Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sensory feedback attitude control for a grasped object by a multi-fingered hand-arm system

This paper proposes a novel method for stable grasping and attitude regulation of an object using a multi-fingered hand-arm system. The proposed method is based on a simple sensory-feedback control using the information of an object attitude, and any mathematically complicated computation, such as calculation of inverse dynamics and kinematics, are not required. In addition, the stability of the overall system applied this method is verified. Firstly, nonholonomic rolling constraints between a multi-fingered hand-arm system and an object are formulated. Then, a novel control method for stable grasping and attitude regulation of the grasped object is proposed. It is assumed that information of the attitude of the object is available in real time by external sensors, such as vision, force, tactile sensors, and so on. Next, the stability of the overall system is verified by analyzing the closed-loop dynamics. Finally, it is demonstrated through numerical simulations that our proposed method enables to grasp the object with arbitrary shape, and regulate the attitude of the object stably.
Nanomaterial-based stretchable and transparent electrodes

ABSTRACT The recent advent of unprecedented wearable applications engendered the need for stretchable electronics, which can be realized by making the individual components stretchable. The transparent conducting electrode is one of the most important components of optoelectronic devices. Therefore, developing transparent electrodes in a stretchable form is essential for the implementation of stretchable electronics. In this paper, the recent efforts in the development of stretchable and transparent electrodes, particularly those using nanomaterials such as metal nanowires, metal nanofibers, and carbon nanotubes are introduced.
A COMBINED APPROACH FOR ESTIMATING A FEATURE-DOMAIN REVERBERATION MODEL IN NON-DIFFUSE ENVIRONMENTS

A combined approach for estimating a feature-domain reverberation model suitable for the robust distant-talking automatic speech recognition concept REMOS (REverberation MOdeling for Speech recognition) [1] is proposed. Based on a few calibration utterances recorded in the target environment, the combined approach employs ML estimation and blind estimation of the reverberation time to determine a two-slope reverberation model. Since measurements of room impulse responses become unnecessary, the effort for training is greatly reduced compared to [1] and compared to training HMMs on artificially reverberated data. Connected digit recognition experiments show that the proposed reverberation models in connection with the REMOS concept significantly outperform HMM-based recognizers trained on reverberant data.
Folic Acid Supplementation Mitigates Alzheimer's Disease by Reducing Inflammation: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Background/Aims. Low serum folate levels can alter inflammatory reactions. Both phenomena have been linked to Alzheimer's disease (AD), but the effect of folic acid on AD itself is unclear. We quantified folate supplementation's effect on inflammation and cognitive function in patients with AD over the course of 6 months. Methods. Patients newly diagnosed with AD (age > 60 years; n = 121; mild to severe; international criteria) and being treated with donepezil were randomly assigned into two groups with (intervention group) or without (control group) supplemental treatment with folic acid (1.25 mg/d) for 6 months. The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) was administered to all patients at baseline and follow-up, and blood samples were taken before and after treatment. We quantified serum folate, amyloid beta (Aβ), interleukin-6 (IL-6), tumor necrosis factor α (TNFα), plasma homocysteine (Hcy), S-adenosylmethionine (SAM), S-adenosylhomocysteine (SAH), and the mRNA levels of presenilin (PS), IL-6, and TNFα in leukocytes. Data were analyzed using a repeated-measures mixed model. Results. The mean MMSE was slightly increased in the intervention group compared to that in the control group (P < 0.05). Posttreatment, plasma SAM and SAM/SAH levels were significantly higher (P < 0.05), while Aβ 40, PS1-mRNA, and TNFα-mRNA levels were lower in the intervention group than in the control group (P < 0.05). The Aβ 42/Aβ 40 ratio was also higher in the intervention group (P < 0.05). Conclusions. Folic acid is beneficial in patients with AD. Inflammation may play an important role in the interaction between folic acid and AD. This trial is registered with clinical trial registration number ChiCTR-TRC-13003246.
3D photonic crystals for ultra-light trapping in solar cells

