Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Study and Modelling of the Melt Pool Dynamics during Selective Laser Sintering and Melting

Selective laser sintering (SLS) and Selective Laser Melting (SLM) are parent layer manufacturing processes that allow generating complex 3D parts by consolidating layers of powder material on top of each other. Consolidation is obtained by processing the selected areas using the thermal energy supplied by a focused laser beam. In SLS partial fusion of powder particles takes place, followed by a solidification of the created liquid. SLM is essentially the same process as SLS, with the difference that the particles are completely molten under the laser beam. This development is driven by the need to produce near full dense objects, with mechanical properties comparable to those of bulk materials and by the desire to avoid lengthy post processing cycles. Identification of the optimal process conditions (so-called process window) is a crucial task for industrial application of SLS/SLM processes. Operating parameters of the process are adjusted in correspondence with optical and thermal properties of the processed material. Nowadays in SLS/SLM there is a tendency to increase the speed of the fabrication as a consequence of the available higher laser powers. It leads to increase of laser scanning speeds. In these circumstances, to rely only on experimental investigations in order to adjust process and material parameters is time-consuming and ineffective. Simulation tools are strongly needed for the visualization and analysis of SLS/SLM processes. In SLM the powder grains under the laser are completely molten and form a liquid domain called melt pool. Evolution of the melt pool during the process, its interaction with the laser, the substrate and the surrounding non-molten powder strongly affect the quality of the final part. The goal of this work is to study the melt pool dynamics by means of the finite-element simulation software, built specially for SLS/SLM. The numerical model is based on the homogeneous medium hypothesis. It considers the interaction between the laser and the powder material, the phase transformations and the evolution of the material properties during the process. We also study the influence of the phase change on the process efficiency. The macroscopic model is completed by the sub-models, which allow to study at microscopic level the processes taking place in the powder bed during its laser heating and melting. Melting of separate powder particles during laser irradiation is studied by means of the improved Single Grain Model. The capillary phenomena taking place in the powder bed during SLS/SLM are also studied. The interconnection of powder grains during their melting is approached by the mechanism of liquid drops coalescence. According to the obtained results, the depth-dependent sintering threshold for powder materials is proposed.
State of Health Estimation of Lithium-Ion Batteries Using Capacity Fade and Internal Resistance Growth Models

In this paper, a method for the estimation of remaining useful lifetime (RUL) of lithium-ion batteries has been presented based on a combination of its capacity degradation and internal resistance growth models. The capacity degradation model is developed recently based on battery capacity test data. An empirical model for internal resistance growth is also developed based on electrochemical-impedance spectroscopy (EIS) test data. The obtained models are used in a particle filtering (PF) framework for making end-of-lifetime (EOL) predictions at various phases of its lifecycle. Further, the above two models were fused together to obtain a new degradation model for RUL estimation. It has been observed that the fused degradation model has improved the standard deviation of prediction as compared to the individual degradation models by maintaining satisfactory prediction accuracy. The effect of parameter variations on the performance of the PF algorithm has also been studied. Finally, the predictions are validated with experimental data. From the results it can be observed that with the availability of longer volume of data, the prediction accuracy gradually improves. The prognostics framework proposed in this paper provides a structured way for monitoring the state of health (SoH) of a battery.
Nonlinear modelling of differential amplifier circuit

This paper presents the nonlinear modelling of differential amplifier (DA) circuit. The paper presents derivation of Volterra series of differential amplifier using transistor nonlinearities and perturbation theory. MATLAB simulations demonstrate the usefulness of nonlinearity consideration. Derived expression can be used as a model for designing, simulation and analysis of new circuits in software like SIMULINK.
Performance analysis of optimized corporate-fed microstrip array for ISM band applications

This paper presents a low cost high gain corporate feed rectangular microstrip patch antenna array of two elements having cuttings at the corners, with detailed steps of design process, operates in Industrial Scientific Medical (ISM) band (2.4 GHz). The proposed antenna structures are designed using FR4 dielectric substrate having permittivity εr= 44 and substrate thickness of 1.6 mm. The gain of these simulated antennas are obtained as 2.4819 dB with return loss of −17.779 dB for a single element patch and 6.3128 dB with return loss of −15.8320 dB for an array of two elements. The simulations have been carried out by using Antenna simulator HFSS version 15.0. 0 to obtain the VSWR, return loss and radiation pattern.
Adaptive Energy-Efficient Power Allocation in Green Interference-Alignment-Based Wireless Networks

