Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development of a software procedure for Curved Layered Fused Deposition Modelling (CLFDM)

Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) is one of the most widely used Rapid Prototyping processes that uses the technique of depositing a semi-solid material in layers to build up a part and finds application in a variety of situations, be it making a mould for the rapid production of an industrial tool or the production of models for preoperative planning of complex cranial reconstructive surgery. When it comes to directly producing the end products, the process is still in its infancy, using inferior materials and flat layer deposition, bringing forth shortcomings such as poor surface quality, low strength for curved parts, and undesirably higher number of layers. Some of these shortcomings can be overcome if material deposition is modelled in curved layers as against the traditional flat-layer slicing and deposition. While the stair case effect can be significantly minimized, mechanical properties of the parts will also be enhanced due to continuity in fibres and the elimination of the inherent weakness between laminations. However, this being a fairly new idea, there are no existing facilities for practically implementing and experimentally testing this concept of Curved Layered Fused Deposition Modeling (CLFDM). The current research is to develop both hardware and software systems to build a working FDM system and implement CLFDM. The project involves the construction of an FDM system and then development of mathematical models for curved slicing. The numerical data generated from curved slicing algorithms is integrated with the hardware system for the practical implementation of CLFDM. Efficient curved slicing algorithms are developed and successfully used on the FDM system built for the practical implementation of CLFDM. Several case studies involving geometrical complications of increasing complexities have been successfully modelled and physically produced using CLFDM.
Rapid and efficient site-specific mutagenesis without phenotypic selection.

Several single-base substitution mutations have been introduced into the lacZ alpha gene in cloning vector M13mp2, at 40-60% efficiency, in a rapid procedure requiring only transfection of the unfractionated products of standard in vitro mutagenesis reactions. Two simple additional treatments of the DNA, before transfection, produce a site-specific mutation frequency approaching 100%. The approach is applicable to phenotypically silent mutations in addition to those that can be selected. The high efficiency, approximately equal to 10-fold greater than that observed using current methods without enrichment procedures, is obtained by using a DNA template containing several uracil residues in place of thymine. This template has normal coding potential for the in vitro reactions typical of site-directed mutagenesis protocols but is not biologically active upon transfection into a wild-type (i.e., ung+) Escherichia coli host cell. Expression of the desired change, present in the newly synthesized non-uracil-containing covalently closed circular complementary strand, is thus strongly favored. The procedure has been applied to mutations introduced via both oligonucleotides and error-prone polymerization. In addition to its utility in changing DNA sequences, this approach can potentially be used to examine the biological consequences of specific lesions placed at defined positions within a gene.
Using the Web to Overcome Data Sparseness

This paper shows that the web can be employed to obtain frequencies for bigrams that are unseen in a given corpus. We describe a method for retrieving counts for adjective-noun, noun-noun, and verb-object bigrams from the web by querying a search engine. We evaluate this method by demonstrating that web frequencies and correlate with frequencies obtained from a carefully edited, balanced corpus. We also perform a task-based evaluation, showing that web frequencies can reliably predict human plausibility judgments.
Building timing predictable embedded systems

A large class of embedded systems is distinguished from general-purpose computing systems by the need to satisfy strict requirements on timing, often under constraints on available resources. Predictable system design is concerned with the challenge of building systems for which timing requirements can be guaranteed a priori. Perhaps paradoxically, this problem has become more difficult by the introduction of performance-enhancing architectural elements, such as caches, pipelines, and multithreading, which introduce a large degree of uncertainty and make guarantees harder to provide. The intention of this article is to summarize the current state of the art in research concerning how to build predictable yet performant systems. We suggest precise definitions for the concept of “predictability”, and present predictability concerns at different abstraction levels in embedded system design. First, we consider timing predictability of processor instruction sets. Thereafter, we consider how programming languages can be equipped with predictable timing semantics, covering both a language-based approach using the synchronous programming paradigm, as well as an environment that provides timing semantics for a mainstream programming language (in this case C). We present techniques for achieving timing predictability on multicores. Finally, we discuss how to handle predictability at the level of networked embedded systems where randomly occurring errors must be considered.
Real Time Optics of Amorphous Silicon Solar Cellfabrication on Textured Tin-Oxide-Coated Glass

