Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A joint PHY/MAC architecture for low-radiated power TH-UWB wireless ad hoc networks

Due to environmental concerns and strict constraints on interference imposed on other networks, the radiated power of emerging pervasive wireless networks needs to be strictly limited, yet without sacrificing acceptable data rates. Pulsed Time-Hopping Ultra-Wide Band (TH-UWB) is a radio technology that has the potential to satisfy this requirement. Although TH-UWB is a multi-user radio technology, non-zero cross-correlation between time-hopping sequences, time-asynchronicity between sources and a multipath channel environment make it sensitive to strong interferers and near-far scenarios. While most protocols manage interference and multiple-access through power control or mutual exclusion (CSMA/CA or TDMA), we base our design on rate control, a relatively unexplored dimension for multiple-access and interference management. We further take advantage of the nature of pulsed TH-UWB to propose an interference mitigation scheme that reduces the impact of strong interferers. A source is always allowed to send and continuously adapts its channel code (hence its rate) to the interference experienced at the destination. In contrast to power control or exclusion, our MAC layer is local to sender and receiver and does not need coordination among neighbors not involved in the transmission. We show by simulation that we achieve a significant increase in network throughput.
An FPGA SAT solver based on enhanced constraint

As the first NP-complete problem, the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem is the key problem in computer theory and application. FPGA has been address frequently to accelerate the SAT solving process in the last few years, owing to its parallelism and flexibility. In this paper, we have proposed a novel SAT solver adopting an improved local search algorithm on the reconfigurable hardware platform. The new software preprocessing procedure and hardware architecture are involving to solve large-scale SAT problem instances. As compared with the past solver, the solver has the following advantages:(1) the preprocessing technology can strongly improve the efficiency of solver; (2) the strategy of strengthening the variable selection can avoid the same variable flipped continuously and repeatedly. It reduces the possibility of searching into local optimum. The experiments have shown that our solver has better performance than previous works.
Electrical Transport and Magnetoresistance in Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes Films

Electrical transport properties and magnetoresistance of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) films were investigated within temperature range (2 – 300) K and in magnetic fields up to 8 T. A crossover between metallic (dR/dT > 0) and non-metallic (dR/dT 10 K only negative MR was observed in the whole range of available magnetic fields. The negative MR can be approximated using 1D weak localization (WL) model. The low temperature positive MR is induced by contribution from electron-electron interactions. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.5755/j01.ms.20.2. 6311
Proximal tubular epithelial cells preferentially endocytose covalently‐modified albumin compared to native albumin

Albumin can be covalently modified at surface lysine residues and thus the circulation contains a mixture of native albumin (i.e. not modified) and albumin with varying degrees of modification. Uptake and lysosomal degradation of glomerular filtered albumin by proximal tubular cells via the megalin scavenger receptor is considered an important mechanism to limit albumin loss in the urine. However, whether this is a general mechanism of tubular uptake of albumin or if this is restricted to modified albumin is unknown. To address this question, we investigated the uptake of modified versus native albumin by proximal tubular cells.
Mental health in the island nations of the Western Pacific: a rapid review of the literature

Objectives: The aim of the study was to identify mental-health-relevant literature accessible to policy makers and healthcare workers in the island nations of the Western Pacific. Methods: Material collated to support the inaugural Leadership in Mental Health: Island Nations course held in Cairns in May 2015 was used as the basis of a “rapid review”. Results: The rapid review considered 303 documents identified by a search carried out using James Cook University’s OneSearch, Google Scholar, and the authors’ knowledge. Search terms included mental health and the like, and terms with Pacific and current Pacific island country names. Findings were classified by region/country, year of release/publication, mental health issue addressed, peer-reviewed or grey literature, and type of study. Almost half of the findings had been released in the previous five years. However, only 36% were peer-reviewed publications and only 3.6% of the findings were intervention studies. Conclusions: There is limited easily accessible documentation to confidently direct practice or policies regarding which strategies are likely to be effective in responding to the high rates of mental ill-health experienced in the Pacific island nations, or to plan for increases as a consequence of rapid social and demographic changes that are transforming Pacific island societies.
Ion exchange in glass: a mature technology for photonic devices

Ion exchange processes in glass have been studied since several decades, and have demonstrated themselves as one of the most convenient technologies to produce integrated optical components and devices. Ion-exchanged waveguides are attractive candidates for photonic components because they exhibit low insertion losses, thanks also to the capability of very good matching to the modal field of an optical fiber, and their fabrication costs are very low in batch production. A brief overview of the main processes and demonstrated applications is presented here.
Review mining for music digital libraries: phase II