Interference alignment (IA) is a promising technique for interference management in wireless networks. However, the sum rate may fall short of the theoretical maximum, particularly at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels since IA mainly concentrates on mitigating the interference, instead of improving the quality of desired signal. Moreover, most of the previous works focused on improving spectrum efficiency, but the energy efficiency (EE) aspect is largely ignored. In this paper, an adaptive energy-efficient IA algorithm is proposed through power allocation (PA) and transmission-mode adaptation for green IA-based wireless networks. The PA problem for IA is first analyzed; then, we propose a PA scheme that optimizes the EE of IA-based wireless networks. When the SNR is low, the transmitted power of some users may become zero. Thus, the users with low transmitted power are turned into the sleep mode in our scheme to save energy. The transmitted power and transmission mode of the remaining active users are adapted again to further improve the EE of the network. To guarantee the interests of all the users, fairness among users is also considered in the proposed scheme. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in improving the EE of IA-based wireless networks.
Extraskeletal ( Ectopic ) Calcification and Ossification

A significant number and variety of disorders cause extraskeletal deposition of calcium and phosphate (Table 1). In some, mineral is precipitated as amorphous calcium phosphate or as crystals of hydroxyapatite; in others, osseous tissue is formed. The pathogenesis of ectopic mineralization is generally attributed to one of three mechanisms (Table 1). First, a supranormal “calcium-phosphate solubility product” in extracellular fluid can cause metastatic calcification. Second, mineral may be deposited as dystrophic calcification into metabolically impaired or dead tissue despite normal serum levels of calcium and phosphate. Third, ectopic ossification (or true bone formation) occurs in a few disorders for which the pathogenesis is becoming increasingly understood. Discussed briefly in this introduction are these three mechanisms for extraskeletal calcification or ossification. Subsequently, there follows a description of disorders that illustrate each pathogenesis.
“I will take ARVs once my body deteriorates”: an analysis of Swazi men’s perceptions and acceptability of Test and Start

Swaziland has the highest HIV prevalence in the world. To mitigate the spread and devastation caused by HIV and to improve the wellbeing of people living with HIV, the country has adopted the latest available HIV prevention campaigns, including “Test and Start”. Because evidence from randomised controlled trials has demonstrated a significant risk reduction in HIV transmission when HIV-positive people start antiretroviral therapy (ART) early, Swaziland aims to find these people and link them to treatment. This study presents findings regarding the perceptions of this promising HIV-prevention intervention among men aged 17–69 years. A combination of qualitative methods including focus group discussions (12), in-depth interviews (17), informal conversations and participant observation (21) were used to collect data in two peri-urban communities in 2013–2014. Findings illustrate that men still fear taking an HIV test because of a relatively high probability of a positive test which some still interpret as a death sentence. Other potential barriers to the effectiveness of Test and Start programmes include lack of hospitality in hospitals, fear of starting treatment early related to side effects of ART, poverty, and lack of trust in the financial stability of the Swazi government. We argue that several social factors need to be considered for the Test and Start programme to be more effective.
KANGAROO: A Distributed System for SNA - Social Network Analysis in Huge-scale Networks

Social network analysis is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, computers and other information or knowledge entities. The continued exponential growth in the scale of social networks is giving birth to a new challenge to social network analysis. The scale of these graphs, in some cases, is millions of nodes and billions of edges. In this paper, we present a distributed system, KANGAROO, for huge scale social network based on two main computing models which are for finding common neighbour and maximal clique. KANGAROO is implemented on the top of the Hadoop platform, the open source version of MapReduce. This system implements most algorithms of social network analysis, including basic statistics, community detection, link prediction and network evolution etc. based on the MapReduce computing framework. More than anything else, KANGAROO is applied to a real-world huge scale social network. The application scenarios, including degree distribution, linear projection algorithm for community detection and community visualization of presentation layer, demonstrate KANGAROO is efficient, scalable and effective.
Both temperature fluctuations and East Asian monsoons have driven plant diversification in the karst ecosystems from southern China

Karst ecosystems in southern China are species‐rich and have high levels of endemism, yet little is known regarding the evolutionary processes responsible for the origin and diversification of karst biodiversity. The genus Primulina (Gesneriaceae) comprises ca. 170 species endemic to southern China with high levels of ecological (edaphic) specialization, providing an exceptional model to study the plant diversification in karsts. We used molecular data from nine chloroplast and 11 nuclear regions and macroevolutionary analyses to assess the origin and cause of species diversification due to palaeoenvironmental changes and edaphic specialization in Primulina. We found that speciation was positively associated with changes in past temperatures and East Asian monsoons through the evolutionary history of Primulina. Climatic change around the mid‐Miocene triggered an early burst followed by a slowdown of diversification rate towards the present with the climate cooling. We detected different speciation rates among edaphic types, and transitions among soil types were infrequently and did not impact the overall speciation rate. Our findings suggest that both global temperature changes and East Asian monsoons have played crucial roles in floristic diversification within the karst ecosystems in southern China, such that speciation was higher when climate was warmer and wetter. This is the first study to directly demonstrate that past monsoon activity is positively correlated with speciation rate in East Asia. This case study could motivate further investigations to assess the impacts of past environmental changes on the origin and diversification of biodiversity in global karst ecosystems, most of which are under threat.
Reductions in the mitochondrial ABC transporter Abcb10 affect the transcriptional profile of heme biosynthesis genes

