Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Forest resource management for sustainable development : a case of Mount Meru Forest Reserve in Northern Tanzania

Management systems as applied to most of the world's tropical forests are anthropocentric. In view of this, conservation of these ecosystems has been threatened by overuse and pressure of exotic monocultures. Sustainable forest development aims at utilizing the forest resource without unduly degrading the forest ecosystems. This study examines the case of Mount Meru forest reserve, a tropical montane rainforest in northern Tanzania. The main aim of the study is to investigate human induced causes of forest degradation and to propose ways to improve the forest management so as to attain sustainable forest development. The study is based on survey data obtained from the study area through semi-structured interviews conducted with 198 key informats. Social study methods have been used for data analysis and interpretation. ;· It has been found that human instinct, both at the individual level and at community and national levels, emphasizes short-term gain, threatening long-term survival. This has resulted in exploitative use of the forest ecosystem reducing options for its future use. Implementation of forest policies to intensify forest conservation is difficult due to poor supervision, partly caused by the extensiveness of the areas involved, and the large population dependent on forest resources for survival. Raising awareness of the implications of human actions on these ecosystems is found to be an essential prerequisite for enabling change in attitudes and behaviour and a move towards actions necessary to generate sustainable development. Cooperative ingenuity in relation to the use and allocation of forest resources is essential. This necessitates considerations for the predicament of the majority poor. Consistent review of government policies is also important. It is recommended that local communities be involved in forest management activities. In addition, immediate action to restore degraded areas is also recommended.
Ieee Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 1 a Topological Approach to Simplification of Three-dimensional Scalar Functions

— This paper describes an efficient combinato-rial method for simplification of topological features in a 3D scalar function. The Morse-Smale complex, which provides a succinct representation of a function's associated gradient flow field, is used to identify topological features and their significance. The simplification process, guided by the Morse-Smale complex, proceeds by repeatedly applying two atomic operations that each remove a pair of critical points from the complex. Efficient storage of the complex results in execution of these atomic operations at interactive rates. Visualization of the simplified complex shows that the simplification preserves significant topological features and removes small features and noise.
Irrelevant variability normalization in learning HMM state tying from data based on phonetic decision-tree

We propose to apply the concept of irrelevant variability normalization to the general problem of learning structure from data. Because of the problems of a diversified training data set and/or possible acoustic mismatches between training and testing conditions, the structure learned from the training data by using a maximum likelihood training method will not necessarily generalize well on mismatched tasks. We apply the above concept to the structural learning problem of phonetic decision-tree based hidden Markov model (HMM) state tying. We present a new method that integrates a linear-transformation based normalization mechanism into the decision-tree construction process to make the learned structure have a better modeling capability and generalizability. The viability and efficacy of the proposed method are confirmed in a series of experiments for continuous speech recognition of Mandarin Chinese.
Environmental, energetic and economic life-cycle assessment from " cradle to cradle " (3E-C2C) of buildings assemblies

The sustainability assessment of a building must represent a part of an integrated evaluation of the building performance. The envelope is one of the main parts of the buildings and external walls directly influence its thermal and environmental performance because of their considerable weight in the initial embodied energy, life-cycle energy consumption and whole-life cost. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach to provide the environmental, energetic and economic life-cycle assessment from “cradle to cradle” (3E-C2C) of building assemblies and exemplifies its application in the process of selection of the external wall of a building.
Modeling and Experimental Analysis of Magnetostrictive Devices: From the Material Characterization to Their Dynamic Behavior

This paper deals with the development of a modeling approach for describing the magnetomechanical behavior of magnetostrictive actuators. The model couples the finite element solution, accounting for eddy currents in the magnetic materials, with a modified Preisach-type model, identified starting from the static characterization of the magnetoelastic material. The model is applied to the dynamic analysis of a Terfenol-D actuator under ac and biased supply conditions, comparing the results with experiments, and focusing the investigation on the dynamic characteristics of the device.
Quantitative analysis of forest fragmentation in Patagonia, Argentina

