Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The stress-assisted enhancement of piezoelectric properties due to mechanically incompatible domain structures in BaTiO3

The piezoelectric properties of tetragonal BaTiO3 (BTO) crystals with a high density of 90° twin domain boundaries were experimentally investigated by Wada and Tsurumi (2004 Br. Ceram. Trans. 103 93). These crystals with engineered dense domain structures exhibit significantly larger intrinsic d33 and d31 coefficients than in mono-domain crystals. This phenomena was studied theoretically and several enhancement mechanisms (domain wall broadening, polarization tilting) were suggested in the past, but no satisfactory explanation was found. We present a model which incorporates the additional effect of stress-assisted phase transition in elastically incompatible domain structures of BTO. According to our results, the internal stress, existing in [101] poled tetragonal BTO, shifts the system closer to the 4mm-mm2 phase transition, and the latter leads to the enhancement of macroscopic piezoelectric properties. The domain structure and effective properties of the BTO crystal are analyzed with phase field simulation based on Ginzburg-Landau-Devonshire theory.
Suppression of the Arboviruses Dengue and Chikungunya Using a Dual-Acting Group-I Intron Coupled with Conditional Expression of the Bax C-Terminal Domain

In portions of South Asia, vectors and patients co-infected with dengue (DENV) and chikungunya (CHIKV) are on the rise, with the potential for this occurrence in other regions of the world, for example the United States. Therefore, we engineered an antiviral approach that suppresses the replication of both arboviruses in mosquito cells using a single antiviral group I intron. We devised unique configurations of internal, external, and guide sequences that permit homologous recognition and splicing with conserved target sequences in the genomes of both viruses using a single trans-splicing Group I intron, and examined their effectiveness to suppress infections of DENV and CHIKV in mosquito cells when coupled with a proapoptotic 3' exon, ΔN Bax. RT-PCR demonstrated the utility of these introns in trans-splicing the ΔN Bax sequence downstream of either the DENV or CHIKV target site in transformed Aedes albopictus C6/36 cells, independent of the order in which the virus specific targeting sequences were inserted into the construct. This trans-splicing reaction forms DENV or CHIKV ΔN Bax RNA fusions that led to apoptotic cell death as evidenced by annexin V staining, caspase, and DNA fragmentation assays. TCID50-IFA analyses demonstrate effective suppression of DENV and CHIKV infections by our anti-arbovirus group I intron approach. This represents the first report of a dual-acting Group I intron, and demonstrates that we can target DENV and CHIKV RNAs in a sequence specific manner with a single, uniquely configured CHIKV/DENV dual targeting group I intron, leading to replication suppression of both arboviruses, and thus providing a promising single antiviral for the transgenic suppression of multiple arboviruses.
Extraction of curved lines from images

A method to extract curvilinear structures and their widths from digital images is presented. The approach is based on differential geometric properties of the image function. For each pixel, the second order Taylor polynomial is computed by convolving the image with the derivatives of a Gaussian smoothing kernel. Line points are required to have a vanishing gradient and a high curvature in the direction perpendicular to the line. The resulting filter generates a single response for each line. The line position can be determined with sub-pixel accuracy and the algorithm scales to lines of arbitrary width. A procedure to determine the width of the lines is described. It is based on locating the corresponding edge points of each line point in the direction perpendicular to the line with sub-pixel accuracy.
An online English e-learning framework based on web service discovery

In most industrial e-learning supply companies, even interactive systems of know-how transfer go quite different from the educational needs of customers (teachers or students) at a university. Dynamic and adaptive parsers are presented here to supply teachers and students with individualized analytical online teaching materials of English languages. The parsers are supported by a large scale repository of current English language and teaching materials. Web service discovery technology based on multi-agent system and our local corpora can substantially promote the repository competency to fulfill the e-learning task. A case study demonstrates a favorable support to our system.
Contrarian Strategies and Cross-Autocorrelations in Stock Returns: Evidence from France