A rotating-compensator multichannel ellipsometer has been used to measure the four spectra (1.4--4.0 eV) that describe the Stokes vector of the light beam reflected from the surface of an amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) p-i-n solar cell during fabrication on textured tin-oxide (SnO{sub 2}) coated glass. The Stokes vector elements include the irradiance in the reflected beam (or the reflectance) and the parameters {l_brace}(Q, {chi}), p{r_brace} of the reflected beam, where Q and {chi} are the tilt and ellipticity angles of the polarization ellipse and p is the degree of polarization. The value of p deviates from unity in part due to the non-uniform nature of the textured SnO{sub 2} substrate film. An analysis of Q and {chi} that neglects the effects of the texture can provide the time evolution of the thicknesses, microscopic structure, and the optical properties of the component layers of the a-Si:H solar cell. Deviations of the measured reflectance spectra from those predicted on the basis of the (Q, {chi}) analysis provide the thickness dependence of the scattering and the evolution of the macroscopic structure of the solar cell. The measurement and analysis approach is important because of its potential application for real time monitoring of solar cellmore » production. The analysis results also provide realistic inputs for optical modeling of the effects of texture in light trapping for solar cell efficiency enhancement. « less
Processing of Capsid Protein by Cathepsin L Plays a Crucial Role in Replication of Japanese Encephalitis Virus in Neural and Macrophage Cells

ABSTRACT The flavivirus capsid protein not only is a component of nucleocapsids but also plays a role in viral replication. In this study, we found a small capsid protein in cells infected with Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) but not in the viral particles. The small capsid protein was shown to be generated by processing with host cysteine protease cathepsin L. An in vitro cleavage assay revealed that cathepsin L cleaves the capsid protein between amino acid residues Lys18 and Arg19, which are well conserved among the mosquito-borne flaviviruses. A mutant JEV resistant to the cleavage of the capsid protein by cathepsin L was generated from an infectious cDNA clone of JEV by introducing a substitution in the cleavage site. The mutant JEV exhibited growth kinetics similar to those of the wild-type JEV in monkey (Vero), mosquito (C6/36), and porcine (PK15) cell lines, whereas replication of the mutant JEV in mouse macrophage (RAW264.7) and neuroblastoma (N18) cells was impaired. Furthermore, the neurovirulence and neuroinvasiveness of the mutant JEV to mice were lower than those of the wild-type JEV. These results suggest that the processing of the JEV capsid protein by cathepsin L plays a crucial role in the replication of JEV in neural and macrophage cells, which leads to the pathogenesis of JEV infection.
Shielding effectiveness of low temperature plasma screen

Plasma has been known to absorb microwave if the microwave frequency is near the characteristic plasma frequency, however, to achieve large area plasma screen with low power is difficult. In this experiment, individual low temperature plasma tubes are arranged into a planar array and microwave transmission attenuation through this array were measured with power input to the plasma tubes as a reference parameter. We found attenuation of ∼2 dB at 700 W of input power is achievable on S band signals. Higher attenuation is possible provided the plasma is stable. Higher frequency is also possible if the gap between the plasma tubes can be narrowed.
Transition-Based Parsing of the Chinese Treebank using a Global Discriminative Model

Transition-based approaches have shown competitive performance on constituent and dependency parsing of Chinese. State-of-the-art accuracies have been achieved by a deterministic shift-reduce parsing model on parsing the Chinese Treebank 2 data (Wang et al., 2006). In this paper, we propose a global discriminative model based on the shift-reduce parsing process, combined with a beam-search decoder, obtaining competitive accuracies on CTB2. We also report the performance of the parser on CTB5 data, obtaining the highest scores in the literature for a dependency-based evaluation.
Noncontact ultrasonic excitation thermography inspection technique

Conventional ultrasonic thermography (thermosonic or sonic infrared imaging) is a technique in which acoustic energy is coupled to the structure by means of an acoustic transducer in contact with the sample, the captured temperature at the defect areas by an infrared camera is relatively higher than that of the surrounding area. The primary problem of this technique is that the acoustic horn must be mechanically in contact against the tested sample with an applied force. Therefore, the potential for damaging the structure especially for the filmy, brittle and fragile structure can't be ignored. In this paper, a new NDE technique based on a non-contact ultrasonic excitation thermography has been presented. The technique utilizes a redesigned ultrasonic horn to excite the sample in a non-contact fashion, and an infrared camera to monitor the variation of the surface temperature. The presented experimental results show that the non-contact ultrasonic excitation thermography has some potential in NDE application.
Reprints Available Directly from the Publisher Photocopying Permitted by License Only Quantitative Analysis of the Efficiency of Clonal Deletion in the Thymus

