Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Network Events on Multiple Space and Time Scales in Cultured Neural Networks and in a Stochastic Rate Model

Cortical networks, in-vitro as well as in-vivo, can spontaneously generate a variety of collective dynamical events such as network spikes, UP and DOWN states, global oscillations, and avalanches. Though each of them has been variously recognized in previous works as expression of the excitability of the cortical tissue and the associated nonlinear dynamics, a unified picture of the determinant factors (dynamical and architectural) is desirable and not yet available. Progress has also been partially hindered by the use of a variety of statistical measures to define the network events of interest. We propose here a common probabilistic definition of network events that, applied to the firing activity of cultured neural networks, highlights the co-occurrence of network spikes, power-law distributed avalanches, and exponentially distributed ‘quasi-orbits’, which offer a third type of collective behavior. A rate model, including synaptic excitation and inhibition with no imposed topology, synaptic short-term depression, and finite-size noise, accounts for all these different, coexisting phenomena. We find that their emergence is largely regulated by the proximity to an oscillatory instability of the dynamics, where the non-linear excitable behavior leads to a self-amplification of activity fluctuations over a wide range of scales in space and time. In this sense, the cultured network dynamics is compatible with an excitation-inhibition balance corresponding to a slightly sub-critical regime. Finally, we propose and test a method to infer the characteristic time of the fatigue process, from the observed time course of the network’s firing rate. Unlike the model, possessing a single fatigue mechanism, the cultured network appears to show multiple time scales, signalling the possible coexistence of different fatigue mechanisms.
Byzantine Consensus in Directed Graphs

Consider a synchronous point-to-point network of n nodes connected by directed links, wherein each node has a binary input. This paper proves a tight necessary and sucient condition on the underlying communication topology for achieving Byzantine consensus among these nodes in the presence of up to f Byzantine faults. We derive a necessary condition, and then we provide a constructive proof of suciency by presenting a Byzantine consensus algorithm for directed graphs that satisfy the necessary condition.
Vitamin H-regulated transgene expression in mammalian cells

Although adjustable transgene expression systems are considered essential for future therapeutic and biopharmaceutical manufacturing applications, the currently available transcription control modalities all require side-effect-prone inducers such as immunosupressants, hormones and antibiotics for fine-tuning. We have designed a novel mammalian transcription-control system, which is reversibly fine-tuned by non-toxic vitamin H (also referred to as biotin). Ligation of vitamin H, by engineered Escherichia coli biotin ligase (BirA), to a synthetic biotinylation signal fused to the tetracycline-dependent transactivator (tTA), enables heterodimerization of tTA to a streptavidin-linked transrepressor domain (KRAB), thereby abolishing tTA-mediated transactivation of specific target promoters. As heterodimerization of tTA to KRAB is ultimately conditional upon the presence of vitamin H, the system is vitamin H responsive. Transgenic Chinese hamster ovary cells, engineered for vitamin H-responsive gene expression, showed high-level, adjustable and reversible production of a human model glycoprotein in bench-scale culture systems, bioreactor-based biopharmaceutical manufacturing scenarios, and after implantation into mice. The vitamin H-responsive expression systems showed unique band pass filter-like regulation features characterized by high-level expression at low (0–2 nM biotin), maximum repression at intermediate (100–1000 nM biotin), and high-level expression at increased (>100 000 nM biotin) biotin concentrations. Sequential ON-to-OFF-to-ON, ON-to-OFF and OFF-to-ON expression profiles with graded expression transitions can all be achieved by simply increasing the level of a single inducer molecule without exchanging the culture medium. These novel expression characteristics mediated by an FDA-licensed inducer may foster advances in therapeutic cell engineering and manufacturing of difficult-to-produce protein therapeutics.
A Study of Dip-Coatable, High-Capacitance Ion Gel Dielectrics for 3D EWOD Device Fabrication

