Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lithium-ion batteries: Comprehensive technical analysis of second-life batteries for smart grid applications

In the upcoming years, thousands of battery storage systems will be decommissioned from electric vehicles. Instead of recycling or sending them immediately to landfills, these battery systems could be reused in other applications, such as grid or end-user applications. Second-life batteries are still expected to be capable of storing and delivering substantial energy. It is possible that they could satisfy the requirements of stationary applications. Indeed, the total lifetime value of the battery will increase when the remaining capacity of batteries can be invested to meet the requirements of other energy-storage applications. Consequently, the price of battery systems will be decreased, which helps the widespread commercialization both of electric vehicles and grid storage systems. However, there is an increasing need to investigate the potential of using second-life batteries in stationary applications (i.e., electric supply, ancillary services, grid system, end user/utility customer, and renewable integration). While some used battery technologies are now ready for commercial demonstration, there is no clear market structure to demonstrate the benefits of the used batteries for grid applications. While the need and opportunities for second-life batteries are obviously a number of gaps and limitations currently constrain the adoption of using the second-life batteries for grid-scale applications. Therefore, in this article, a comprehensive technical analysis is provided by addressing all aspects of a battery's life cycle to investigate the feasibility of reusing the retired EV batteries in stationary applications. This manuscript provides the experimental verification of the proposed solutions in order to face the main technical challenges, such as: lack of standards and models, aggravation of the aging process, difficulty testing and sorting staggering number of batteries, and inefficient of circuits and operational scenarios. Furthermore, Battery model is designed and verified by using MATLAB/Simulink environment.
Improved performance of Aurora 4 using HTK and unsupervised MLLR adaptation

The introduction of Aurora 4 tasks provides a standard database and methodology for comparing the effectiveness of different robust algorithms on LVCSR. One important issue on Aurora 4 tasks is the computation time involved in evaluating different test conditions. In this paper we show that by employing HTK as the recognition frontend and backend on Aurora 4 tasks with the use of cepstral mean subtraction, 14% relative improvement is achieved on the baseline clean train tasks at a 82.5% time reduction in training time and 40% time reduction on decoding. Furthermore, we found that optimizing the model complexity can increase the recognition performance (in both computation time and accuracy). Accuracy can be further improved with the use of unsupervised MLLR adaptation on one or multiple sentences. The adaptation results show that most of the gain from adaptation comes from adapting to the environment instead of to the speaker. With the use of adaptation,the error rate is reduced from the baseline result of 69.6% to 40%.
Investigating an 'Agile-Rigid' Approach in Globally Distributed Requirements Analysis

The global software development environment brings with itself abundant business opportunities as well as challenges in terms of coordination, communication and control. Recent years have also witnessed the growth of the agile movement. To address the global software development challenges there is a need to combine the flexibility offered by the growing agile development approaches with the rigidity offered by the traditional plan-based approaches. This paper reports an exploratory quasi-experimental study, which investigates the performance of requirements analysis projects in an ‘agile-rigid’ distributed environment. The study yields several interesting conclusions that can assist organizations in managing their global software projects more effectively. Our experiment indicates that project monitoring and control, project communication, and process facilitation between peer teams significantly influence the success of such projects. Creation of an agile-rigid environment can help organizations mitigate various risks inherent in globally distributed software development.
Towards Better Understanding of Agile Values in Global Software Development

Globally distributed software development (GSD) and agile methods are two current and important trends in software and systems engineering. While agile methods seem to cope well with increasingly changing business environments, it is far from obvious how these light-weight processes can best contribute to GSD. In this paper, method rationale is proposed as an analytical tool to understand the values that underpin agile methods and how these map to the GSD domain. Specifically, the paper presents an initial analysis of the values and goals embraced by the ‘agile manifesto’ and compares briefly with partial results from an ongoing study on the use of agile methods in GSD.
Towards comprehensive software reliability evaluation in open source software

This paper proposes a unified modeling framework for software reliability assessment in open source project. We combine the classical non-homogeneous Poisson process based software reliability growth model (SRGM) with a familiar regression scheme called the generalized linear model (GLM), and develop a novel framework not only to estimate software reliability measures, but also to investigate impacts of software metrics on the fault-detection process. The resulting GLM-based SRGM involves the common SRGMs as well as some existing metrics-based SRMs, such as logistic-regression-based SRGM and Poisson-regression-based SRGM, and possesses a great data fitting ability. We also provide an effective parameter estimation algorithm based on the EM (Expectation-Maximization) principle. Finally, it is shown through numerical experiments with actual open source project data that our approach can estimate software reliability measures with higher accuracy and can feedback the analysis results to improve the current software development projects.
Enhancer Trapping Reveals Widespread Circadian Clock Transcriptional Control in Arabidopsis1[w]

