Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Seaweed Extracts From Laminaria and Ascophyllum nodosum spp. as Biostimulants in Zea mays L. Using a Combination of Chemical, Biochemical and Morphological Approaches

Seaweed extracts can be employed as biostimulants during crop cultivation owing to their positive effects on plant performance. Therefore, in this study one extract from Laminaria (A) and five extracts from Ascophyllum nodosum (B–F) were assayed on maize (Zea mays L.) plants supplied for 2 days with 0.5 mL L−1 of single products to evaluate their capacity to stimulate root growth and morphology, nutrition, and sugars accumulation. Firstly, extracts were chemically characterized via Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) and FT-Raman spectroscopies, and their content in carbon, nitrogen, phenolic acids and hormones (indole-3-acetic acid, IAA, and Isopentenyladenosine, IPA) was quantified. The auxin like- and gibberellic acid -like activities of all extracts were also determined. FT-IR and FT-Raman spectra provided complementary information depicting distinct spectral pattern for each extract. Bands assigned to alginic and uronic acids were dominant in FT-IR spectra, while those corresponding to polyaromatic rings were evident in FT-Raman spectra. In general, extracts stimulated root growth, nutrition, esterase activity, and sugar content. However, they showed high variation in chemical features, which may explain their different capacity in triggering physiological responses in maize. Among A. nodosum extracts for instance, E was the most efficient in promoting root morphology traits, likely because of its elevate content in IAA (32.43 nM), while F extract was the highest in phenol content (1,933 mg L−1) and the most successful in improving plant nutrition. On the other hand, C extract was very effective in stimulating root elongation, but did not influence plant nutrition. B and D extracts induced similar positive effects on plants, although they greatly varied in chemical composition. Laminaria extract (A) differed from A. nodosum extracts, because of its low content in total phenols and the presence of both IAA- and GA-like activity. We conclude that all seaweed extracts acted as biostimulants in maize, but their chemical properties appeared crucial in predicting the physiological response preferentially elicited by individual seaweed extracts.
A Consensus-Based Approach for Platooning with Intervehicular Communications and Its Validation in Realistic Scenarios

Automated and coordinated vehicles' driving (platooning) is very challenging due to the multibody control complexity and the presence of unreliable time-varying wireless intervehicular communication (IVC). We propose a novel controller for vehicle platooning based on consensus and analytically demonstrate its stability and dynamic properties. Traditional approaches assume the logical control topology as a constraint fixed a priori, and the control law is designed consequently; our approach makes the control topology a design parameter that can be exploited to reconfigure the controller, depending on the needs and characteristics of the scenario. Furthermore, the controller automatically compensates outdated information caused by network losses and delays. The controller is implemented in Plexe, which is a state-of-the-art IVC and mobility simulator that includes basic building blocks for platooning. Analysis and simulations show the controller robustness and performance in several scenarios, including realistic propagation conditions with interference caused by other vehicles. We compare our approach against a controller taken from the literature, which is generally considered among the most performing ones. Finally, we test the proposed controller by implementing the real dynamics (engine, transmission, braking systems, etc.) of heterogeneous vehicles in Plexe and verifying that platoons remain stable and safe, regardless of real-life impairments that cannot be modeled in the analytic solution. The results show the ability of the proposed approach to maintain a stable string of realistic vehicles with different control-communication topologies, even in the presence of strong interference, delays, and fading conditions, providing higher comfort and safety for platoon drivers.
An Artificial Bee Colony Based Algorithm for Feature Selection

