Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Seed Size, Suspension Recycling and Substrate Pre-Treatment on the CVD Growth of Diamond Coatings

CVD growth of uniform conformal polycrystalline diamond (PCD) coatings over complex three dimensional structures is very important material processing technique. It has been found that the nucleation and subsequent growth period is very critical for successful development of CVD diamond based technologies. There are many methods of enhancing diamond nucleation on foreign substrates-ultrasonic treatment with diamond seed suspension being the best among them. A combination of ultrasonic seeding (US) technique with prior treatment (PT) of the substrate under CVD diamond growth conditions for brief period of time, has found to be very effective in enhancing the diamond nucleation during CVD growth—together they are known as NNP. But successive usage of the same seeding suspension up to ten cycles deteriorates the seeding efficiency. 6th seeding cycle onwards the silicon substrates are barely get covered by diamond crystallites. Five different diamond micron grits were used for seeding the silicon substrates and it is observed that US with the sub-micron particles (0.25 μm) is very effective in efficient nucleation of PCD on Si substrates. PT of the substrate somewhat negates the effect of successive use of the same seeding slurry but it is best to avoid recycling of the same seeding suspension using micron size diamond grits.
Directly Printable Flexible Strain Sensors for Bending and Contact Feedback of Soft Actuators

This paper presents a fully printable sensorized bending actuator that can be calibrated to provide reliable bending feedback and simple contact detection. A soft bending actuator following a pleated morphology, as well as a flexible resistive strain sensor, were directly 3D printed using easily accessible FDM printer hardware with a dual-extrusion tool head. The flexible sensor was directly welded to the bending actuator’s body and systematically tested to characterize and evaluate its response under variable input pressure. A signal conditioning circuit was developed to enhance the quality of the sensory feedback, and flexible conductive threads were used for wiring. The sensorized actuator’s response was then calibrated using a vision system to convert the sensory readings to real bending angle values. The empirical relationship was derived using linear regression and validated at untrained input conditions to evaluate its accuracy. Furthermore, the sensorized actuator was tested in a constrained setup that prevents bending, to evaluate the potential of using the same sensor for simple contact detection by comparing the constrained and free-bending responses at the same input pressures. The results of this work demonstrated how a dual-extrusion FDM printing process can be tuned to directly print highly customizable flexible strain sensors that were able to provide reliable bending feedback and basic contact detection. The addition of such sensing capability to bending actuators enhances their functionality and reliability for applications such as controlled soft grasping, flexible wearables, and haptic devices.
Effect of various agents in alleviating the toxicity of tannic acid for chickens.

Abstract FULLER et al. (1967) were able to reduce the growth depressing effects for chickens of 1% dietary tannic acid by supplementing the diet with methionine, choline (or betaine) or arginine (or ornithine), and completely overcome the adverse effect of 0.5% dietary tannic acid with these supplements. This combination of methyl donors and arginine was found to be only partially effective against 1% dietary tannic acid but more effective against digallic acid by Rayudu et al. (1970). Dollahite and Camp (1962) found calcium hydroxide to alleviate tannic acid toxicity in rabbits. Also, tannic acid can be complexed and inactivated from its solution in in vitro conditions by polymers such as polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) (Boudet, 1965), and polyoxyethylene sorbitan monoleate (Tween 80) (Zanobini et al., 1967). It was desired to test these polymers, Ca(OH)2, CaCO3 and Na2 CO3 in case these could overcome tannic acid toxicity for chickens. As tannic acid was…
A 63‐dB gain OTA operating in subthreshold with 20‐nW power consumption

This paper presents a two‐stage bulk‐driven operational transconductance amplifier operating in weak‐inversion region. The proposed amplifier is upgraded using recycling structure, current shunt technique, positive feedback source degeneration and indirect frequency compensation feedback to enhance transconductance under a reasonable stability. Combining these approaches leads to an ultra‐low‐power high performance amplifier without increasing power dissipation compared to the conventional one. Simulation results in 0.13‐µm complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor technology show the proposed structure achieves a 63‐dB DC gain at 0.25‐V supply voltage with just 20‐nW power dissipation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Power and Energy Issues on Lightweight Cryptography

