Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bilingualism and inhibitory control : Possible confounds with the variables “ profession ” and “ level of education ”

Recent studies have presented controversial results concerning the bilingual advantage (i.e., bilinguals’ tendency to outperform monolinguals on nonlinguistic interference tasks measuring executive functions (EFs) such as executive control (EC), attention, inhibition, problem solving). Recent research has shown that bilinguals tend to show a more robust advantage in overall reaction times (RTs), rather than an advantage on the magnitude of the interference effect. Irrespective of nature, the so-called bilingual advantage has been found in different age groups, but sometimes no bilingual advantage is actually found. This study investigates the consequences of bilingualism on inhibitory control, focusing on two variables that may compete with the bilingual advantage: “profession” and “level of education”. Two groups of highly-educated middle-aged professionals, businesspeople and teachers/professors, divided into bi/monolinguals, were tested in a nonverbal cognitive task, the Simon task, in order to replicate previous studies which have found a bilingual advantage in the interference effect for the same age group. Although bilinguals outperformed their monolingual counterparts, no signifi cant statistical differences were found in the interference effect, and both language groups were faster in the incongruent trials than in the congruent ones, resulting in null interference effects and thus countering the initial idea that participants always take longer to respond to incongruent trials. Results suggest that certain professional activities, as well as higher levels of education might act as confounds with the bilingual advantage.
Correlated Multi-objective Multi-fidelity Optimization for HLS Directives Design

High-level synthesis (HLS) tools have gained great attention in recent years because it emancipates engineers from the complicated and heavy hardware description language writing, by using high-level languages and HLS directives. However, previous works seem powerless, due to the time-consuming design processes, the contradictions among design objectives, and the accuracy difference between the three stages (fidelities). To find good HLS directives, in this paper, a novel correlated multi-objective non-linear optimization algorithm is proposed to explore the Pareto solutions while making full use of data from different fidelities. A non-linear Gaussian process is proposed to model relationships among the analysis reports from different fidelities for the same objective. For the first time, correlated multivariate Gaussian process models are introduced into this domain to characterize the complex relationships of multiple objectives in each design fidelity. A tree-based method is proposed to erase invalid solutions and obviously non-optimal solutions. Experimental results show that our non-linear and pioneering correlated models can approximate the Pareto-frontier of the directive design space in a shorter time with much better performance and good stability, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Influence of genetic variability on the quality of strawberry cultivars: sensorial, physical-chemical and nutritional characterization

Strawberries are berry-type fruits that are very popular and widely consumed all over the world. The sensorial, physical-chemical and nutritional characteristics of strawberries are parameters of quality that influence the choices of consumers. However, these characteristics may be influenced by intrinsic and extrinsic factors that alter the fruit quality. The concentrations of nutrients and other chemical compounds in strawberries may increase and/or decrease according to the cropping system, maturation stage, climatic conditions, and preservation and storage methods. Factors characteristic of the cultivar, such as the genetic profile, may also influence the composition of strawberries. In this context, the objective of this research was to evaluate the sensorial, physical-chemical and nutritional characteristics of different strawberry cultivars to identify the genotype(s) with the best characteristics for commercialization and human consumption. The day-neutral strawberry cultivar "Aromas" and short-day strawberry cultivars "Camarosa, Camino Real, Dover, Sweet Charlie, and Tudla" were cultivated in the Olericultura Sector of the State University of the Midwest (UNICENTRO), Paraná State, Brazil. The fruits were characterized in relation to their physical-chemical, nutritional and sensorial aspects. According to the sensorial profiles, the Camarosa, Camino Real, Dover, and Tudla genotypes showed greater acceptability among consumers. Camarosa, Sweet Charlie, and Tudla presented better physical-chemical characteristics for human consumption, while the cultivars Camarosa, Dover, and Tudla had the best nutritional contents. In general, it is concluded that the genotypes Camarosa and Tudla are the most favourable for human consumption, according to their sensorial, physical-chemical and nutritional characteristics.
Evaluating the Accuracy of Models for Predicting the Speech Acceptability for Children with Cochlear Implants

