Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Formation and coalescence of relativistic binary stars: the effect of kick velocity

Using Monte Carlo calculations of the modern scenario for binary stellar evolution, and taking account of the spin evolution of magnetized compact stars (the 'scenario machine'), we compute for the first time the number of galactic binary pulsars with different companion types [OB star, white dwarf (WD), neutron star (NS), black hole (BH), or planet] assuming various phenomenological distributions for kick velocities of newborn NSs. We demonstrate a strong dependence of the binary pulsar population fractions relative to single pulsars on the mean kick velocity, and find an optimal kick velocity of 150-200 km S-l. We also investigate the way in which the merging rates of relativistic binary stars (NS + NS, NS + BH, BH + BH) depend on the kick velocity. We show that the BH + BH merging may occur, depending on the parameters of BH formation, at a rate of one per 200000-500000 yr in a Milky Way-type galaxy. The NS + NS merging rate Rns is found to be 1 per '" 3000 yr for zero recoil, and decreases to one per 10 000 yr even for the highest kick velocities of 400 km S-l. That the merging rates derived from evolutionary calculations are higher, by two orders of magnitude, than those based on binary pulsar statistics only, is suggested to be the result of the fact that the observable binary pulsars in pairs with NSs form only a fraction of the total number of binary NS systems. The merging rates obtained imply an expected detection rate of binary BHs (by a gravitational wave detector) comparable with and even higher than the binary NS merging rate for a wide range of parameters. Detecting the final frequency of a merging event at about 100 Hz and the shaping of the waveforms would bring firm evidence of the existence of BHs in nature.
General Approach for Modelling of Reactive Transport in Porous Media

This work presents a relatively new approach designed for modelling reacting flows in porous media by using conditional expectations. Similar methods, aimed at obtaining, closing and using conditional expectations in reacting fluid flows, were previously developed for and successfully used in turbulent combustion (e.g. conditional moment closure or CMC) are now generalised and adapted to perform simulations of reacting flows in porous media. Different versions of the porous models PCMC (porous CMC) variations of PDCMC (distance conditioned moment closure) have been proposed and are now summarised in this work. These approaches utilise single-conditioned expectations and the closure of the equations is obtained by using diffusion approximations conventional in CMC. Fractal properties of a porous medium can be used to evaluate the coefficients of the conditional equations. A new approach for investigating transport phenomena in irregularly-connected pore networks and obtaining corresponding transport coefficients has also been suggested. This approach combines a generalised effective medium approximation with a macroscopic continuum model and allows us to explicitly obtain analytical expressions for the transport coefficients for both unconditional and conditional models. As demonstrated, the proposed general approach is capable of emulating various regimes of reactive transport in porous media, while permitting accurate reproduction of the experimental results.
The development of a half-size micromouse and its application in mobile robot education

The development of a half-size micromouse for international contests and mobile robot education is presented in this paper. It is used in a project-oriented course for senior undergraduate and graduate students about mobile robots, because the related contest is fun for students to explore many disciplines of knowledge and skills. To make a micomouse run in an unknown maze, students need to integrate the skills of designing 1) mechanical parts, 2) its printed circuit board, 3) sensor calibration procedures, 4) digital motion control algorithms, 5) path planning algorithms, and 6) maze solvers. To win some prize in a contest also requires students to devise some advanced new algorithms for a micromouse to find the best route and run faster. Therefore, improved algorithms about 1) a simple and efficient time-based diagonal maze solver, and 2) position and velocity resolution enhancement with accelerometers are also presented in this paper.
Exact Inference for Multi-label Classification using Sparse Graphical Models

This paper describes a parameter estimation method for multi-label classification that does not rely on approximate inference. It is known that multi-label classification involving label correlation features is intractable, because the graphical model for this problem is a complete graph. Our solution is to exploit the sparsity of features, and express a model structure for each object by using a sparse graph. We can thereby apply the junction tree algorithm, allowing for efficient exact inference on sparse graphs. Experiments on three data sets for text categorization demonstrated that our method increases the accuracy for text categorization with a reasonable cost.
ICT adoption in materials management among construction firms in construction industry

