Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Particle Swarm Based Meta-Heuristics for Function Optimization and Engineering Applications

This paper evaluates the performance of three Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms, namely attraction-repulsion based PSO (ATREPSO), Quadratic Interpolation based PSO (QIPSO) and Gaussian Mutation based PSO (GMPSO). Whereas all the algorithms are guided by the diversity of the population to search the global optimal solution of a given optimization problem, GMPSO uses the concept of mutation and QIPSO uses the reproduction operator to generate a new member of the swarm. We tested the variants of PSO on ten standard benchmark functions and compared the results with classical PSO algorithm. Also, the performance of all algorithms is tested on two engineering design problems. The numerical results show that all the algorithms outperform the classical particle swarm optimization by a remarkable difference.
A soft-switching strategy for three-phase boost power factor correction rectifiers

This paper proposes a novel resonant active-clamped soft-switching method for a three-phase six-switch boost power factor correction rectifier, where all the main switches can undergo zero voltage switching (ZVS). It is realized by an additional efficient auxiliary circuit. The additional soft-switching circuit consists of three active switches and one resonant inductor. The ZVS for all the six switches can be ensured by proper selection of resonant parameters. Although the soft-switching auxiliary circuit consumes 3 active switches, the analysis in this manuscript shows that zero-voltage switching can also be achieved in these auxiliary switches, without any extra losses for the auxiliary circuit. A 2.2-kW three-phase boost PFC prototype with the additional auxiliary circuit for soft-switching is developed and tested to verify the occurrence of ZVS at the six switches with the proposed circuit. The experimental results show a reduction in total loss by 40% and hence, an increase in conversion efficiency from 98.2% to 99% at 2.2kW load power with maintaining unity power factor.
Modeling Stem Cell Induction Processes Citation

Technology for converting human cells to pluripotent stem cell using induction processes has the potential to revolutionize regenerative medicine. However, the production of these so called iPS cells is still quite inefficient and may be dominated by stochastic effects. In this work we build mass-action models of the core regulatory elements controlling stem cell induction and maintenance. The models include not only the network of transcription factors NANOG, OCT4, SOX2, but also important epigenetic regulatory features of DNA methylation and histone modification. We show that the network topology reported in the literature is consistent with the observed experimental behavior of bistability and inducibility. Based on simulations of stem cell generation protocols, and in particular focusing on changes in epigenetic cellular states, we show that cooperative and independent reaction mechanisms have experimentally identifiable differences in the dynamics of reprogramming, and we analyze such differences and their biological basis. It had been argued that stochastic and elite models of stem cell generation represent distinct fundamental mechanisms. Work presented here suggests an alternative possibility that they represent differences in the amount of information we have about the distribution of cellular states before and during reprogramming protocols. We show further that unpredictability and variation in reprogramming decreases as the cell progresses along the induction process, and that identifiable groups of cells with elite-seeming behavior can come about by a stochastic process. Finally we show how different mechanisms and kinetic properties impact the prospects of improving the efficiency of iPS cell generation protocols. Citation: Grácio F, Cabral J, Tidor B (2013) Modeling Stem Cell Induction Processes. PLoS ONE 8(5): e60240. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0060240 Editor: Rajasingh Johnson, University of Kansas Medical Center, United States of America Received November 25, 2012; Accepted February 23, 2013; Published May 8, 2013 Copyright: 2013 Grácio et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This research was supported by the MIT Portugal Program, Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (BD 42942), the US National Institutes of Health (CA112967), the Singapore–MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, the US National Science Foundation (0821391), and a gift of computing hardware from Intel Corporation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors note here that some of the computations were carried out on hardware donated by the Intel Corporation. This does not alter the authors’ adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. * E-mail: tidor@mit.edu
On free-space optic communication with Alamouti-type coding and direct detection

By Transmitting unipolar positive signals, a novel association of Alamouti space-time coding to free-space optic (FSO) communication is presented. We examine intensity modulation (IM) based on electrical fast Fourier transform (FFT) design with Hermitian symmetry. The proposed technique aims at limiting signal fading due to scintillation. It maximizes the spatial diversity, increases the reliability, and makes it possible to use digital complex QAM modulations while preserving direct detection (DD).
Layered Display with Accommodation Cue Using Scattering Polarizers