Abstract We analyzed the occurrence of forest fires and the substitution by exotic conifer species in one emblematic area of the indigenous forest species `cipres´ geographical distribution representing 2,5% of the total area covered by this species in the Patagonian Andes of Argentina, to quantify changes in landscape heterogeneity between 1970 and 2001. Our results showed that those places dominated by `cipres´ forests forming a continuous or interconnected area of more than 4,000 hectares in 1970 had been drastically modified in 2001. A net area reduction of 14% was accompanied by a strong negative change in forest landscape heterogeneity due to fragmentation of `cipres´ forests -almost 24% in the considered period of time-. A significant decrease was checked in the average patch size -35 hectares in 1970 vs. 10 hectares in 2001-. Major `cipres´ patch occupied in 1970 an area of almost 500 hectares, whereas in 2001 it was almost 60% smaller -210 hectares-. Keywords : Patagonia, fragmentation of indigenous forest, landscape change
Design and expression of a chimeric vaccine candidate for avian necrotic enteritis

Necrotic enteritis is an economically important disease of poultry mainly caused by Clostridium perfringens. The bacteria release multiple toxins of which NetB, alpha toxin and TpeL have been reported to play important roles in pathogenicity and/or severity of the disease. In this study, the sequence of clostridial toxins NetB, alpha toxin and TpeL were analyzed using bioinformatics tools to determine protein domains with high immunogenicity factor. Several chimeric trivalent proteins consisting of the immunogenic regions of the three toxins were designed and evaluated. The separate regions were fused together using rigid linkers. Based on a modeled tertiary structure, a proper combination was selected and expressed in a bacterial host (Escherichia coli) and successfully purified. The expression of the chimeric protein was further verified by western blotting. The ability of the immunized serum in recognizing each individual subunit of the chimeric protein was also examined. Circular dichroism was used to evaluate the predicted secondary structure of the chimeric protein. In vitro potency test demonstrated that the serum from a rabbit immunized with the chimeric protein is able to partially neutralize Alpha toxin, hence the construct can potentially be used as a vaccine against C. perfringens.
Coded Modulation for High Speed Optical Transport Networks

At a time where almost 1.75 billion people around the world use the Internet on a regular basis, optical communication over optical fibers that is used in long distance and high demand applications has to be capable of providing higher communication speed and reliability. In recent years, strong demand is driving the dense wavelength division multiplexing network upgrade from 10 Gb/s per channel to more spectrally-efficient 40 Gb/s or 100 Gb/s per wavelength channel, and beyond. The 100 Gb/s Ethernet is currently under standardization, and in a couple of years 1 Tb/s Ethernet is going to be standardized as well for different applications, such as the local area networks (LANs) and the wide area networks (WANs). The major concern about such high data rates is the degradation in the signal quality due to linear and non-linear impairments, in particular polarization mode dispersion and intrachannel nonlinearities. Moreover, the higher speed transceivers are expensive, so the alternative approaches of achieving the required rates is preferably done using commercially available components operating at lower speeds. In this dissertation, different LDPC-coded modulation techniques are presented to offer a higher spectral efficiency and/or power efficiency, in addition to offering aggregate rates that can go up to 1Tb/s per wavelength. These modulation formats are based on the bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) and include: (i) three-dimensional LDPCcoded modulation using hybrid direct and coherent detection, (ii) multidimensional LDPC-coded modulation, (iii) subcarrier-multiplexed four-dimensional LDPC-coded modulation, (iv) hybrid subcarrier/amplitude/phase/polarization LDPC-coded modulation, and (v) iterative polar quantization based LDPC-coded modulation.
A Multiobjective Approach to Multi-microgrid System Design