Nitelik seciminin amaci calisma zamanini ve siniflandiricinin verimliligini iyilestirmek icin siniflandirma islemi sirasinda kullanilacak olan ozellik sayisini azaltmaktir. Bu calismada, siniflandirma islemleri icin yakin zamanda gelistirilmis basarili bir suru zekasi algoritmasi olan Yapay Ari Kolonisi (YAK) Optimizasyon Teknigine dayali bir nitelik secim yontemi gelistirilmistir. Gelistirilen yontem UCI veritabanindan elde edilen ve siniflandirma problemlerinde siklikla kullanilan 15 veri kumesi uzerinde sinanmistir. Deney sonuclari onerilen YAK tabanli algoritmanin siniflandima calismalari icin iyi nitelikleri secebildigini gostermistir
A 2.6nW, 0.5V, 52dB-DR, 4th-order Gm-C BPF: Moving closer to the FoM's fundamental limit

A nano-power 4th-order band-pass filter operating from a 0.5 V supply voltage with an adjustable center frequency, ranging from 250 Hz to 4 kHz (4 octaves), is presented. The filter is constituted from cascadable 2nd-order circuit cells that are realized by a network of three transistors and two capacitors comprising only one branch of bias current. As a result of the compact low voltage circuit architecture, a dynamic range of 52 dB is obtained, which leads to best figure of merit achieved among other existing designs.
Policy Discussion Briefing January 2007 Composite performance measures in the public sector

It is rare to open a newspaper or read a government report without seeing some sort of reference to the performance of public sector organisations. The public have become used to judging schools, hospitals, local councils, and other public sector organisations, in terms of their performance rating. This has led to an explosion in the number and variety of league tables. League table position can have major implications, for example wholesale changes in leadership of an organisation. As a result, achieving good ratings is a major endeavour for public sector managers.
Lack of effect of induction of hypothermia after acute brain injury.

BACKGROUND Induction of hypothermia in patients with brain injury was shown to improve outcomes in small clinical studies, but the results were not definitive. To study this issue, we conducted a multicenter trial comparing the effects of hypothermia with those of normothermia in patients with acute brain injury. METHODS The study subjects were 392 patients 16 to 65 years of age with coma after sustaining closed head injuries who were randomly assigned to be treated with hypothermia (body temperature, 33 degrees C), which was initiated within 6 hours after injury and maintained for 48 hours by means of surface cooling, or normothermia. All patients otherwise received standard treatment. The primary outcome measure was functional status six months after the injury. RESULTS The mean age of the patients and the type and severity of injury in the two treatment groups were similar. The mean (+/-SD) time from injury to randomization was 4.3+/-1.1 hours in the hypothermia group and 4.1+/-1.2 hours in the normothermia group, and the mean time from injury to the achievement of the target temperature of 33 degrees C in the hypothermia group was 8.4+/-3.0 hours. The outcome was poor (defined as severe disability, a vegetative state, or death) in 57 percent of the patients in both groups. Mortality was 28 percent in the hypothermia group and 27 percent in the normothermia group (P=0.79). The patients in the hypothermia group had more hospital days with complications than the patients in the normothermia group. Fewer patients in the hypothermia group had high intracranial pressure than in the normothermia group. CONCLUSIONS Treatment with hypothermia, with the body temperature reaching 33 degrees C within eight hours after injury, is not effective in improving outcomes in patients with severe brain injury.
Optical Properties of Erbium Doped Tellurite Glasses

This paper presents the optical properties of erbium doped tellurite glasses with the composition of 55TeO2-2Bi2O3-35ZnO-5PbO-(3-x)Na2O-xEr2O3 where x = 0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, and 3.0 mol% . Refractive index of the glasses was measured using Brewster’s angle method and their optical absorption spectra were measured in spectral range 200 – 1100 nm recorded at room temperature. The results show that the glass refractive index increases with the increase of Er3+ ion content in the glass and the optical band gap energy decreases with the increase of erbium content in the glass.
Temperature measurements of polymer melts in the heating barrel during injection molding. Part I. Temperature distribution along the screw axis in the reservoir

