRECOSAR. The classification method has been tested with several ENVISAT images acquired for the surroundings of the Strait of Gibraltar. Ground truth has been retrieved via transponder polls, which reveals a preliminary ratio of positive classifications close to 70%. Although this value is not definitive and more tests are needed, it is a good starting point.
Research on Dust Aerosol Particles Size Distribution

According to the characteristics of Sand-dust aerosol in northwest of China, the Sand-dust aerosol particle size distributions have been measured. A great deal of data have been collected in different weather conditions, which include background, floating dust, blowing sand, and sand storm. The rules have been found out through statistical analysis. Sand aerosol concentration is changeable in different weather conditions and process. During the blowing sand and sand storm weather, aerosol concentration changes a lot, but during the floating dust weather, it changes a little. The stronger the aerosol concentration is, the more the number of aerosol particles (d>2.5μm) is , and the more obvious changes occurs in the concentration of various diameter ranges. During different processes, coarse and fine particles have different contributions to the surface concentration. Through comparing the results, the wind speed is an important factor in weather conditions, and in different dust weathers, the PM1, PM2.5 and PM10 distribution different greatly.
Adherence to Medical Recommendations and Treatments by Elderly Patients: Usefil Web Services Addressing This Challenge

USEFIL is proposing an integrated system which will cope with ageing problem providing advanced, affordable and unobtrusive monitoring and web communication solutions for seniors living independently. Older adults face many challenges to their independence, often related to feeling loneliness, to a decline in mobility or cognition causing for example unintentional medication non-adherence. The "adherence USEFIL system" provides efficient and effective means of increased adherence to medical recommendations and treatments by elderly patients and thus extends the time that older people can live independently in their homes while limiting increases in public expenditure. This paper describes the design process of the services and apps of the "adherence USEFIL system". Aim of the paper is to demonstrate the use of the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) to design an ICT solution for increasing adherence to medical recommendations and treatments by elderly people. More specifically using the theoretical lens of the Design Science Research Methodology theory the paper presents the necessary steps that have been conducted to design the "adherence USEFIL system". Results demonstrate that the exploitation of 'off-the-shelf' consumer devices readily succeeds in meeting the study's initial objectives.
Non-filter waveform generation from cepstrum using spectral phase reconstruction

This paper discusses non-ﬁlter waveform generation from cepstral features using spectral phase reconstruction as an alternative method to replace the conventional source-ﬁlter model in text-to-speech (TTS) systems. As the primary purpose of the use of ﬁlters is considered as producing a waveform from the desired spectrum shape, one possible alternative of the source-ﬁlter framework is to directly convert the designed spectrum into a waveform by utilizing a recently developed “ phase reconstruction ” from the power spectrogram. Given cepstral features and fundamental frequency ( F 0 ) as desired spectrum from a TTS system, the spectrum to be heard by the listener is calculated by converting the cepstral features into a linear-scale power spectrum and multiplying with the pitch structure of F 0 . The signal waveform is generated from the power spectrogram by spectral phase reconstruction. An advantageous property of the proposed method is that it is free from undesired amplitude and long time decay often caused by sharp resonances in recursive ﬁlters. In preliminary experiments, we compared temporal and gain characteristics of the synthesized speech using the proposed method and mel-log spectrum approximation (MLSA) ﬁlter. Results show the proposed method performed better than the MLSA ﬁlter in the both characteristics of the synthesized speech, and imply a desirable properties of the proposed method for speech synthesis.
A Blueprint for a Mutationist Theory of Replicative Strand Asymmetries Formation