The aim of this paper is to study the profits of a contrarian strategy on the French Stock market. The profits of the standard contrarian strategy (sell winners and buy losers in all states of the nature) lead to smaller but still significant profits in France. These profits are bigger for those stocks which are held long and are more likely to occur when the market is bullish. We examine the lead-lag relation between a large size firms portfolio and small size firms portfolios. We do not find evidence of an asymmetric reaction to bad and good news as in MacQueen et al. (1996). Finally, we show that overreaction to firm specific information is the primary source of contrarian profits and that the decomposition is robust to the factor model chosen to describe asset returns. The performance of the standard strategy is obtained by capturing the profits due to the overreaction of the stocks shorted. The long side serves as a partial hedge against market fluctuations. This asymmetry was not documented by previous research and deserves a closer look in order to determine if it is specific to the French Stock market.
CD34+ hematopoietic progenitors from human cord blood differentiate along two independent dendritic cell pathways in response to GM-CSF+TNF alpha

Human dendritic cells (DC) can now be generated in vitro in large numbers by culturing CD34+ hematopoietic progenitors in presence of GM- CSF+TNF alpha for 12 d. The present study demonstrates that cord blood CD34+ HPC indeed differentiate along two independent DC pathways. At early time points (day 5-7) during the culture, two subsets of DC precursors identified by the exclusive expression of CD1a and CD14 emerge independently. Both precursor subsets mature at day 12-14 into DC with typical morphology and phenotype (CD80, CD83, CD86, CD58, high HLA class II). CD1a+ precursors give rise to cells characterized by the expression of Birbeck granules, the Lag antigen and E-cadherin, three markers specifically expressed on Langerhans cells in the epidermis. In contrast, the CD14+ progenitors mature into CD1a+ DC lacking Birbeck granules, E-cadherin, and Lag antigen but expressing CD2, CD9, CD68, and the coagulation factor XIIIa described in dermal dendritic cells. The two mature DC were equally potent in stimulating allogeneic CD45RA+ naive T cells. Interestingly, the CD14+ precursors, but not the CD1a+ precursors, represent bipotent cells that can be induced to differentiate, in response to M-CSF, into macrophage-like cells, lacking accessory function for T cells. Altogether, these results demonstrate that different pathways of DC development exist: the Langerhans cells and the CD14(+)-derived DC related to dermal DC or circulating blood DC. The physiological relevance of these two pathways of DC development is discussed with regard to their potential in vivo counterparts.
Medicinal Plants Disease Identification Using Canny Edge Detection Algorithm , Histogram Analysis and CBIR

— Ayurveda certainly brings substantial revenue to India by foreign exchange through export of ayurvedic medicines. Plants diseases cause major production and economic losses in agricultural and medicinal industry worldwide. Monitoring of health and detection of diseases in plants and trees is critical issue. This paper presents a method for identification of medicinal plants based on some important features extracted from its leaf images. The most significant part of research on plant disease to identify the disease based on CBIR (content based image retrieval) that is mainly concerned with the accurate detection of diseased medicinal plant. This paper presents an approach where the plant is identified based on its leaf features such as color histogram and edge histogram. Canny edge detection is also very useful to find the strong edges of leaf of plants and that is used to draw the edge histogram which is one of the parameter for testing. Edge Histogram is plotted on strong edges after applying canny edge Detection Algorithm. Color Histogram separate the layers to plot the red, green and blue layer histogram to check the intensity of each color pixels in the sample image which is another parameter for testing that image is healthy or infected.
Performance Analysis of Route Optimization on Proxy Mobile IPv6