We present a dip-coatable, high-capacitance ion gel dielectric for scalable fabrication of three-dimensional (3D) electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) devices such as an n × n liquid prism array. Due to the formation of a nanometer-thick electric double layer (EDL) capacitor, an ion gel dielectric offers two to three orders higher specific capacitance (c ≈ 10 μF/cm2) than that of conventional dielectrics such as SiO2. However, the previous spin-coating method used for gel layer deposition poses several issues for 3D EWOD device fabrication, particularly when assembling multiple modules. Not only does the spin-coating process require multiple repetitions per module, but the ion gel layer also comes in risks of damage or contamination due to handling errors caused during assembly. In addition, it was observed that the chemical formulation previously used for the spin-coating method causes the surface defects on the dip-coated gel layers and thus leads to poor EWOD performance. In this paper, we alternatively propose a dip-coating method with modified gel solutions to obtain defect-free, functional ion gel layers without the issues arising from the spin-coating method for 3D device fabrication. A dip-coating approach offers a single-step coating solution with the benefits of simplicity, scalability, and high throughput for deposition of high-capacitance gel layers on non-planar EWOD devices. An ion gel solution was prepared by combining the [EMIM][TFSI] ionic liquid and the [P(VDF-HFP)] copolymer at various wt % ratios in acetone solvent. Experimental studies were conducted to fully understand the effects of chemical composition ratios in the gel solution and how varying thicknesses of ion gel and Teflon layers affects EWOD performance. The effectiveness and potentiality of dip-coatable gel layers for 3D EWOD devices have been demonstrated through fabricating 5 × 1 arrayed liquid prisms using a single-step dip-coating method. Each prism module has been individually controlled to achieve spatial beam steering without the need for bulky mechanical moving parts.
Design of integrated electro-hydraulic power unit for hybrid mobile working machines

A high power density integrated non-overlapping concentrated tooth winding synchronous machine with embedded permanent magnets for a hydraulic motor-pump is designed. Direct liquid cooling with the working fluid itself is implemented. Aspects of immersing the motor into hydraulic oil for cooling purposes are discussed. FEM modelling of PM eddy-current losses and static temperature evaluation are performed.
GPS Based Secure Communication Strategy For Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Now a day, one of the most attractive research topics in the area of Intelligent Traffic Control is Inter vehicle communication. In V2V communication or we can also call VANET i.e. Vehicular ad-hoc network; a vehicle can communicate with its neighboring vehicles even in the absence of a central Base Station. The concept of this shortest communication is to send vehicle safety messages one-to-one or one too-many vehicles via wireless connection. Such messages are generally short in length and have very short lifetime in which they have to reach at the target. The Inter-vehicle communication system is an adhoc network with high mobility and changing number of nodes, where mobile nodes animatedly create temporary networks and transferring messages from one node to others by using multiple hops due to restriction of tiny range. The routing in vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET) has attracted many attentions during the last few years. So in this thesis we are focusing on the routing concept for the VANET i.e. Principles for routing, disintegration of the routing function and obligation. The data delivery through Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks is challenging since it must efficiently handle rapid topology changes and a fragmented network.
Energetic Constraints on Species Coexistence in Birds

The association between species richness and ecosystem energy availability is one of the major geographic trends in biodiversity. It is often explained in terms of energetic constraints, such that coexistence among competing species is limited in low productivity environments. However, it has proven challenging to reject alternative views, including the null hypothesis that species richness has simply had more time to accumulate in productive regions, and thus the role of energetic constraints in limiting coexistence remains largely unknown. We use the phylogenetic relationships and geographic ranges of sister species (pairs of lineages who are each other’s closest extant relatives) to examine the association between energy availability and coexistence across an entire vertebrate class (Aves). We show that the incidence of coexistence among sister species increases with overall species richness and is elevated in more productive ecosystems, even when accounting for differences in the evolutionary time available for coexistence to occur. Our results indicate that energy availability promotes species coexistence in closely related lineages, providing a key step toward a more mechanistic understanding of the productivity–richness relationship underlying global gradients in biodiversity.
Human detection and character recognition in TV-style movies

The objective of this master thesis is the recognition of human characters in TV-style video sequences. In order to recognize the same person at different time instances in a video sequence, the outward appearance of the person has to be described and learned with an appropriate model. The diversity in which humans can appear makes the task of human detection and character recognition to a particularly challenging problem. TVstyle movies provide an uncontrolled, realistic working environment for human detection and character recognition. Possible applications range from surveillance (e.g., intrusion detection) and security applications (e.g., person identification) to image retrieval or semiautomatic image annotation (e.g., automatic labeling of faces in personal photo albums).
The Efficacy and Underlying Mechanism of Sulfone Derivatives Containing 1,3,4-oxadiazole on Citrus Canker

The objectives of the current study were to isolate and identify the pathogen responsible for citrus canker and investigate the efficacy of sulfone derivatives containing 1,3,4-oxadiazole moiety on controlling citrus canker caused by Xanthomonas citri subsp. citri (Xcc) under in vitro and field conditions. In an in vitro study, we tested eight sulfone derivatives against Xcc and the results demonstrated that compound 3 exhibited the best antibacterial activity against Xcc, with a half-maximal effective concentration (EC50) value of 1.23 μg/mL, which was even better than those of commercial bactericides Kocide 3000 (58.21 μg/mL) and Thiodiazole copper (77.04 μg/mL), respectively. Meanwhile, under field experiments, compound 3 treatments demonstrated the highest ability to reduce the disease of citrus canker in leaves and fruits in two different places relative to an untreated control as well as the commercial bactericides Kocide 3000 and Thiodiazole copper. Meanwhile, compound 3 could stimulate the increase in peroxidase (POD), polyphenol oxidase (PPO), and phenylalanine ammonia lyase (PAL) activities in the navel orange leaves, causing marked enhancement of plant resistance against citrus canker. Moreover, compound 3 could damage the cell membranes, destruct the biofilm formation, inhibit the production of extracellular polysaccharide (EPS), and affect the cell membrane permeability to restrain the growth of the bacteria.
DocPlayer : why doesn ’ t your desktop play this way ?