A projection-type layered display inducing the accommodation cue is proposed. To support the accommodation cue, the concept of multiplane displays, especially the principle of additive type compressive light field display, is adopted. To achieve the additive type light field display, two layered scattering polarizers and a single projector which is synchronized with polarization rotator are used. Scattering polarizer diffuses light rays with specific linear polarization state while transmits the other rays with the orthogonal polarization state. Utilizing this characteristic, two layer images can be displayed at different depths presenting multiplane display. By adopting an additional computational process, several viewpoints can be provided to a single eye and support the accommodation cue. We expect that the proposed method can be adopted to virtual reality system. Detailed principle of the proposed system and its feasibility are explained with simulations and experiments.
Music Emotion Recognition

Providing acomplete review of existing work in music emotion developed in psychology and engineering, Music Emotion Recognition explains how to account for the subjective nature of emotion perception in the development of automatic music emotion recognition (MER) systems. Among the first publications dedicated to automatic MER, it begins with a comprehensiveintroduction to the essential aspects of MERincluding background, key techniques, and applications. This ground-breaking reference examines emotion from a dimensional perspective. It defines emotions in music as points in a 2D plane in terms of two of the most fundamental emotion dimensions according to psychologistsvalence and arousal. The authors present a computational framework that generalizes emotion recognition from the categorical domain to real-valued 2D space. They also: Introduce novel emotion-based music retrieval and organization methods Describe a ranking-base emotion annotation and model training method Present methods that integrate information extracted from lyrics, chord sequence, and genre metadata for improved accuracy Consider an emotion-based music retrieval system that is particularly useful for mobile devices The book details techniques for addressing the issues related to: the ambiguity and granularity of emotion description, heavy cognitive load of emotion annotation, subjectivity of emotion perception, and the semantic gap between low-level audio signal and high-level emotion perception. Complete with more than 360 useful references, 12 example MATLAB codes, and a listing of key abbreviations and acronyms, this cutting-edge guide supplies the technical understanding and tools needed to develop your own automatic MER system based on the automatic recognition model.
Mockup builder: direct 3D modeling on and above the surface in a continuous interaction space

Our work introduces a semi-immersive environment for conceptual design where virtual mockups are obtained from gestures we aim to get closer to the way people conceive, create and manipulate three-dimensional shapes. We present on-and-above-the-surface interaction techniques following Guiard's asymmetric bimanual model to take advantage of the continuous interaction space for creating and editing 3D models in a stereoscopic environment. To allow for more expressive interactions, our approach continuously combines hand and finger tracking in the space above the table with multi-touch on its surface. This combination brings forth an alternative design environment where users can seamlessly switch between interacting on the surface or in the space above it depending on the task. Our approach integrates continuous space usage with bimanual interaction to provide an expressive set of 3D modeling operations. Preliminary trials with our experimental setup show this as a very promising avenue for further work.
IT User Satisfaction in Academia: A Comparison Across Three Student Types

This study utilized critical incidents and open-ended surveys to develop a focused information technology (IT) user satisfaction survey for use in academia. The resulting Likert-type scale survey was administered to 122 individuals enrolled in three different MBA programs – traditional, distance-learning, and executive – at a large university. Hypothesis testing employed ANOVA and SEM. The results suggest that IT user satisfaction differs among these student groups, and IT user satisfaction positively influences satisfaction with the academic program. Contributions of the study include an examination of IT user satisfaction in an academic setting and an investigation of the ways in which IT impacts the education process across different program types.
A cancelable biometric scheme based on multi-lead ECGs

Biometric technologies offer great advantages over other recognition methods, but there are concerns that they may compromise the privacy of individuals. In this paper, an electrocardiogram (ECG)-based cancelable biometric scheme is proposed to relieve such concerns. In this scheme, distinct biometric templates for a given beat bundle are constructed via “subspace collapsing. ” To determine the identity of any unknown beat bundle, the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm, incorporating a “suppression and poll” strategy, is adopted. Unlike the existing cancelable biometric schemes, knowledge of the distortion transform is not required for recognition. Experiments with real ECGs from 285 subjects are presented to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme. The best recognition rate of 97.58 % was achieved under the test condition Ntrain = 10 and Ntest = 10.
Fuzzy merging of MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes measurements

The work presents the design of a fuzzy rule base aimed at intelligent merging of measurements by the two sensor types in a Micro Electro-Mechanical Sensor (MEMS) device - accelerometers and three gyroscopes placed on the three axes in the 3D space. The idea aroused from the available expert knowledge how to merge the measurements from both sensors in order to asses inertial force vectors on three space axes. The proposed method is tested on the measurement data collected from a MEMS device placed in a mobile phone. The results demonstrated ability of the proposed fuzzy merging approach to compensate inaccurate readings from the accelerometer during a rotation around one of the phone axis.
Automated Rating of ESL Essays