We continue our work on the automatic mining of user-created music reviews towards the goal of connecting user opinions to music objects in music digital libraries (MDL). We demonstrate an experimental system which automatically discovered the key descriptive patterns that differentiated positive from negative reviews which helps us to better understand our successful phase I results. Comparison to an earlier study indicates an important consistency across projects that warrants further investigation
On linear prediction of Internet traffic for packet and burst switching networks

We show that prediction algorithms in the least mean square error sense prove better in a burst rather than in a packet switching network. For the latter, further information about the packet arrival distribution within the prediction interval is required. Regarding burst switching, we compare optical burst switching networks with and without linear prediction to conclude that linear prediction provides a significant improvement in end-to-end latency with low bandwidth waste.
Development of Binding Assays for the SH2 Domain of Grb7 and Grb2 Using Fluorescence Polarization

Adaptor proteins Grb7 and Grb2 have been implicated as being 2 potential therapeutic targets in several human cancers, especially those that overexpress ErbB2. These 2 proteins contain both a SH2 domain (Src homology 2) that binds to phosphorylated tyrosine residues contained within ErbB2 and other specific protein targets. Two assays based on enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and fluorescence polarization methods have been developed and validated to find and rank inhibitors for both proteins binding to the pY1139. Fluorescence polarization assays allowed the authors to determine quickly and reproducibly affinities of peptides from low nanomolar to high micromolar range and to compare them directly for Grb7 and Grb2. As a result, the assays have identified a known peptidomimetic Grb2 SH2 inhibitor (mAZ-pTyr-(αMe)pTyr-Asn-NH2) that exhibits the most potent affinity for the Grb7 SH2 domain described to date. (Journal of Biomolecular Screening 2008:112-119)
Laser-induced bulk damage in Yb:S-FAP crystals

The Mercury laser uses ytterbium-doped strontium fluorapatite (Yb:S-FAP) crystals as the gain medium with a nominal clear aperture of 4 x 6 cm. Recent damage test data have indicated the existence of bulk precursors in Yb:S-FAP that initiate damage starting at approximately 10 J/cm2 at 9 ns under 1064 nm irradiation. In this paper, we report on preliminary results on bulk damage studies on Yb:S-FAP crystals.
On the reliability of wireless fingerprinting using clock skews

Determining whether a client station should trust an access point is a known problem in wireless security. Traditional approaches to solving this problem resort to cryptography. But cryptographic exchange protocols are complex and therefore induce potential vulnerabilities in themselves. We show that measurement of clock skews of access points in an 802.11 network can be useful in this regard, since it provides fingerprints of the devices. Such fingerprints can be used to establish the first point of trust for client stations wishing to connect to an access point. Fingerprinting can also be used in the detection of fake access points. We demonstrate deficiencies of previously studied methods that measure clock skews in 802.11 networks by means of an attack that spoofs clock skews. We then provide means to overcome those deficiencies, thereby improving the reliability of fingerprinting. Finally, we show how to perform the clock-skew arithmetic that enables network providers to publish clock skews of their access points for use by clients.
Effects of residual stresses on shaft friction of bored cast in situ piles in sand

The existence of residual stresses locked-in prefabricated displacement piles is a well-known problem and has been addressed by a number of researchers in the last decades. This is not the case with cast in situ piles: as a consequence of concrete curing, pile-soil interaction starts soon after concrete casting, causing stress changes in terms of both normal and shear stresses. Such circumstance has been confirmed by few experimental evidences, reported in the paper, in saturated or dry soil conditions. In order to evaluate the influence of residual stresses on the subsequent pile response to axial loading, a broad parametric study has been carried out by means of numerical modelling. Particular focus is given to the effects induced on the shaft friction of floating bored piles embedded in wet and dry sandy soils. The results have been interpreted with the aim of highlighting errors commonly made if a stress-free pile is assumed when interpreting a specific load test results on instrumented piles and/or arranging general design methods.
Design of a Multi-Modal End-Effector and Grasping System: How Integrated Design helped win the Amazon Robotics Challenge

We present the grasping system and design approach behind Cartman, the winning entrant in the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge. We investigate the design processes leading up to the final iteration of the system and describe the emergent solution by comparing it with key robotics design aspects. Following our experience, we propose a new design aspect, precision vs. redundancy, that should be considered alongside the previously proposed design aspects of modularity vs. integration, generality vs. assumptions, computation vs. embodiment and planning vs. feedback. We present the grasping system behind Cartman, the winning robot in the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge. The system makes strong use of redundancy in design by implementing complimentary tools, a suction gripper and a parallel gripper. This multi-modal end-effector is combined with three grasp synthesis algorithms to accommodate the range of objects provided by Amazon during the challenge. We provide a detailed system description and an evaluation of its performance before discussing the broader nature of the system with respect to the key aspects of robotic design as initially proposed by the winners of the first Amazon Picking Challenge. To address the principal nature of our grasping system and the reason for its success, we propose an additional robotic design aspect `precision vs. redundancy'. The full design of our robotic system, including the end-effector, is open sourced and available at this http URL
A Virtual Machine Server for the Future Internet

