Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Real-Time Implementation of a 31-Level Asymmetrical Cascaded Multilevel Inverter for Dynamic Loads

Among the renewable energy applications, the most popular inverters are cascaded multilevel inverters. Irrespective of numerous benefits these inverters face reliability issues due to the presence of more circuit components in the design. This has been a critical challenge for researchers in designing inverters with enhanced reliability by reducing the total harmonic distortion (THD). This paper proposes a 31-level asymmetric cascaded multilevel inverter for renewable energy applications. The proposed topology produces waveforms consisting of the staircase with a high number of output levels with lesser components with low THD. The investigations on the feasibility and performance of MLI under steady-state, transient, and dynamic load disturbances. The results are validated from a 1.6kW system which provides the proposed inverter.
Modeling Multi-generational Product Adoption Based on Competition within & between Brands

The success of the product is measured by the satisfaction perceived by customers. New amendments, addition of new features, necessary rectifications or changes are considered and performed by manufactures only when the product is liked by its customers and can make satisfied in future as well. In the present proposal, we have discussed a mathematical modeling framework for a successive generational product launched into the marketplace and analyzed how customers’ satisfaction influences the sales of the products that incorporates the competitive effect as well. In this study, competition is studied under two broad categories together such as: - 1) Competition within Brand and) Competition between Brands.
Recognition of Assembly Tasks Based on the Actions Associated to the Manipulated Objects

This paper proposes a complete framework to automatically recognize assembly manipulation motions performed by humans, for the purpose of generating and retrieving robot motions from a database. Using the concept of affordance, we can obtain the relationship between the manipulated object and its associated human actions to narrow down the possible actions that each manipulated object can afford. Based on this relationship we design motion templates containing a set of basic motions associated to the manipulated objects and stored them in the database. Recognition of motion data is done by matching it with the existing motion templates on the database using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). We verify the validity of the proposed method using three different assembly tasks performed by two subjects, which include basic assembly motions such as insertion and bolt screwing.
Security, Performance, and Applications of Smart Contracts: A Systematic Survey

Blockchain is the promising technology of recent years, which has attracted remarkable attention in both academic studies and practical industrial applications. The smart contract is a programmable transaction that can perform a sophisticated task, execute automatically, and store on the blockchain. The smart contract is the key component of the blockchain, which has made blockchain a technology beyond the scope of the cryptocurrencies and applicable for a variety of applications such as healthcare, IoT, supply chain, digital identity, business process management, and more. Although in recent years the progress toward improving blockchain technology with the focus on the smart contract has been impressive, there is a lack of reviewing the smart contract topic. This paper systematically reviews the key concepts and proposes the direction of recent studies and developments regarding the smart contract. The research studies are presented in three main categories: 1) security methods and tools; 2) performance improvement approaches; and 3) decentralized applications based on smart contracts.
Recurrent Selection on the Winters sex-ratio Genes in Drosophila simulans

Selfish genes, such as meiotic drive elements, propagate themselves through a population without increasing the fitness of host organisms. X-linked (or Y-linked) meiotic drive elements reduce the transmission of the Y (X) chromosome and skew progeny and population sex ratios, leading to intense conflict among genomic compartments. Drosophila simulans is unusual in having a least three distinct systems of X chromosome meiotic drive. Here, we characterize naturally occurring genetic variation at the Winters sex-ratio driver (Distorter on the X or Dox), its progenitor gene (Mother of Dox or MDox), and its suppressor gene (Not Much Yang or Nmy), which have been previously mapped and characterized. We survey three North American populations as well as 13 globally distributed strains and present molecular polymorphism data at the three loci. We find that all three genes show signatures of selection in North America, judging from levels of polymorphism and skews in the site-frequency spectrum. These signatures likely result from the biased transmission of the driver and selection on the suppressor for the maintenance of equal sex ratios. Coalescent modeling indicates that the timing of selection is more recent than the age of the alleles, suggesting that the driver and suppressor are coevolving under an evolutionary “arms race. ” None of the Winters sex-ratio genes are fixed in D. simulans, and at all loci we find ancestral alleles, which lack the gene insertions and exhibit high levels of nucleotide polymorphism compared to the derived alleles. In addition, we find several “null” alleles that have mutations on the derived Dox background, which result in loss of drive function. We discuss the possible causes of the maintenance of presence–absence polymorphism in the Winters sex-ratio genes.
AMBRA1-Mediated Mitophagy Counteracts Oxidative Stress and Apoptosis Induced by Neurotoxicity in Human Neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y Cells

