Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling Slab‐Slab Interactions: Dynamics of Outward Dipping Double‐Sided Subduction Systems

Slab‐slab interaction is a characteristic feature of tectonically complex areas. Outward dipping double‐sided subduction is one of these complex cases, which has several examples on Earth, most notably the Molucca Sea and Adriatic Sea. This study focuses on developing a framework for linking plate kinematics and slab interactions in an outward dipping subduction geometry. We used analog and numerical models to better understand the underlying subduction dynamics. Compared to a single subduction model, double‐sided subduction exhibits more time‐dependent and vigorous toroidal flow cells that are elongated (i.e., not circular). Because both the Molucca and Adriatic Sea exhibit an asymmetric subduction configuration, we also examine the role that asymmetry plays in the dynamics of outward dipping double‐sided subduction. We introduce asymmetry in two ways; with variable initial depths for the two slabs (“geometric” asymmetry), and with variable buoyancy within the subducting plate (“mechanical” asymmetry). Relative to the symmetric case, we probe how asymmetry affects the overall slab kinematics, whether asymmetric behavior intensifies or equilibrates as subduction proceeds. While initial geometric asymmetry disappears once the slabs are anchored to the 660 km discontinuity, the mechanical asymmetry can cause more permanent differences between the two subduction zones. In the most extreme case, the partly continental slab stops subducting due to the unequal slab pull force. The results show that the slab‐slab interaction is most effective when the two trenches are closer than 10–8 cm in the laboratory, which is 600–480 km when scaled to the Earth.
End-to-end delay in mobile ad hoc networks with generalized transmission range and limited packet redundancy

One of the challenging roadblocks stunting the development and commercialization of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), is the lack of a thorough understanding of the fundamental performance limits in MANETs. Distinguished from available works which mainly focused on deriving order sense scaling laws of the delay performance in MANETs and usually assumed a localized transmission range, this paper examines the MANET packet delay from a much more detailed perspective. Specifically, we assume for each node a general transmission power control such that the transmission range can be flexibly adapted and adopt a generalized two-hop relay with limited packet redundancy for packet routing. For a tagged traffic flow in the MANET, we first develop a theoretical framework based on two correlated FIFO queues to fully characterize the complicated packet delivery process. Then for any feasible traffic input rate there, we derive closed-form expressions for the corresponding expected end-to-end packet delay. Extensive simulations are further conducted to validate our theoretical results.
Geometric Nelder-Mead Algorithm for the permutation representation

The Nelder-Mead Algorithm (NMA) is an almost half-century old method for numerical optimization, and it is a close relative of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Differential Evolution (DE). In recent work, PSO, DE and NMA have been generalized using a formal geometric framework that treats solution representations in a uniform way. These formal algorithms can be used as templates to derive rigorously specific PSO, DE and NMA for both continuous and combinatorial spaces retaining the same geometric interpretation of the search dynamics of the original algorithms across representations. In previous work, a geometric NMA was derived for the binary string representation. In this paper, we advance this line of research and derive formally a specific NMA for the permutation representation. The result is a Nelder-Mead Algorithm searching the space of permutations by acting directly on this representation. We present initial experimental results for the new algorithm on the Traveling Salesman Problem. The peculiar geometry of the permutation space seems to affect the performance of the geometric NMA that does not perform as well as the NMA for the binary string representation. We present a discussion about the nature of permutation spaces that seeks to explain this phenomenon. Further study is required to understand if this is a fundamental limitation of the application of the geometric NMA to permutation spaces.
Chronic Hydrocephalus after Experimental Subarachnoid Hemorrhage