In this work we develop a virtual machine server (VMS) to instantiate and control virtual routers in a pluralist network substrate based on Xen [1]. The server provides services to the piloting plane of the future Internet architecture. Our implementation relies on Web services and on a virtualized systems management library. In order to demonstrate the server operation, we have also implemented a graphical user interface where the user plays the role of the piloting system.
Private Content Based Image Retrieval Using Hadoop

Today, huge quantity of data, in the form of images, is produced through digital cameras, mobile phones and photo editing software. A large part of this data is stored in online repositories. This data is private to each user and consequently it should not be accessible by others. In earlier systems, images were searched by the tags or keywords or description assigned to them wherein if an image is wrongly described, querying image search will not result in the required image. Here, a ‘content based’ search has been proposed which analyzes the content of the image. System will allow user to upload a particular image and depending on combined values of color, shape and texture, the system will retrieve similar images from database. The system incorporates techniques for upload and search of images over large datasets of images based on the content of the images rather than the keywords and tags or any other textual information. Another part of the system is Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS). Hadoop defines a framework which allows processing on distributed large sets across clusters of computer.
Impact of Interorganizational Relationships on Technology Diffusion: An Agent-Based Simulation Modeling Approach

Interorganizational relationships are an integral part of an organization's decision-making process. The reason is that an organization's decision affects and is affected by the decision of its partners, particularly in the context of technology adoption and diffusion. Therefore, it is important to explore the role of this social network of organizations in shaping the process of technology diffusion. We conduct a series of experiments using the agent-based simulation modeling technique to identify strategically located firms in a network that can significantly influence the process of software diffusion. Our findings suggest that: 1) structural location of organizations does significantly influence the process of diffusion; and 2) the criteria for identifying strategically located firms depend on contextual factors, such as network topology, network density, and interoperability costs. To illustrate the practical use of these results, we propose a “network-aware” pricing strategy that takes advantage of information regarding organizational social networks. We illustrate that contrary to prevalent practice in the enterprise software market, where firms are generally targeted on the basis of their size, network-aware pricing has the potential to facilitate the development of a more effective market penetration strategy.
The Part-Time/Full-Time Wage Gap in Central and Eastern Europe: The Case of Estonia

Unlike Western countries, there are no studies focusing on the full-time/part-time wage gap in Central and Eastern Europe countries. The focus of this paper is the incidence and reasons for the part-time wage gap in Estonia, a small Eastern European catch up economy. We use Estonian Labour Force Survey data for 1997-2007, and the part time wage gap is decomposed using the Heckman selection model and Oaxaca-Blinder wage decompositions. The results indicate that for females the observable part-time wage premium is unexplained with the controls used in the analysis. For males, the full-time raw premium exists, but it is to a large extent captured by explanatory variables. For both genders, the labour market situation is remarkably better for voluntary part-timers. The probable explanations for this are the generally low wage levels, the cyclical behaviour of wage gaps, undeclared income and unobserved heterogeneity of employees and firms.
Using Prosodic and Spectral Features in Detecting Depression in Elderly Males

As research in speech processing has matured, there has been much interest in paralinguistic speech processing problems including the speaker’s mental and psychological health. In this study, we focus on speech features that can identify the speaker’s emotional health, i.e., whether the speaker is depressed or not. We use prosodic speech measurements, such as pitch and energy, in addition to spectral features, such as formants and spectral tilt, and compute statistics of these features over different regions of the speech signal. These statistics are used as input features to a discriminative classifier that predicts the speaker’s depression state. We find that with an N -fold leave-one-out cross-validation setup, we can achieve a prediction accuracy of 81.3%, where random guess is 50%.
Cascode and transconductance with capacitances feedback compensation for multistage amplifiers driving no load and 1nF capacitive load

A cascode and transconductance with capacitances feedback compensation (CTCFC) for multistage amplifiers is proposed in this paper. By adding a transconductance with capacitor feedback across the output stage, the shorting effect of this capacitor is eliminated, which enlarges the gain at higher frequency region. This capacitor can also help stabilize no load configuration. The other compensation capacitor through cascode from the output to the first stage simplifies the circuit and provides zeros to further increase the bandwidth. The proposed technique has been verified by an implementation in a 0. 6μm CMOS process. The gain-bandwidth product (GBW) is 3.6MHz under a capacitive load of 1nF. The slew rate is 2.6V/μs and the current consumption is 88μA which shows an improvement in IFOM L performance.
Molecular evaluation of antibiotic susceptibility of Tropheryma whipplei in axenic medium.