ATP-binding cassette subfamily B member 10 (Abcb10) is a mitochondrial ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter that complexes with mitoferrin1 and ferrochelatase to enhance heme biosynthesis in developing red blood cells. Reductions in Abcb10 levels have been shown to reduce mitoferrin1 protein levels and iron import into mitochondria, resulting in reduced heme biosynthesis. As an ABC transporter, Abcb10 binds and hydrolyzes ATP, but its transported substrate is unknown. Here, we determined that decreases in Abcb10 did not result in protoporphyrin IX accumulation in morphant-treated zebrafish embryos or in differentiated Abcb10-specific shRNA murine Friend erythroleukemia (MEL) cells in which Abcb10 was specifically silenced with shRNA. We also found that the ATPase activity of Abcb10 is necessary for hemoglobinization in MEL cells, suggesting that the substrate transported by Abcb10 is important in mediating increased heme biosynthesis during erythroid development. Inhibition of 5-aminolevulinic acid dehydratase (EC 4.2.1.24) with succinylacetone resulted in both 5-aminolevulinic acid (ALA) accumulation in control and Abcb10-specific shRNA MEL cells, demonstrating that reductions in Abcb10 do not affect ALA export from mitochondria and indicating that Abcb10 does not transport ALA. Abcb10 silencing resulted in an alteration in the heme biosynthesis transcriptional profile due to repression by the transcriptional regulator Bach1, which could be partially rescued by overexpression of Alas2 or Gata1, providing a mechanistic explanation for why Abcb10 shRNA MEL cells exhibit reduced hemoglobinization. In conclusion, our findings rule out that Abcb10 transports ALA and indicate that Abcb10's ATP-hydrolysis activity is critical for hemoglobinization and that the substrate transported by Abcb10 provides a signal that optimizes hemoglobinization.
Towards question identification from online healthcare consultation forum post in bahasa

Question proccessing is an important step in automatic question answering system. Texts from online healthcare consultation forum posts contain question. However, the narrative text of forum post needs to be decomposed to identify the question. We propose a question decomposition module for healthcare forum post in Bahasa Indonesia. The module consists of three main components, namely sentence splitter, sentence classifier, and multi-questions splitter. We apply machine learning approach for sentence classification and rule-based chunking approach for multi-questions splitting.
Effects of low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation and neuromuscular electrical stimulation on upper extremity motor recovery in the early period after stroke: a preliminary study

Abstract Objective: To assess the efficacy of inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) on upper extremity motor function in patients with acute/subacute ischemic stroke. Methods: Twenty-five ischemic acute/subacute stroke subjects were enrolled in this randomized controlled trial. Experimental group 1 received low frequency (LF) rTMS to the primary motor cortex of the unaffected side + physical therapy (PT) including activities to improve strength, flexibility, transfers, posture, balance, coordination, and activities of daily living, mainly focusing on upper limb movements; experimental group 2 received the same protocol combined with NMES to hand extensor muscles; and the control group received only PT. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan was used to evaluate the activation or inhibition of the affected and unaffected primary motor cortex. Results: No adverse effect was reported. Most of the clinical outcome scores improved significantly in all groups, however no statistically significant difference was found between groups due to the small sample sizes. The highest percent improvement scores were observed in TMS + NMES group (varying between 48 and 99.3%) and the lowest scores in control group (varying between 13.1 and 28.1%). Hand motor recovery was significant in both experimental groups while it did not change in control group. Some motor cortex excitability changes were also observed in fMRI. Conclusion: LF-rTMS with or without NMES seems to facilitate the motor recovery in the paretic hand of patients with acute/subacute ischemic stroke. TMS or the combination of TMS + NMES may be a promising additional therapy in upper limb motor training. Further studies with larger numbers of patients are needed to establish their effectiveness in upper limb motor rehabilitation of stroke.
Accelerating sparse matrix-vector multiplication on GPUs using bit-representation-optimized schemes