Construction materials management plays a significant role in the success and profitability of construction projects. Some of the problems relating to materials management are materials shortages, delays in supply, price fluctuations, damage and wastage, and lack of storage space. To overcome the problem, the advent of ICT has been largely exercised in developed countries to aid and improve construction materials management. Overall, there are five processes involved within the materials management, namely planning, procurement, logistics, handling, stock and waste control processes. Studies have shown that the use of ICT in managing the materials on site has not fully utilised by many construction firms despite of the potential benefits. This is due to some barriers faced by the construction firms in adopting the ICT. This research was carried out to investigate the adoption of ICT among the construction firms in Sarawak at the different process of materials management as well as to determine the requirements needed to increase the usage of ICT in material management. Qualitative approach has been chosen to conduct the research where face-to-face semi-structure interviews was carried out among ten selected construction firms registered with CIDB. Content analysis was done to analyse the transcribed interviews to determine the themes. The findings showed that there were high numbers of common ICT tools involved at the planning and procurement stage of materials management processes while handling and waste and stock control stage have the lowest adoption of ICT tools. It was also found that modern tracking technologies such as RFID and bar coding system used in developed countries has not been utilized and can be considered as non-existence in construction firms' materials management. This was due to the high investments required to purchase the ICT tools such as the hardware, staffs training as well as qualified ICT specialist for specific software knowledge and technology testing of automation or wireless technologies.
Log-scale Modulation Frequency Coefficient: A Tempo Feature for Music Emotion Classification

This paper proposes a tempo feature extraction method. The tempo information is modeled by the narrow-band, low-pass temporal modulation component, which is decomposed into a modulation spectrum via joint frequency analysis. In implementation, the modulation spectrum is directly estimated from the modified discrete cosine transform coefficients, which are output of partial MP3 (MPEG 1 Layer 3) decoder. Then the log-scale modulation frequency coefficients are extracted from the amplitude of modulation spectrum. The tempo feature is employed in automatic music emotion classification. The accuracy is improved with several hybrid classification methods based on posterior fusion. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the presented tempo feature and the hybrid classification approach.
From Subspaces to Metrics and Beyond: Toward Multi-Diversified Ensemble Clustering of High-Dimensional Data

The emergence of high-dimensional data in various areas has brought new challenges to the ensemble clustering research. To deal with the curse of dimensionality, considerable efforts in ensemble clustering have been made by incorporating various subspace-based techniques. Besides the emphasis on subspaces, rather limited attention has been paid to the potential diversity in similarity/dissimilarity metrics. It remains a surprisingly open problem in ensemble clustering how to create and aggregate a large number of diversified metrics, and furthermore, how to jointly exploit the multi-level diversity in the large number of metrics, subspaces, and clusters, in a unified ensemble clustering framework. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a novel multi-diversified ensemble clustering approach. In particular, we create a large number of diversified metrics by randomizing a scaled exponential similarity kernel, which are then coupled with random subspaces to form a large set of metric-subspace pairs. Based on the similarity matrices derived from these metric-subspace pairs, an ensemble of diversified base clusterings can thereby be constructed. Further, an entropy-based criterion is adopted to explore the cluster-wise diversity in ensembles, based on which the consensus function is therefore presented. Experimental results on twenty high-dimensional datasets have confirmed the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art.
Classification of Child Molesters by Plethysmographic Assessment of Sexual Arousal and a Self-Report Measure of Sexual Preference

The present study examined the extent to which the use of multiple measures of pedophilic interest improved on the diagnostic accuracy of any single measure. Seventy-two child molesters completed a self-report card-sort measure of sexual interest, as well as direct monitoring of penile response (penile plethysmograph-PPG) when presented with erotic slides or audio material. The reliability of all measures was high (alpha .91-.96). All three measures of pedophilic interest (i.e., card sort, PPG slides, PPG audio) significantly differentiated boy-object (n = 20) and girl-object child molesters (n = 52). The card-sort measure showed the greatest classification accuracy and was the only measure to significantly improve accuracy, once the other two modalities were considered. Consideration of all three modalities provided classification accuracy (91.7%) greater than any single measure.
Do mechanical gait parameters explain the higher metabolic cost of walking in obese adolescents?

Net metabolic cost of walking normalized by body mass (C(W.BM(-1)); in J.kg(-1). m(-1)) is greater in obese than in normal-weight individuals, and biomechanical differences could be responsible for this greater net metabolic cost. We hypothesized that, in obese individuals, greater mediolateral body center of mass (COM) displacement and lower recovery of mechanical energy could induce an increase in the external mechanical work required to lift and accelerate the COM and thus in net C(W.BM(-1)). Body composition and standing metabolic rate were measured in 23 obese and 10 normal-weight adolescents. Metabolic and mechanical energy costs were assessed while walking along an outdoor track at four speeds (0.75-1.50 m/s). Three-dimensional COM accelerations were measured by means of a tri-axial accelerometer and gyroscope and integrated twice to obtain COM velocities, displacements, and fluctuations in potential and kinetic energies. Last, external mechanical work (J.kg(-1). m(-1)), mediolateral COM displacement, and the mechanical energy recovery of the inverted pendulum were calculated. Net C(W.BM(-1)) was 25% higher in obese than in normal-weight subjects on average across speeds, and net C(W.BM(-67)) (J.kg(-0.67). m(-1)) was significantly related to percent body fat (r(2) = 0.46). However, recovery of mechanical energy and the external work performed (J.kg(-1). m(-1)) were similar in the two groups. The mediolateral displacement was greater in obese subjects and significantly related to percent body fat (r(2) = 0.64). The mediolateral COM displacement, likely due to greater step width, was significantly related to net C(W.BM(-67)) (r(2) = 0.49). In conclusion, we speculate that the greater net C(W.BM(-67)) in obese subjects may be partially explained by the greater step-to-step transition costs associated with wide gait during walking.
Probabilistic Prediction of Temporal Locality