The circadian clock synchronizes the internal biology of an organism with the environment and has been shown to be widespread among organisms. Microarray experiments have shown that the circadian clock regulates mRNA abundance of about 10% of the transcriptome in plants, invertebrates, and mammals. In contrast, the circadian clock regulates the transcription of the virtually all cyanobacterial genes. To determine the extent to which the circadian clock controls transcription in Arabidopsis, we used in vivo enhancer trapping. We found that 36% of our enhancer trap lines display circadian-regulated transcription, which is much higher than estimates of circadian regulation based on analysis of steady-state mRNA abundance. Individual lines identified by enhancer trapping exhibit peak transcription rates at circadian phases spanning the complete circadian cycle. Flanking genomic sequence was identified for 23 enhancer trap lines to identify clock-controlled genes (CCG-ETs). Promoter analysis of CCG-ETs failed to predict new circadian clock response elements (CCREs), although previously defined CCREs, the CCA1-binding site, and the evening element were identified. However, many CCGs lack either the CCA1-binding site or the evening element; therefore, the presence of these CCREs is insufficient to confer circadian regulation, and it is clear that additional elements play critical roles.
Excavating Second Life

While the anthropology of online communities has emerged as a significant area of research, there has been little discussion of the possibilities of the archaeology of virtual settlements, defined here as interactive synthetic environments in which users are sensually immersed and which respond to user input. Bartle (in Designing Virtual Worlds, 2003: 1) has described such virtual settlements as `places where the imaginary meets the real'. In this sense, an examination of the role of heritage in virtual settlements has the potential to shed light on the role of heritage in both `real' and `imagined' communities more generally. This article develops the concept of `cyberarchaeology' (originally devised by Jones in his 1997 article, `Virtual Communities') to study the virtual material culture of the settlement Second Life, and in particular, its explicit programme of heritage conservation. A survey of heritage places in Second Life suggests that the functions of heritage in virtual settlements may be far more limited than in the actual world, functioning primarily as a structure of governance and control through the establishment of the rationale for (virtual) land ownership and the production of a sense of community through memorials which produce a sense of `rootedness' and materialize social memory. Such functions of heritage are consistent with recent discussion of the role of heritage in western societies. Nonetheless, this study of heritage and cyber-archaeology provides insights into the ways in which the notions of heritage are transforming in the early 21st century in connection with the proliferation of virtual environments, and the challenge this provides to contemporary society.
Secondary Transceiver Design in the Presence of Frequency Offset between OFDM-Based Primary and Secondary Systems

In a cognitive network where both primary and secondary systems are Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing modulated, carrier frequency offset between the two systems is inevitable and may cause harmful interference. In this paper, we jointly optimize the transceiver for the secondary system considering the frequency offset between secondary transmitter (ST) and primary receiver (PR). We first derive unified interference constraints with different information of inference channels known at ST, and formulate the transceiver design problem based on minimum mean square criterion as a convex optimization problem. To reveal the structure of secondary transceiver, we derive closed-form pre- processors in two special cases. It is shown from the simulations that with the increase of frequency offset, the performance of primary system degrades evidently when its bandwidth is smaller than that of secondary system, whereas the performance of secondary system using the proposed transceiver improves due to frequency diversity.
Angiogenesis in Gliomas: Biology and Molecular Pathophysiology

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is characterized by exuberant angiogenesis, a key event in tumor growth and progression. The pathologic mechanisms driving this change and the biological behavior of gliomas remain unclear. One mechanism may involve cooption of native blood vessels by glioma cells inducing expression of angio‐poietin‐2 by endothelial cells. Subsequently, vascular apoptosis and involution leads to necrosis and hypoxia. This in turn induces angiogenesis that is associated with expression of hypoxia‐inducible factor (HIF)‐1 a and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in perinecrotic pseudopalisading glioma cells. Here we review the molecular and cellular mechanisms implicated in HIF‐1 ‐dependent and HIF‐1 ‐independent glioma‐associated angiogenesis. In GBMs, both tumor hypoxia and genetic alterations commonly occur and act together to induce the expression of HIF‐1. The angiogenic response of the tumor to HIF‐1 is mediated by HIF‐1‐regulated target genes leading to the upregulation of several proangiogenic factors such as VEGF and other adaptive response molecules. Understanding the roles of these regulatory processes in tumor neovascularization, tumor growth and progression, and resistance to therapy will ultimately lead to the development of improved antiangiogenic therapies for GBMs.
Designing Robust Software Systems through Parametric Markov Chain Synthesis