We suggest three-dimensional photonic crystals as a direction selective filter for ultra-light trapping in solar cells. 3D photonic crystals allow tailoring of the photonic stop gap in space and energy. We analyzed different photonic crystal structures concerning their spectral and direction selective properties and defined two figures of merit for our application: a quality factor and a transmission coefficient. By analyzing different experimentally feasible 3D photonic crystals, we found that the inverted opal has the best properties. We verified the direction selective properties of the inverted opal in the microwave spectral range and found a very good agreement between experiment and simulation.
Improved Automatic Skin Detection in Color Images

Mahalanobis distance has already proved its strength in hu- man skin detection using a set of skin values. We present this work that uses automatic skin detection after an initial camera calibration. The calibration is done by human sampling from test individuals. A scaling is performed on the work data, before applying the Mahalanobis distance that ensures better results than previous works. We use the TSL color space also used successfully by others authors, where undesired effects are reduced and the skin distribution fits better in a Gaussian model than in others color spaces. Also, using an initial filter, normally large areas of easily distinct non skin pixels, are eliminated from further processing. Analyzing and grouping the resulting elements from the discriminator, improves the ratio of correct detection and reduce the small non skin ar- eas present in a common complex image background, including Asiatic, Caucasian, African and interracial descent persons. Also this method is not restricted to orientation, size or grouping candidates. The present work is a first step in a approach for human face detection in color images, but not limited in any way to this goal.
Response of closed Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer sections under combined bending and torsion

Structural response under combined bending (M) and torsion (T) of pultruded Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer composite hollow circular and square sections has been investigated, using unique experimental facility for combined loads. Prior to determining combined response, bending and torsional strengths at failure were found separately for all test sections. To evaluate structural response, strain gages were attached at 6 to 12 critical locations of each specimen. For each cross-section, three samples were tested under combined load combinations, i.e. (0.25 Mmax, TFailure), (0.50 Mmax, TFailure) and (0.75 Mmax, TFailure). The results have been presented as M vs ɛ, T vs θ, and M / M max vsT / T max . Local bending effect are found to be significant under point loads, even though they are distributed over a small area. The interactive plots exhibited three distinct zones, i.e. bending moment dominated zone, torque dominated zone, and transition zone. The failure modes revealed a distinct pattern with crack initiation sites and propagation directions. The potential energy method of bent and twisted specimens of isotropic thin-walled sections has been extended to thin-walled orthotropic members. Finite element analyses using ANSYS-SHELL181 was carried out to develop torsion-bending interaction response and compare with experimental data. Principal strain to failure predictions under combined loads, except under pure bending, resulted in a constant strain to failure for a given fiber architecture.
EVALUATION OF GLYCAN PROFILES OF TAMM-HORSFALL GLYCOPROTEIN AND UROMODULIN

Uromodulin is well-known to be the more potent immunosuppressive glycoprotein isolated from pregnant women urine, compared to its counterpart, Tamm-Horsfall glycoprotein (THP) isolated from non-pregnant women/male urine. However, structural profiles of these glycoproteins were controversial until today. Hence, this paper aims to identify the pregnancy associated glycosylation changes of THP and uromodulin. THP and uromodulin isolated with diatomaceous earth filtration were subjected for structural characterization using MALDI-TOF tandem mass spectrometry (MS) analyses. Both THP and uromodulin expressed high-mannose and complex-type N-glycan carrying Sda, LacNAc, LacdiNAc sequence as the capping antennae. In comparison to THP, uromodulin expressed higher abundance of LacdiNAc sequence and heavily sialylated complex type Nglycans, where up to four sialic acid residues were observed in its tetra-antennary glycans. Both THP and uromodulin expressed Core 1 and Core 2 O-glycans. These findings suggested that the higher level of LacdiNAc sequence and sialylation in uromodulin might facilitate its lymphocyte suppressive response more effectively than that of THP.
A Hybrid Non-Ribosomal Peptide/Polyketide Synthetase Containing Fatty-Acyl Ligase (FAAL) Synthesizes the β-Amino Fatty Acid Lipopeptides Puwainaphycins in the Cyanobacterium Cylindrospermum alatosporum