In the mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), a mobile node (MN) directly manages its signaling related mobility because the MIPv6 is a host based mobility protocol. On the other hands, the proxy mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) provides a network based mobility in where special network entities manage all gnaling related mobility for supporting mobility service of MN. The route optimization (RO) mechanism for PMIPv6 is proposed while the specification of PMIPv6 is still focusing on basic operations. The RO mechanism establishes the enhanced communication path between MNs so that it can reduce transmission delay and network burden. In this paper, we analyze the performance of RO mechanism compared with the basic PMIPv6. The presented results confirm that the RO mechanism provide the improved performance during the MN communicates with the CN, due to the established communication path.
Optimal Multiunit Exchange Design

We investigate multiunit exchange where a central planner and participants both bring commodities to sell and the central planner plays the role of platform provider. The central planner has restrictions on allocations. We characterize the optimal mechanism concerning his (her) revenue under incentive compatibility and individual rationality in the ex-post term. We introduce modified virtual valuation and show that the optimization problem can be replaced with the maximization of modified virtual valuations. We apply our results to important problems of single-unit demands and position exchanges. We demonstrate a clock auction design that implements the optimal position allocation through dominant strategies.
Observations and three-dimensional photoionization modelling of the wolf-Rayet planetary nebula NGC 1501

Recent observations reveal that the central star of the planetary nebula Abell 48 exhibits spectral features similar to massive nitrogen-sequence Wolf–Rayet stars. This raises a pertinent question, whether it is still a planetary nebula or rather a ring nebula of a massive star. In this study, we have constructed a three-dimensional photoionization model of Abell 48, constrained by our new optical integral field spectroscopy. An analysis of the spatially resolved velocity distributions allowed us to constrain the geometry of Abell 48. We used the collisionally excited lines to obtain the nebular physical conditions and ionic abundances of nitrogen, oxygen, neon, sulphur and argon, relative to hydrogen. We also determined helium temperatures and ionic abundances of helium and carbon from the optical recombination lines. We obtained a good fit to the observations for most of the emission-line fluxes in our photoionization model. The ionic abundances deduced from our model are in decent agreement with those derived by the empirical analysis. However, we notice obvious discrepancies between helium temperatures derived from the model and the empirical analysis, as overestimated by our model. This could be due to the presence of a small fraction of cold metal-rich structures, which were not included in our model. It is found that the observed nebular line fluxes were best reproduced by using a hydrogen-deficient expanding model atmosphere as the ionizing source with an effective temperature of Teff = 70 kK and a stellar luminosity of L� = 5500 L� , which corresponds to a relatively low-mass progenitor star (∼ 3M � ) rather than a massive Pop I star.
Information Theory-Based Approach for Contrast Analysis in Polarimetric and/or Interferometric SAR Images

We propose a new approach for evaluating the contribution of the different channels of polarimetric and interferometric synthetic aperture radar (PolInSAR) images. For that purpose, we demonstrate that the Bhattacharyya distance between the probability density functions of neighboring regions in the image provides an efficient scalar contrast measure. We show that the analysis of this contrast measure allows one to precisely characterize the contribution of each channel for different system configurations, including intensity, polarimetric, and interferometric images. We illustrate this approach using a real synthetic aperture radar image to compare several polarimetric system architectures. Since PolInSAR imaging configurations can correspond to complex and expensive systems, the proposed method can be helpful in system imaging optimization.
Interference-induced enhancement of field entanglement in a microwave-driven V-type single-atom laser

We demonstrate the generation of two-mode continuous-variable (CV) entanglement in a V-type three-level atom trapped in a doubly resonant cavity using a microwave field driving a hyperfine transition between two upper excited states. By numerically simulating the dynamics of this system, our results show that the CV entanglement with large mean number of photons can be generated even in presence of the atomic relaxation and cavity losses. More interestingly, it is found that the intensity and period of entanglement can be enhanced significantly with the increasing of the atomic relaxation due to the existence of the perfect spontaneously generated interference between two atomic decay channels. Moreover, we also show that the entanglement can be controlled efficiently by tuning the intensity of spontaneously generated interference and the detuning of the cavity field.
Experimental Design Method for Multi-Parent Crossover Kit