Therapeutic strategies are needed to protect dopaminergic neurons in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients. Oxidative stress caused by dopamine may play an important role in PD pathogenesis. Selective autophagy of mitochondria (mitophagy), mainly regulated by PINK1 and PARKIN, plays an important role in the maintenance of cell homeostasis. Mutations in those genes cause accumulation of damaged mitochondria, leading to nigral degeneration and early-onset PD. AMBRA1ActA is a fusion protein specifically expressed at the mitochondria, and whose expression has been shown to induce a powerful mitophagy in mammalian cells. Most importantly, the pro-autophagy factor AMBRA1 is sufficient to restore mitophagy in fibroblasts of PD patients carrying PINK1 and PARKIN mutations. In this study, we investigated the potential neuroprotective effect of AMBRA1-induced mitophagy against 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA)- and rotenone-induced cell death in human neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cells. We demonstrated that AMBRA1ActA overexpression was sufficient to induce mitochondrial clearance in SH-SY5Y cells. We found that apoptosis induced by 6-OHDA and rotenone was reversed by AMBRA1-induced mitophagy. Finally, transfection of SH-SY5Y cells with a vector encoding AMBRA1ActA significantly reduced 6-OHDA and rotenone-induced generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Altogether, our results indicate that AMBRA1ActA is able to induce mitophagy in SH-SY5Y cells in order to suppress oxidative stress and apoptosis induced by both 6-OHDA and rotenone. These results strongly suggest that AMBRA1 may have promising neuroprotective properties with an important role in limiting ROS-induced dopaminergic cell death, and the utmost potential to prevent PD or other neurodegenerative diseases associated with mitochondrial oxidative stress.
Implicationsof sterol structure formembrane lipid composition , £ uidityandphospholipidasymmetry inSaccharomyces cerevisiae

Sterols are essential components of the plasma membrane in eukaryotic cells. Nystatin-resistant erg mutants were used in the present study to investigate the in vitro effects of altered sterol structure on membrane lipid composition, fluidity, and asymmetry of phospholipids. Quantitative analyses of the wild type and mutants erg2, erg3 and erg6 revealed that mutants have lower sterol (free)-tophospholipid molar ratios than the wild type. Phosphatidylcholine content was decreased in erg2 and erg3 mutants; however, it was increased in erg6 strains as compared to normals. Phosphatidylserine content was increased in the erg6 mutant only. Fluorescence anisotropy decreased with temperature in both probes, and was lower for mutants than for the wild type, suggesting an increased freedom in rotational movement due to decreased membrane order. Investigation of changes in the aminophospholipid transbilayer distribution using two chemical probes, trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid and fluorescamine, revealed that the amounts of phosphatidylethanolamine derivatized by these probes were quite similar in both the wild type and various erg strains. The present findings suggest that adaptive responses in yeast cells with altered sterol structure are possibly manifested through changes in membrane lipid composition and fluidity, and not through transbilayer rearrangement of aminophospholipids.
Active Disturbance Rejection Control With Self-Adjusting Parameters for Vibration Displacement System of Continuous Casting Mold

Continuous casting mold (CCM) is molding equipment of the casting blank and widely used in iron and steel metallurgy. This paper focuses on the tracking control of vibration displacement of CCM is driven by a servo motor. To address the non-unique inverse solution of the nonlinear periodic function, a new nonlinear processing algorithm is developed. Based on the algorithm, an active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) with self-adjusting parameters to estimate and compensate the disturbances is proposed for suppressing the disturbances and improving the tracking performance. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.
QoS-Aware Service Continuity in the Virtualized Edge

5G systems are envisioned to support numerous delay-sensitive applications such as the tactile Internet, mobile gaming, and augmented reality. Such applications impose new demands on service providers in terms of the quality of service (QoS) provided to the end-users. Achieving these demands in mobile 5G-enabled networks represent a technical and administrative challenge. One of the solutions proposed is to provide cloud computing capabilities at the edge of the network. In such vision, services are cloudified and encapsulated within the virtual machines or containers placed in cloud hosts at the network access layer. To enable ultrashort processing times and immediate service response, fast instantiation, and migration of service instances between edge nodes are mandatory to cope with the consequences of user’s mobility. This paper surveys the techniques proposed for service migration at the edge of the network. We focus on QoS-aware service instantiation and migration approaches, comparing the mechanisms followed and emphasizing their advantages and disadvantages. Then, we highlight the open research challenges still left unhandled.
Trajectories of change in obesity and symptoms of depression: the CARDIA study.