The main goal of this study is to design a market operator (MO) and a distribution network operator (DNO) for a network of microgrids in consideration of multiple objectives. This is a high-level design and only those microgrids with nondispatchable renewable energy sources are considered. For a power grid in the network, the net value derived from providing power to the network must be maximized. For a microgrid, it is desirable to maximize the net gain derived from consuming the received power. Finally, for an independent system operator, stored energy levels at microgrids must be maintained as close as possible to storage capacity to secure network emergency operation. To achieve these objectives, a multiobjective approach is proposed: the price signal generated by the MO and power distributed by the DNO are assigned based on a Pareto optimal solution of a multiobjective optimization problem. By using the proposed approach, a fair scheme that does not advantage one particular objective can be attained. Simulations are provided to validate the proposed methodology.
Detection of Artificially Generated Seismic Signals Using Balloon‐Borne Infrasound Sensors

We conducted an experiment in Pahrump, Nevada, in June 2017, where artificial seismic signals were created using a seismic hammer, and the possibility of detecting them from their acoustic signature was examined. In this work, we analyze the pressure signals recorded by highly sensitive barometers deployed on the ground and on tethers suspended from balloons. Our signal processing results show that wind noise experienced by a barometer on a free‐flying balloon is lower compared to one on a moored balloon. This has never been experimentally demonstrated in the lower troposphere. While seismoacoustic signals were not recorded on the hot air balloon platform owing to operational challenges, we demonstrate the detection of seismoacoustic signals on our moored balloon platform. Our results have important implications for performing seismology in harsh surface environments such as Venus through atmospheric remote sensing.
A Solitary Variant of Congenital Self‐healing Reticulohistiocytosis: Solitary Hasimoto‐Prltzker Disease

Abstract: Four neonates had solitary, congenital, rapidly growing, spontaneously ulcerating tumors of the face, trunk, and extremities. No extracutaneous involvement was found, and all lesions spontaneously involuted. Mononuclear cells of the cutaneous infiltrate were Langerhans'cells. These findings expand the spectrum of congenital self‐healing reticulohistiocytosis.
Immunosenescence-Related Transcriptomic and Immunologic Changes in Older Individuals Following Influenza Vaccination

The goal of annual influenza vaccination is to reduce mortality and morbidity associated with this disease through the generation of protective immune responses. The objective of the current study was to examine markers of immunosenescence and identify immunosenescence-related differences in gene expression, gene regulation, cytokine secretion, and immunologic changes in an older study population receiving seasonal influenza A/H1N1 vaccination. Surprisingly, prior studies in this cohort revealed weak correlations between immunosenescence markers and humoral immune response to vaccination. In this report, we further examined the relationship of each immunosenescence marker (age, T cell receptor excision circle frequency, telomerase expression, percentage of CD28− CD4+ T cells, percentage of CD28− CD8+ T cells, and the CD4/CD8 T cell ratio) with additional markers of immune response (serum cytokine and chemokine expression) and measures of gene expression and/or regulation. Many of the immunosenescence markers indeed correlated with distinct sets of individual DNA methylation sites, miRNA expression levels, mRNA expression levels, serum cytokines, and leukocyte subsets. However, when the individual immunosenescence markers were grouped by pathways or functional terms, several shared biological functions were identified: antigen processing and presentation pathways, MAPK, mTOR, TCR, BCR, and calcium signaling pathways, as well as key cellular metabolic, proliferation and survival activities. Furthermore, the percent of CD4+ and/or CD8+ T cells lacking CD28 expression also correlated with miRNAs regulating clusters of genes known to be involved in viral infection. Integrated (DNA methylation, mRNA, miRNA, and protein levels) network biology analysis of immunosenescence-related pathways and genesets identified both known pathways (e.g., chemokine signaling, CTL, and NK cell activity), as well as a gene expression module not previously annotated with a known function. These results may improve our ability to predict immune responses to influenza and aid in new vaccine development, and highlight the need for additional studies to better define and characterize immunosenescence.
Does Living and Working in a Hot Environment Induce Clinically Relevant Changes in Immune Function and Voluntary Force Production Capacity?