Chronic communicating hydrocephalus is a significant health problem affecting up to 20% of survivors of spontaneous subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). The development of new treatment strategies is hampered by the lack of well characterized disease models. This study investigated the incidence of chronic hydrocephalus by evaluating the temporal profile of intracranial pressure (ICP) elevation after SAH, induced by endovascular perforation in rats. Twenty-five adult male Sprague-Dawley rats (260–320g) were subjected to either endovascular perforation or sham surgery. Five animals died after SAH induction. At 7, 14 and 21 days after surgery ICP was measured by stereotaxic puncture of the cisterna magna in SAH (n=10) and SHAM (n=10) animals. On day 21 T-maze test was performed and the number of alterations and latency to decision was recorded. On day 23, samples were processed for histological analyses. The relative ventricle area was evaluated in coronal Nissl stained sections. On day 7 after surgery all animals showed normal ICP. The absolute ICP values were significantly higher in SAH compared to SHAM animals on day 21 (8.26±4.53 mmHg versus 4.38±0.95 mmHg) but not on day 14. Observing an ICP of 10mmHg as cut-off, 3 animals showed elevated ICP on day 14 and another animal on day 21. The overall incidence of ICP elevation was 40% in SAH animals. On day 21, results of T-maze testing were significantly correlated with ICP values, i.e. animals with elevated ICP showed a lower number of alterations and a delayed decision. Histology yielded a significantly higher (3.59 fold increased) relative ventricle area in SAH animals with ICP elevation compared to SAH animals without ICP elevation. In conclusion, the current study shows that experimental SAH leads to chronic hydrocephalus, which is associated with ICP elevation, behavioral alterations and ventricular dilation in about 40% of SAH animals.
Transforming Education Policy: Evaluating UAQTE Program Implementation Through LDA, BoW and TF-IDF Techniques

This research aimed to deepen our understanding of the issues and challenges faced by beneficiaries of the Philippines' Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education (UAQTE) program by utilizing Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) complemented by Bag of Words (BoW) and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF -IDF) techniques. The study used the “Boses Ko” participatory toolkit, a digital portal to collect student responses from the various Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The analysis showcased the LDA model's proficiency in identifying distinct clusters, underscoring its ability to generate coherent and meaningful topics that provide interpretable and insightful dataset representations. Evaluation of the models included Silhouette and Coherence Scores, supplemented by manual assessments by domain experts. This comprehensive approach led to the identification of key themes, including “Academic Difficulties,” “Financial Difficulties,” “Pandemic-Related Challenges,” “Grant Disbursement,” and “Program Implementation. ” The identified themes present actionable policy recommendations geared towards strengthening academic support, financial assistance, flexible grant disbursement, addressing pandemic-related challenges, and establishing a structured feedback mechanism. These measures collectively aim to enhance the overall implementation of the UAQTE program.
Astrometric and photometric data fusion for inactive space object feature estimation

This paper presents a new method to determine the mass of an inactive space object from photometric and astrometric data. Typically the effect of solar radiation pressure is used to determine area-to-mass ratio for space objects from angles observations. The area-to-mass ratio of a space object can greatly affect its orbital dynamics; therefore angles data are sensitive to this quantity. On the other hand, photometric data is not sensitive to mass but is a strong function of the albedo-area and the rotational dynamics of the space object. The albedo-area can be used to determine the amount of energy reflected from solar radiation. Since these two data types are sensitive to albedo-area and area-to-mass, then by fusing photometric data with angles data it is possible to determine the area and mass of a space object. This work employs an unscented Kalman filter to estimate rotational states, translational states, area states and mass of an inactive space object. Mass is not observerable with only angles data or only photometric data, but it is shown in this work that with the two combined data types mass can be recovered. Recovering this characteristic and trajectories with sufficient accuracy is shown in this paper. The performance of the new method is demonstrated via simulated scenarios.
Penalized-likelihood sinogram restoration for computed tomography

We formulate computed tomography (CT) sinogram preprocessing as a statistical restoration problem in which the goal is to obtain the best estimate of the line integrals needed for reconstruction from the set of noisy, degraded measurements. CT measurement data are degraded by a number of factors-including beam hardening and off-focal radiation-that produce artifacts in reconstructed images unless properly corrected. Currently, such effects are addressed by a sequence of sinogram-preprocessing steps, including deconvolution corrections for off-focal radiation, that have the potential to amplify noise. Noise itself is generally mitigated through apodization of the reconstruction kernel, which effectively ignores the measurement statistics, although in high-noise situations adaptive filtering methods that loosely model data statistics are sometimes applied. As an alternative, we present a general imaging model relating the degraded measurements to the sinogram of ideal line integrals and propose to estimate these line integrals by iteratively optimizing a statistically based objective function. We consider three different strategies for estimating the set of ideal line integrals, one based on direct estimation of ideal "monochromatic" line integrals that have been corrected for single-material beam hardening, one based on estimation of ideal "polychromatic" line integrals that can be readily mapped to monochromatic line integrals, and one based on estimation of ideal transmitted intensities, from which ideal, monochromatic line integrals can be readily estimated. The first two approaches involve maximization of a penalized Poisson-likelihood objective function while the third involves minimization of a quadratic penalized weighted least squares (PWLS) objective applied in the transmitted intensity domain. We find that at low exposure levels typical of those being considered for screening CT, the Poisson-likelihood based approaches outperform the PWLS objective as well as a standard approach based on adaptive filtering followed by deconvolution. At higher exposure levels, the approaches all perform similarly
Text knowledge representation model based on human concept learning