OBJECTIVES We investigated whether, over time, baseline obesity is associated with change in depressive symptoms or if baseline symptoms of depression are associated with change in body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference. METHODS We used latent growth curve modeling to examine data from years 5, 10, 15, and 20 of the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study (n = 4643). We assessed depressive symptomatology with the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale. RESULTS Respondents who started out with higher levels of depressive symptoms experienced a faster rate of increase in BMI (for Whites only) and waist circumference (for Blacks and Whites) over time than did those who reported fewer symptoms of depression in year 5. Initial BMI and waist circumference did not influence the rate of change in symptoms of depression over time. CONCLUSIONS Depressive symptomatology likely plays a role in the development of physical health problems, such as cardiovascular disease, through its association with increases in relative weight and abdominal obesity over time.
Object classification using hybrid fiber optical force/proximity sensor

Intelligent perception to determine the physical interaction between robotic hands and the environment is a topic of great interest for the sensing and robotics communities. Sensor information on object stiffness and associated object deformation is essential to plan and execute stable and tight grasps. This paper proposes a novel robot-finger-integrated perception sensor to estimate the physical interaction with objects. The sensing principle of our combined force and proximity sensor is based on light intensity modulation, involving fiber optics technology to measure the proximity between robot fingers and object during approach as well as to detect normal and lateral forces. In order to distinguish between hard and soft (deformable) objects a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is employed to classify the handled object's stiffness based on the measured force and proximity data. The classifier does not require prior knowledge of the objects and achieves 87% classification accuracy on a set of household objects with different mechanical characteristics.
Structural alteration of mPTP modifies its open probability following ischemia – reperfusion

Postconditioning has recently been described as a powerful cardioprotection that prevents lethal reperfusion injury. Growing evidence suggests that mitochondrial permeability transition may be a key event in postconditioning. This proposition arises from the complementary observations that: (1) conditions for the mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP) opening are built up during early reperfusion, (2) mPTP opens at the time of reperfusion, (3) transgenic structural alteration of mPTP modifies its opening probability following ischemia– reperfusion, (4) mPTP plays a role in preconditioning, and (5) postconditioning attenuates lethal reperfusion injury. We review in this article current evidence for an important role of the mitochondrial transition pore in postconditioning. D 2006 European Society of Cardiology. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Fingerprint Drug Analysis: Overcoming Pitfalls and Heading Toward the Future?

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's World Drug Report of 2017, 5% of the global population has used drugs at least once, and about 29.5 million individuals suffer from drug use disorders (1). The impact of drug use is underlined by the estimated loss of 28 million “healthy” life years or disability-adjusted life years (DALYs)2 owing to premature death and disability. Opioids, including heroin, remain the most harmful drugs because they are associated with the risk of fatal overdoses and infectious diseases, resulting in almost 12 million DALYs. Cocaine use disorders were attributed to an estimated 999000 DALYs in 2015. Although the effects of drug use on the global health burden are clear, the drug market still seems to be expanding. The global potential of opium production is on the rise and was estimated to be 6380 tons in 2016; cocaine manufacturing is increasing again after a big fall in 2006 to 2013, with estimated quantities of 1125 tons in 2015 (1). As a result, adequate detection of cocaine and heroin is of utmost importance to control drug trafficking, to ensure proper healthcare, and to provide adequate workplace and forensic drug testing. Bioanalytics has gone through a period of extensive change driven by technological advancement, resulting in high-sensitive techniques, and, as a result, an increased use of alternative matrices. In the past decade, analysis of fingerprints for the detection of illegal drugs and medication has been investigated because it is a noninvasive, difficult to falsify, and traceable sampling procedure ensuring the chain of custody (2). In this issue of Clinical Chemistry , Ismail et al. describe the detection of cocaine and/or heroin use by mass spectrometric analysis of fingerprints collected on dedicated Whatman paper (2). The same research group previously reported the development and validation …
Dysregulation of Pain- and Emotion-Related Networks in Trigeminal Neuralgia

