Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Qualitative and Quantitative Architecture Characterisation of Porous Materials

Amethod for extracting accuratemicrostructural information fromheterogeneousmaterialsusing micro Computed Tomography (CT) is presented. A highly porous fibrous structure is used asa case study. The proposed method includes a filtering step to increase the resolution of the gray-scaleslices, a local segmentation step to accurately separate the fibres from the background and a thinningprocedure to simplify the structure and extract quantitative statistics such as the number of fibre jointsper fibre, fibre orientation and segment length (sections between joints) distributions.
Mechanistic behaviour under traffic load of a clayey silt modified with lime

The behaviour under traffic loads of a soil modified with lime was researched through a laboratorial mechanistic approach. A clayey silty soil from Cebollatí, eastern Uruguay, and a commercial calcic lime were used. Cyclic triaxial compression tests were carried out on the soil treated with different lime contents, curing periods and dry densities in order to study its resilient behaviour. The fatigue life was investigated through cyclic indirect diametrical tensile tests by varying the lime content and curing period. A model of resilient modulus as power function of the deviator stress was found, independent of the lime content and curing period and dependent on the compaction effort. The model is similar to that observed in the natural soil, which means that the treated soil behaves as modified material. Nevertheless, the material is susceptible to fatigue cracking. The fatigue life, expressed as the number of load cycles up to break, is an inverse power function of the initial tensile strain, being most sensitive to that parameter. It was found that the fatigue life can be better explained when expressed as function of the ratio between the initial tensile strain and the tensile stain at break.
Supporting job-level secure access to GPGPU resources on existing grid infrastructures

Grids provide secure, utility-like access to a wide variety of large-scale, distributed computational and storage resources. In particular, the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) and Open Science Grid (OSG) have excelled in processing vast workloads of independent jobs for the research community. Researchers demand increasingly faster processing speeds to solve increasingly larger and more complex problems. To meet this need, attention has shifted over the past decade away from single-core processing models towards the use of multi-core, many-core and massively parallel computational accelerators. The increasing availability and use of General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPUs) are an example of this. This paper addresses many of the challenges that exist in the integration of resources such as GPGPUs into Grid infrastructures. Specifically, solutions are proposed for discovering and describing GPGPU Grid resources, specifying multi-GPGPU job requirements, performing multi-GPGPU allocation to jobs, dynamically updating publicly-readable GPGPU usage information and enforcing GPGPU access control to prevent distinct jobs from inadvertently accessing the same device. The proposed solution is fully compatible with widely-used and accepted standards and middleware including the GLUE 2.0 schema and EGI Unified Middleware Distribution. A prototype implementation is also described.
Serglycin in Quiescent and Proliferating Primary Endothelial Cells

Proteoglycans are fundamental components of the endothelial barrier, but the functions of the proteoglycan serglycin in endothelium are less described. Our aim was to describe the roles of serglycin in processes relevant for endothelial dysfunction. Primary human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) were cultured in vitro and the expression of proteoglycans was investigated. Dense cell cultures representing the quiescent endothelium coating the vasculature was compared to sparse activated cell cultures, relevant for diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease. Secretion of 35S- proteoglycans increased in sparse cultures, and we showed that serglycin is a major component of the cell-density sensitive proteoglycan population. In contrast to the other proteoglycans, serglycin expression and secretion was higher in proliferating compared to quiescent HUVEC. RNAi silencing of serglycin inhibited proliferation and wound healing, and serglycin expression and secretion was augmented by hypoxia, mechanical strain and IL-1β induced inflammation. Notably, the secretion of the angiogenic chemokine CCL2 resulting from IL-1β activation, was increased in serglycin knockdown cells, while angiopoietin was not affected. Both serglycin and CCL2 were secreted predominantly to the apical side of polarized HUVEC, and serglycin and CCL2 co-localized both in perinuclear areas and in vesicles. These results suggest functions for serglycin in endothelial cells trough interactions with partner molecules, in biological processes with relevance for diabetic complications, cardiovascular disease and cancer development.
Short CCA-Secure Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption

We propose a technique of individually modifying an attribute-based encryption scheme (ABE) secure against chosen-plaintext attacks (CPA) into an ABE scheme secure against chosen- ciphertext attacks (CCA) in the standard model. We demonstrate the technique in the case of the Waters ciphertext-policy ABE (CP-ABE). Our technique is helpful when a Diffie-Hellman tuple to be verified is in the terminal group of a bilinear map. We utilize the Twin Diffie-Hellman Trapdoor Test of Cash, Kiltz and Shoup, and it results in expansion of secret key length and decryption cost of computation by a factor of four, whereas public key length, ciphertext length and encryption cost of computation remain almost the same. In the case that the size of attribute sets are small, those lengths and costs are smaller than those of the CP-ABE obtained via the generic transformation of Yamada et al. in PKC 2011.
Probabilistic unsupervised Chinese sentence compression

