Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spin- and Pair-Density-Wave Glasses

Spontaneous breaking of translational symmetry---known as `density wave' order---is common in nature. However such states are strongly sensitive to impurities or other forms of frozen disorder leading to fascinating glassy phenomena. We analyze impurity effects on a particularly ubiquitous form of broken translation symmetry in solids: a Spin Density Wave (SDW) with spatially modulated magnetic order. Related phenomena occur in Pair Density Wave (PDW) superconductors where the superconducting order is spatially modulated. For weak disorder, we find that the SDW / PDW order can generically give way to a SDW / PDW glass---new phases of matter with a number of striking properties, which we introduce and characterize here. In particular, they exhibit an interesting combination of conventional (symmetry-breaking) and spin glass (Edwards-Anderson) order. This is reflected in the dynamic response of such a system, which---as expected for a glass---is extremely slow in certain variables, but---surprisingly---is fast in others. Our results apply to all uniaxial metallic SDW systems where the ordering vector is incommensurate with the crystalline lattice. In addition, the possibility of a PDW glass has important consequences for some recent theoretical and experimental work on $La_{2-x}Ba_xCu_2O_4$.
Design space exploration of row buffer architecture for phase change memory with LPDDR2-NVM interface

Phase change memory (PCM) is an attractive candidate for the future memory, but it still has several limitations to overcome such as write latency and long-term endurance. A large body of literature has been dedicated to solving these problems. However, almost all of the previous studies did not consider an important practical aspect of the PCM - an interface. The LPDDR2-NVM standard interface recently introduced by JEDEC is widely adopted by the manufacturers of commercial PCM these days. The LPDDR2-NVM standard allows a more flexible use of row buffers compared to the conventional DRAM interface. In this paper, we explore the design space of row buffer architecture in the PCM with LPDDR2-NVM interface. The effect of row buffer architecture on memory performance is investigated in terms of unit size and number of RDBs, and its management policy. We use the timing parameters from industry prototype PCM and analyze the result from the perspective of Pareto's optimum. The experimental results show that a properly-designed row buffer architecture enhances system-level performance up to 44.2% even at the same cost.
An anonymous biometric‐based remote user‐authenticated key agreement scheme for multimedia systems

We analyze the security of the Li et al. authentication scheme and show its vulnerability to off‐line password‐guessing and replay attacks. We design a new anonymous authentication scheme. The proposed scheme not only removes the drawback of the scheme of the Li et al. scheme but also protects user's anonymity. Moreover, we show validity of our proposed scheme using Burrows, Abadi, and Needham logic. Our scheme is comparable in terms of the communication and computational overhead with related schemes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Actively-targeted LTVSPWY peptide-modified magnetic nanoparticles for tumor imaging

Background Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely used in modern clinical medicine as a diagnostic tool, and provides noninvasive and three-dimensional visualization of biological phenomena in living organisms with high spatial and temporal resolution. Therefore, considerable attention has been paid to magnetic nanoparticles as MRI contrast agents with efficient targeting ability and cellular internalization ability, which make it possible to offer higher contrast and information-rich images for detection of disease. Methods LTVSPWY peptide-modified PEGylated chitosan (LTVSPWY-PEG-CS) was synthesized by chemical reaction, and the chemical structure was confirmed by 1H-NMR. LTVSPWY-PEG-CS-modified magnetic nanoparticles were prepared successfully using the solvent diffusion method. Their particle size, size distribution, and zeta potential were measured by dynamic light scattering and electrophoretic mobility, and their surface morphology was investigated by transmission electron microscopy. To investigate their selective targeting ability, the cellular uptake of the LTVSPWY-PEG-CS-modified magnetic nanoparticles was observed in a cocultured system of SKOV-3 cells which overexpress HER2 and A549 cells which are HER2-negative. The in vitro cytotoxicity of these nanoparticles in SKOV-3 and A549 cells was measured using the MTT method. The SKOV-3-bearing nude mouse model was used to investigate the tumor targeting ability of the magnetic nanoparticles in vivo. Results The average diameter and zeta potential of the LTVSPWY-PEG-CS-modified magnetic nanoparticles was 267.3 ± 23.4 nm and 30.5 ± 7.0 mV, respectively, with a narrow size distribution and spherical morphology. In vitro cytotoxicity tests demonstrated that these magnetic nanoparticles were carriers suitable for use in cancer diagnostics with low toxicity. With modification of the LTVSPWY homing peptide, magnetic nanoparticles could be selectively taken up by SKOV-3 cells overexpressing HER2 when cocultured with HER2-negative A549 cells. In vivo biodistribution results suggest that treatment with LTVSPWY-PEG-CS-modified magnetic nanoparticles/DiR enabled tumors to be identified and diagnosed more rapidly and efficiently in vivo. Conclusion LTVSPWY-PEG-CS-modified magnetic nanoparticles are a promising contrast agent for early detection of tumors overexpressing HER2 and further diagnostic application.
The Predictability of Returns with Regime Shifts in Consumption and Dividend Growth