Document-management is becoming a central and troubling issue for typical users of computers; and the need for more intuitive, flexible, and effective management-systems is becoming more and more evident. This paper reports on work to develop DocPlayer, a solution inspired by the control-metaphor of media-players. First, other attempts to address the document-management problem are reviewed; then the DocPlayer system is described – along with a brief summery of reactions from users. The paper concludes with a brief analysis of the DocPlayer solution and some proposals for future research.
Modeling Multi-path TCP Throughput with Coupled Congestion Control and Flow Control

Multi-Path Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) is emerging as a dominant paradigm that enables users to utilize multiple Network Interface Controllers (NICs) simultaneously. Due to the complexity of its protocol design, the steady-state performance of MPTCP still remains largely unclear through model analysis. This introduces severe challenges to quantitatively study the efficiency, fairness and stability of existing MPTCP implementations. In this paper, we for the first time investigate the modeling of coupled congestion control and flow control algorithms in MPTCP. By proposing a closed-form throughput model, we reveal the relationship between MPTCP throughput and subflow characters, such as Round Trip Time (RTT), packet loss rate and receive buffer size. The extensive NS2-based evaluation indicates that the proposed model can be applied to understand the throughput of MPTCP in various situations. In particular, when MPTCP subflows have similar RTTs, the average Error Rate (ER) of the proposed model is less than 8%. Even in the situation where huge RTT difference exists between subflows, the model can still behave well with average ER less than 10%.
Power Loading in Parallel Diversity Channels Based on Statistical Channel Information

In this paper, we show that there exists an arbitrary number of power allocation schemes that achieve capacity in systems operating in parallel channels comprised of single-input multiple-output (SIMO) Nakagami-m fading subchannels when the number of degrees of freedom L (e.g., the number of receive antennas) tends to infinity. Statistical waterfilling - i.e., waterfilling using channel statistics rather than instantaneous channel knowledge - is one such scheme. We further prove that the convergence of statistical waterfilling to the optimal power loading scheme is at least O(1/(L log L)), whereas convergence of other schemes is at worst O(1/ log L). To validate and demonstrate the practical use of our findings, we evaluate the mutual information of example SIMO parallel channels using simulations as well as new measured ultrawideband channel data.
Does positive affect buffer the associations between job insecurity and work engagement and psychological distress? A test among South African workers

This study aims to respond to earlier calls to study well-known concepts, more specifically, job insecurity, in less traditional (i.e. non-European, non-US) settings, as well as factors that may mitigate the aversive consequences of job insecurity for employees' work-related functioning. We investigate (1) the relationship between job insecurity and work engagement and psychological distress, and (2) the moderating role of positive affect in these relationships. Cross-sectional data from 296 employees in a South African government organisation were used to test the hypotheses. The results showed that job insecurity was negatively related to work engagement and positively to psychological distress. These relationships were buffered by positive affect.
Rotation of the cluster of galaxies A2107

We present indications of rotation in the galaxy cluster A2107 by a method that searches for the maximum gradient in the velocity field in a flat disc-like model of a cluster. Galaxies from cumulative subsamples containing more and more distant members from the cluster centre are projected on to an axis passing through the centre and we apply a linear regression model on the projected distances x and the line-of-sight velocities V. The axis with the maximum linear correlation coefficient r max = max[r (V , x)] defines the direction of the maximum velocity gradient, and consequently it presents the major axis of the apparently elliptical cluster. Because the effects of rotation are subtle, we put strong emphasis on the estimation of the uncertainties of the results by implementing different bootstrap techniques. We have found that rotational effects are more strongly expressed at distances of 0.26‐0.54 Mpc from the cluster centre. The total virial mass of the cluster is (3.2 ± 0.6) × 10 14 M� , while the virial mass, corrected for rotation, is (2.8 ± 0.5) × 10 14 M� . Ke yw ords: methods: statistical ‐ galaxies: clusters: individual: A2107.
2012 International Conference on Information Management, Innovation Management and Industrial Engineering towards Matching Food Metadata in Emergency Decision-making Using Ontology and Mapreduce