This study developed a model for predicting healthy hearing people’s speech acceptability for children with cochlear implants using multiple regression analysis, support vector regression, and random forest and evaluated the prediction performance of the model by comparing mean absolute errors and root mean squared errors. This study targeted 91 hearing-impaired children between four and eight years old who had worn cochlear implants at least one year and less than five years. Speech data of children wearing cochlear implants (CI) were collected through two tasks: speaking and reading. The outcome variable, healthy hearing people’s speech acceptability for children wearing CI was evaluated by 80 college students (freshman and sophomore) who did not have prior knowledge of children with a cochlear implant. The results of this study showed that the random forest algorithm (mean absolute errors=0.81and root mean squared error=0.108) was the best model for predicting the speech acceptability of children wearing CI. The results of this study imply that the predictive performance of random forest will be the best among ensemble models when developing a machine learning model using speech data of children wearing CI.
An Efficient Z-Source Inverter based Solar Power Generation System Fed IM Drive

The increasing importance of fuel saving has been responsible for the revival of interest in alternative source of energy. Thus, the decentralization of power generation and increasing use of non-conventional energy sources has become essential to adopt a low cost generating system for operating in remote areas. With the renewed interest in solar power generation as an alternative energy source, the conventional Voltage Source Inverter (VSI) based Solar Power Generation System has not as much efficiency and reliability. Hence, in this paper, a most recent Z-Source Inverter (ZSI) based Solar Power Generation System for feeding static as well as dynamic load (induction motor drive) is proposed and implemented for remote and rural areas. In this topology, the conventional VSI is replaced by latest ZSI. The Z-Source inverter employs a unique impedance network coupled with inverter circuit. The ZSI have recently been proposed as an alternative power conversion concept as it has both voltage buck and boost capabilities. The developed system can provide ride through capabilities during voltage sags, reduces the line harmonics, improves power factor, increases reliability and extends output voltage range. Compared to conventional Voltage Source inverter (VSI) based Solar Power Generation System, the proposed system needs less PV cells and gives the superior performance. Simulation results are given to compare the behaviour of conventional and proposed topology and also demonstrate the new features of the improved topology.
Research Proposal (Part B2) CORE-MATH : Ensuring Correctly Rounded Mathematical Functions

In 1985, the IEEE 754 standard defined for the first time what the result of a computation on floating-point numbers should be. Today, any program using floating-point additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions yields bit-to-bit identical results, whatever the hardware, compiler, or operating system. This is because IEEE 754 requires the best possible result for these operations, called correct rounding.
Anna PASZKIEWICZ-JASIŃSKA, Longina NADOLNA

The paper presents phytosociological characteristic of grassland communities in farms situated in the Sudetes and extensive breeding beef cattle. Natural values (species richness and diversity index H’) and utility value of the sward were estimated. Communities of the studied grasslands were ascribed to the class Molinio-Arrhenatheretea and the order Arrhenatheretalia. Two plant associations – Arrhenatheretum elatioris and Lolio-Cynosuretum and 3 communities with dominating species – Poa pratensis-Festuca rubra, Agrostis capillaris and Holcus lanatus were distinguished. Lolio-Cynosuretum association was found on pastures in all studied farms, other phytosociological units were noted on meadows or on grasslands used as both meadows and pastures. Plant communities were characterised by a high species richness (30 – 69 species in total). Grazed grasslands in the Middle Sudetes were populated by more species than meadows. The index of floristic diversity varied between 2.06 and 2.42 and its highest value was noted in Holcus lanatus community. Most (75%) of analysed grasslands had good utility value (FVS>6.0). In all studied farms grazed grasslands had higher utility value of the sward.
The mechanism of ABL1 upregulating the expression of PD-L1 and the therapeutic effect of PD-L1 and STAT3 inhibitors in lung adenocarcinoma.