A putative operon encoding the biosynthetic pathway for the cytotoxic cyanobacterial lipopeptides puwainphycins was identified in Cylindrospermum alatosporum. Bioinformatics analysis enabled sequential prediction of puwainaphycin biosynthesis; this process is initiated by the activation of a fatty acid residue via fatty acyl-AMP ligase and continued by a multidomain non-ribosomal peptide synthetase/polyketide synthetase. High-resolution mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy measurements proved the production of puwainaphycin F/G congeners differing in FA chain length formed by either 3-amino-2-hydroxy-4-methyl dodecanoic acid (4-methyl-Ahdoa) or 3-amino-2-hydroxy-4-methyl tetradecanoic acid (4-methyl-Ahtea). Because only one puwainaphycin operon was recovered in the genome, we suggest that the fatty acyl-AMP ligase and one of the amino acid adenylation domains (Asn/Gln) show extended substrate specificity. Our results provide the first insight into the biosynthesis of frequently occurring β-amino fatty acid lipopeptides in cyanobacteria, which may facilitate analytical assessment and development of monitoring tools for cytotoxic cyanobacterial lipopeptides.
Dental morphology and mechanical efficiency during development in a hard object feeding primate (Cercoebus atys)

Teeth play a prominent role in food acquisition and processing by providing the working surfaces to initiate and propagate fracture. Variation in the shape and size of teeth has therefore naturally been associated with various dietary adaptations. However, few studies have actually tested the functional consequences of tooth form on food breakdown. The work presented in this thesis uses a combination of shape quantification and physical testing to further our understanding of the relationship between dental occlusal morphology and food breakdown in the dietary specialisation hard object feeding. The sooty mangabey, Cercocebus atys, is a primate that specialises in hard object feeding throughout its life, and so presents an interesting study group that will be of focus in this thesis. Individual cusps which vary in angle and bluntness performed differently (in terms of force, energy, duration and fragmentation) during food breakdown physical testing. Therefore trade-offs in dental occlusal morphology may have to occur when optimising for more than one performance criteria. This may in part explain the diversity of tooth form observed in hard object feeders. The morphology of C. atys molars changes considerably with age due to wear, with high sharp cusps in the juveniles wearing down to produce dentine pools surrounded by an enamel ridge in older individuals. Given the considerable change in dental occlusal morphology due to wear, performance is minimally effected in hard hollow object feeding, this is particularly relevant for the dietary ecology of C. atys suggesting functional equivalence in the tooth as it wears. This study reveals a complex relationship between dental occlusal morphology and dietary ecology.
Hepatitis C Virus: A Review of Treatment Guidelines, Cost-effectiveness, and Access to Therapy

Abstract Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection remains a significant medical concern in the United States and around the world. It is still one of the leading causes of chronic liver disease, and, for more than 20 years, there has been little progress in the treatment of HCV infection. The advent of direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) initiated the era of high efficacy and well-tolerated medications with high cure rates. The efficacy of these medications has prompted many professional societies around the world to update their treatment guidelines to include DAAs as first-line treatment. Guidelines by the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease/Infectious Disease Society of America, World Health Organization, Asian-Pacific Association for the Study of Liver and the European Association for the Study of Liver have all incorporated DAAs into their treatment guidelines. Despite the promising data supporting these medications, however, their cost represents a limiting factor to their use, even though studies have shown DAAs to be cost-effective. In addition to the expense of these medications and limited resources, there are many barriers preventing patients from receiving this potentially life-saving treatment. In order to overcome these barriers, these issues need to be recognized and addressed.
A formal analysis of requirements-based testing