One of the major mechanisms for establishing self-tolerance is the clonal deletion of self-reactive T cells during their development in the thymus. Using a TCR transgenic mouse model, we have established a quantitative ex vivo assay for examining the sensitivity and specificity of negative selection. Thymic organ cultures established from mice of varying MHC haplotypes were incubated with antigen, and the efficiency of clonal deletion assessed. We show here that clonal deletion of CD4/8 thymocytes is sensitive to both the gene dosage and the allelic variation of MHC class II molecules expressed on thymic antigen-presenting cells. We also find that when epithelial cells in the thymic cortex are the only antigen-presenting cells expressing the appropriate MHC class II molecules, negative selection of CD4+8 cells is as efficient as when antigen is presented on all thymic antigen-presenting cells. These studies demonstrate that the induction of self-tolerance via clonal deletion in the thymus is a function not only of antigen concentration, but also of MHC class II cell-surface density. In addition, together with the reports of others, these results confirm that cortical epithelial cells can mediate negative selection, and demonstrate that they do so in the intact thymic microenvironment.
Selection and characterization of DNA aptamer for metastatic prostate cancer recognition and tissue imaging

Prostate cancer (PCa) is the second leading cause of death and most prevalent cancer in men. The absence of curative options for castration-resistant metastatic prostate cancer and biomarkers able to discriminate between indolent and aggressive tumors contribute to these statistics. In this study, a DNA aptamer termed DML-7 was successfully selected against human PCa cell line DU145 by using the cell-based systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX) method. The selected aptamer DML-7 was found to internalize into target cells in a temperature-dependent manner and exhibit high binding affinity for target cells with dissociation constants in the nanomolar range. Binding analysis further revealed that DML-7 only binds to DU145 and PC-3 cells with metastatic potential, but not to LNCaP or 22Rv1 cells with low or nonmetastatic potential, demonstrating that DML-7 has excellent selectivity for the recognition of the metastatic PCa cells. Clinical tissue imaging further confirmed these results. Therefore, both high binding affinity and specificity to metastatic PCa cells and tissues afford DML-7 with the potential for development into a novel tool for diagnosis and targeted drug delivery against metastatic prostate cancer.
UKP-BIU: Similarity and Entailment Metrics for Student Response Analysis

Our system combines text similarity measures with a textual entailment system. In the main task, we focused on the influence of lexicalized versus unlexicalized features, and how they affect performance on unseen questions and domains. We also participated in the pilot partial entailment task, where our system significantly outperforms a strong baseline.
Revisiting the Description-to-Behavior Fidelity in Android Applications

Since more than 96% of mobile malware targets on Android platform, various techniques based on static code analysis or dynamic behavior analysis have been proposed to detect malicious applications. As malware is becoming more complicated and stealthy, recent research proposed a promising detection approach that looks for the inconsistency between an application's permissions and its description. In this paper, we revisit this approach and find that using description and permission will lead to many false positives. Therefore, we propose employing app's privacy policy and its bytecode to enhance description and permission for malware detection. It is non-trivial to automatically analyze privacy policy and perform the cross-verification among these four kinds of software artifacts including, privacy policy, bytecode, description, and permissions. We propose a novel data flow model for analyzing privacy policy, and develop a novel system, named TAPVerifier, for carrying out investigation of individual software artifacts and conducting the cross-verification. The experimental results show that TAPVerifier can analyze privacy policy with a high accuracy and recall rate. More importantly, integrating privacy policy and code level information removes 8.1%-65.5% false positives of existing systems based on description and permission.
Reliable MLC NAND flash memories based on nonlinear t-error-correcting codes

Multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memories are very popular storage media because of their power efficiency and big storage density. This paper proposes to use nonlinear t-error-correcting codes to replace linear BCH codes for error detection and correction in MLC NAND flash memories. Compared to linear BCH codes with the same bit-error correcting capability t, the proposed codes have less errors miscorrected by all codewords and nearly no undetectable errors. For example, the proposed (8281, 8201, 11) 5-error-correcting code has no errors of multiplicity six miscorrected by all codewords while the widely used (8262, 8192, 11) linear shortened BCH code has 11 over 6 × A11 errors in this class, where A11 ≈ 1014 is the number of codewords of Hamming weight eleven in the shortened BCH code. Moreover, in spite of the fact that the Hamming distance of the proposed code is 2t+1, it can also correct some errors of multiplicity t+1 and t+2 requiring no extra hardware overhead and latency penalty. In this paper, the constructions and the error correction algorithm for the nonlinear t-error-correcting codes are presented. The architecture of the encoder and the decoder for the codes are shown. The error correcting capabilities, the hardware overhead, the latency and the power consumption for the encoder and the decoder will be analyzed and compared to that of the linear BCH codes to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed codes for error detection and correction in MLC NAND flash memories.
Availability target redefinition for dynamic connections in WDM networks with shared path protection

