Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Synthesis of an energy-optimal self-heating strategy for Li-ion batteries

The resistance of Lithium-ion cells increases at sub-zero temperatures reducing the cells' power availability. One way to improve the cells' performance in these adverse operation conditions is to proactively heat them. In this paper, we consider the scenario in which a cell is heated from both inside and outside; a current is drawn from the cell to power a convective heater; Joule heating warms the cell from inside. A problem formulation to derive the time-limited energy-optimal current policy is presented, analyzed and numerically solved. It is observed that the optimal current policy resembles a sequence of constant voltage, constant current and phases, mirroring conventional wisdom. Finally, the notion of productive warm-up-a warm-up procedure that ensures that the cell can perform work once warmed-up-is introduced; and an approximation of the optimal solution is used to identify the lowest state of charge at various operating conditions (portion of the state-space) from which productive warm-up is feasible.
Coronary Artery Calcium Improves Risk Assessment in Adults With a Family History of Premature Coronary Heart Disease: Results From Multiethnic Study of Atherosclerosis

Background—The prognostic value of coronary artery calcium (CAC) or carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT) among asymptomatic adults with a family history (FH) of premature coronary heart disease is unclear. Methods and Results—Multiethnic Study of Atherosclerosis enrolled 6814 adults without known atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD). Hard ASCVD events were ascertained over a median follow-up of 10.2 years. We estimated adjusted-hazard ratios for CAC and CIMT categories using Cox regression, both within and across FH status groups. Improvement in discrimination with CAC or CIMT added to variables from the ASCVD pooled cohort equation was also evaluated using receiver-operating characteristic curve and likelihood ratio analysis. Of 6125 individuals (62±10 years; 47% men) who reported information on FH, 1262 (21%) had an FH of premature coronary heart disease. Among these, 104 hard ASCVD events occurred. Crude incidence rates (per 1000 person-years) for hard ASCVD were 4.4 for CAC, 0 (n=574; 46% of the sample); 8.8 for CAC, 1 to 99 (n=368); 14.9 for CAC, 100 to 399 (n=178); and 20.8 for CAC, ≥400 (n=142). Relative to CAC=0, adjusted hard ASCVD hazard ratios for each CAC category among persons with an FH were 1.64 (95% confidence interval, 0.94–2.87), 2.45 (1.31–4.58), and 2.80 (1.44–5.43), respectively. However, there was no increased adjusted hazard for hard ASCVD in high versus low CIMT categories. In participants with an FH of premature coronary heart disease, CAC improved discrimination of hard ASCVD events (P<0.001). However, CIMT did not discriminate ASCVD (P=0.70). Conclusions—Nearly half of individuals reporting FH have zero CAC and may receive less net benefit from aspirin or statin therapy. Among persons with an FH, CAC is a robust marker of absolute and relative risk of ASCVD, whereas CIMT is not.
Distributed adaptive locomotion by a modular robotic system, M-TRAN II

A modular robot has a distributed mechanical composition which can make various configurations and also make locomotion in a wide variety of configurations. Modular robots are thought to be useful in extreme or unknown environments by adaptively changing their shape and locomotion patterns. As for locomotion, two types can be used; one is whole-body fixed-configuration locomotion and the other is locomotion by self-reconfiguration. In this paper we deal with the former type of locomotion which is realized by coordinated joint actuation. So far, proposed control methods for whole-body locomotion by modular robots have been based on predefined locomotion sequences. However, locomotion based on predefined sequences cannot adapt to changing terrain conditions such as uphill, downhill, slippery and sticky grounds. To solve such problems, we propose a distributed control mechanism using a CPG controller which enables adaptive locomotion by modular robots. Besides the real-time CPG control we introduce a decentralized control mechanism for detecting the situation that the robot is stuck and initiating transformation to another shape for recovering the situation. The results of various hardware experiments by 4-legged structure prove the feasibility of the method for adaptive locomotion and transformation by our M-TRAN II modules.
A Source-Level Energy Optimization Framework for Mobile Applications