The upregulation of programmed cell death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) and continuous mutation of EGFR could induce chemoresistance in somatic cancers, however, the molecular mechanism of oncogene ABL1 in regulating the expression of PD-L1 in lung adenocarcinoma (LAD) remains unclear. In addition, the therapeutic effect of STAT3 and PD-L1 inhibitors in LAD is not fully understood. The ABL1 lentiviruses were used to transfect LAD cell lines (H1975, PC-9) with different EGFR mutation subtypes. Next, the expression of the JAK/STAT3 and PD-L1 pathway was detected followed by the treatment with STAT3 and PD-L1 inhibitors. Lastly, we observed the apoptosis and expression of STAT3 and PD-L1 before and after treatments in transfected and knocked down cell lines. The expression of ABL1 was upregulated by more than 3.71-fold and the expression of PD-L1 increased by 4.85-fold in lung cancer tissues compared with para-cancer tissues (both P < 0.01), the ABL1 could induce upregulation of PD-L1 in LAD cell lines. Furthermore, the STAT3 inhibitor might induce more apoptosis than the PD-L1 inhibitor in both H1975 and PC-9 cell lines (both P < 0.01) The STAT3 inhibitor combined with PD-L1 inhibitor had a synergistic effect on the PC-9 cell line, and the antagonistic effect was observed on the H1975 cell line. Furthermore, the expression of PD-L1 decreased almost equally after the PD-L1 inhibitor combined with a STAT3 inhibitor or the STAT3 inhibitor alone (P > 0.05). In addition, the STAT3 and PD-L1 decreased significantly after the STAT3 inhibitor compared with other treatments on the H1975 cell line (both P < 0.01). To conclude, the EGFR mutation subtypes might influence the therapeutic efficacy in the treatment with PD-L1 inhibitor combined with STAT3 inhibitor on LAD cell lines.
Synthesis and crystal structure of N-6-[(4-pyridylamino)carbonyl]-pyridine-2-carboxylic acid methyl ester zinc complex

A reaction between monoamide ligand namely N-6-[(4-pyridylamino)carbonyl]-pyridine-2-carboxylic acid methyl ester (L4) and zinc chloride has been attempted in order to generate a carboxylate complex suitable for anion inclusion. This reaction gives rise to a formation of discrete complex with general formula [ZnCl2(L4)2]. Complex [ZnCl2(L4)2] crystallizes in the monoclinic space group, P21/c, with one zinc(II) center, one molecule of ligand L4, one coordinated chloride and one methanol molecule in the asymmetric unit. The extended structure of this molecule shows that the zinc atom is coordinated by four donors: two L4 and two chloride anions. The zinc atom adopts distorted tetrahedral geometry with the angles between the donors in the range 103.62(11)-122.74(8)°. In this study, the amide cavity is bound with methanol through hydrogen-bonding interactions. The methanol molecules is hydrogen bonded to the amide moiety with bond lengths O30-H8···O12 and N17-H17···O30 of 1.988 and 2.078 Å, respectively.
Transparent Conductive Oxides for the Epsilon-Near-Zero Tamm Plasmon Polaritons

We demonstrated the possibility of using transparent conducting oxides (AZO, GZO, ITO) to form Tamm plasmon polaritons in the near-infrared spectral range where the permitivity of oxides is near-zero. The spectral properties of the structures have been investigated in the framework of the temporal coupled mode theory and confirmed by transfer matrix method. It was found that in the critical coupling conditions the maximal Q-factor of a Tamm plasmon polariton is achieved when photonic crystal is conjugated with the AZO film, while at the conjugation with the ITO films the broadest spectral line is obtained. The sensitivity of the wavelength and spectral width of the Tamm plasmon polariton to changes of the oxide film thickness, the bulk concentration of a dopand and the angle of incidence are demonstrated. © 2019
Relationships between exposure to polyhalogenated aromatic hydrocarbons and organochlorine pesticides and the risk for developing type 2 diabetes: a systematic review and a meta-analysis of exposures to 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD)