We present a method for the synthesis of software system designs that satisfy strict quality requirements, are Pareto-optimal with respect to a set of quality optimisation criteria, and are robust to variations in the system parameters. To this end, we model the design space of the system under development as a parametric continuous-time Markov chain (pCTMC) with discrete and continuous parameters that correspond to alternative system architectures and to the ranges of possible values for configuration parameters, respectively. Given this pCTMC and required tolerance levels for the configuration parameters, our method produces a sensitivity-aware Pareto-optimal set of designs, which allows the modeller to inspect the ranges of quality attributes induced by these tolerances, thus enabling the effective selection of robust designs. Through application to two systems from different domains, we demonstrate the ability of our method to synthesise robust designs with a wide spectrum of useful tradeoffs between quality attributes and sensitivity.
DNN approach to speaker diarisation using speaker channels

Speaker diarisation addresses the question of “who speaks when” in audio recordings, and has been studied extensively in the context of tasks such as broadcast news, meetings, etc. Performing diarisation on individual headset microphone (IHM) channels is sometimes assumed to easily give the desired output of speaker labelled segments with timing information. However, it is shown that given imperfect data, such as speaker channels with heavy crosstalk and overlapping speech, this is not the case. Deep neural networks (DNNs) can be trained on features derived from the concatenation of speaker channel features to detect which is the correct channel for each frame. Crosstalk features can be calculated and DNNs trained with or without overlapping speech to combat problematic data. A simple frame decision metric of counting occurrences is investigated as well as adding a bias against selecting nonspeech for a frame. Finally, two different scoring setups are applied to both datasets. The stricter SHEF setup finds diarisation error rates (DER) of 9.2% on TBL and 23.2% on RT07 while the NIST setup achieves 5.7% and 15.1% respectively.
A vehicular ad hoc networks intrusion detection system based on BUSNet

The open medium, dynamic topology, and multi-hop cooperative routing of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) make it facing more security challenge than wired networks. In this paper, a hierarchical VANETs intrusion detection system based on BUSNet is present. BUSNet is basically a virtual mobile backbone infrastructure that is constructed using public buses. We use the bus nodes as the cluster-heads to gather the routing control messages and data packets transmitted among the vehicles. The bus nodes first transmit the original network behavior information to the access points deployed along the road sides. Then the access points can get a global view of the VANETs, and we can detect anomaly behaviors through analyzing the data. The anomaly detection method is based on the neural network which can build the normal network behavior model through learning process. After the trained neural network is stable, it can monitor the VANETs security by detecting the network control message and data packet in real time and alarm immediately if there is anomaly behavior. The experiments in NS2 show that the detection method can detect anomaly behavior with low false alarm rate.
Requirement of Rad18 protein for replication through DNA lesions in mouse and human cells

In yeast, the Rad6-Rad18 ubiquitin conjugating enzyme plays a critical role in promoting replication although DNA lesions by translesion synthesis (TLS). In striking contrast, a number of studies have indicated that TLS can occur in the absence of Rad18 in human and other mammalian cells, and also in chicken cells. In this study, we determine the role of Rad18 in TLS that occurs during replication in human and mouse cells, and show that in the absence of Rad18, replication of duplex plasmids containing a cis-syn TT dimer or a (6-4) TT photoproduct is severely inhibited in human cells and that mutagenesis resulting from TLS opposite cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers and (6-4) photoproducts formed at the TT, TC, and CC dipyrimidine sites in the chromosomal cII gene in UV-irradiated mouse cells is abolished. From these and other observations with Rad18, we conclude that the Rad6-Rad18 enzyme plays an essential role in promoting replication through DNA lesions by TLS in mammalian cells. In contrast, the dispensability of Rad18 for TLS in chicken DT40 cells would suggest that the role of the Rad6-Rad18 enzyme complex has diverged considerably between chicken and mammals, raising the possibility that TLS mechanisms differ among them.
Overcoming tumor heterogeneity in the molecular diagnosis of urological cancers

Our understanding of tumor heterogeneity and impact on treatment response is still in its infancy, presenting significant challenges to the molecular pathologist, treating physician and ultimately for the patient. Given that tumor recurrence due to treatment resistance is the most common cause of cancer death, there remains a critical unmet need to change the current paradigm. The mechanisms which underlie tumor heterogeneity can be broadly divided into genomic instability and non-mutational processes, including stochastic variations in cellular responses, modulation by tumor microenvironment and or phenotypic/ functional plasticity relating to cancer stem cells. We believe that these biological mechanisms are not mutually exclusive and emphasize the need for more suitable methodologies to exploit the spatiotemporal patterns of intratumoral heterogeneity using novel approaches such as quantitative tissue-based biomarker assessment and systemic fluid analytics. Generating a comprehensive patient-centric phenotypic disease profile should generate a ‘codex’ which can be employed to change the current treatment decision process.
The Value of Genetic Information for Diabetes Risk Prediction – Differences According to Sex, Age, Family History and Obesity