Classical trigeminal neuralgia (TN) is a severe neuropathic facial pain disorder associated with increased risks of anxiety and depression. Converging evidence suggests that chronic pain pathophysiology involves dysfunctional pain-related and emotion-related networks. However, whether these systems are also among the culprit networks for TN remains unclear. Here, we aimed to assess TN-related anatomical and functional brain anomalies in pain-related and emotion-related networks. We investigated differences in gray matter (GM) volume and the related resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) between 29 classical TN patients and 34 matched healthy controls. Relationships between brain measurement alterations, clinical pain and emotional states were identified. A longitudinal observation was further conducted to determine whether alterations in the brain could renormalize following pain relief. Reduced GM volumes in the bilateral amygdala, periaqueductal gray (PAG) and right insula were found in TN patients compared with healthy control subjects. Whole-brain rsFC analyses with the four above-mentioned anatomical regions as seeds identified three significantly altered functional circuits, including amygdala-DLPFC, amygdala-mPFC and amygdala-thalamus/putamen circuitry. The amygdala-DLPFC and amygdala-mPFC circuits were associated with clinical pain duration and emotional state ratings, respectively. Further longitudinal analysis found that rsFC strength abnormalities in two fronto-limbic circuits (left amygdala/left DLPFC and right amygdala/right PFC) were resolved after pain relief. Together, structural and functional deficits in pain-related and emotion-related networks were associated with TN patients, as demonstrated by our multimodal results. Pain relief had protective effects on brain functional connectivity within fronto-limbic circuits. Our study provides novel insights into the pathophysiology of TN, which may ultimately facilitate advances in TN intervention.
Ultrathin and flexible 4-channel scope for guiding surgical resections using a near-infrared fluorescence molecular probe for cancer

Minimally-invasive optical imaging is being advanced by molecular probes that enhance contrast using fluorescence. The applications in cancer imaging are very broad, ranging from early diagnosis of cancer to the guiding of interventions, such as surgery. The high-sensitivity afforded by wide-field fluorescence imaging using scanning laser light is being developed for these broad applications. The platform technology being introduced for fluorescence-guided surgery is multimodal scanning fiber endoscope (mmSFE), which places a sub-1-mm optical fiber scanner at the tip of a highly flexible scope. Because several different laser wavelengths can be mixed and scanned together, full-color reflectance imaging can be combined with near infrared (NIR) fluorescence imaging in a new 4-channel multimodal SFE. Different imaging display modes are evaluated to provide surgeons fluorescence information with anatomical background preserved. These preliminary results provide a measure of mmSFE imaging performance in vitro and ex vivo, using a mouse model of brain cancer and BLZ-100 fluorescence tumor indicator. The mmSFE system generated wide-field 30 Hz video of concurrent reflectance and NIR fluorescence with sensitivity below 1 nM in vitro. Using the ex vivo mouse brain tumor model, the low-power 785-nm laser source does not produce any noticeable photobleaching of tumors with strong fluorescence signal over 30 minutes of continuous multimodal imaging. The wide-field NIR fluorescence images of the mouse brain surface produced a match to the conventional histology slices by processing the hematoxylin signal in a mean intensity projection to the outer surface and then registering with the mmSFE image. These results indicate the potential for the mmSFE and BLZ-100 tumor indicator for fluorescence guidance of keyhole neurosurgery.
Local revitalization model based on soft systems methodology

An aging society evidently has had an effect on the recent increase of abandoned farmland in Japan. Therefore, realizing local revitalization is of utmost importance. This study first examines the present situation of abandoned farmland in the Oga area. It then examines the cause-effect relationship and comes up with solutions based on Soft Systems Methodology. In particular, chain management of sightseeing resources by space and time, including experience-based sightseeing are extracted as one of the effective solutions. Moreover, the countermeasures already taken by the committee for the promotion of Oga east coast are also introduced from this perspective.
A Framework for Incorporating Alignment Information in Parsing

The standard PCFG approach to parsing is quite successful on certain domains, but is relatively inflexible in the type of feature information we can include in its probabilistic model. In this work, we discuss preliminary work in developing a new probabilistic parsing model that allows us to easily incorporate many different types of features, including crosslingual information. We show how this model can be used to build a successful parser for a small handmade gold-standard corpus of 188 sentences (in 3 languages) from the Europarl corpus.
Modern Development Technologies and Investigation of Food Production Technological Complex Automated Systems

Nowadays, the application of modern technologies, the scenario-targeted approach namely, allows to provide the stable quality of product and energy saving in conditions of the objects changing parameters at the stage of control system development. These technologies also include the genetic algorithms and network structures. The following article presents the variants of modern technology applications at the stage of control system development of the separate departments of sugar factory, diary enterprises and brewery.
The role of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in the four P medicine era

The current era of medicine is often named “4PMedicine”. Four P represents the acronym of Personalized, Predictive, Preventive and Participative (Fig. 1). In 2011 Hood and Friend [1] developed the concept of 4P Medicine, comprising not only the idea of a personalized medicine based on a well-defined molecular predictive medicine, but also a health concept in which disease prevention and citizen participation in the management of health should become the medicine of the future, following a systems medicine approach. The backbone of 4P medicine is translational research aiming to define molecular pathways that are selectively involved in each type of cancer, allowing for targeted therapy on a personalized basis. The „magic bullet‰