In the present review, we summarized current knowledge on replicative strand asymmetries in prokaryotic genomes. A cornerstone for the creation of a theory of their formation has been overviewed. According to our recent works, the probability of nonsense mutation caused by replication-associated mutational pressure is higher for genes from lagging strands than for genes from leading strands of both bacterial and archaeal genomes. Lower density of open reading frames in lagging strands can be explained by faster rates of nonsense mutations in genes situated on them. According to the asymmetries in nucleotide usage in fourfold and twofold degenerate sites, the direction of replication-associated mutational pressure for genes from lagging strands is usually the same as the direction of transcription-associated mutational pressure. It means that lagging strands should accumulate more 8-oxo-G, uracil and 5-formyl-uracil, respectively. In our opinion, consequences of cytosine deamination (C to T transitions) do not lead to the decrease of cytosine usage in genes from lagging strands because of the consequences of thymine oxidation (T to C transitions), while guanine oxidation (causing G to T transversions) makes the main contribution into the decrease of guanine usage in fourfold degenerate sites of genes from lagging strands. Nucleotide usage asymmetries and bias in density of coding regions can be found in archaeal genomes, although, the percent of “inversed” asymmetries is much higher for them than for bacterial genomes. “Homogenized” and “inversed” replicative strand asymmetries in archaeal genomes can be used as retrospective indexes for detection of OriC translocations and large inversions.
CuMF_SGD: Fast and Scalable Matrix Factorization

Matrix factorization (MF) has been widely used in e.g., recommender systems, topic modeling and word embedding. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is popular in solving MF problems because it can deal with large data sets and is easy to do incremental learning. We observed that SGD for MF is memory bound. Meanwhile, single-node CPU systems with caching performs well only for small data sets; distributed systems have higher aggregated memory bandwidth but suffer from relatively slow network connection. This observation inspires us to accelerate MF by utilizing GPUs's high memory bandwidth and fast intra-node connection. We present cuMF_SGD, a CUDA-based SGD solution for large-scale MF problems. On a single CPU, we design two workload schedule schemes, i.e., batch-Hogwild! and wavefront-update that fully exploit the massive amount of cores. Especially, batch-Hogwild! as a vectorized version of Hogwild! overcomes the issue of memory discontinuity. We also develop highly-optimized kernels for SGD update, leveraging cache, warp-shuffle instructions and half-precision floats. We also design a partition scheme to utilize multiple GPUs while addressing the well-known convergence issue when parallelizing SGD. On three data sets with only one Maxwell or Pascal GPU, cuMF_SGD runs 3.1X-28.2X as fast compared with state-of-art CPU solutions on 1-64 CPU nodes. Evaluations also show that cuMF_SGD scales well on multiple GPUs in large data sets.
A Developer's Survey of Polygonal Simplification Algorithms

Polygonal models currently dominate interactive computer graphics. This is chiefly because of their mathematical simplicity: polygonal models lend themselves to simple, regular rendering algorithms that embed well in hardware, which has in turn led to widely available polygon rendering accelerators for every platform. Unfortunately, the complexity of these models, which is measured by the number of polygons, seems to grow faster than the ability of our graphics hardware to render them interactively. Put another way, the number of polygons we want always seems to exceed the number of polygons we can afford. Polygonal simplification techniques offer one solution for developers grappling with complex models. These methods simplify the polygonal geometry of small, distant, or otherwise unimportant portions of the model, seeking to reduce the rendering cost without a significant loss in the scene's visual content. The article surveys polygonal simplification algorithms, identifies the issues in picking an algorithm, relates the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, and describes several published algorithms.
Significance of strain rate-dependence in modelling of organic materials

This paper explores the significance of the inherent strain rate-dependence of many biological materials. Such characteristics are pertinent to computational modelling of these materials for the purposes of surgical robotics and simulation. A pair of 2-dimensional finite element models of the human brain/ventricle system are developed and used to analyse the brain structural disease, hydrocephalus. The models are geometrically identical, and both incorporate a linear biphasic material model for the brain parenchyma. Model 1 is assigned a Young modulus value, E/sub 0/ = 3156 Pa, based on the instantaneous elastic response derived from a hyperviscoelastic model. Model 2 accounts for the extremely slow loading characteristic of the disease and a revised modulus value of E/sub /spl infin// = 584.4 Pa is assigned. This significant variation in stiffness generates similar differences in the simulation results. The conclusion is that consideration of the intrinsic strain rate-dependence of organic materials is vital to the satisfactory modelling of such materials, and hence significant to surgical robot performance.