A new procedure has been developed to measure the temperature distribution of the polymer melts along the screw axis during injection by using a small sheath thermocouple. At the same time, the effects of molding conditions on temperature distribution has been studied. The temperature distribution of the polymer melt along the screw axis during injection can be obtained from the difference between the standard temperature profile and the temperature profile of the polymer melt with unknown and non-uniform temperature measured under the same rate of injection. The temperature of a polymer melt within a shot is not uniform. The difference between the maximum and the minimum temperature within a shot may exceed 10°C in some cases. There are two major factors which govern the effects of molding conditions on the temperature distribution of the polymer melts during injection. The first is the amount of shear heating in the metering zone. The second is the amount of heat absorbed into the polymer in the compression and feed zones.
Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations Open Access Should Adjustment for Covariates Be Used in Prevalence Estimations?

Background: Adjustment for covariates (also called auxiliary variables in survey sampling literature) is commonly applied in health surveys to reduce the variances of the prevalence estimators. In theory, adjusted prevalence estimators are more accurate when variance components are known. In practice, variance components needed to achieve the adjustment are unknown and their sample estimators are used instead. The uncertainty introduced by estimating variance components may overshadow the reduction in the variance of the prevalence estimators due to adjustment. We present empirical guidelines indicating when adjusted prevalence estimators should be considered, using gender adjusted and unadjusted smoking prevalence as an illustration.
Miniaturised chemical analysis systems-materials and bonding

Amongst the separation methods of analytical chemistry, capillary electrophoresis (CE), free-flow electrophoresis (FFE) and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) have been subject to a miniaturisation. These systems are called /spl mu/-TAS (miniaturised total analysis systems). Miniaturisation is the key for several advances in chemical analysis: analysis speed is drastically increased with shrinking capillary dimensions; sample and waste consumption is reduced to nano- or microlitre volumes and, using modem microsystem technologies and advanced materials, the reproducibility of the results improves while the cost exposure of the analytical instrument shrinks. The use of polymer materials as substrates for analysis chips leads to disposable systems, important for applications in biochemistry and clinical diagnostics. In the long run, these systems can perform complex chemical analysis in sensorlike fashion, on-line and in-situ.
Separation of overlapping RFID signals by antenna arrays

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology to wirelessly transmit the identity of tagged objects. For long-range (UHF) systems with multiple tags, the tag replies may overlap. Current solutions are based on collision avoidance using MAC protocols (e.g. slotted ALOHA and binary tree algorithms). This can be a time-consuming process. In this paper, it is shown how an antenna array in combination with blind source separation techniques can be used to separate multiple overlapping tag signals. The source signals are modeled as Zero Constant Modulus (ZCM) signals, and the corresponding ZCM algorithms are tested on synthetic and measured data sets.
Spatially Rendering Decomposed Recordings-Integrating Score-Informed

In this contribution, we present a system for creating novel renderings of a given music recording that aurally highlight certain musical aspects or semantics using spatial localizations. The system decomposes a monaural audio recording into separate events using score-informed source separation techniques and prepares them for an interactive mobile player that renders audio based on semantic information. We demonstrate the capabilities of the system by means of an example using an immersive chroma helix model which the listener can navigate in realtime using mobile sensor controls.
A new approach to the estimator ’ s selection

In the framework of an abstract statistical model we discuss how to use the solution of one estimation problem (Problem A) in order to construct an estimator in another, completely different, Problem B. As a solution of Problem A we understand a data-driven selection from a given family of estimators A(H) = { Âh, h ∈ H } and establishing for the selected estimator so-called oracle inequality. If ĥ ∈ H is the selected parameter and B(H) = { B̂h, h ∈ H } is an estimator’s collection built in Problem B we suggest to use the estimator B̂ĥ. We present very general selection rule led to selector ĥ and find conditions under which the estimator B̂ĥ is reasonable. Our approach is illustrated by several examples related to adaptive estimation. AMS 2000 subject classifications: Primary 60E15; secondary 62G07, 62G08.
Community Graph and Linguistic Analysis to Validate Relationships for Knowledge Base Population