Research on sentence compression has been undergoing for many years in other languages, especially in English, but research on Chinese sentence compression is rarely found. In this paper, we describe an efficient probabilistic and syntactic approach to Chinese sentence compression. We introduce the classical noisy-channel approach into Chinese sentence compression and improve it in many ways. Since there is no parallel training corpus in Chinese, we use the unsupervised learning method. This paper also presents a novel bottom-up optimizing algorithm which considers both bigram and syntactic probabilities for generating candidate compressed sentences. We evaluate results against manual compressions and a simple baseline. The experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Development of numerical prediction of liquid film flows on packing elements in absorbers

Gas-liquid interfacial f lows, such as liquid film f lows, are encountered in many industrial processes including absorption and distillation. The present study focuses on the characteristics of the transition between film flow and rivulet flow as the liquid flow rate and the wall surface texture treatments are varied. A threedimensional gas-liquid interfacial f low simulation based on the Volume of Fluid (VOF) model has been developed. A hysteresis of the transition between the film flow and rivulet flow as the liquid flow rate changes has been discovered, which implies that the transition phenomenon depends primarily on the history of the change of the interfacial surface shape. Further study on the texture geometry shows that surface texture treatments can impede liquid channeling and increase the wetted area.
Broad HIV Epitope Specificity and Viral Inhibition Induced by Multigenic HIV-1 Adenovirus Subtype 35 Vector Vaccine in Healthy Uninfected Adults

A correlation between in vivo and in vitro virus control mediated by CD8+ T-cell populations has been demonstrated by CD8 T-cell-mediated inhibition of HIV-1 and SIV replication in vitro in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from infected humans and non-human primates (NHPs), respectively. Here, the breadth and specificity of T-cell responses induced following vaccination with replication-defective adenovirus serotype 35 (Ad35) vectors containing a fusion protein of Gag, reverse transcriptase (RT), Integrase (Int) and Nef (Ad35-GRIN) and Env (Ad35-ENV), derived from HIV-1 subtype A isolates, was assessed in 25 individuals. The vaccine induced responses to a median of 4 epitopes per vaccinee. We correlated the CD8 responses to conserved vs. variable regions with the ability to inhibit a panel of 7 HIV-1 isolates representing multiple clades in a virus inhibition assay (VIA). The results indicate that targeting immunodominant responses to highly conserved regions of the HIV-1 proteome may result in an increased ability to inhibit multiple clades of HIV-1 in vitro. The data further validate the use of the VIA to screen and select future HIV vaccine candidates. Moreover, our data suggest that future T cell-focused vaccine design should aim to induce immunodominant responses to highly conserved regions of the virus.
Dual-polarized spatial division multiple access transmission for 3D multiuser massive MIMO

The paper proposes a spatial division multiple access (SDMA) multiuser transmission scheme for massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems working in the 3D scenery where the BS is deployed with dual-polarized (DP) uniform linear arrays(ULA). Considering the physical features for dual-polarized arrays, we obtain the DP antenna beamspace channels by designating the beam transformation matrix, which can ensure the channel transmission correlation matrix is a diagonal matrix, and that the DP beamspace channels are orthogonal between each beam direction. Based on the maximum sum-rate principle and the orthogonality of the beam channels, the users in a cell are scheduled by greedy algorithm. The base station communicates with the scheduled users with orthogonal beams. Thus, the multiuser multiple input multiple output links turn into single user MIMO link. Simulation results demonstrate that the system throughput has been greatly improved compared with that under single polarized environment.
Efficient analysis of nano-photonic coupled resonator devices using coupled mode theory

Nanophotonic technologies may open up to new paths to optoelectronic integration. Coupled resonator photonic crystal devices may find important applications in both the linear and the non-linear regime. These devices are well suited for coupling of mode analysis, which usually requires much less computational resources compared Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) schemes. Coupled mode models also provide a useful physical insight in the device operation. In this paper, we present a general coupled mode theoretic model for the treatment of coupled cavity devices incorporating various phenomena such as dispersion, frequency variation of the coupling coefficients, non-adjacent cavity coupling and waveguide mode self coupling. The model is validated comparing its results against the FDTD method and the strength of the underlying assumptions is validated.
Traffic Model and Performance Analysis for Cellular Mobile Radio Telephone Systems with Prioritized and Nonprioritized Handoff Procedures - Version 2a