The sparse matrix-vector (SpMV) multiplication routine is an important building block used in many iterative algorithms for solving scientific and engineering problems. One of the main challenges of SpMV is its memory-boundedness. Although compression has been proposed previously to improve SpMV performance on CPUs, its use has not been demonstrated on the GPU because of the serial nature of many compression and decompression schemes. In this paper, we introduce a family of bit-representation-optimized (BRO) compression schemes for representing sparse matrices on GPUs. The proposed schemes, BRO-ELL, BRO-COO, and BRO-HYB, perform compression on index data and help to speed up SpMV on GPUs through reduction of memory traffic. Furthermore, we formulate a BRO-aware matrix reodering scheme as a data clustering problem and use it to increase compression ratios. With the proposed schemes, experiments show that average speedups of 1.5× compared to ELLPACK and HYB can be achieved for SpMV on GPUs.
Zinc transporters are differentially expressed in human non-small cell lung cancer

Lung cancer is one of the most common human malignancies worldwide, but its oncogenesis process remains unclear. Recent studies demonstrated that zinc (Zn) and Zn transporters were associated with the development and progression of human cancers. The role of Zn transporters including ZIPs and ZnTs in lung cancer, however, has never been evaluated. Thus, we aimed to investigate the expression levels of all human Zn transporters, including 14 ZIPs and 10 ZnTs, in eight different lung cancer cell lines and paired human tumor tissues. We observed great variations in ZIPs and ZnTs mRNA levels across cell lines and human lung cancer specimens. ZIPs showed a tendency to be upregulated, while ZnTs exhibited a downward expression trend. ZIP4 was overexpressed in six lung cancer cell lines and 59% (26/44) of tumor tissues, which was consistent with results from lung cancer datasets including TCGA database. Our results indicated that the dysregulation of Zn transporters may contribute to lung tumorigenesis.
Retention of pharmaceutical residues: the example of the Altendorf retention soil filter

A study has been conducted on a retention soil filter (RSF) to test its effectiveness in removing pharmaceutical residues from combined sewer overflows (CSO). Efficient removal of solids, nutrients and heavy metals has already been proven by Frechen (Neue Erkenntnisse zur Mischwasserbehandlung in Retentionsbodenfiltern, 2012). The possibility that organic micropollutants are also retained by the use of retention soil filters has been identified, but data is lacking. Results obtained in this study, in which testing for removal by RSF of numerous micropollutant substances has been performed, are most promising. The pharmaceuticals diclofenac and ibuprofen are presented in detail as examples of such micropollutants. Both show a reduction in positive samples of more than 55% as well as a significant reduction in median and maximum concentrations. These results add to the evidence that using retention soil filters in the advanced treatment of wastewater from combined sewer overflows reduces the exposure of watercourses to pharmaceutical residues.
A Feedback-Based Transmission for Wireless Networks with Energy and Secrecy Constraints

This paper investigates new transmission techniques for clustered feedback-based wireless networks that are characterized by energy and secrecy constraints. The proposed schemes incorporate multiuser diversity gain with an appropriate power allocation (PA) in order to support a defined Quality-of-Service (QoS) and jointly achieve lifetime maximization and confidentiality. We show that an adaptive PA scheme that adjusts the transmitted power using instantaneous feedback and suspends the transmission when the required power is higher than a threshold significantly prolongs the network lifetime without affecting the QoS of the network. In addition, the adaptation of the transmitted power on the main link improves the secrecy of the network and efficiently protects the source message from eavesdropper attacks. The proposed scheme improves network's confidentiality without requiring any information about the eavesdropper channel and is suitable for practical applications. Another objective of the paper is the energy analysis of networks by taking into account processing and maintenance energy cost at the transmitters. We demonstrate that the combination of PA with an appropriate switch-off mechanism, that allows the source to transmit for an appropriate fraction of the time, significantly extends the network lifetime. All the proposed protocols are evaluated by theoretical and simulation results.
Dynamic scheduling for efficient hierarchical sparse matrix operations on the GPU

We introduce a hierarchical sparse matrix representation (HiSparse) tailored for the graphics processing unit (GPU). The representation adapts to the local nonzero pattern at all levels of the hierarchy and uses reduced bit length for addressing the entries. This allows a smaller memory footprint than standard formats. Executing algorithms on a hierarchical structure on the GPU usually entails significant synchronization and management overhead or slowdowns due to diverging execution paths and memory access patterns. We address these issues by means of a dynamic scheduling strategy specifically designed for executing algorithms on top of a hierarchical matrix on the GPU. The evaluation of our implementation of basic linear algebra routines, suggests that our hierarchical format is competitive to highly optimized standard libraries and significantly outperforms them in the case of transpose matrix operations. The results point towards the viability of hierarchical matrix formats on massively parallel devices such as the GPU.