Energy efficiency can have a significant influence on user experience of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Although energy is consumed by hardware, software optimization plays an important role in saving energy, and thus software developers have to participate in the optimization process. The source code is the interface between the developer and hardware resources. In this paper, we propose an energy-optimization framework guided by a source code energy model that allows developers to be aware of energy usage induced by the code and to apply very targeted source-level refactoring strategies. The framework also lays a foundation for the code optimization by automatic tools. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first that achieves this for a high-level language such as Java. In a case study, the experimental evaluation shows that our approach is able to save from 6.4% to 50.2% of the CPU energy consumption in various application scenarios.
Long-Term Quality-of-Life and Functioning Comparison of Atomoxetine Versus Other Standard Treatment in Pediatric Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Abstract Psychopharmacological agents were shown to be important for improving the quality of life (QoL) of patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A short-term, 10-week study found atomoxetine (ATX) to be effective in improving QoL of ADHD patients. We compared, for the first time, long-term treatment outcomes of ATX and other early standard therapy (OEST, any pharmacological ADHD treatment except ATX) in QoL and functional impairment in pharmacologically naive children/ adolescents in a randomized, controlled, open-label study at 6 and 12 months. Patients received ATX (0.5–1.8 mg/kg per day) or OEST (mainly methylphenidate). Quality of life and functioning were assessed by the Child Health and Illness Profile–Child Edition, Parent Rating Form and the Weiss Functional Impairment Rating Scale–Parent Report. Three hundred ninety-eight patients (79.4% male; mean age, 9.3 years) received study treatment. The Child Health and Illness Profile–Child Edition, Parent Rating Form achievement domain t scores significantly improved from baseline to 6 months from means of 28.0 to 37.1 for ATX and from 28.3 to 40.7 for OEST. Mean t scores at 12 months were 40.0 for ATX and 41.0 for OEST. The Weiss Functional Impairment Rating Scale–Parent Report total score improved from baseline to 6 months in both groups (ATX: mean 1.02 to 0.63; OEST: 0.96 to 0.59). Both treatments were safe with no statistically significant difference in the overall rate of adverse events. Overall, the improvements in QoL and functional impairment observed over time for ATX and OEST were meaningful and stable over the study period of 12 months. Between-group differences were small but sometimes statistically significant, providing the first-time long-term comparative symptomatic and QoL analysis between ATX and OEST.
mAAS -- A Mobile Ambulatory Assessment System for Alcohol Craving Studies

Currently, most methods in clinical psychology research primarily rely on questionnaires and interviews with examiners, which could not provide real-life subject behavioral and psychology data monitoring and collecting services. This paper presents a smartphone-based mobile Ambulatory Assessment System, called mAAS, for psychology research, especially alcohol craving studies, to improve current methods and provide real-time data monitoring and collecting. This system consists of a wearable sensor, Equivital EQ2 sensor, for measuring physiological data, an Android smartphone, and a web server. The smartphone is responsible for collecting physiological data from wireless wearable sensor, recording smartphone sensor data, interacting with the users to conducting various surveys, and uploading data to the web server. The server is responsible for data processing, computation, and visualization. The sensor and survey data are used by machine learning methods to build models to predict alcohol or other substance cravings and emotion dysregulation caused by various psychological disorders. The system has been deployed in a field study of alcohol craving and initial data collected from real subjects are promising.
Development and Stability Studies of Novel Liposomal Vancomycin Formulations

A promising strategy to improve the therapeutic efficiency of antimicrobial agents is targeted therapy. Although vancomycin has been considered a gold standard for the therapy of MRSA pneumonia, clinical failure rates have also been reported owing to its slow, time-dependent bactericidal activity, variable lung tissue penetration and poor intracellular penetration into macrophages. Liposomal encapsulation has been established as an alternative for antimicrobial delivery to infected tissue macrophages and offers enhanced pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics and decreased toxicity compared to standard preparations. The aim of the present work is to prepare vancomycin in two different liposomal formulations, conventional and PEGylated liposomes using different methods. The prepared formulations were optimized for their particle size, encapsulation efficiency and physical stability. The dehydration-rehydration was found to be the best preparation method. Both the conventional and PEGylated liposomal formulations were successfully formulated with a narrow particle size and size distribution and % encapsulation efficiency of 9 ± 2 and 12 ± 3, respectively. Both the formulations were stable at 4°C for 3 months. These formulations were successfully used to evaluate for their intracellular killing of MRSA and in vivo pharmacokinetic and bio-distribution studies.
The Complexity of Conjunctive Query Abduction in DL-Lite

In order to meet usability requirements, most logic-based applications provide explanation facilities for reasoning services. This holds also for DLs, where research focused on the explanation of both TBox reasoning and, more recently, query answering. Besides explaining the presence of a tuple in a query answer, it is important to explain also why a given tuple is missing. We address this latter problem for (conjunctive) query answering over DL-Lite ontologies, by adopting abductive reasoning, that is, we look for additions to the ABox that force a given tuple to be in the result. As reasoning tasks, we consider existence and recognition of an explanation, and relevance and necessity of a certain assertion for an explanation. We characterize the computational complexity of these problems for subset minimal and cardinality minimal solutions.
Design of dual-polarized wideband patch antenna by FDTD method

A three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is applied to analyze the performance of a dual-polarized wideband patch antenna in this paper. The simulated results obtained by the FDTD method are compared with measured data. And effects of different design parameters, including inner and outer radiuses of annular-ring slot, cross-slot width, and feed-line length, on the antenna performance are studied. Furthermore, the time-domain field distribution is presented in this paper.
On a Technique for Transparently Empowering Classical Compiler Optimizations on Multithreaded Code