This study investigated the effect of living (summer vs. winter) and working (morning vs. afternoon) in a hot environment on markers of immune function and forearm strength. Thirty-one healthy male gas field employees were screened before (between 05:30 and 07:00) and after their working day (between 15:30 and 17:00) during both seasons. Body core temperature and physical activity were recorded throughout the working days. The hot condition (i.e. summer) led a higher (p≤0.05) average body core temperature (~37.2 vs. ~37.4 °C) but reduced physical activity (−14.8%) during the work-shift. Our data showed an increase (p≤0.05) in lymphocyte and monocyte counts in the summer. Additionally, work-shift resulted in significant (p≤0.001) changes in leukocytes, lymphocytes and monocytes independently of the environment. Handgrip (p=0.069) and pinch (p=0.077) forces tended to be reduced from pre-to post-work, while only force produced during handgrip manoeuvres was significantly reduced (p≤0.05) during the hot compared to the temperate season. No interactions were observed between the environment and work-shift for any marker of immune function or forearm strength. In summary, working and living in hot conditions impact on markers of immune function and work capacity; however by self-regulating energy expenditure, immune markers remained in a healthy reference range.
Study of a new link layer security scheme in a wireless sensor network

Security of wireless sensor network (WSN) is always considered a critical issue and has a number of considerations that separate them from traditional wireless sensor network. First, sensor devices are typically vulnerable to physical compromise. Second, they have significant power and processing constraints. Third, the most critical security issue is protecting the aggregate output of the system, even if individual nodes may be compromised. While a variety of security techniques are being developed and lots of researches are going on security fields. In this paper we have proposed a new technique to provide data authentication and privacy in faster, scalable and cost effective way.
Impact of obesity on disability, function, and physical activity: data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative

Objectives: Older adults with obesity are at risk for osteoarthritis (OA) and are predisposed to functional decline and disability. We examined the association between obesity and disability, physical activity, and quality of life at 6 years. Method: Using data from the longitudinal Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI), we analysed older adults (age ≥ 60 years) with a body mass index (BMI) at baseline ≥ 18.5 kg/m2 (n = 2378) using standard BMI categories. Outcomes were assessed at the 6-year follow-up and included: the Late-Life Function and Disability Index (LLDI), the 12-item Short Form Health Survey (SF-12), and the Physical Activity Scale for the Elderly (PASE). Linear regression predicted outcomes based on BMI category, adjusting for age, sex, race, education, smoking, cohort status, radiographic knee OA, co-morbidity scores, and baseline scores when available. Results: Follow-up data were available for 1727 (71.9%) participants (mean age 67.9 ± 5.3 years; 61.6% female). At baseline, obese subjects compared to overweight and normal were on a greater number of medications (4.28 vs. 3.63 vs. 3.32), had lower gait speeds (1.22 vs. 1.32 vs. 1.36 m/s), higher Charlson scores (0.59 vs. 0.37 vs. 0.30), and higher Western Ontario and McMaster University OA Index (WOMAC) scores (right: 14.8 vs. 10.3 vs. 7.5; left: 14.4 vs. 9.9 vs. 7.5). SF-12 scores at 6 years were lower in obese patients than in overweight or normal [99.5 (95% CI 98.7–100.4) vs. 101.1 (95% CI 100.4–101.8) vs. 102.8 (95% CI 101.8–103.8)], as were PASE scores [115.1 (95% CI 110.3–119.8) vs. 126.2 (95% CI 122.2–130.2) vs. 131.4 (95% CI 125.8–137.0)]. The LLDI limitation component demonstrated differences in obese compared to overweight or normal [78.6 (95% CI 77.4–79.9) vs. 81.2 (95% CI 80.2–82.3) vs. 82.5 (95% CI 81.1–84.0)]. Conclusions: Obesity was associated with worse physical activity scores, lower quality of life, and higher risk of 6-year disability.
Exploring a Gallery with Intelligent Labels