The predictability of the market return and dividend growth is addressed in an equilibrium model with two regimes. A state variable that drives the conditional means of the aggregate consumption and dividend growth rates follows different time-series processes in the two regimes. In linear predictive regressions over 1930-2009, the market return is predictable by the price-dividend ratio with R2 11.7% if the probability of being in the first regime exceeds 50%; and dividend growth is predictable by the price-dividend ratio with R2 28.3% if the probability of being in the second regime exceeds 50%. The model-implied state variables perform significantly better at predicting the equity, size, and value premia, the aggregate consumption and dividend growth rates, and the variance of the market return than linear regressions with the market price-dividend ratio and risk free rate as predictive variables.
The influence of respiratory sinus arrhythmia and time of day on decision making and risk taking

Humans make a wide variety of decisions every day – from which route to take to the store to which job offer to accept. It has recently been proposed that two different systems, one affective and intuitive (System 1), the other logical and deliberative (System 2) interact to guide decision making. Neuroimaging research has supported this hypothesis, but other physiological indices of emotion regulation have been largely unexplored in the context of decision making. Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) is an index of cardiac vagal control, and has been shown to mediate emotion regulation, and vary under stress. Both impaired sleep and the phase of the sleep/wake circadian schedule also influence the expression and regulation of emotion. Sleep deprivation has been shown to lead to poor decision-making, but the relationship between sleep/wake circadian rhythms and decision making has been largely unexplored. Physiological indicators of emotion regulation (such as RSA) are likely to interact with sleep/wake circadian rhythms to influence the strategies used in decision making. The present study found that while time of day did not have an independent influence on decision making or risk taking, these functions appear to fluctuate with body temperature, a physiological index of circadian phase, with optimal performance occurring at higher body temperatures. Furthermore, while RSA appears to be unrelated to decision making and risk taking, circadian phase may influence physiological responses to stress (as measured by RSA) at different times of the day. In particular, morning-types may be more reactive to stress in the evening than during the day. Further research is needed to validate and clarify these findings.
SERP-level disambiguation from search results

Fast growth of search engines' popularity shows the users attraction to the Web engines. However there is a chance of misinterpretation for ambiguous queries. At this point, we propose a more adherence user interface which consist of a relevant visual content as well as generating new search snippet and title. Recent researches for meeting this aim are focused on a whole page thumbnail for assisting users to remember a recently visited Web page. Withal, this is not discussed yet that how a specific visual content of a page can allow users to distinguish between a useful and worthless page in the result page especially in an ambiguous search task. Our studya shows that the improvement in both textual search snippet and title as well as the additional thumbnail were helpful for users to clarify the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) in an ambiguous search task.
Acute gastric dilatation with infarction and perforation

This is a report of a 22-year-old woman with treated anorexia nervosa who died of complications of acute gastric dilatation—that is, infarction and perforation with severe and irreversible shock. Binge eating and drinking, precipitated by emotional crises, contributed to her acute gastric dilatation. This complication of anorexia nervosa has been previously reported, but, unlike the others, this case ended fatally. The literature is reviewed.
A Performance Comparison of Routing Protocols for Large-Scale Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

It is commonly known to the wireless research community that efficient routing algorithms can provide significant benefits in ad hoc networks, including larger throughput, lower average end-to-end delay, fewer lost data packets and generally an improved network performance. Many routing protocols for such networks have been proposed so far, the most popular of which are the Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR), the Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector routing protocol (AODV), the TemporallyOrdered Routing Algorithm (TORA) and the Location-Aided Routing protocol (LAR). In this report we present some results, derived from the extended simulations that we performed, in order to compare the efficiency of the above four protocols. We consider that wireless mobile terminals are spread in a large geographical area. For our simulations we used two simulators, the QualNet and the ns-2 simulator.
Reverberation robust speech recognition by matching distributions of spectrally and temporally decorrelated features

This paper addresses dereverberation of speech using an unsupervised approach utilizing speech prior and taking only weak assumptions on reverberation. Our approach uses a long time context representation of reverberated speech in spectraltemporal supervectors which are decorrelated by PCA. In the decorrelated domain, supervectors are mapped from the reverberant speech distribution to the clean speech distribution and then to mel-spectral vectors. A mel-domain Wiener filter is applied as post processing. Our results demonstrate performance gains over the provided baseline recognizer, and show that the method can be coupled to CMLLR adaptation with cumulative benefits for clean trained models. Furthermore, we show that using dimensionality reduction coupled with the Wiener filter is better than using full-dimensional PCA in representing small variance components in speech.
Mutual Coupling Reduction of Microstrip Antennas using Defected Ground Structure

