Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A least resistance path to the analysis of unstructured overlay networks

Unstructured overlay networks for peer-to-peer applications combined with stochastic algorithms for interest-based clustering and resource location are attractive due to low-maintenance costs and inherent fault-tolerance properties. Moreover, there is a relatively large volume of experimental evidence that these methods are efficiency-wise a good alternative to structured methods, which require more sophisticated algorithms for maintenance and fault-tolerance. Specifically in the case of interest-based clustering, it has been recently suggested that a resource location strategy based on non-trivial randomwalks can be used to construct an overlay network with scale-free and clustering properties, which can be navigated efficiently. However, currently there is a very limited selection of appropriate tools to use in evaluating performance and other properties of such non-trivial methods. We present a framework for analyzing unstructured overlays and stochastic algorithms on them, connecting the corresponding graphs, random walks and resistor networks by using elementary linear algebra calculations. We express the framework in a way that can be used in various contexts regarding the overlay network and statistical methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate its usage by studying non-trivial random walks in overlays with power-law node degree distribution; in particular we address a broad set of topics of interest for peer-to-peer overlays, including content-replication efficiency, fault-tolerance, query-replication efficiency and resource constraint handling.
Virtual Prototyping and Distributed Control for Solar Array with Distributed Multilevel Inverter

In this paper, we present the virtual prototyping of a solar array with a grid-tie implemented as a distributed inverter and controlled using distributed algorithms. Due to the distributed control and inherent redundancy in the array composed of many panels and inverter modules, the virtual prototype exhibits fault-tolerance capabilities. The distributed identifier algorithm allows the system to keep track of the number of operating panels to appropriately regulate the DC voltage output of the panels using buck-boost converters, and determine appropriate switching times for H-bridges in the grid-tie. We evaluate the distributed inverter, its control strategy, and fault-tolerance through simulation in Simulink/Stateflow. Our virtual prototyping framework allows for generating arrays and grid-ties consisting of many panels, and we evaluate arrays of five to dozens of panels. Our analysis suggests the achievable total harmonic distortion (THD) of the system may allow for operating the array in spite of failures of the power electronics, control software, and other subcomponents.
Multi-view Description of Real-Time Systems- Architecture

Real-time embedded systems should benefit from component-based software engineering to handle complexity and deal with dependability. In these systems, applications should not only be logically correct but also behave within time windows. However, in the current component based software engineering approaches, a few of component models handles time properties in a manner that allows efficient analysis and checking at the architectural level. In this paper, we present a meta-model for component-based software description that integrates timing issues. To achieve a complete functional model of software components, our meta-model focuses on four functional aspects: interface, static behavior, dynamic behavior, and interaction protocol. With each aspect we have explicitly associated a time model. Such a time model can be used to check a component’s design against certain properties and to compute the timing properties of component assemblies. Keywords—Real-time systems, Software architecture, software component, dependability, time properties, ADL, metamodeling.
Certification of Composite-Metal Hybrid Structures

The primary goal in a damage-tolerance certification program is to avoid catastrophic failure due to fatigue, corrosion, or accidental damage throughout the operational life of the aircraft. The damage-tolerance philosophy is well established for metallic airframes, where proven methods (structural analysis and inspection procedures) and supporting databases exist to detect damage and predict crack growth and residual strength. Damage growth mechanics and load spectra for composite and metal structures have significant differences that make the certification of composite-metal hybrid structures challenging, costly and time consuming. Several test substantiation approaches such as two separate full -scale test articles–one focusing metal certification and the other focusing composites certification, or address concerns related to composite components at lower level of building-blocks of testing (i.e., pre-production article) and focus the certification of metallic components in full-scale level can be used for certification of hybrid structures. Often composite structural certification uses load-enhancement factor(s) to reduce the test duration. In certain cases, this causes the enhanced load spectrum to have loads beyond the clipping level of metal structural details. A technique called a multi-LEF is introduced so that different combinations of life-load factors can be used for different parts of the spectrum so that the high loads (that potentially can go beyond clipping level after LEF application) can have a higher life factor and a lower or no LEF. Second concept called Load-Life Shift (LLS) is introduced so that a single test article can be used to substantiate both metal and composites as a two-phase certification methodology with different LEFs, i.e., first phase with LEF=1 for metal and second phase LEF>1 for composite to reduce the required test duration. The LLS approach provides a mechanism to obtain credit for the loads applied during first phase (focusing metal) so that the composite certification phase can be reduced. The application of LLS approach requires the use of differed spectrum in order to prevent metal crack growth retardation. A series of sequencing studies were employed to understand the implications of spectrum modifications to overall damage growth mechanism for both composite and metallic structure. The goal of the program is to provide an efficient certification approach that weighs both the economic aspects of certification and the time frame required for certification testing, while ensuring that safety is the key priority.
Syntax encapsulated phrase model for statistical machine translation