The increasing gap between processor and memory speeds, as well as the introduction of multi-core CPUs, have exacerbated the dependency of CPU performance on the memory subsystem. This trend motivates the search for more efficient caching mechanisms, enabling both faster service of frequently used blocks and decreased power consumption. In this paper we describe a novel, random sampling based predictor that can distinguish transient cache insertions from non-transient ones. We show that this predictor can identify a small set of data cache resident blocks that service most of the memory references, thus serving as a building block for new cache designs and block replacement policies. Although we only discuss the L1 data cache, we have found this predictor to be efficient also when handling L1 instruction caches and shared L2 caches.
A parametric model of the brain vascular system for estimation of the arterial input function (AIF) at the tissue level

In this paper, we introduce a novel model of the brain vascular system, which is developed based on laws of fluid dynamics and vascular morphology. This model is used to address dispersion and delay of the arterial input function (AIF) at different levels of the vascular structure and to estimate the local AIF in DCE images. We developed a method based on the simplex algorithm and Akaike information criterion to estimate the likelihood of the contrast agent concentration signal sampled in DCE images belonging to different layers of the vascular tree or being a combination of different signal levels from different nodes of this structure. To evaluate this method, we tested the method on simulated local AIF signals at different levels of this structure. Even down to a signal to noise ratio of 5.5 our method was able to accurately detect the branching level of the simulated signals. When two signals with the same power level were combined, our method was able to separate the base signals of the composite AIF at the 50% threshold. We applied this method to dynamic contrast enhanced computed tomography (DCE‐CT) data, and using the parameters estimated by our method we created an arrival time map of the brain. Our model corrected AIF can be used for solving the pharmacokinetic equations for more accurate estimation of vascular permeability parameters in DCE imaging studies.
Preliminary test of phytochemical screening of crude ethanolic and aqueous extract of Moringa pterygosperma Gaertn

The bioactive compounds present in the plant are responsible for the medicinal properties of the plant. The present investigation is aimed in screening the bioactive compounds present in the leaves, stem bark and flowers of Moringa pterygosperma an important ethnomedicinal plant. The qualitative analysis for the present phytochemicals was performed using ethanol and aqueous extracts of leaves, stem bark and flowers of Moringa plant by various standard techniques available. Phytochemical analysis revealed the presence of alkaloids, flavonoids, terpenoids, glycosides, steroids and phenols in all the extracts varying quantities. Since the plant contain high quantities of these new bioactive potential compounds, it is reliable to possess large number of pharmacological values like antioxidants, antifungal, antibacterial, anti abortifacient, anti-inflammatory, antiulcer, diuretics activities and are being employed for the treatment of different ailments in the indigenous system of medicine.
Side-Channel Attacks: Ten Years After Its Publication and the Impacts on Cryptographic Module Security Testing

Side-channel attacks are easy-to-implement whilst powerful attacks against cryptographic implementations, and their targets range from primitives, protocols, modules, and devices to even systems. These attacks pose a serious threat to the security of cryptographic modules. In consequence, cryptographic implementations have to be evaluated for their resistivity against such attacks and the incorporation of different countermeasures has to be considered. This paper surveys the methods and techniques employed in these attacks, the destructive effects of such attacks, the countermeasures against such attacks and evaluation of their feasibility and applicability. Finally, the necessity and feasibility of adopting this kind of physical security testing and evaluation in the development of FIPS 140-3 standard are explored. This paper is not only a survey paper, but also more a position paper.
Ratio of Mediator Probability Weighting for Estimating Natural Direct and Indirect Effects