Background Genome-wide association studies have identified numerous single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with type 2 diabetes through the past years. In previous studies, the usefulness of these genetic markers for prediction of diabetes was found to be limited. However, differences may exist between substrata of the population according to the presence of major diabetes risk factors. This study aimed to investigate the added predictive value of genetic information (42 single nucleotide polymorphisms) in subgroups of sex, age, family history of diabetes, and obesity. Methods A case-cohort study (random subcohort N = 1,968; incident cases: N = 578) within the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition Potsdam study was used. Prediction models without and with genetic information were evaluated in terms of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve and the integrated discrimination improvement. Stratified analyses included subgroups of sex, age (<50 or ≥50 years), family history (positive if either father or mother or a sibling has/had diabetes), and obesity (BMI< or ≥30 kg/m2). Results A genetic risk score did not improve prediction above classic and metabolic markers, but – compared to a non-invasive prediction model – genetic information slightly improved the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (difference [95%-CI]: 0.007 [0.002–0.011]). Stratified analyses showed stronger improvement in the older age group (0.010 [0.002–0.018]), the group with a positive family history (0.012 [0.000–0.023]) and among obese participants (0.015 [−0.005–0.034]) compared to the younger participants (0.005 [−0.004–0.014]), participants with a negative family history (0.003 [−0.001–0.008]) and non-obese (0.007 [0.000–0.014]), respectively. No difference was found between men and women. Conclusion There was no incremental value of genetic information compared to standard non-invasive and metabolic markers. Our study suggests that inclusion of genetic variants in diabetes risk prediction might be useful for subgroups with already manifest risk factors such as older age, a positive family history and obesity.
SYSTEMATIC EFFECTS IN INTERFEROMETRIC OBSERVATIONS OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND POLARIZATION

The detection of the primordial B-mode spectrum of the polarized cosmic microwave background (CMB) signal may provide a probe of inflation. However, observation of such a faint signal requires excellent control of systematic errors. Interferometry proves to be a promising approach for overcoming such a challenge. In this paper we present a complete simulation pipeline of interferometric observations of CMB polarization, including systematic errors. We employ two different methods for obtaining the power spectra from mock data produced by simulated observations: the maximum likelihood method and the method of Gibbs sampling. We show that the results from both methods are consistent with each other as well as, within a factor of six, with analytical estimates. Several categories of systematic errors are considered: instrumental errors, consisting of antenna gain and antenna coupling errors; and beam errors, consisting of antenna pointing errors, beam cross-polarization, and beam shape (and size) errors. In order to recover the tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, within a 10% tolerance level, which ensures the experiment is sensitive enough to detect the B-signal at r = 0.01 in the multipole range 28 < ℓ < 384, we find that, for a QUBIC-like experiment, Gaussian-distributed systematic errors must be controlled with precisions of |grms| = 0.1 for antenna gain, |ϵrms| = 5 × 10−4 for antenna coupling, δrms ≈ 0. °7 for pointing, ζrms ≈ 0. °7 for beam shape, and μrms = 5 × 10−4 for beam cross-polarization. Although the combined systematic effects produce a tolerance level on r twice as large for an experiment with linear polarizers, the resulting bias in r for a circular experiment is 15% which is still on the level of desirable sensitivity.
On the performance of space-time codes with transmit correlation

In this work, we analyze the pairwise error probability (PEP) performance of space-time codes in the presence of transmit fading correlation. Unlike receive correlation, the effect of transmit correlation depends on the specific space-time code used. We show that at low SNR, depending on the code, transmit correlation can either improve or degrade the PEP performance. By analyzing the worst case scenario for asymptotically high or low SNR, we show that, to guarantee robust performance for arbitrary transmit correlation, the minimum eigenvalue of the codeword pair difference matrix should be maximized among all codeword pairs. Numerical and simulation results are given to corroborate the theoretical analysis.
PVSOLA: A PHASE VOCODER WITH SYNCHRONIZED OVERLAP-ADD

In this paper we present an original method mixing temporal and spectral processing to reduce the phasiness in the phase vocoder. Phasiness is an inherent artifact of the phase vocoder that appears when a sound is slowed down. The audio is perceived as muffled, reverberant and/or moving away from the microphone. This is due to the loss of coherence between the phases across the bins of the Short-Term Fourier Transform over time. Here the phase vocoder is used almost as usual, except that its phases are regularly reset in order to keep them coherent. Phase reset consists in using a frame from the input signal for synthesis without modifying it. The position of that frame in the output audio is adjusted using cross-correlation, as is done in many temporal time-stretching methods. The method is compared with three state-of-the-art algorithms. The results show a significant improvement over existing processes although some test samples present artifacts.