The essential abilities of text knowledge representation, such as automatic construction, carrying abundant semantics and flexible reasoning, should be held due to the rapid growth of web resources and the requirements of the reasoning-based web services. However, current text knowledge representation models either lose many textual semantics or cannot be constructed automatically. To solve the above issues, text knowledge representation model is proposed based on the concept algebra of human concept learning. Then, the degree-2 power series hypothesis is developed and the reasoning ability of text representation is proposed. Finally, the results compared with current knowledge representation models show that our model performs better than other models in representing text knowledge.
Collaborative QoS architecture between DiffServ and 802.11e wireless LAN

As the multimedia applications such as voice over IP (VoIP) and audio/visual (AV) streaming across the Internet emerge, many are working on the network architecture to extend such applications to the wireless networking domain. The emerging IEEE 802.11e quality-of-service (QoS)-enabled wireless LAN (WLAN) is considered a strong candidate for the air interface for such multimedia applications thanks to the IP-centric network paradigm along with its inherent high-speed transmission capability. This paper provides an integrated wired/wireless network architecture interfacing QoS between user level traffic over IP using differentiated service (Diffserv) and transport level traffic using IEEE 802.11e WLAN. Our study investigates the correlations in end-to-end traffic management between Diffserv and 802.11e, and presents the hierarchical QoS signaling interface between Diffserv and 802.11e, in terms of traffic classifying, shaping and policing.
Fast Continuous Collision Detection between Rigid Bodies

This paper introduces a fast continuous collision detection technique for polyhedral rigid bodies. As opposed to most collision detection techniques, the computation of the first contact time between two objects is inherently part of the algorithm. The method can thus robustly prevent objects interpenetrations or collisions misses, even when objects are thin or have large velocities. The method is valid for general objects (polygon soups), handles multiple moving objects and acyclic articulated bodies, and is efficient in low and high coherency situations. Moreover, the method can be used to speed up existent continuous collision detection methods for parametric or implicit rigid surfaces. The collision detection algorithms have been successfully coupled to a real‐time dynamics simulator. Various experiments are conducted that show the method's ability to produce high‐quality interaction (precise objects positioning for example) between models up to tens of thousands of triangles, which couldn't have been performed with previous continuous methods.
TestU01: A C library for empirical testing of random number generators

We introduce TestU01, a software library implemented in the ANSI C language, and offering a collection of utilities for the empirical statistical testing of uniform random number generators (RNGs). It provides general implementations of the classical statistical tests for RNGs, as well as several others tests proposed in the literature, and some original ones. Predefined tests suites for sequences of uniform random numbers over the interval (0, 1) and for bit sequences are available. Tools are also offered to perform systematic studies of the interaction between a specific test and the structure of the point sets produced by a given family of RNGs. That is, for a given kind of test and a given class of RNGs, to determine how large should be the sample size of the test, as a function of the generator's period length, before the generator starts to fail the test systematically. Finally, the library provides various types of generators implemented in generic form, as well as many specific generators proposed in the literature or found in widely used software. The tests can be applied to instances of the generators predefined in the library, or to user-defined generators, or to streams of random numbers produced by any kind of device or stored in files. Besides introducing TestU01, the article provides a survey and a classification of statistical tests for RNGs. It also applies batteries of tests to a long list of widely used RNGs.
Single View Reconstruction of Curved Surfaces

Recent advances in single-view reconstruction (SVR) have been in modelling power (curved 2.5D surfaces) and automation (automatic photo pop-up). We extend SVR along both of these directions. We increase modelling power in several ways: (i) We represent general 3D surfaces, rather than 2.5D Monge patches; (ii) We describe a closed-form method to reconstruct a smooth surface from its image apparent contour, including multilocal singularities ("kidney-bean" self-occlusions); (iii) We show how to incorporate user-specified data such as surface normals, interpolation and approximation constraints; (iv) We show how this algorithm can be adapted to deal with surfaces of arbitrary genus. We also show how the modelling process can be automated for simple object shapes and views, using a-priori object class information. We demonstrate these advances on natural images drawn from a number of object classes.
The C8 Health Project: Design, Methods, and Participants