In the past few years, much attention has been paid on extending phrase-based statistical machine translation with syntactic structures. In this paper we introduce a novel syntax encapsulated phrase(SEP) model, in which treebank tag sequences are employed to decorate the bilingual phrase pairs. We use tag sequences, instead of phrase pairs, to train the lexicalized reordering model. Since the number of treebank tags is much smaller than the number of words, the tag sequence based reordering model is smaller and more accurate than the phrase based reordering model. Experiments were carried out on four types of models: the phrase model, the hierarchical phrase model, the POS tag encapsulated phrase(PTEP) model and the syntactic tag encapsulated phrase(STEP) model. The STEP model obtained higher BLEU-4 score than other models on NIST 2005 MT task.
Tetracycline Resistance and Presence of Tetracycline Resistance Determinants tet(V) and tap in Rapidly Growing Mycobacteria from Agricultural Soils and Clinical Isolates

Rapidly growing mycobacteria (RGM) inhabit soil and water but certain strains represent a health risk for human and animals. Both clinical and soil RGM may be under selection pressure for resistance to tetracycline (TET) antibiotics, since tetracyclines are administrated to humans and farm animals, and TET residues enter soil through manuring; however, resistance to TET and the presence of TET-resistance genes have been assessed only in clinical isolates. We were therefore interested in comparing soil and clinical RGM in terms of TET resistance and the presence of TET-resistance genes. We used 44 RGM from grasslands with different exposure to animal manure, and 38 clinical RGM from Czech hospitals. There was no difference between the clinical and soil isolates in TET resistance, with >50% resistant isolates in both groups. otr(A), otr(B), tet(K), tet(L) or tet(M) were not detected in any soil or clinical isolate. In contrast, most isolates harbored tet(V) and tap, both encoding mycobacterial efflux pumps, including species where these genes have never been evidenced before. The phylogeny of tet(V) correlated with isolates’ BOX-PCR profiles, suggesting that this gene evolved along with mycobacterial genomes as a part of the intrinsic resistome. In certain cases, tet(V) and/or tap were found in TET-sensitive isolates, or inversely, were not found in resistant strains. Concluding, intrinsic efflux pumps may be more important for TET resistance than horizontally transferred genes in both soil and clinical RGM. Their simple presence, however, does not attest to resistance, and therefore their diversity, function and expression merit further research.
Verification and validation in software product line engineering

Verification and Validation (V&V) is currently performed during application development for many systems, especially safety-critical and mission-critical systems. However, the V&V process has been limited to single system development. This dissertation describes the extension of V&V from an individual application system to a product line of systems that are developed within an architecture-based software engineering environment. In traditional V&V, the system provides the context under which the software will be evaluated, and V&V activities occur during all phases of the system development lifecycle. The transition to a product line approach to development removes the individual system as the context for evaluation, and introduces activities that are not directly related to a specific system. This dissertation presents an approach to V&V of software product lines that uses the domain model and the domain architecture as the context for evaluation, and enables V&V to be performed throughout the modified lifecycle introduced by domain engineering. This dissertation presents three advances that assist in the adaptation of V&V from single application systems to a product line of systems. The first is a framework for performing V&V that includes the activities of traditional application-level V&V, and extends these activities into domain engineering and into the transition between domain engineering and application engineering. The second is a detailed method to extend the crucial V&V activity of criticality analysis from single system development to a product line of systems. The third advance is an approach to enable formal reasoning, which is needed for high assurance systems, on systems that are based on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products.
A new mechanism for mtDNA pathogenesis: impairment of post-transcriptional maturation leads to severe depletion of mitochondrial tRNASer(UCN) caused by T7512C and G7497A point mutations