The recently developed dumb-bell shaped defected ground structure (DGS) is successfully used to mutual coupling reduction of a two-element microstrip antenna array. Comparison of the proposed DGS antenna with other techniques shows the unique capability of the DGS structure to reduce the mutual coupling. Influence of the designed DGS on radiation pattern of the antenna array is also investigated
Low-energy Tall Buildings? Room for Improvement as Demonstrated by New York City Energy Benchmarking Data

This paper proposes a framework for understanding the energy consumption differences between tall and low-rise buildings. Energy usage data from 706 office buildings in New York illustrates expected correlations from the framework. Notable correlations include: taller buildings tend to use more energy until a plateau at 30~39 floors; tall buildings in Manhattan use 20% more energy than low-rise buildings in Manhattan, while tall buildings outside Manhattan use 4% more energy than lowrise buildings outside Manhattan. Additional correlations are discussed, among which is the trend that the Energy Star program in New York City assigns higher ratings to tall buildings with higher EUIs than low-rise buildings with the same EUI. Since Energy Star is based on regressions of existing buildings, the Energy Star ratings suggest taller buildings have higher EUIs than shorter buildings, which is confirmed by the New York City energy benchmarking data.
Efficient Visibility Encoding for Dynamic Illumination in Direct Volume Rendering

We present an algorithm that enables real-time dynamic shading in direct volume rendering using general lighting, including directional lights, point lights, and environment maps. Real-time performance is achieved by encoding local and global volumetric visibility using spherical harmonic (SH) basis functions stored in an efficient multiresolution grid over the extent of the volume. Our method enables high-frequency shadows in the spatial domain, but is limited to a low-frequency approximation of visibility and illumination in the angular domain. In a first pass, level of detail (LOD) selection in the grid is based on the current transfer function setting. This enables rapid online computation and SH projection of the local spherical distribution of visibility information. Using a piecewise integration of the SH coefficients over the local regions, the global visibility within the volume is then computed. By representing the light sources using their SH projections, the integral over lighting, visibility, and isotropic phase functions can be efficiently computed during rendering. The utility of our method is demonstrated in several examples showing the generality and interactive performance of the approach.
Magic boards

Using a marker or chalkboard allows spontaneity during a presentation or discussion. However, this spontaneity comes at the cost of incorporating visual effects, such as those associated with a computer generated presentation, into the board based presentation. Our goal is to combine the spontaneity of board based presentations with the effects and benefits of a computer generated presentation. In this paper, we present Magic Boards, an approach for augmenting a video containing a presentation with marker or chalkboard. The system finds regions of related writing, through time, on the board. Each region is presented to the author as a single image. The author can then repaint the image with more detail or replace it with a new image or a video/animation. The system replaces the writing on the board with the images and videos provided by the author. The result is a new video in which the board has been augmented with material provided by the author, making it easier to read and understand.
Web site keywords: A methodology for improving gradually the web site text content

The construction of a web site is a great challenge that integrates different elements such as the hyperlink structure, colors, pictures, movies and textual contents. In the latter, the correct textual content can be the key to attracting users to visit the site. In fact, many users visit a web site by using a web search engine such as, Google or Yahoo! , and continue exploring the site if it contains the information that they are looking for. In this paper, a methodology to extract the main words in a static web site is proposed. Furthermore, one of the key elements in this methodology is to determine which pages in a web site can further attract the users attention when they are browsing the site. These words are called web site keywords and by using them in the site textual content, significant improvements, from the point of view of the user, can be achieved. A web user's browsing behaviour can be classified in two categories: those of amateurs and experienced. The former is a user with little or no experience in using web-based systems. Their browsing behaviour is normally erratic and it can take them a considerable amount of time to find what they are looking for. The latter is a user with a greater amount of experience with web-based systems whose behaviour is more controlled and purpose driven, and thus takes them less time in determining whether the site contains worthwhile information. What is important, regarding the experienced web users is that there is a correlation between the amount of time spent on a webpage during a session and the extent to which they are interested in the page content. By using this characteristic, a feature vector is created in relation to the time spent on each page during a user's session. The described vectors are the input for two clustering algorithms: SOFM and K-means, which enables the extraction of significant patterns about users with similar or identical browsing behaviour and content preferences. Then, these patterns form the basis in identification of the web site keywords. In order to validate the proposed methodology, web data originated in a complex static web site belonging to a Chilean bank was used. From the clusters identified, a set of web site keywords were identified and their utility was tested on a group of real users, thus illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.
Intonation of French songs: from text to tune