PREFACE This manuscript is an updated version of the frequently referenced VT-86 paper † by Hong and Rappaport, which is among the earliest published analytical treatments of teletraffic modeling for cellular systems. Much work has been done in this field since 1986, but it is not the intention of this manuscript to bring the reader up to date on the subject. Rather, the intention is to make available in one place a “clean” version of the paper which eliminates grammatical and typographical errors that appeared in the original publication and also to correct equation (34) of that paper which contains a mathematical error. The error in equation (34) potentially impacts the computation of several of the system performance curves that were presented. We have recalculated the performance curves using the corrected formula and have compared these to the original curves that were presented. In spite of the error, the original curves are only marginally different from the revised curves in the range of parameters that were presented. Nevertheless, to clarify the record, this manuscript contains a full set of revised figures, which has been calculated on the basis of the corrected formula. In preparing this revision, to the extent possible we have adhered to the wording and numbering of the original paper, except that we have also taken the opportunity to improve grammatical constructions in several places. This revised manuscript will be listed and maintained as a technical report of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences of the State University of New York and will be available upon request. In addition, an electronic version in Adobe’s pdf format will be posted on the Web at the following URL’s.
Comparison of ultrasound quality assurance phantom measurements from matched and mixed scanner‐transducer combinations

Our goal in this work was to compare the results of common phantom tests made using matched and mixed ultrasound (US) scanner‐transducer combinations. Sets of common US quality assurance (QA) measurements were made using matched US scanner‐transducer combinations (i.e., transducers purchased for use with a particular scanner), as well as unmatched (mixed) combinations. Measurements of vertical and horizontal distance accuracy, and depth of penetration were performed using three common transducer types. Means, standard deviations, and differences between the mean mix and match measurements divided by the standard deviation (match‐mix difference, or MMD), and two‐sided, paired t‐tests were computed for the groups of mixed and matched measurements. MMDs for vertical and horizontal distance accuracy test results were less than 0.87 in all cases, well below our threshold value of 2.0, which indicates that a significant difference exists. MMDs for the depth of penetration measurements were less than 1.50, again below the threshold value. These results suggest that all of the mixed and matched data sets were very similar. The more sensitive t‐tests indicate statistically significant differences in only 2 of the 18 pairs of data sets. In conclusion, this study suggests that QA measurements generated by mixed or matched scanner‐transducer combinations are very comparable. The ability to obtain QA phantom test data from mixed scanner‐transducer combinations reduces the time required for US QA testing. PACS number(s): 87.57. –s, 87.62. +n
Segment-based approach for subsequence searches in sequence databases

The sequence database is a set of data sequences, each of which is an ordered list of elements [1]. Sequences of stock prices, money exchange rates, temperature data, product sales data, and company growth rates are the typical examples of sequence databases [2, 8]. Similarity search is an operation that finds sequences or subsequences whose changing patterns are similar to that of a given query sequence [1, 2, 8]. Similarity search is of growing importance in many new applications such as data mining and data warehousing [6, 17]. There have been many research efforts [1, 7, 8, 10, 17] for efficient similarity searches in sequence databases using the Euclidean distance as a similarity measure. However, recent techniques [13–15, 18] tend to favor the time warping distance for its higher accuracy and wider applicability at the expense of high computation cost. Time warping is a transformation that allows any sequence element to replicate itself as many times as needed without extra costs [18]. For → example, two sequences X = 〈20, 21, 21, 20, 20, 23, 23, 23〉 → and Q = 〈20, 20, 21,20, 23〉 can be identically transformed into 〈20, 20, 21, 21, 20, 20, 23, 23, 23〉 by time warping. The time warping distance is defined as the smallest distance between two sequences transformed by time warping. While the Euclidean distance can be used only when two sequences compared are of the same length, the time warping distance can be applied to any two sequences of arbitrary lengths. Therefore, the time warping distance fits well with the databases where sequences are of different lengths. The time warping distance can be applied to both whole sequence and subsequence searches. Let us first consider the
Using morpheme and syllable based sub-words for polish LVCSR

Polish is a synthetic language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. It makes use of a high degree of inflection leading to high out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rates, and high Language Model (LM) perplexities. This poses a challenge for Large Vocabulary and Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) systems. Here, the use of morpheme and syllable based units is investigated for building sub-lexical LMs. A different type of sub-lexical units is proposed based on combining morphemic or syllabic units with corresponding pronunciations. Thereby, a set of grapheme-phoneme pairs called graphones are used for building LMs. A relative reduction of 3.5% in Word Error Rate (WER) is obtained with respect to a traditional system based on full-words.
Software defined network traffic measurement: Current trends and challenges