In genetic algorithm, the most commonly used recombination operator involves two parents to produce offspring. A few attempts to study the effect of using multi-parent recombination in genetic algorithm have been reported in the literatures [1][3]. The rationale is to bias the recombination with more parents to improve the performance. In evolution strategies, a recombination operation was first proposed to produce new offspring that may inherit genes from more than two parents. In that approach, the number of parents is not fixed.
Designing a Storage Infrastructure for Scalable Cloud Services

In an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) cloud services, storag e needs of VM (Virtual Machine) instances are met through virtual disks (i.e. vir tual block devices). However, it is nontrivial to provide virtual disks to VMs in an ef ficient and scalable way for a couple of reasons. First, a VM host may be requ ired to provide virtual disks for a large number of VMs. It is difficult to ascerta in the largest possible storage demands and physically provision them all in the h ost machine. On the other hand, if the storage spaces for virtual disks are p rovided through remote storage servers, aggregate network traffic due to stor age accesses from VMs can easily deplete the network bandwidth and cause congestion. We propose a system, vStore, which overcomes these issues by utilizing the host’s limited local disk space as a block-level cache for the remote storage in or der to absorb network traffics from storage accesses. This allows the VMM (V irtual Machine Monitor) to serve VMs’ disk I/O requests from the host’s local disks mo t of the time, while providing the illusion of much larger storage space for cre ating new virtual disks. Caching is a well-studied topic in many different contexts , but caching virtual disks at block-level poses special challenges in achiev ing high performance while maintaining virtual disk semantics. First, after a disk wr ite operation finishes from the VM’s perspective, the data should survive e en if the host immediately encounters a power failure. Second, as disk I/O perfo rmance is dominated by disk seek times, it is important to keep a virtual disk as sequen tial as possible in the limited cache space. Third, the destaging operation that se nds dirty pages back to the remote storage server should be self-adaptive a nd minimize the impact on the foreground traffic. We propose techniques to add ress these challenges and implemented them in Xen. Our evaluation shows that vStore p rovides the illusion of unlimited storage space, significantly reduces network tr affic, and incurs a low disk I/O performance overhead.
Direct Brain Interfaces for Healing Games

Direct Brain Interfaces (DBIs) have been demonstrated to provide a channel of communication and environmental control for people with severe motor disabilities. DBIs have also been proposed and implemented in gaming and other entertainment applications for mainstream users. A new study at Georgia Tech is exploring the possibility of combining direct brain interfaces, gaming, and robotics to pioneer new therapies for stroke rehabilitation for people with residual paralysis or paresis. The aim is to enable a paralyzed patient to operate an upper-limb rehabilitation robot, initially using motor cortical brain signals, in hopes of restoring muscle movement to affected limbs. A simple game environment provides motivation and performance metrics for patients to repeatedly practice targeted reaching tasks. Closed-loop visual and proprioceptive feedback may help restore or replace damaged neural pathways to improve movement ability and stroke recovery. Author
Helicobacter pylori Infection of Gastrointestinal Epithelial Cells in vitro Induces Mesenchymal Stem Cell Migration through an NF-κB-Dependent Pathway

The role of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) in the physiology of the gastrointestinal tract epithelium is currently not well established. These cells can be recruited in response to inflammation due to epithelial damage, home, and participate in tissue repair. In addition, in the case of tissue repair failure, these cells could transform and be at the origin of carcinomas. However, the chemoattractant molecules responsible for MSC recruitment and migration in response to epithelial damage, and particularly to Helicobacter pylori infection, remain unknown although the role of some chemokines has been suggested. This work aimed to get insight into the mechanisms of mouse MSC migration during in vitro infection of mouse gastrointestinal epithelial cells by H. pylori. Using a cell culture insert system, we showed that infection of gastrointestinal epithelial cells by different H. pylori strains is able to stimulate the migration of MSC. This mechanism involves the secretion by infected epithelial cells of multiple cytokines, with a major role of TNFα, mainly via a Nuclear Factor-kappa B-dependent pathway. This study provides the first evidence of the role of H. pylori infection in MSC migration and paves the way to a better understanding of the role of bone marrow-derived stem cells in gastric pathophysiology and carcinogenesis.
Visual Specification of Structural and Temporal Properties