Relation extraction between entities from text plays an important role in information extraction and knowledge discovery related tasks. Relation extraction systems produce a large number of candidates where many of them are not correct. A relation validation method justifies a claimed relation based on the information provided by a system. In this paper, we propose some features by analyzing the community graphs of entities to account for some sort of world knowledge. The proposed features improve validation of relations significantly when they are combined with voting and some state-of-the-art linguistic features.
A ultra low power CMOS pA/V transconductor and its application to wavelet filters

Two topologies of ultra low-power CMOS triode transconductor are proposed. Its input transistors are kept in the triode region to benefit from the lowest gm/ID ratio. The gm is adjusted by a well defined (W/L) and VDS, the latter a replica of the tuning voltage VTUNE. Transconductance down to hundreds of pA/V are obtained and used to implement a 6th order wavelet filter. The resulting design complies with a 1.5V supply and a 0. 35µm CMOS process. The total power consumption of the wavelet filters using the first and second topology of transconductor equals 51nW and 114nW, respectively.
Supervised and Unsupervised Speech Enhancement Using Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Reducing the interference noise in a monaural noisy speech signal has been a challenging task for many years. Compared to traditional unsupervised speech enhancement methods, e.g., Wiener filtering, supervised approaches, such as algorithms based on hidden Markov models (HMM), lead to higher-quality enhanced speech signals. However, the main practical difficulty of these approaches is that for each noise type a model is required to be trained a priori. In this paper, we investigate a new class of supervised speech denoising algorithms using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). We propose a novel speech enhancement method that is based on a Bayesian formulation of NMF (BNMF). To circumvent the mismatch problem between the training and testing stages, we propose two solutions. First, we use an HMM in combination with BNMF (BNMF-HMM) to derive a minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimator for the speech signal with no information about the underlying noise type. Second, we suggest a scheme to learn the required noise BNMF model online, which is then used to develop an unsupervised speech enhancement system. Extensive experiments are carried out to investigate the performance of the proposed methods under different conditions. Moreover, we compare the performance of the developed algorithms with state-of-the-art speech enhancement schemes using various objective measures. Our simulations show that the proposed BNMF-based methods outperform the competing algorithms substantially.
31-03-2015 Open Call Deliverable OCG-DS 1 . 1 : DREAMER final report

The DREAMER project had the objective of developing and exploiting Software Defined Networking (SDN) capability in carrier grade IP backbones. DREAMER focused and delivered results on how a network based on an OpenFlow/SDN control plane can provide the same functionalities of an IP/MPLS control plane, offering a carrier grade approach to resiliency and fault management. DREAMER has developed software, performed testing and achieved results in three main areas of OpenFlow/SDN research: data plane, control plane and experimental tools. Concerning the Data Plane, a hybrid IP and SDN networking approach has been considered. A solution called “OSHI” (Open Source Hybrid IP / SDN networking ) has been designed and implemented over Linux OS. As for the Control Plane, the project exploited and contributed to the development of the ONOS Open Source controller, with a solution to distribute the control of a geographical scale SDN network among a set of clusters of ONOS controllers. The solution is called “ICONA” (Inter Cluster ONos Application ). As for the experimental tools, DREAMER has developed and released Mantoo (Management tools) that provides an easy design, deployment and control of the SDN experiments. It Includes a web front end called “Topology 3D ” (Topology Designer, Deployer & Director ) that allows to graphically design a network topology (made of L3 routers, L2 switches, end devices) and to configure the set of services to be provided on top. DREAMER has implemented prototypes of the proposed solutions based on Open Source tools and has contributed to the development of some of these tools. Therefore DREAMER is having an impact towards the availability of a truly open eco system for carrier grade backbone IP networks based on the SDN paradigm . DREAMER has produced results than can be used by the NRENs and the GÉANT backbone when planning future upgrades. The software has been released as Open Source.
Plagiarism detection based on structural information