Next generation networks such as Software Defined Networks (SDN) must support the integration of new paradigms of service offerings such as virtual cloud computing, big data applications, data centers services, and rich multimedia content. Operators of next generation SDNs are responsible for configuring policies that employ traffic monitoring tools and measurement mechanisms to detect and react to a wide range of network events and applications. In this article, we take a look at traffic measurement methods in SDNs, cover their strengths and weaknesses, point to open issues, and remaining future challenges.
On Learning Perceptrons with Binary Weights

We present an algorithm that PAC learns any perceptron with binary weights and arbitrary threshold under the family of product distributions. The sample complexity of this algorithm is of O[(n/)4 ln(n/)] and its running time increases only linearly with the number of training examples. The algorithm does not try to find an hypothesis that agrees with all of the training examples; rather, it constructs a binary perceptron based on various probabilistic estimates obtained from the training examples. We show that, under the restricted case of the uniform distribution and zero threshold, the algorithm reduces to the well known clipped Hebb rule. We calculate exactly the average generalization rate (i.e., the learning curve) of the algorithm, under the uniform distribution, in the limit of an infinite number of dimensions. We find that the error rate decreases exponentially as a function of the number of training examples. Hence, the average case analysis gives a sample complexity of O[n ln(1/)], a large improvement over the PAC learning analysis. The analytical expression of the learning curve is in excellent agreement with the extensive numerical simulations. In addition, the algorithm is very robust with respect to classification noise.
Difficult Diagnoses: Family Caregivers’ Experiences During and Following the Diagnostic Process for Dementia

Diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) and adequately connecting families with information and supportive services continue to be challenging processes. Definitive diagnoses can take months and there is often little in place to systematically link families with community organizations. In this brief descriptive study, the researchers examined family caregivers’ (N = 106) experiences with these processes. While specialists and sophisticated tests were often used, 58% of caregivers reported that a definitive diagnosis still took 3 months or longer, with 12% waiting more than 1 year. Caregivers also indicated that they were not provided with adequate information about the disease or about community resources both at the time of diagnosis and 1-year following the diagnosis. These findings suggest that there is ample opportunity to improve services offered to families affected by ADRD and that additional training, coordination, and cooperation may enhance our ability to help during and following the diagnosis.
Dietary carbohydrates and denitrification in recirculating aquaculture systems

Due to overfishing of global fish stocks and increasing fish meal prices, plant ingredients are being increasingly used as an alternative source of protein in fish feeds. However, the inclusion of unpurified plant ingredients will also increase the content of fibers in feeds. Fibers are nearly indigestible and will therefore increase solid waste production in aquaculture. This solid waste can be used to as a carbon source for denitrification to control nitrate levels in recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS), thereby reducing both solid and dissolved waste production. Additionally, fibers can change the recovery characteristics and lower the degradability of fecal waste. Therefore, this study investigates how changes in the dietary carbohydrate composition can affect waste production, system performance and denitrification in RAS. Furthermore, ultrasound treatment (to decrease particle size in fecal waste) and enzymatic conditioning (to increase fiber degradability) were tested as possible means to increase the bioavailability of carbon in fecal waste for denitrification. Comparing a high fiber (HNSP) and low fiber (LNSP) diet in RAS stocked with rainbow trout confirmed that the fibers in the HNSP diet increase fecal waste production. Although the HNSP diet produced more fecal waste than the LNSP diet, both diets produced the same amount of biodegradable fecal carbon. Since feces removal was higher in RAS using the HNSP diet, the load of degradable organic matter on the biofilters was lower with the HNSP diet than with the LNSP diet. Furthermore, fecal waste produced with the HNSP diet contained larger particles than feces of the LNSP diet, which could also improve the recovery of fecal waste with microscreens. Feces produced with the HNSP diet were also less degradable than feces produced with the LNSP diet. By using fecal waste as an internal carbon source for denitrification, solid and dissolved waste emissions from RAS could be reduced by ~50% for the HNSP diet. However, only approximately half of the supplied cellulose and hemicellulose were degraded in the denitrification reactors, whereas lignin was not degraded at all. Thus, the overall degradability of organic carbon in fecal waste was limited by fibers as hemicellulose, cellulose and lignin. Ultrasound and enzymatic conditioning did not sufficiently increase the degradability of fecal waste. Nonetheless, fibers originating from unpurified plant ingredients may also have beneficial effects on RAS performance by increasing fecal recovery. A more selective choice of feed ingredients could be used to increase the recovery and degradability of fecal waste in RAS.