Background The C8 Health Project was created, authorized, and funded as part of the settlement agreement reached in the case of Jack W. Leach, et al. v. E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company (no. 01-C-608 W.Va., Wood County Circuit Court, filed 10 April 2002). The settlement stemmed from the perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA, or C8) contamination of drinking water in six water districts in two states near the DuPont Washington Works facility near Parkersburg, West Virginia. Objectives This study reports on the methods and results from the C8 Health Project, a population study created to gather data that would allow class members to know their own PFOA levels and permit subsequent epidemiologic investigations. Methods Final study participation was 69,030, enrolled over a 13-month period in 2005–2006. Extensive data were collected, including demographic data, medical diagnoses (both self-report and medical records review), clinical laboratory testing, and determination of serum concentrations of 10 perfluorocarbons (PFCs). Here we describe the processes used to collect, validate, and store these health data. We also describe survey participants and their serum PFC levels. Results The population geometric mean for serum PFOA was 32.91 ng/mL, 500% higher than previously reported for a representative American population. Serum concentrations for perfluorohexane sulfonate and perfluorononanoic acid were elevated 39% and 73% respectively, whereas perfluorooctanesulfonate was present at levels similar to those in the U.S. population. Conclusions This largest known population study of community PFC exposure permits new evaluations of associations between PFOA, in particular, and a range of health parameters. These will contribute to understanding of the biology of PFC exposure. The C8 Health Project also represents an unprecedented effort to gather basic data on an exposed population; its achievements and limitations can inform future legal settlements for populations exposed to environmental contaminants.
Downlink performance of hybrid precoding in massive MIMO systems subject to phase noise

Recent works have identified hybrid analog-digital processing as a cost-effective alternative to conventional full-digital processing in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems owing to the deployment of far less number of radio frequency (RF) chains. In this paper, we analyze the impact of oscillator phase noise on hybrid precoding in massive MIMO systems. Relying on the time division duplexing (TDD) operation, we design an efficient uplink (UL) channel estimation scheme suitable for the hybrid architecture by exploiting channel covariance matrices (CCMs) of sparse massive MIMO channels. Additionally, we employ a CCM aided RF precoder combined with regularized zero-forcing (RZF) precoding performed in the baseband. Subsequently, we derive the deterministic equivalent (DE) for the downlink (DL) signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), which visibly reveals the impact of phase noise on the performance of hybrid precoding in massive MIMO systems. Finally, we verify the analytical result and show the performance comparison of the proposed hybrid precoding scheme for different phase noise variances through Monte Carlo (MC) simulations.
Automation of News Content Curation and Storytelling for Local Newsrooms

Local news organizations face myriad challenges in handling copious amounts of data and information. The current approach of manually reviewing, classifying and pub-lishing news or analyzing raw news source data from public or law enforcement agencies leads to reduced quality, scale and timeliness in handling important news. In this paper, we present AI/ML-driven solutions to automate mundane processes involved with news content curation and storytelling. We present two pipelines particularly targeting local newsrooms with resource limitations that can be aided by automation solutions. The first automated pipeline performs a newsworthiness assessment from e-mail data and involves a neural network approach to classify the news as “Worthy”, “Not Worthy” or “Unsure”. The second automated pipeline addresses news storytelling from police blotters encompassing multiple law enforcement agencies, and involves multi-format parsers to streamline the collection, formatting, and publication. Experiment results of our first pipeline shows our approach achieves an accuracy rate of 91 % after successful and seamless integration of the classifier with real-world datasets. Integration results of our second pipeline shows that our approach had 96 % effectiveness in integration with story generation technology for reporting crime incidents.
Scheduling optional computations in fault-tolerant real-time systems

We introduce an exact schedulability analysis for the optional computation model under a specified failure hypothesis. From this analysis, we propose a solution for determining, before run-time, the degree of fault tolerance allowed in the system. This analysis will allow the system designer to verify if all the tasks in the system meet their deadlines and to decide which optional parts must be discarded if some deadlines would be missed. The identification of feasible options that satisfy some optimality criteria requires the exploration of a potentially large combinatorial space of possible optional parts to discard. Since this complexity is too high to be considered practical in dynamic systems, two heuristic algorithms are proposed for selecting which tasks must be discarded and for guiding the process of searching for feasible options. The performance of the algorithms is measured quantitatively with simulations using synthetic task sets.