Data integration technologies improve the accuracy of decision-making in the occurrence of public emergency. Set in the emergency food supply, we propose in this paper a new method to match food metadata with ontology and MapReduce. In specific, by extending the "ARGOVOC" ontology from the Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations (FAO), ontological descriptions about food metadata are established. Based upon the classification of emergency functionalities, food metadata in the same category are matched in a two-stage TF­ IOF way, which is further implemented using the MapReduce framework for efficient parallel computation. Evaluations on the subsidiary agricultural product metadata, provided by the Suguo supermarket, show the feasibility of our approach.
THE ACCURACY OF THE OBJECTS POSITION MEASURING IN AN IMAGE

A discrete location of photo-sensitive elements in CCD and in other matrixes leads to the distortions of shape, reduction of sizes, shift, etc. of the objects in an image. As a result, the distortions influence on the accuracy of the objects coordinates measuring. In this paper, we estimate the corner points coordinates measurement errors for arbitrary oriented rectangle and the other objects with mutually perpendicular boundary segments. We derive the formulas for calculation of the errors depending on the angle orientation of the figures. Estimations are based on the properties of digital straight segments and geometrical constructions. Some applications of the results are discussed.
MAGMA: analysis of two-channel microarrays made easy

The web application MAGMA provides a simple and intuitive interface to identify differentially expressed genes from two-channel microarray data. While the underlying algorithms are not superior to those of similar web applications, MAGMA is particularly user friendly and can be used without prior training. The user interface guides the novice user through the most typical microarray analysis workflow consisting of data upload, annotation, normalization and statistical analysis. It automatically generates R-scripts that document MAGMA's entire data processing steps, thereby allowing the user to regenerate all results in his local R installation. The implementation of MAGMA follows the model-view-controller design pattern that strictly separates the R-based statistical data processing, the web-representation and the application logic. This modular design makes the application flexible and easily extendible by experts in one of the fields: statistical microarray analysis, web design or software development. State-of-the-art Java Server Faces technology was used to generate the web interface and to perform user input processing. MAGMA's object-oriented modular framework makes it easily extendible and applicable to other fields and demonstrates that modern Java technology is also suitable for rather small and concise academic projects. MAGMA is freely available at www.magma-fgcz.uzh. ch.
Using Electrolaryngography and Electroglottography to Assess the Singing Voice: A Systematic Review

Electrolaryngography (Lx) and electroglottography (EGG) are noninvasive methods used to assess human vocal fold vibration and investigate speech and singing. This paper provides a systematic review of evidence-based studies using Lx/EGG in the analysis of the singing voice, identifying and critically appraising the thematic content and the research methodologies of the relevant investigations. Lx/EGG represents a powerful tool for the analysis of the singing voice in medical settings, and in support of research and teaching. Current research in this area is paving the way toward a better comprehension of singing performance.
DPSSEE: a distributed proactive semantic software engineering environment

We present a distributed proactive semantic software engineering environment (DPSSEE) that incorporates logic rules into software development process to capture the semantics from all levels of the software life cycle. It introduces the syntax and semantics of the rule description language (RDL) employed by DPSSEE and two working scenarios that illustrate the use of proactive rules for workflow control and design consistency checking.
Networks of Maritime Radar Systems: Sensor Selection Algorithm for PD ≪ 1 Based on the Modified Riccati Equation

This paper presents a novel sensor selection algorithm for target tracking, based on the Modified Riccati Equation (MRE). The MRE provides an upper bound of the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and is easily calculated. Using the MRE, it is possible to include sensors with a probability of detection Pd ≪ 1. State estimation is done with a modified Particle Filter (PF), taking into account missed detections. The performance of the MRE sensor selection scheme is studied for single and multiple steps ahead, and, for the case of Pd = 1, compared with other methods.
Learning Adaptive Parameter Tuning for Image Processing

The non-stationary nature of image characteristics calls for adaptive processing, based on the local image content. We propose a simple and flexible method to learn local tuning of parameters in adaptive image processing: we extract simple local features from an image and learn the relation between these features and the optimal filtering parameters. Learning is performed by optimizing a user defined cost function (any image quality metric) on a training set. We apply our method to three classical problems (denoising, demosaicing and deblurring) and we show the effectiveness of the learned parameter modulation strategies. We also show that these strategies are consistent with theoretical results from the literature.
Secret key establishment over a pair of independent broadcast channels

We consider the problem of secret key establishment (SKE) in the presence of a passive adversary, Eve, when Alice and Bob are connected by a pair of independent discrete memoryless broadcast channels in opposite directions. We refer to this setup as 2DMBC. We define the secret-key capacity in this setup and provide a lower bound on the capacity by proposing a two-round SKE protocol. We also prove an upper bound and show that the two bounds coincide in the case of degraded 2DMBCs.