In this paper a novel method for detecting plagiarized passages in document collections is presented. In contrast to previous work in this field that uses mainly content terms to represent documents, the proposed method is based on structural information provided by occurrences of a small list of stopwords (i.e., very frequent words). We show that stopword n-grams are able to capture local syntactic similarities between suspicious and original documents. Moreover, an algorithm for detecting the exact boundaries of plagiarized and source passages is proposed. Experimental results on a publicly-available corpus demonstrate that the performance of the proposed approach is competitive when compared with the best reported results. More importantly, it achieves significantly better results when dealing with difficult plagiarism cases where the plagiarized passages are highly modified by replacing most of the words or phrases with synonyms to hide the similarity with the source documents.
Downstream VDSL channel tracking using limited feedback for crosstalk precompensated schemes

With increasing bandwidths and decreasing loop lengths, crosstalk becomes the main impairment in VDSL systems. For downstream communication, crosstalk precompensation techniques have been designed to cope with this issue by using the collocation of the transmitters. These techniques naturally need an accurate estimation of the crosstalk channel impulse responses. We investigate the issue of tracking these channels. Due to the lack of coordination between the receivers, and because the amplitude levels of the remaining crosstalk channels after precompensation are very low, blind estimation schemes are inefficient in this case. So some part of the upstream or downstream bit rate needs to be used to help the estimation. In this paper, we design a new algorithm to try to limit the bandwidth used for the estimation purpose by exploiting the collocation at the transmitter side. The principle is to use feedback from the receiver to the transmitter instead of using pilots in the downstream signal. It is shown by simulations that the proposed estimation is more efficient, in terms of needed overhead, than a classical scheme using pilot symbols.
Restoration of Motion Blurred Images Based on Rich Edge Region Extraction Using a Gray-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix

To improve the efficiency of blur kernel estimation based on prior knowledge, a method of deblurring an image based on rich edge region extraction using a gray-level co-occurrence matrix is proposed in this paper. First, the relationship between the image edge information and the related coefficients of a gray-level co-occurrence matrix is analyzed, based on which an index representing the amount of image edge information is proposed. Next, high-frequency layer information is extracted from the blurred image to be processed with a bilinear interpolation method in the luminance channel. Subsequently, the high-frequency layer image is divided into nine regions, based on a sliding window, and the rich edge region index of each region is calculated; then, the region with the richest edge information is extracted. Finally, the extracted rich edge region, instead of the entire motion blurred image, is used to estimate the blur kernel with L0-regularized intensity and gradient prior, and the blurred image is blindly restored. An image quality evaluation function and the operation time are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the recovery efficiency while ensuring the recovery quality as well.
A High Efficiency Orthogonally Switching Passive Charge Pump Rectifier for Energy Harvesters

The design and analytical modeling of a high efficiency energy harvester comprising a passive voltage-boosting network (VBN) and a switching charge pump rectifier (CPR) is presented in this paper. To improve the power conversion efficiency (PCE), the VBN increases the voltage at the input of the CPR and provides control signals for switching. Unlike traditional Schottky and diode-connected MOS transistor rectifiers, the proposed orthogonally switching CPR (OS-CPR) comprises MOS transistors as voltage-controlled switches. Analytical models for the OS-CPR are developed and presented. Circuit-level optimization techniques are employed to reduce conduction and switching losses. Simulated in a 90 nm standard CMOS technology (IBM 9RF), a 5-stage 915 MHz OS-CPR achieves a dc voltage of 1.35 V and a PCE of 11.9% with a 1 MΩ load at -18.2 dBm available input power (PS,AV). To show technology scalability of the design, the OS-CPR is also validated using AMS 0.18 μm high-voltage (HV) CMOS technology. When benchmarked with traditional rectifiers, the OS-CPR (under similar conditions) achieves a higher PCE and a higher output dc voltage. The OS-CPR is easily scalable to operate over multiple sub-GHz ISM frequency bands.