A large body of data-flow analyses exists for analyzing and optimizing sequential code. Unfortunately, much of it cannot be directly applied on parallel code, for reasons of correctness. This article presents a technique to automatically, aggressively, yet safely apply sequentially-sound data-flow transformations, without change, on shared-memory programs. The technique is founded on the notion of program references being “siloed” on certain control-flow paths. Intuitively, siloed references are free of interference from other threads within the confines of such paths. Data-flow transformations can, in general, be unblocked on siloed references. The solution has been implemented in a widely used compiler. Results on benchmarks from SPLASH-2 show that performance improvements of up to 41% are possible, with an average improvement of 6% across all the tested programs over all thread counts.
Spatial characterization of indoor MIMO radio channel at both 6.05GHz and 2.45GHz based on measurement

Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) scheme at 6.06. 1GHz is one of the enabling technologies for the next generation mobile communications. To compare the spatial characteristics of MIMO channel at 6.05GHz with those at 2.45GHz, an extensive MIMO channel measurement is performed at both frequency bands under typical classroom environment with channel sounder based on vector network analyzer. Spatial correlations at both frequency bands are analyzed from the measured data in different propagation conditions, including Non Line-of-Sight (NLOS) and Line-of-Sight (LOS) propagation. Measurement shows that, there are significantly distinctions between spatial correlations at 6.05GHz and 2.45GHz. After that, Capacity results of the experiments are discussed.
Control of cracks by interfaces in composites

A novel theory is proposed to show how a crack may he accelerated or retarded when it meets an interface between two equally brittle materials of different elastic properties. Measurements of a model crack travelling through a brittle adhesive joint have substantially verified the theory. The results demonstrate that the toughness of a composite material, having a periodic stiffness change along the crack path, may be very much greater than the toughness of the individual components of the composite. The relevance of these ideas to the design of tough composite structures is discussed.
Ultralow-Dose Abdominal Computed Tomography: Comparison of 2 Iterative Reconstruction Techniques in a Prospective Clinical Study

Purpose To assess lesion detection and image quality of ultralow-dose (ULD) abdominal computed tomography (CT) reconstructed with filtered back projection (FBP) and 2 iterative reconstruction techniques: hybrid-based iDose, and image-based SafeCT. Materials and Methods In this institutional review board–approved ongoing prospective clinical study, 41 adult patients provided written informed consent for an additional ULD abdominal CT examination immediately after standard dose (SD) CT exam on a 256-slice multidetector computed tomography (iCT, Philips-Healthcare). The SD examination (size-specific dose estimate, 10 ± 3 mGy) was performed at 120 kV with automatic exposure control, and reconstructed with FBP. The ULD examination (1.5 ± 0.4 mGy) was performed at 120 kV and fixed tube current of 17 to 20 mAs/slice to achieve ULD radiation dose, with the rest of the scan parameters same as SD examination. The ULD data were reconstructed with (a) FBP, (b) iDose, and (c) SafeCT. Lesions were detected on ULD FBP series and compared to SD FBP “reference-standard” series. True lesions, pseudolesions, and missed lesions were recorded. Four abdominal radiologists independently blindly performed subjective image quality. Objective image quality included image noise calculation and noise spectral density plots. Results All true lesions (n, 52: liver metastases, renal cysts, diverticulosis) in SD FBP images were detected in ULD images. Although there were no missed or pseudolesions on ULD iDose and ULD SafeCT images, appearance of small low-contrast hepatic lesions was suboptimal. The ULD FBP images were unacceptable across all patients for both lesion detection and image quality. In patients with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 kg/m2 or less, ULD iDose and ULD SafeCT images were acceptable for image quality that was close to SD FBP for both normal and abnormal abdominal and pelvic structures. With increasing BMI, the image quality of ULD images was deemed unacceptable due to photo starvation. Evaluation of kidney stones with ULD iDose/SafeCT images was found acceptable regardless of patient size. Image noise levels were significantly lower in ULD iDose and ULD SafeCT images compared to ULD FBP (P < 0.01). Conclusions Preliminary results show that ULD abdominal CT reconstructed with iterative reconstruction techniques is achievable in smaller patients (BMI ⩽ 25 kg/m2) but remains a challenge for overweight to obese patients. Lesion detection is similar in full-dose SD FBP and ULD iDose/SafeCT images, with suboptimal visibility of low-contrast lesions in ULD images.
Modelling of dynamical effects related to the wettability and capillarity of simple and complex liquids