A systematic review was performed to evaluate the association between environmental exposures to polyhalogenated aromatic hydrocarbons (PHAHs) and organochlorine (OC) pesticides and the risk for type 2 diabetes (T2D). Searches of EMbase, Google Scholar, Medline, and Scopus were performed. Reports were included if they were original human studies whose design included a control group and if the sample size was larger than 10 participants per group. The articles were excluded if the type of diabetes was unknown or Type 1. Odds ratios (OR), 95% confidence intervals (CI), and modified Naranjo scores for the effects of environmental contaminants were determined for each study. Of the 35 eligible studies, six were included in the meta-analysis; these focused specifically on 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD). Meta-analysis of these studies showed no significant increased OR for the development of T2D from exposure to TCDD. However, subgroup analysis showed significant elevated OR for the development of T2D if exposure is repeated and accompanied by exposure to other persistent pesticides (OR = 1.48; 1.10–1.90) but a decreased odds for T2D with exposure resulting from accidental exposure (OR = 0.46; 0.39–0.52). Our results suggest that there are significant risks of developing T2D in populations with recurring exposures to TCDD in concert with other persistent chlorinated pesticides. A mean Naranjo score of 2.0 was determined for all 35 articles; this score was 2.5 when examining only TCDD studies and 2.1 when examining studies that looked only at T2D. Each of these Naranjo scores suggests a possible association between the prevalence of T2D and exposure to PHAHs or OC pesticides.
Comparison of the Leaching Behaviour of Alachlor and its Metabolites Under Field and Laboratory Conditions

The aim of the investigation was to evaluate whether the results of field studies and those obtained from soil column experiments are comparable in order to describe leaching behaviour of pesticides. The fate of Alachlor and its metabolites 2,6-diethylaniline and 2-chloro-2',6-diethylacetanilide are described in this paper. Field leaching study and laboratory soil column experiments carried out with the formulated herbicide LASSO® gave similar results. Applied Alachlor remained mostly in the top 10 cm soil layer representing a limited mobility. Very small amounts of Alachlor in ground and percolated water indicated only a slight leaching potential. The calculated half-life of 15 days and 90% loss after 335 days demonstrate a remarkable persistence of alachlor. Only 2-chloro-2',6'-diethylacetanilide but not 2,6-diethylaniline was detected in soil and percolated water. It is still uncertain if these residues originate from the formulated product or result partially from metabolism. Column experiments with the same soil carried out under undisturbed conditions are a simple alternative to field studies and allow quantitative estimations. The column experiments support the assumption that most of the alachlor that cannot be found after application is not lost by wind drifting or volatilization but due to formation of bound residues.
Poly(amide-imide)s obtained from 3,5-diamino-N-(thiazol-2-yl)-benzamide and dicarboxylic acids containing various amino acid units

This study reports a green approach toward the synthesis of novel optically active poly(amide-imide)s (PAI)s bearing thiazole moiety, which was formed by the polycondensation reaction of 3,5-diamino-N-(thiazol-2-yl)benzamide and various diacids containing natural amino acids in molten tetrabutylammonium bromide. Diamine monomer was synthesized by the reduction of 3,5-dinitro-N-(thiazol-2-yl)benzamide in methanol using iron oxide hydroxide as a catalyst. This catalyst can rapidly reduce the sulfur and azo-containing aromatic nitro compounds to the corresponding amines in high yield by employing hydrazine hydrate as a hydrogen donor. Chiral diacid monomers were synthesized in high yield through the reaction of pyromellitic dianhydride and amino acids (l-isoluecine, S-valine, S-methionine, and l-phenylalanine) in acetic acid. The direct polymerization reactions of these monomers provided a series of new optically active PAIs with inherent viscosities in the range of 0.20–0.28 dL g−1. The obtained polymers were characterized by Fourier-transformed infrared spectroscopy, specific rotation measurements, and the representative of them by proton nuclear magnetic resonance and elemental analysis techniques.
Role of Ammonium Chloride in Preparing Poly(urea-formaldehyde) Microcapsules Using One-Step Method