To date, traditional NLP parsers have not been widely successful in TESOL-oriented applications, particularly in scoring written compositions. Re-engineering such applications to provide the necessary robustness for handling ungrammatical English has proven a formidable obstacle. We discuss the use of a non-traditional parser for rating compositions that attenuates some of these difficulties. Its dependency-based shallow parsing approach provides significant robustness in the face of language learners' ungrammatical compositions. This paper discusses how a corpus of L2 essays for English was rated using the parser, and how the automatic evaulations compared to those obtained by manual methods. The types of modifications that were made to the system are discussed. Limitations to the current system are described, future plans for developing the system are sketched, and further applications beyond English essay rating are mentioned.
Creatinine levels among Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans in the Hispanic Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

BACKGROUND Although Latinos constitute the largest and fastest growing minority group in the United States, little is known about the prevalence of renal disease among different Latino subgroups. METHODS We used data from the Hispanic Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (HHANES) to compare serum creatinine measurements among Mexican Americans, mainland Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans. We compared estimated creatinine clearance across Latino subgroups adjusted for demographic, clinical, and socioeconomic characteristics (including known predictors of chronic kidney disease) using survey logistic regression analysis. RESULTS Cuban Americans had higher mean serum creatinine levels than the other groups across both gender and age categories. In multivariable analysis, Puerto Ricans [odds ratio (OR) 1.74, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.16 to 2.60] and Cuban Americans (OR 4.59, CI 2.53 to 8.31) were more likely than the referent category of Mexican Americans to have an estimated creatinine clearance < 60 mL/min/1.73 m2. CONCLUSION Serum creatinine levels differ substantially among Latino subgroups, suggesting national origin needs to be taken into consideration in studies of renal disease in Latinos. In addition, our findings highlight the need for more contemporary studies directly comparing both incidence rates of end-stage renal disease and measured renal function among Latino subgroups, perhaps leading to subgroup-specific prediction equations.
Towards Provably-Secure Scalable Anonymous Broadcast

We devise a scalable and provably-secure protocol for fully-anonymous broadcast in large-scale networks. Similar to the dining cryptographers networks (DCNETS), our algorithm uses secure multi-party computation (MPC) to ensure anonymity. However, we address the weaknesses of DC-NETS, which are poor scalability and vulnerability to jamming attacks. When compared to the state-of-the-art, our protocol reduces the total bit complexity from O(n2) to O(n) per anonymous message sent in a network of size n; total latency increases from O(1) to polylog(n). We assume up to a one third fraction of the parties is controlled by a static Byzantine adversary. We further assume that this adversary is computationally unbounded, and thus make no cryptographic hardness assumptions.
A Visualization-based Approach to Explore Geographic Metadata

The paper presents a visualization-based approach to explore large databases of geographic metadata. The aim of the data exploration is to search and acquire expressive geographic data to create a geographic information system. Metadata repositories which provide information about available geographic data exist on the web and are usually queried to perform data acquisition task. We propose a visualization–based tool to assist the user in this metadata exploration. The approach is characterized by the integration of multi visualization techniques, interaction methods and data mining concepts. The use of multi visualization techniques and a dynamic interaction with them allow to discover new information among data and assists the user in his reasoning.
Profiling of Atherosclerotic Lesions by Gene and Tissue Microarrays Reveals PCSK6 as a Novel Protease in Unstable Carotid Atherosclerosis

Objective—Carotid plaque instability is a major cause of ischemic stroke, but detailed knowledge about underlying molecular pathways is still lacking. Here, we evaluated large-scale transcriptomic and protein expression profiling in a biobank of carotid endarterectomies followed by characterization of identified candidates, as a platform for discovery of novel proteins differentially regulated in unstable carotid lesions. Approach and Results—Genes highly upregulated in symptomatic versus asymptomatic plaques were selected from Affymetrix microarray analyses (n=127 plaques), and tissue microarrays constructed from 34 lesions were assayed for 21 corresponding proteins by immunohistochemistry. Quantification of stainings demonstrated differential expression of CD36, CD137, and DOCK7 (P<0.05) in unstable versus stable lesions and the most significant upregulation of a proprotein convertase, PCSK6 (P<0.0001). Increased expression of PCSK6 in symptomatic lesions was verified by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (n=233), and the protein was localized to smooth muscle &agr;-actin positive cells and extracellular matrix of the fibrous cap by immunohistochemistry. PCSK6 expression positively correlated to genes associated with inflammation, matrix degradation, and mitogens in microarrays. Stimulation of human carotid smooth muscle cells in vitro with cytokines caused rapid induction of PCSK6 mRNA. Conclusions—Using a combination of transcriptomic and tissue microarray profiling, we demonstrate a novel approach to identify proteins differentially expressed in unstable carotid atherosclerosis. The proprotein convertase PCSK6 was detected at increased levels in the fibrous cap of symptomatic carotid plaques, possibly associated with key processes in plaque rupture such as inflammation and extracellular matrix remodeling. Further studies are needed to clarify the role of PCSK6 in atherosclerosis.
Improvement of TND steganalysis based on image complexity