We have studied the consequences of two homoplasmic, pathogenic point mutations (T7512C and G7497A) in the tRNASer(UCN) gene of mitochondrial (mt) DNA using osteosarcoma cybrids. We identified a severe reduction of tRNASer(UCN) to levels below 10% of controls for both mutations, resulting in a 40% reduction in mitochondrial protein synthesis rate and in a respiratory chain deficiency resembling that in the patients muscle. Aminoacylation was apparently unaffected. On non-denaturating northern blots we detected an altered electrophoretic mobility for G7497A containing tRNA molecules suggesting a structural impact of this mutation, which was confirmed by structural probing. By comparing in vitro transcribed molecules with native RNA in such gels, we also identified tRNASer(UCN) being present in two isoforms in vivo, probably corresponding to the nascent, unmodified transcripts co-migrating with the in vitro transcripts and a second, faster moving isoform corresponding to the mature tRNA. In cybrids containing either mutations the unmodified isoforms were severely reduced. We hypothesize that both mutations lead to an impairment of post-transcriptional modification processes, ultimately leading to a preponderance of degradation by nucleases over maturation by modifying enzymes, resulting in severely reduced tRNASer(UCN) steady state levels. We infer that an increased degradation rate, caused by disturbance of tRNA maturation and, in the case of the G7497A mutant, alteration of tRNA structure, is a new pathogenic mechanism of mt tRNA point mutations.
SEISMIC ASSESSMENT OF UNREINFORCED MASONRY WALLS BASED ON FEM MICRO MODELS

Seismic rehabilitation of the existing un-reinforced masonry buildings is an important and timely issue in the field of earthquake engineering community. This issue has been of interest in Iran since many un-reinforced masonry schools are located in the moderate to high active seismic regions. One of the common strategies, for the rehabilitation of un-reinforced masonry walls, is one-side shotcrete method. This rehabilitation method has been comprehensively investigated in this paper by means of the Finite Element Method (FEM) micro models i.e. modelling brick and mortar. A set of different walls was taken into consideration with various aspect ratios, mortar quality, wall thickness and gravity load conditions. The OpenSees platform was utilized in order to build the micro models. The increase in the strength of the rehabilitated walls is compared with the strength of the unrehabilitated walls and the results are summarized for the engineering purposes. This strength increase is somehow significant in the majority of the wall cases.
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Formal hardware verification ranges from proving that two co mbinational circuits compute the same functions to the much more ambitious task of proving tha t a sequential circuit obeys some abstract property expressed in temporal logic. In tracing t he history of work in this area, we find a few efforts in the 1970s and 1980s, with a big increase in verification capabilities the late 1980s up through today. The advent of efficient Boolean infer ence methods, starting with Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) and more recently with efficient Bo olean satisfiability (SAT) checkers has provided the enabling technology for these advances. 1. Introdu tion Functional hardware verification involves determining whe ther or not a logic design matches a specification of its intended behavior. Mos t c mmonly, the design consists of a combinational or sequential logic gate circuit (possibly derived from an RTL description), and so the analysis can be per formed purely at the Boolean level. Furthermore, the circuit is generally ssumed to be either fully combinational or fully synchronous, and hence the fun ctionality can be verified without any consideration of the circuit timing. In many applications, the specification is also given as a log ic circuit. This form of verification is referred to as equivalence checking . For example, a designer might want to verify that some optimizations to a netl ist did not alter its functionality. Even when verifying that a gate-level netli st implements a specification given in a hardware description language such as Ver ilog or VHDL, the first step is typically to expand the HDL description into gat e-level form and then use this as the specification. Equivalence checking can be further categorized as combinationalor sequential. With combinational equivalence checking, the two circuit s are acyclic, gate-level circuits, and the task is to determine whether th y compute the same 1
Feed-out losses of whole-crop cereal silage

The utilisation of whole-crop cereal silage, when fed on pasture, is an unknown factor when assessing the economics of whole-crop cereal silage in dairy farming systems. This study aimed to document the utilisation of whole-crop cereal silage and compare it to the utilisation of pasture silage fed under the same conditions. Data was collected from nine whole-crop cereal and two pasture silage feeding events during the autumn and spring of 2004. The concentration of silage fed in spring (3.04 kg (dry matter) DM/m) was lower (P<0.001) than that fed in autumn (4.59 kg DM/m). Residual silage left after feeding (kg/m fed) was not significantly affected by season or silage type. When expressed as a percentage of that fed, utilisation was lower for whole-crop cereal silage (80.6%) than for pasture silage (90.4%; P<0.032). However, when silage utilisation (g/kg DM fed) and the amount fed (kg DM) were compared, the utilisation of the silage was positively related to the amount fed (r = 0.44; P<0.001) with utilisation of over 90% being achieved when more than 4 kg DM/m was fed (measured in 38% of the feeding events).
Symmetry-breaking thermally induced collapse of dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates

We investigate a Bose-Einstein condensate with additional long-range dipolar interaction in a cylindrically symmetric trap within a variational framework. Compared to the ground state of this system, little attention has as yet been payed to its unstable excited states. For thermal excitations, however, the latter is of great interest, because it forms the ``activated complex'' that mediates the collapse of the condensate. For a certain value of the $s$-wave scatting length our investigations reveal a bifurcation in the transition state, leading to the emergence of two additional and symmetry-breaking excited states. Because these are of lower energy than their symmetric counterpart, we predict the occurrence of a symmetry-breaking thermally induced collapse of dipolar condensates. We show that its occurrence crucially depends on the trap geometry and calculate the thermal decay rates of the system within leading-order transition state theory with the help of a uniform rate formula near the rank-2 saddle which allows the bifurcation to be smoothly passed.
Directed correspondence search: Finding feature correspondences in images using the Harmony Search algorithm

A robot's ability to correctly recognise landmarks as ones previously seen is a key feature in visual navigation algorithms. Each newly captured scene contains multiple visual features with an unknown number of new features that have never been observed and old features that need to be correctly recognised and identified. This challenge of correctly identifying common features between different frames is also known as the visual correspondence problem. In this article a new algorithm is presented that attempts to solve this problem by using an adapted version of the Harmony Search algorithm. All features are assumed to be static and consistency in the predicted camera movement is taken into account to remove outliers. Initial results show rapid convergence early in the optimisation process. This suggests that DCS could be effectively used as a rapid way of initialising other algorithms like RANSAC.
Smart glove

Combat sports are competitive sports where two fighters fight against each other abiding by certain rules of engagement. Boxing and mixed martial are the most popular and fastest growing combat sports and have become a major source of entertainment for fans and the general public. There are many tools employed that help fighters learn the sports punching and kicking mechanics, defensive and offensive attacks and drills to improve endurance, but rarely do we see technology gadgets employed to assist fighters during this learning process. The purpose of this project is to develop a training glove for fighters that will help them master defense and punching mechanics which in turn will help them improve their endurance. The performance metric of the fighter revolves around three key factors: punch count, punch force and guard level monitoring. The system will keep count of the number of punches thrown during a training session as the fighter hits the bag, measure the punching force and monitor the fighters guard level. This will greatly improve the fighter's defense mechanics because the system will inform the fighter when his hands are down, reminding them that they are making a mistake. This will force the fighter keep his hands up at an appropriate height and angle that is appropriate for defense. The total number of punches and the force count will be saved so that the fighter can compare current and previous training sessions. Graphs such as punch output vs. time and force output vs. time will allow the fighter, and his coach, to see how his punch count and punching power has increased over time. The system will encompass a hardware component and a software component to process all the data provided by the hardware. The hardware component involves the use of accelerometers, force sensors, a microprocessor and transceivers. The software component of the project involves writing software for a mobile device.
The Cost of a WARC: Analyzing Web Archives in the Cloud

The value of web archives to support scholarship in the humanities and social sciences is slowly being realized by the increasing availability of scalable tools and platforms. The cost of providing scholarly access is a critical component of developing a long-term sustainability strategy. This paper attempts to answer a straightforward question: How much does it cost to analyze web archives in the cloud? To make this question more concrete, we examine the creation of three derivatives (extraction of collection statistics, full text, and the webgraph) that serve as the starting points of many scholarly inquiries. Our analysis shows that these typical derivatives costs around US$7 per TB using our Archives Unleashed Toolkit. We describe in detail the methodology and assumptions made to arrive at this figure. To our knowledge, we are the first to quantify the economics of scholarly access to web archives, and we believe that this information is valuable for service planning by archives, libraries, and other institutions.
Virtual object manipulation using a mobile phone

Augmented Reality (AR) on mobile phones has reached a level of maturity where it can be used as a tool for 3D object manipulation. In this paper we look at user interface issues where an AR enabled mobile phone acts as an interaction device. We discuss how traditional 3D manipulation techniques apply to this new platform. The high tangibility of the device and its button interface makes it interesting to compare manipulation techniques. We describe AR manipulation techniques we have implemented on a mobile phone and present a small pilot study evaluating these methods.
CHANGE MECHANISM ANALYSIS AND INTEGRATION CHANGE DETECTION METHOD ON SAR IMAGES

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image change detection is a very complex problem like SAR imaging mechanism. Every change detection method has its advantage and disadvantage, and there are no optimal change detection approaches. If general means is directly applied to SAR image change detection, the results are usual no ideal. Sometimes, for a pair of multitemporal SAR images, different detection methods can obtain different detected results; what’s more, the results are contrary. In order to improve SAR image change detection precision, this paper detailedly studies SAR image change mechanism, makes classifications to SAR image change types, and proposes a novel all texture features fusion change detection method and an integration SAR image change detection algorithm. Finally, the airborne SAR image data of Canadian Convair-580 C/X-SAR tests the methods, and experimental results indicate that the presented methods are feasible.