OBJECTIVES AND METHODS Whipple's disease is a rare multisystem chronic infection, involving the intestinal tract as well as various other organs. Tropheryma whipplei is a slow-growing facultative intracellular bacterium that remains poorly understood. In vitro antibiotic susceptibility testing has previously been assessed in cells using a real-time quantitative PCR assay. In this study, we have evaluated the antibiotic susceptibility of three strains of T. whipplei grown in axenic medium using the same assay. RESULTS The active compounds in axenic medium were doxycycline, macrolide compounds, penicillin G, streptomycin, rifampicin, chloramphenicol, thiamphenicol, teicoplanin, vancomycin, amoxicillin, gentamicin, aztreonam, levofloxacin and ceftriaxone, with MICs in the range 0.06-1 mg/L. Cefalothin was less active, with MICs in the range 2-4 mg/L. We found that co-trimoxazole was active with MICs in the range 0.5-1 mg/L, and sulfamethoxazole alone was active with MICs in the range 0.5-1 mg/L. MICs of trimethoprim varied from 64-128 mg/L. CONCLUSIONS Co-trimoxazole was effective in vitro, but this activity was due to sulfamethoxazole alone. These results were in accordance with the fact that T. whipplei does not contain the encoding gene for dihydrofolate reductase, the target for trimethoprim.
OCR of historical printings with an application to building diachronic corpora: A case study using the RIDGES herbal corpus

This article describes the results of a case study that applies Neural Network-based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to scanned images of books printed between 1487 and 1870 by training the OCR engine OCRopus [@breuel2013high] on the RIDGES herbal text corpus [@OdebrechtEtAlSubmitted]. Training specific OCR models was possible because the necessary *ground truth* is available as error-corrected diplomatic transcriptions. The OCR results have been evaluated for accuracy against the ground truth of unseen test sets. Character and word accuracies (percentage of correctly recognized items) for the resulting machine-readable texts of individual documents range from 94% to more than 99% (character level) and from 76% to 97% (word level). This includes the earliest printed books, which were thought to be inaccessible by OCR methods until recently. Furthermore, OCR models trained on one part of the corpus consisting of books with different printing dates and different typesets *(mixed models)* have been tested for their predictive power on the books from the other part containing yet other fonts, mostly yielding character accuracies well above 90%. It therefore seems possible to construct generalized models trained on a range of fonts that can be applied to a wide variety of historical printings still giving good results. A moderate postcorrection effort of some pages will then enable the training of individual models with even better accuracies. Using this method, diachronic corpora including early printings can be constructed much faster and cheaper than by manual transcription. The OCR methods reported here open up the possibility of transforming our printed textual cultural heritage into electronic text by largely automatic means, which is a prerequisite for the mass conversion of scanned books.
An improved image segmentation algorithm for salient object detection

Semantic object detection is one of the most important and challenging problems in image analysis. Segmentation is an optimal approach to detect salient objects, but often fails to generate meaningful regions due to over-segmentation. This paper presents an improved semantic segmentation approach which is based on JSEG algorithm and utilizes multiple region merging criteria. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is encouraging and effective in salient object detection.
Stokes polynomial filters

The paper considers a new class of filters with transfer functions using the polynomials introduced by the British physicist Sir G.G. Stokes. The filters are transitional between Bessel and Butterworth ones. When one compares the step-responses of Bessel, Stokes, and Butterworth filters of the same order and the same -3dB bandwidth then the result is following. The Bessel filters have a certain delay and (practically) no overshoot in their step-transient response. The Stokes filters have larger delay than Bessel filters and a small overshoot. Finally, the Butterworth filters have largest delay and largest overshoot. The paper illustrates these properties and describes the data required for synthesis of the Stokes filters.
Synchronization engineering: tuning the phase relationship between dissimilar oscillators using nonlinear feedback

A mild, nonlinear, time-delayed feedback signal was applied to two heterogeneous oscillators in order to synchronize their frequencies with an arbitrary and controllable phase difference. The feedback was designed using phase models constructed from experimental measurements of the intrinsic dynamical properties of the oscillators. The feedback signal produced an interaction function that corresponds to the desired collective behaviour. The synchronized phase difference between the elements can be tuned to any value on the interval 0 and 2π by shifting the phase of the interaction function using the feedback delay. Numerical simulations were conducted and experiments carried out with electrochemical oscillators.