This study investigates the role of ammonium chloride in the process of preparing poly (urea-formaldehyde) (PUF) microcapsules using the one-step method. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and optical microscopy (OM) were used to observe the morphology of the microcapsule. The results showed that the addition of ammonium chloride in the one-step process of prepar- ing PUF resin microcapsule decreases the pH of the system. The decrease in pH of the system is due to the reaction between ammo- nium chloride and formaldehyde, and more so due to the reaction between ammonium chloride and hydroxymethyl urea. In addition to reducing the pH of the system, the reaction between ammonium chloride and urea-formaldehyde resin can generate surface active substances, which drives the formed UF nanoparticles to enrich the surface of the dispersed phase. V C 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 129: 2848-2856, 2013
On feedback passivation under sampling

In this paper we show that feedback passivation under sampling can be preserved under digital control through the redefinition of a passifying output map which depends on the sampling period. The design is constructive and approximate solutions make sense. The procedure is applied to port Hamiltonian dynamics and Interconnection and Damping Assignment feedback. Performances are illustrated over the gravity pendulum example.
Smoothing and Shrinking the Sparse Seq2Seq Search Space

Current sequence-to-sequence models are trained to minimize cross-entropy and use softmax to compute the locally normalized probabilities over target sequences. While this setup has led to strong results in a variety of tasks, one unsatisfying aspect is its length bias: models give high scores to short, inadequate hypotheses and often make the empty string the argmax—the so-called cat got your tongue problem. Recently proposed entmax-based sparse sequence-to-sequence models present a possible solution, since they can shrink the search space by assigning zero probability to bad hypotheses, but their ability to handle word-level tasks with transformers has never been tested. In this work, we show that entmax-based models effectively solve the cat got your tongue problem, removing a major source of model error for neural machine translation. In addition, we generalize label smoothing, a critical regularization technique, to the broader family of Fenchel-Young losses, which includes both cross-entropy and the entmax losses. Our resulting label-smoothed entmax loss models set a new state of the art on multilingual grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and deliver improvements and better calibration properties on cross-lingual morphological inflection and machine translation for 7 language pairs.
High-pressure phase diagram of beryllium from 
ab initio
 free-energy calculations

We use first principles molecular dynamics simulations coupled to the thermodynamic integration method to study the hcp-bcc transition and melting of beryllium up to a pressure of 1600 GPa. We derive the melting line by equating solid and liquid Gibbs free energies, and represent it by a Simon Glatzel fit Tm = 1564 K(1 +P/(15.6032 GPa)) , which is in good agreement with previous twophase simulations below 6000 K. We also derive the hcp-bcc solid-solid phase boundary and show that the quasiharmonic approximation underestimates the stability of the hcp structure, predicting lower transition pressures between hcp and bcc phases. Our results are consistent with the stability regime predicted by the phonon quasiparticle method. We also predict that hcp-bcc-liquid triple point is located at 164.7 GPa and 4314 K. In addition, we compute the shock Hugoniot curve, and show that it is in good agreement with experiments, intersecting our derived melting curve at ∼235 GPa and 4900 K. Finally, we make predictions for future ramp compression experiments. Starting with an isentropic compression of the liquid, we predict the path to intersect the melting line at low pressure and temperature, then to continue along the melting line over a large temperature interval of 7000 K as the sample remains in the mixed solid-liquid state before it enters the solid phase.
TrivialAugment: Tuning-free Yet State-of-the-Art Data Augmentation

Automatic augmentation methods have recently become a crucial pillar for strong model performance in vision tasks. While existing automatic augmentation methods need to trade off simplicity, cost and performance, we present a most simple baseline, TrivialAugment, that outperforms previous methods for almost free. TrivialAugment is parameter-free and only applies a single augmentation to each image. Thus, TrivialAugment's effectiveness is very unexpected to us and we performed very thorough experiments to study its performance. First, we compare TrivialAugment to previous state-of-the-art methods in a variety of image classification scenarios. Then, we perform multiple ablation studies with different augmentation spaces, augmentation methods and setups to understand the crucial requirements for its performance. Additionally, we provide a simple interface to facilitate the widespread adoption of automatic augmentation methods, as well as our full code base for reproducibility1. Since our work reveals a stagnation in many parts of automatic augmentation research, we end with a short proposal of best practices for sustained future progress in automatic augmentation methods.