Decomposing a total causal effect into natural direct and indirect effects is central to revealing causal mechanisms. Conventional methods achieve the decomposition by specifying an outcome model as a linear function of the treatment, the mediator, and the observed covariates under identification assumptions including the assumption of no interaction between treatment and mediator. Recent statistical advances relax this assumption typically within the linear or nonlinear regression framework with few exceptions. I propose a non-parametric approach that also relaxes the assumption of no treatment-mediator interaction while avoiding the problems of outcome model specification that become particularly acute in the presence of a large number of covariates. The key idea is to estimate the marginal mean of each counterfactual outcome by weighting every experimental unit such that the weighted distribution of the mediator under the experimental condition approximates their counterfactual mediator distribution under the control condition. The weight to be applied for this purpose is a ratio of the conditional probability of a mediator value under the control condition to the conditional probability of the same mediator value under the experimental condition. A nonparametric approach to estimating the weight on the basis of propensity score stratification promises to increase the robustness of the direct and indirect effect estimates. The outcome is modeled as a function of the direct and indirect effects with minimal model-based assumptions. In contrast with the regression-based approaches, this new method applies regardless of the distribution of the outcome or the functional relationship between the outcome and the mediator, and is suitable for handling a large number of pretreatment covariates. Under modified identification assumptions, the weighting method also makes adjustment for post-treatment covariates, a benefit apparently unavailable in the existing methods.
A Prolific Construction of Strongly Regular Graphs with the n-e.c. Property

A graph is $n$-e.c. $\,$ ($n$-existentially closed) if for every pair of subsets $U$, $W$ of the vertex set $V$ of the graph such that $U\cap W=\emptyset$ and $|U|+|W|=n$, there is a vertex $v\in V-(U\cup W)$ such that all edges between $v$ and $U$ are present and no edges between $v$ and $W$ are present. A graph is strongly regular if it is a regular graph such that the number of vertices mutually adjacent to a pair of vertices $v_1,v_2\in V$ depends only on whether or not $\{v_1,v_2\}$ is an edge in the graph. The only strongly regular graphs that are known to be $n$-e.c. for large $n$ are the Paley graphs. Recently D. G. Fon-Der-Flaass has found prolific constructions of strongly regular graphs using affine designs. He notes that some of these constructions were also studied by Wallis. By taking the affine designs to be Hadamard designs obtained from Paley tournaments, we use probabilistic methods to show that many non-isomorphic strongly regular $n$-e.c. graphs of order $(q+1)^2$ exist whenever $q\geq 16 n^2 2^{2n}$ is a prime power such that $q\equiv 3\! \! \! \pmod{4}$.
Phase conjugation and negative refraction using nonlinear active metamaterials.

We present an experimental demonstration of phase conjugation using nonlinear metamaterial elements. Active split-ring resonators loaded with varactor diodes are demonstrated theoretically to act as phase-conjugating or time-reversing discrete elements when parametrically pumped and illuminated with appropriate frequencies. The metamaterial elements were fabricated and shown experimentally to produce a time-reversed signal. Measurements confirm that a discrete array of phase-conjugating elements act as a negatively refracting time-reversal rf lens only 0. 12λ thick.
Blended Learning of Programming in the Internet Age

This paper presents an advanced variant of learning programming by the use of the Internet and multimedia. It describes the development of a blended learning environment, which, in addition to classroom (face-to-face) lessons, introduces lessons delivered over the Internet: the use of multimedia teaching material with completely dynamic interactive simulations; the use of applications for regular checking and self-checking of the acquisition of knowledge; and applications for regular communication on the teaching material between students and lecturers. This blended learning environment has been developed with the purpose of upgrading the basic programming courses (Programming Fundamentals 1 and Programming Fundamentals 2) at the Advanced School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (VISER) in Belgrade, Serbia. The paper contains a brief description of the goals set, their development and implementation (structure design, the development of teaching materials, scenario implementation, and evaluation), and the results of the implementation and evaluation of these courses.
Narrow-Linewidth and High-Transmission Terahertz Bandpass Filtering by Metallic Gratings

Accurate spectral resolving capability is important to THz spectroscopy. So far, the THz passband filters based on metamaterial and surface plasmon suffer from the broad passband. In this paper, we propose a THz filter with calculated pass band of (Δf/f) <; 0.2% together with a peak transmission above 70% and demonstrate the experimental results with (Δf/f) <; 0.3% limited by the measurement system. The calculated value of (Δf/f) is at least one order of magnitude smaller than the previous results. The unique filtering capability was attributed to the guided-mode resonance that is generated by metallic gratings and a waveguide. Compared to the dielectric gratings, the metallic gratings with a narrow air slit are proved to effectively suppress off-resonance wavelength transmission resulting in a bandpass filtering response. In addition, a weak waveguide is found to benefit a narrow-linewidth filtering. Fabrication method of metallic gratings on membrane in a size of several cm was developed and the experimental results show reasonably good agreement with the simulation for a filter with (Δf/f) <; 0.3% limited by the spectral resolution and detectability of our measurement system.