Ordinary labels on museum or gallery objects compromise the competing demands of di(cid:11)ering visitors, curators and educators. Although adaptive hypermedia systems o(cid:11)er a degree of personalisation to the visitor, they do not go as far as they might. Intelligent labelling can achieve higher levels of personalisation, and this is desirable because it leads to a more coherent and educational visit, and because the overall interaction with the hypermedia resource becomes more like an active conversation, and less like reading a static book. We use natural language generation techniques, from the (cid:12)eld of arti(cid:12)cial intelligence, to generate personalised labels on demand. Our system can deliver these labels as Web pages, in an electronic gallery, or as synthesised speech in a physical gallery. We discuss aspects of coherence and conversa-tionality, and illustrate them with a simple case.
A Two-Stage Data-Driven-Based Prognostic Approach for Bearing Degradation Problem

Prognostics of the remaining useful life (RUL) has emerged as a critical technique for ensuring the safety, availability, and efficiency of a complex system. To gain a better prognostic result, degradation information is quite useful because it can reflect the health status of a system. However, due to the lack of accurate information about the plants' degradation, the prognostic model is usually not well established. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a two-stage strategy that is in the context of data-driven modeling to predict the future health status of a bearing, where the degradation information was estimated by calculating the deviation of multiple statistics of vibration signals of a bearing from a known healthy state. Then, a prediction stage based on an enhanced Kalman filter and an expectation-maximization algorithm were used to estimate the RUL of the bearing adaptively. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a real-bearing degradation problem was implemented.
A Low-Power Real-Time SIFT Descriptor Generation Engine for Full-HDTV Video Recognition

This paper describes a SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) descriptor generation engine which features a VLSI oriented SIFT algorithm, three-stage pipelined architecture and novel systolic array architectures for Gaussian filtering and key-point extraction. The ROI-based scheme has been employed for the VLSI oriented algorithm. The novel systolic array architecture drastically reduces the number of operation cycle and memory access. The cycle counts of Gaussian filtering module is reduced by 82%, compared with the SIMD architecture. The number of memory accesses of the Gaussian filtering module and the key-point extraction module are reduced by 99.8% and 66% respectively, compared with the results obtained assuming the SIMD architecture. The proposed schemes provide processing capability for HDTV resolution video (1920 × 1080 pixels) at 30 frames per second (fps). The test chip has been fabricated in 65nm CMOS technology and occupies 4.2 × 4.2mm2 containing 1.1M gates and 1.38Mbit on-chip memory. The measured data demonstrates 38.2mW power consumption at 78MHz and 1.2V.
Type Prediction in RDF Knowledge Bases Using Hierarchical Multilabel Classification

Large Semantic Web knowledge bases are often noisy, incorrect, and incomplete with respect to type information. Automatic type prediction can help reduce such incompleteness, and, as previous works show, statistical methods are well-suited for this kind of data. Since most Semantic Web knowledge bases come with an ontology defining a type hierarchy, in this paper, we rephrase the type prediction problem as a hierarchical multilabel classification problem. We propose SLCN, a modification of the local classifier per node approach, which performs feature selection, instance sampling, and class balancing for each local classifier. Our approach improves scalability, facilitating its application on large Semantic Web datasets with high-dimensional feature and label spaces. We compare the performance of our proposed method with a state-of-the-art type prediction approach and popular hierarchical multilabel classifiers, and report on experiments with large-scale RDF datasets.
Automatic creation of a concept map

Concept map is a graphical technique for representing knowledge, successfully used in different areas, including education, knowledge management, business and intelligence. In this paper, an overview of different approaches to automatic creation of concept maps from textual and non-textual sources is given. Concept map mining process is defined, and one method for creation of concept maps from unstructured textual sources in the Croatian language is described.