The aim of requirements-based testing is to generate test cases from a set of requirements for a given system or piece of software. In this paper we propose a formal semantics for the generation of test cases from requirements by revising and extending the results presented in previous works (e.g.: [21, 20, 13]). We give a syntactic characterisation of our method, defined inductively over the syntax of LTL formulae, and prove that this characterisation is sound and complete, given some restrictions on the formulae that can be used to encode requirements. We provide various examples to show the applicability of our approach.
Multi-Period Mean-Variance Portfolio Optimization With High-Order Coupled Asset Dynamics

This paper is concerned with a multi-period portfolio management problem over a finite horizon. The objective is to seek the optimal investment policy series which maximizes the weighted sum of a linear combination of the expected return and the variance of portfolio over all the investment periods. This formulation enables the investor to adjust weights for any period and have full freedom and control over their best tradeoff between return and risk over each period. We show that such a problem is a convex quadratic programming problem in terms of the decision variables, regardless of price dynamic nature (either linear or nonlinear cases). By solving the stationary equation directly, an optimal solution is developed for its original problem without using embedding method. The solution is simplified for a general linear price model with high-order and coupled asset dynamics and shown to be implementable with historical price data. Simulation is carried out on USA and China stock markets with real data, which demonstrates feasibility and better performance of the proposed solution than the special case considered in the literature. In particular, the proposed solution with suitable nonzero weights on intermediate time periods offers higher return at the same risk level, compared with one involving the terminal wealth only in the objective function.
The λ-Based Equilibrium Point ( EP ) Hypothesis 1990-1999

How abstract are the ideas required to address biological movement? Consider the question posed by Arthur Winfree (1987, p. 253), the foremost theoretician on temporal order in biology and chemistry: “How does a gymnast calculate forces and rates for hundreds of muscles with millisecond precision while whirling from one maneuver to the next? ” For Winfree, the answer is not forthcoming in the language of kinematic and kinetic variables. The gymnast’s reproducible precision is a more flexible exactitude than the kind we know how to write equations about. It is a kind of exactitude best described and reasoned about in geometry, specifically, the type of geometry that ignores conventional geometric properties (e.g., distance and angle). For Winfree, the gymnast’s reproducible precision is a topological exactitude.
Effective location identification from microblogs

The rapid development of social networks has resulted in a proliferation of user-generated content (UGC). The UGC data, when properly analyzed, can be beneficial to many applications. For example, identifying a user's locations from microblogs is very important for effective location-based advertisement and recommendation. In this paper, we study the problem of identifying a user's locations from microblogs. This problem is rather challenging because the location information in a microblog is incomplete and we cannot get an accurate location from a local microblog. To address this challenge, we propose a global location identification method, called Glitter. Glitter combines multiple microblogs of a user and utilizes them to identify the user's locations. Glitter not only improves the quality of identifying a user's location but also supplements the location of a microblog so as to obtain an accurate location of a microblog. To facilitate location identification, GLITTER organizes points of interest (POIs) into a tree structure where leaf nodes are POIs and non-leaf nodes are segments of POIs, e.g., countries, states, cities, districts, and streets. Using the tree structure, Glitter first extracts candidate locations from each microblog of a user which correspond to some tree nodes. Then Glitter aggregates these candidate locations and identifies top-k locations of the user. Using the identified top-k user locations, Glitter refines the candidate locations and computes top-k locations of each microblog. To achieve high recall, we enable fuzzy matching between locations and microblogs. We propose an incremental algorithm to support dynamic updates of microblogs. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our method achieves high quality and good performance, and scales very well.
Coherent Diffraction Imaging