Recently, new solutions for automatized management in optical networks promise to allow customers to specify on-demand the terms of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) to be guaranteed by the Service Provider (SP). For a WDM mesh network that provides shared-path-protection we exploit the knowledge, among the other Service Level Specifications (SLS), of the connection holding time to dynamically manage the availability provided by the network to the connection during its lifetime. We monitor the actual availability provided to the connection, considering, e.g., the actual downtime experienced by the connection, and, every time the network status changes (typically, for a fault occurrence, or a connection departure or arrival), we evaluate the maximal availability that can be provided to the connection based on our knowledge of all the predictable network state changes, i.e., the future connection departures. Since some of the connection will be ahead of their stipulated availability (credit), while other connections will be behind their availability requirements (debit), we propose a mechanism that allows to “trade” availability “credits” and “debits”, by increasing or decreasing the shareability level of the backup capacity. So, we introduce an holding-time-aware approach which permits to manage in a more flexible manner the availability provided during the connection lifetimes. For a typical wavelength-convertible US nationwide network, our approach obtains significative savings on Blocking Probability (BP), while reducing the penalties due to SLA violations.
An Efficient Scatternet Formation Algorithm for Dynamic Environments

There is increasing interest in wireless ad hoc networks built from portable devices equipped with short-range wireless network interfaces such as Bluetooth. This paper addresses issues related to internetworking such networks to form larger “scatternets. ” Within the constraints imposed by the emerging standard Bluetooth link layer and MAC protocol, we describe an efﬁcient online scatternet topology formation algorithm, called TSF (Tree Scatternet Formation). TSF connects nodes in a tree structure that simpliﬁes packet routing and scheduling. Unlike earlier work, our protocol is designed to work well with dynamic environments where nodes arrive and leave arbitrarily. TSF incrementally builds the topology and healing partitions when they occur. We have developed a Bluetooth simulator in ns that includes most aspects of the entire Bluetooth protocol stack. Using this, we derive simulation results that show that TSF has low latencies in link establishment, tree formation and partition healing, all of which grow logarithmically with the number of nodes in the scatternet. Furthermore, TSF generates tree topologies where the average path length between any node pair grows logarithmically with the size of the scatternet.
Valuable Tourism Information via Mobile Application

The travel and tourism industry is one of the main sources of income in Thailand. People choose to travel around the world, as a way to relax and enjoy their time. Users search information from many resources before and during their travel. We grouped the mobile tourism applications into two main groups in order to analyse the nature of information in the tourism applications. Social network provides rich collaborative user-generated information. We found that most tourism applications require personal information and pre-existing association in order to get information. We argue that, in tourism, a user requires instant and easy access to information. So the social network might not be an appropriate option. Therefore we propose a simple collaborative user-generated content application, which has a location awareness chat system. We aim to provide an application with self-sufficient information that allows the user to instantly share, search, and comment on information at anytime and anywhere. Moreover, the location awareness chat system is introduced to provide instant firsthand information to the users as well.
Transformations to Parallel Codes for Communication-Computation Overlap

This paper presents program transformations directed toward improving communication-computation overlap in parallel programs that use MPI’s collective operations. Our transformations target a wide variety of applications focusing on scientific codes with computation loops that exhibit limited dependence among iterations. We include guidance for developers for transforming an application code in order to exploit the communicationcomputation overlap available in the underlying cluster, as well as a discussion of the performance improvements achieved by our transformations. We present results from a detailed study of the effect of the problem and message size, level of communication-computation overlap, and amount of communication aggregation on runtime performance in a cluster environment based on an RDMA-enabled network. The targets of our study are two scientific codes written by domain scientists, but the applicability of our work extends far beyond the scope of these two applications.
Just-in-Time Grammar

In this paper, we attempt to explain why rule-based syntactic analysis systems have not so far worked as well as they could. This will motivate our approach, which is based on a narrowing of the focus of the rules, resulting in more accurate, less ambiguous, more efficient parsing and relative ease of acquisition. These rules are word-based, rather than construction-based, and are used to produce “Just in Time” grammars for specific inputs. We combine this grammar with an error detection and repair module that is enabled primarily by the dependency-directed capabilities of the basic parsing engine. Our approach is most closely related to the XTAG philosophy (Schabes, et. al., 1988). We discuss the similarities and differences between XTAG and our work while further affirming the benefits of lexicalized grammars.