This Thesis explores physical phenomena characteristic for thin liquid films and small droplets of simple and complex liquids on solid substrates for which wettability and capillarity control their statical and dynamical properties. We start by discussing the general concepts of wettability and capillarity and introduce the common mathematical framework of the lubrication approximation for studies of thin liquid films and small contact angle drops. We demonstrate the derivation of the generic equation describing the evolution of a film of simple liquid from the Navier-Stokes equations. We show how this model can be further extended to incorporate various effects relevant to the case of complex liquids. The results described in the Thesis comprise three projects with the common main theme of the influence of wettability and capillarity on the statics and dynamics of the studied systems, namely (i) Evaporating sessile droplets fed through the solid substrate - a geometry that allows us to discuss steady states of the system and their role in the time evolution of freely evaporating droplets without influx in an isothermal case; (ii) The influence of a solute--dependent wettability on the stability, static and dynamical properties of thin films and drops of non-volatile mixtures, suspensions and solutions; (iii) A parameter-passing scheme between particle-based Molecular Dynamics simulations and the continuum lubrication model which allows us to discuss equilibrium properties of small polymeric droplets. We present the physical questions arising in the three systems and discuss approaches and results as well as possible extensions.
Software-assisted cache replacement mechanisms for embedded systems

We address the problem of improving cache predictability and performance in embedded systems through the use of software-assisted replacement mechanisms. These mechanisms require additional software controlled state information that affects the cache replacement decision. Software instructions allow a program to kill a particular cache element, i.e. effectively make the element the least recently used element, or keep that cache element, i.e. the element will never be evicted. We prove basic theorems that provide conditions under which kill and keep instructions can be inserted into program code, such that the resulting performance is guaranteed to be as good as or better than the original program run using the standard LRU policy. We developed a compiler algorithm based on the theoretical results that, given an arbitrary program, determines when to perform software-assisted replacement, i.e., when to insert either a kill or keep instruction. Empirical evidence is provided that shows that performance and predictability (worst-case performance) can be improved for many programs.
QIS-XML: An Extensible Markup Language for Quantum Information Science

This Master thesis examines issues of interoperability and integration between the Classic Information Science (CIS) and Quantum Information Science (QIS). It provides a short introduction to the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and proceeds to describe the development steps that have lead to a prototype XML specification for quantum computing (QIS-XML). QIS-XML is a proposed framework, based on the widely used standard (XML) to describe, visualize, exchange and process quantum gates and quantum circuits. It also provides a potential approach to a generic programming language for quantum computers through the concept of XML driven compilers. Examples are provided for the description of commonly used quantum gates and circuits, accompanied with tools to visualize them in standard web browsers. An algorithmic example is also presented, performing a simple addition operation with quantum circuits and running the program on a quantum computer simulator. Overall, this initial effort demonstrates how XML technologies could be at the core of the architecture for describing and programming quantum computers. By leveraging a widely accepted standard, QIS-XML also builds a bridge between classic and quantum IT, which could foster the acceptance of QIS by the ICT community and facilitate the understanding of quantum technology by IT experts. This would support the consolidation of Classic Information Science and Quantum Information Science into a Complete Information Science, a challenge that could be referred to as the "Information Science Grand Unification Challenge".
Integrating a SCRUM-Based Process with Human Centred Design: An Experience from an Action Research Study

Context: Agile software processes are more frequently being integrated with aspects of human centered design given the commonalities that the two approaches share, such as user involvement, importance attributed to testing and prototyping practices, iterative design and so on. Goal: tailor a SCRUM-based process by integrating it and adapting it with Human Centered Design (HCD) practices. Method: action research experience carried out in an industrial case study involving researchers, an Italian SME and stakeholders of the final product (a web portal). Results: The research has led to the definition of the HCD-SCRUM process. The classic process has been tailored by: including staff dedicated to the project, considering flexible duration of sprints based on the workload and priority of features to be developed, using an iterative-incremental progression of the SCRUM development practices and including customer interviews. Conclusion: The tailored process outlined in this paper has been substituted to the classic SCRUM process that the company was adopting before this research study.
Design of MR dampers to prevent progressive collapse of moment frames

In this paper the progressive collapse resisting capacity of steel moment frames with MR dampers is evaluated, and a preliminary design procedure for the dampers to prevent progressive collapse is suggested. Parametric studies are carried out using a beam-column subassemblage with varying natural period, yield strength, and damper force. Then the progressive collapse potentials of 15-story steel moment frames installed with MR dampers are evaluated by nonlinear dynamic analysis. The analysis results of the model structures showed that the MR dampers are effective in preventing progressive collapse of framed structures subjected to sudden loss of a first story column. The effectiveness is more noticeable in the structure with larger vertical deflection subjected to larger inelastic deformation. The maximum responses of the structure installed with the MR dampers designed to meet a given target dynamic response factor generally coincided well with the target value on the conservative side.