For centuries, lens-based microscopy, such as light, phase-contrast, fluorescence, confocal and electron microscopy, has played an important role in the evolution of modern science and technology. In 1999, a novel form of microscopy, known as coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) or lensless imaging, was developed and transformed our traditional view of microscopy, in which the diffraction pattern of a noncrystalline object or a nanocrystal was first measured and then directly phased to obtain an image (1). The well-known phase problem is solved by combining the oversampling method with iterative algorithms. The origin of the oversampling concept can be traced back to the Shannon sampling theorem (2). When the diffraction pattern of a finite object is sampled at a frequency sufficiently finer than the Nyquist interval, the phase information is in principle encoded in the diffraction intensities (3) and can be directly retrieved by an iterative algorithm (4). Over the past decade, various CDI methods, such as plane wave CDI, Bragg CDI and ptychographic CDI, have been implemented using synchrotron radiation, X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs), high harmonic generation, optical lasers, and electrons (517).
Theoretical studies to elucidate the influence of magnetic dipolar interactions occurring in the magnetic nanoparticle systems, for biomedical applications

In recent years, the study of magnetic nanoparticles has been intensively developed not only for their fundamental theoretical interest, but also for their many technological applications, especially biomedical applications, ranging from contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging to the deterioration of cancer cells via hyperthermia treatment. The theoretical and experimental research has shown until now that the magnetic dipolar interactions between nanoparticles can have a significant influence on the magnetic behaviour of the system. But, this influence is not well understood. It is clear that the magnetic dipolar interaction intensity is correlated with the nanoparticle concentration, volume fraction and magnetic moment orientations. In this paper, we try to understand the influence of magnetic dipolar interactions on the behaviour of magnetic nanoparticle systems, for biomedical applications. For the model, we considered spherical nanoparticles with uniaxial anisotropy and lognormal distribution of the sizes. The model involves a simulation stage of the spatial distribution and orientation of the nanoparticles and their easy axes of magnetic anisotropy, and an evaluation stage of the Néel relaxation time. To assess the Néel relaxation time, we are going to discretise and adapt, to the local magnetic field, the Coffey analytical solution for the equation Fokker-Planck describing the dynamics of magnetic moments of nanoparticles in oblique external magnetic field. There are three fundamental aspects of interest in our studies on the magnetic nanoparticles: their spatial & orientational distributions, concentrations and sizes.
Development and In Vitro Characterization of Capecitabine-Loaded Alginate–Pectinate–Chitosan Beads for Colon Targeting

abstract Colon-targeted capecitabine beads were formulated by an ionotropic gelation method. The sodium alginate to pectin ratio and chitosan concentration were optimized using a 32 full factorial design. Analysis of response surface plots allowed the identification of an optimized formulation with high drug entrapment and controlled release. Insignificant differences in observed and predicted values for responses validated the optimization method. Optimized beads possessed an average diameter of 1395 µm and good flow properties. Their production as spherical beads having a smooth surface was confirmed by scanning electron microscopy. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy revealed the compatibility of drug with added excipients, while differential scanning calorimetry study confirmed complete drug entrapment in polymer matrix. Higher swelling of beads in phosphate buffer pH 7.4 was obtained in comparison to pH 6.8. An in vitro wash off test indicated 70% mucoadhesion by the beads. In vitro dissolution studies of beads loaded into enteric-coated capsules revealed negligible release in simulated gastric and intestinal fluid, followed by 49.23% release in simulated colonic fluid, in 4 h. The optimized beads were found to be stable for three months at 25 ± 2°C/60 ± 5% RH. In conclusion, the formulated beads showed colon-specific controlled release properties, and thus could prove to be effective for colon cancer treatment.
TRACE HEAVY METAL ANALYSIS USING WHISPERING GALLERY MODE SENSING

A Whispering Gallery Mode (WGM) resonator assay for the detection of trace levels of Pb 2+ was demonstrated. The platform consists of a glass microspheres decorated with glutathione (GSH)-modified gold nanoparticles (GNPs). In our study, GSH was used as a chelator to provide high specificity to Pb 2+ . When the surface of the microsphere was exposed to Pb 2+ with the assistance of a fluidic cell, the resonant mode shifts to longer wavelengths. The shift is found to be proportional to the concentration of Pb 2+ at concentrations as low as 10 ppt making this technique versatile for portable in-field environmental monitoring.