Classically, singing maintains a strict conformity (congruence) between the prosodic structure induced by the text and the musical and rhythmic structures defined by the staff. However, careful acoustical analysis of some contemporary French songs interpreted by renowned artists reveal various strategies to define a singer style which will to some extent incorporate melodic gestures pertaining to speech and not to music. In this study, we examine a few samples of these strategies, showing various cases between the total dominance of the musical structure over the speech prosodic structure to its total independence.
Tracking People on a Torus

We present a framework for monocular 3D kinematic pose tracking and viewpoint estimation of periodic and quasi-periodic human motions from an uncalibrated camera. The approach we introduce here is based on learning both the visual observation manifold and the kinematic manifold of the motion using a joint representation. We show that the visual manifold of the observed shape of a human performing a periodic motion, observed from different viewpoints, is topologically equivalent to a torus manifold. The approach we introduce here is based on the supervised learning of both the visual and kinematic manifolds. Instead of learning an embedding of the manifold, we learn the geometric deformation between an ideal manifold (conceptual equivalent topological structure) and a twisted version of the manifold (the data). Experimental results show accurate estimation of the 3D body posture and the viewpoint from a single uncalibrated camera.
Bias in the Brain: A Diffusion Model Analysis of Prior Probability and Potential Payoff

In perceptual decision-making, advance knowledge biases people toward choice alternatives that are more likely to be correct and more likely to be profitable. Accumulation-to-bound models provide two possible explanations for these effects: prior knowledge about the relative attractiveness of the alternatives at hand changes either the starting point of the decision process, or the rate of evidence accumulation. Here, we used model-based functional MRI to investigate whether these effects are similar for different types of prior knowledge, and whether there is a common neural substrate underlying bias in simple perceptual choices. We used two versions of the random-dot motion paradigm in which we manipulated bias by: (1) changing the prior likelihood of occurrence for two alternatives (“prior probability”) and (2) assigning a larger reward to one of two alternatives (“potential payoff”). Human subjects performed the task inside and outside a 3T MRI scanner. For each manipulation, bias was quantified by fitting the drift diffusion model to the behavioral data. Individual measurements of bias were then used in the imaging analyses to identify regions involved in biasing choice behavior. Behavioral results showed that subjects tended to make more and faster choices toward the alternative that was most probable or had the largest payoff. This effect was primarily due to a change in the starting point of the accumulation process. Imaging results showed that, at cue level, regions of the frontoparietal network are involved in changing the starting points in both manipulations, suggesting a common mechanism underlying the biasing effects of prior knowledge.
The Effects of Physical Activity Feedback on Behavior and Awareness in Employees: Study Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial

Purpose. The SenseWear Armband (SWA) is a multisensor activity monitor that can be used in daily life to assess an individual's physical activity level (PAL). The primary goal of this study was to analyze the impact of different types of feedback on the PAL of Flemish employees. Methods/Design. We recruited 320 sedentary employees (age, 41.0 ± 10.7 years; BMI, 26.2 ± 4.2 kg/m2) to participate in the 12-month study. Participants were randomized into one of four intervention groups after being measured for 7 days and nights by means of the SWA: (1) a minimal intervention group received no feedback (MIG, n = 56); (2) a pedometer group was provided only information on their daily step count (PG, n = 57); (3) a display group received feedback on calories burned, steps taken, and minutes of physical activity by means of the SWA display (DG, n = 57); (4) a coaching group also received the display and had weekly meetings with a Personal Coach (CoachG, n = 57). We hypothesize that participants receiving feedback (SG, DG, and CoachG) will have a greater increase in physical activity outcome variables compared to participants of the minimal intervention group.
A command governor approach to the voltage regulation problem in MV/LV networks with renewable generation units

In this paper a control strategy based on predictive control ideas is proposed for reconfiguring on-line the on-load tap changer (OLTC) voltage set-point in electrical Medium Voltage (MV) power grids in the presence of Distributed Generation (DG). The idea is that an active management of the set-point can be effective for maintaining relevant system variables within prescribed operative constraints in response to unexpected adverse conditions, e.g. changing loads. The voltage set-point reconfiguration problem is formulated as a constrained optimization problem by imposing that the voltages at certain nodes have, compatibly with all prescribed constraints and changed conditions, minimal deviations from their nominal values. Simulation results show that the proposed approach ensures, under certain conditions, feasible evolutions to the overall network.