Information hiding secures information transmission on the Internet, but if used illegally, it will bring great threats even harm to social security. Steganalysis is the detection to the hiding information in digital carrier. An improvement of TND steganalysis for LSB embedding is purposed in this paper. Based on the relationship of the image complexity and the PV value obtained in TND scheme, a weighting scheme is constructed to make the PV values fall into a relative steady interval, which counteracts the difference comes from different images. Experimental result offered higher detection rate and lower false alarm rate than its original scheme.
Laboratory and sky testing results for the TIS H4RG-10 4k × 4k 10-micron visible CMOS-hybrid detector

We present both laboratory and telescope testing results describing the performance of the H4RG-10 CMOS-Hybrid detector. The H4RG-10 is the largest visible hybrid array currently in existence and shows great potential for use in future space missions. We report read noise, dark current, pixel connectivity, persistence, and inter-pixel capacitance measurements for the temperature range 110-240 K. We report on quantitative astrometric and qualitative photometric performance of the instrument based on observations made at USNO's Flagstaff Station observatory and establish an upper limit to the astrometric performance of the detector. We discuss additional testing and future work associated with improving detector performance.
Brain–Computer Interface Classifier for Wheelchair Commands Using Neural Network With Fuzzy Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper presents the classification of a three-class mental task-based brain-computer interface (BCI) that uses the Hilbert-Huang transform for the features extractor and fuzzy particle swarm optimization with cross-mutated-based artificial neural network (FPSOCM-ANN) for the classifier. The experiments were conducted on five able-bodied subjects and five patients with tetraplegia using electroencephalography signals from six channels, and different time-windows of data were examined to find the highest accuracy. For practical purposes, the best two channel combinations were chosen and presented. The three relevant mental tasks used for the BCI were letter composing, arithmetic, and Rubik's cube rolling forward, and these are associated with three wheelchair commands: left, right, and forward, respectively. An additional eyes closed task was collected for testing and used for on-off commands. The results show a dominant alpha wave during eyes closure with average classification accuracy above 90%. The accuracies for patients with tetraplegia were lower compared to the able-bodied subjects; however, this was improved by increasing the duration of the time-windows. The FPSOCM-ANN provides improved accuracies compared to genetic algorithm-based artificial neural network (GA-ANN) for three mental tasks-based BCI classifications with the best classification accuracy achieved for a 7-s time-window: 84.4% (FPSOCM-ANN) compared to 77.4% (GA-ANN). More comparisons on feature extractors and classifiers were included. For two-channel classification, the best two channels were O1 and C4, followed by second best at P3 and O2, and third best at C3 and O2. Mental arithmetic was the most correctly classified task, followed by mental Rubik's cube rolling forward and mental letter composing.
Virtual Ad hoc Network testbeds for high fidelity testing of tactical network applications

Testing of applications for tactical MANETs poses a special technical challenge due to the difficulty of conducting experiments in an ad hoc network environment at a scale larger than a few nodes. One approach is to conduct experiments in a testbed that can imitate a tactical MANET to the highest feasible level of fidelity. For applications, this is achieved by executing unmodified software under real operating systems and realistic hardware resources. For the network, it is achieved by using an emulated/simulated network that behaves like a real MANET in some/all layers of the protocol stack. In this paper, we describe the current state of Virtual Ad hoc Network (VAN) Testbed1 technologies for constructing testbeds that allow testing unmodified tactical applications over simulated MANETs, including network-aware applications. On the application side, we employ Xen-based virtualization to provide high fildelity of application execution environment, testbed resource scalability and manageability. On the network side, we employ user-provided simulation models and enable seamless integration of the hosts that run the software under test with virtual nodes in a simulated network. Our goal is to enable running experiments over large-scale (500–1000 nodes) MANETs using VAN testbeds.