The UML has become the de-facto standard in software engineering. Due to the visual nature and accessibility of its structural diagrams, it is widely accepted as the tool of choice for structural modeling. However, for specifying structural properties that go beyond cardinalities, the UML only provides a textual specification language, the OCL. For mixed structural and temporal properties, only proprietary combinations of OCL with temporal logic exist today. The intricate nature of both OCL and temporal logic already causes problems for many software engineers. When communicating with people without a computer science background, e.g. domain experts, employing OCL, any dialect of temporal logic, or a mix of both is usually impracticable. In this paper, we propose a visual language for specifying requirements including structural as well as temporal aspects. Based on UML Object Diagrams, our approach is capable of expressing both detailed static properties and requirements concerning structural dynamics in a clear and intuitive fashion. In addition, we present a scheme for turning a specification into a powerful behavioral monitor, enabling us to verify dynamic structural properties of models at run-time or in a model checker.
Effects of Clofibrate on Salt Loading-Induced Hypertension in Rats

The effects of clofibrate on the hemodynamic and renal manifestations of increased saline intake were analyzed. Four groups of male Wistar rats were treated for five weeks: control, clofibrate (240 mg/kg/day), salt (2% via drinking water), and salt + clofibrate. Body weight, systolic blood pressure (SBP), and heart rate (HR) were recorded weekly. Finally, SBP, HR, and morphologic, metabolic, plasma, and renal variables were measured. Salt increased SBP, HR, urinary isoprostanes, NOx, ET, vasopressin and proteinuria and reduced plasma free T4 (FT4) and tissue FT4 and FT3 versus control rats. Clofibrate prevented the increase in SBP produced by salt administration, reduced the sodium balance, and further reduced plasma and tissue thyroid hormone levels. However, clofibrate did not modify the relative cardiac mass, NOx, urinary ET, and vasopressin of saline-loaded rats. In conclusion, chronic clofibrate administration prevented the blood pressure elevation of salt-loaded rats by decreasing sodium balance and reducing thyroid hormone levels.
Low-and-high Gain Design Technique for Linear Systems Subject to Input Saturation | a Direct Eigenstructure Assignment Approach

The low-and-high gain design technique, which was initiated in 10] for a chain of integrators and completed in 13] for general linear asymptotically null controllable with bounded controls systems, was conceived for semi-global control problems beyond stabilization and was related to the performance issues such as semi-global stabilization with enhanced utilization of the available control capacity and semi-global disturbance rejection. Although the low-and-high gain design technique as initiated in 10] is based on explicit eigenstructure assignment, its full development in 13] is based on the solution of an algebraic Riccati equation (ARE) which is parameterized in an arbitrarily small scalar, called low gain parameter. In this paper, we develop a new complete low-and-high gain design procedure which is based on explicit eigenstructure assignment. The new design approach avoids the solution of the numerically stii parameterized ARE.
Tissue Image Classification Using Multi-Fractal Spectra

Tissue image classification is a challenging problem due to the fact that the images contain highly irregular shapes in complex spatial arrangement. The multi-fractal formalism has been found useful in characterizing the intensity distribution present in such images, as it can effectively resolve local densities and also represent various structures present in the image. This paper presents a detailed study of feature vectors derived from the distribution of Holder exponents and the geometrical characteristics of the multi-fractal spectra that can be used in applications requiring image classification and retrieval. The paper also gives the results of experimental analysis performed using a tissue image database and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed multi-fractal-based descriptors in tissue image classification and retrieval. Implementation aspects that need to be considered for improving classification accuracy and the feature representation capability of the proposed descriptors are also outlined.