— Portable devices as smartphones, smart cards and other embedded devices need encryption technology to guarantee security. Users store private data daily in electronic devices making use of cryptography to ensure data confidentiality, needing reliable authentication mechanisms. Typical encryption security is based on the usage of algorithms that are mathematically secure, but often requiring expensive computing and power resources. The implementation of security mechanisms on dedicated hardware has been shown as a first-order solution to achieve both required security and low power consumption with reduced resources, in the so-called lightweight cryptography. Upcoming Internet of Thing (IoT) is requiring such solutions extensively. Furthermore, the physical implementation of the encryption algorithm can leak side-channel information that can be used by an attacker to reveal secret key or private data. Therefore, the physical implementations of low-power cryptographic devices have to be carefully considered at algorithmic, circuit and layout levels, in order to be secure against active and passive attacks. A great effort has been recently devoted to the implementation of secure lightweight cryptography, occupying an increasingly large interest from academy and companies, to meet the challenges of IoT. The paper is a survey of i) lightweight cryptography algorithms; ii) techniques to reduce power applied to cryptohardware implementations; iii) vulnerability analysis of low-power techniques against side-channel attacks; and iv) the possibilities opened to emerging technologies and devices in the “More than Moore” scenario.
CT and MRI findings of thymic carcinoid.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the CT and MRI findings of thymic carcinoid and to compare these findings with previously published findings of thymoma. METHODS 11 cases of pathologically proven thymic carcinoid were reviewed retrospectively. Three patients had typical carcinoid, and eight patients had atypical carcinoid. The characteristics of the tumours and related thoracic abnormalities were assessed in each case on CT and/or MRI by two chest radiologists. The final decisions on the findings were reached by consensus. RESULTS Thymic carcinoids were more likely to have a large mass (ranging from 18 to 105 mm), irregular contours (n = 8), heterogeneous intensity on T2 weighted images (n = 6; eight patients underwent MRI), heterogeneous enhancement (n = 9) and local invasion (n = 7). A necrotic or cystic component was identified in seven patients (one typical carcinoid and six atypical carcinoids). Lymphadenopathy was seen in four patients. Septum, capsule, haemorrhage and calcification were seen in three patients, two patients, two patients and one patient, respectively, with atypical carcinoid. CONCLUSION Thymic carcinoids tend to have a high prevalence of large masses, irregular contours, heterogeneous intensity on T2 weighted images, heterogeneous enhancement and local invasion on CT and/or MRI. A necrotic or cystic component is often seen in atypical carcinoid. Advances in knowledge: Radiologic features of thymic carcinoid mimic those of high-risk thymomas and/or thymic carcinomas.
WebAPIRec: Recommending Web APIs to Software Projects via Personalized Ranking

Application programming interfaces (APIs) offer a plethora of functionalities for developers to reuse without reinventing the wheel. Identifying the appropriate APIs given a project requirement is critical for the success of a project, as many functionalities can be reused to achieve faster development. However, the massive number of APIs would often hinder the developers’ ability to quickly find the right APIs. In this light, we propose a new, automated approach called <monospace>WebAPIRec</monospace> that takes as input a project profile and outputs a ranked list of web APIs that can be used to implement the project. At its heart, <monospace>WebAPIRec</monospace> employs a personalized ranking model that ranks web APIs specific (personalized) to a project. Based on the historical data of web API usages, <monospace>WebAPIRec</monospace> learns a model that minimizes the incorrect ordering of web APIs, i.e., when a used web API is ranked lower than an unused (or a not-yet-used) web API. We have evaluated our approach on a dataset comprising 9883 web APIs and 4315 web application projects from ProgrammableWeb with promising results. For 84.0% of the projects, <monospace>WebAPIRec</monospace> is able to successfully return correct APIs that are used to implement the projects in the top-five positions. This is substantially better than the recommendations provided by ProgrammableWeb's native search functionality. <monospace>WebAPIRec</monospace> also outperforms McMillan <italic>et al.</italic>'s application search engine and popularity-based recommendation.
Attributes of diagnostic tests to increase uptake of dual testing for syphilis and HIV in Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Introduction Syphilis and HIV screening is highly recommended for pregnant women and those at risk for infection. We used conjoint analysis to identify factors associated with testing preferences for HIV and syphilis infection. Methods We recruited 298 men and women 18 years and over seeking testing or care at GHESKIO (Haitian Study Group for Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections) clinics. We created eight hypothetical dual HIV-syphilis test profiles varying across six dichotomous attributes. Participants were asked to rate each profile using Likert preference scales. An impact score was generated for each attribute by taking the difference between the preference scores for the preferred and non-preferred level of each attribute. Two-sided one-sample t-test was used to generate p values. Results Of 298 study participants, 61 (20.5%) were male. Of 237 females, 49 (20.7%) were pregnant. Cost (free vs. US$4; p < .0001) had the highest impact on willingness to test, followed by number of blood draws (1 vs. 2; p < .0001), blood draw method (fingerprick vs. venipuncture; p < .0001), test type (rapid vs. laboratory; p = .0005), and time-to-result (20 minutes vs. 1 week; p = .0139). Conclusion HIV and syphilis testing preferences for this study sample in Port-au-Prince prioritized cost, single fingerprick, laboratory-based testing and timeliness.
An Optimal Image-Based Method for Identification of Acoustic Emission (AE) Sources in Plate-Like Structures Using a Lead Zirconium Titanate (PZT) Sensor Array

This paper proposes an innovative method for identifying the locations of multiple simultaneous acoustic emission (AE) events in plate-like structures from the view of image processing. By using a linear lead zirconium titanate (PZT) sensor array to record the AE wave signals, a reverse-time frequency-wavenumber (f-k) migration is employed to produce images displaying the locations of AE sources by back-propagating the AE waves. Lamb wave theory is included in the f-k migration to consider the dispersive property of the AE waves. Since the exact occurrence time of the AE events is usually unknown when recording the AE wave signals, a heuristic artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm combined with an optimal criterion using minimum Shannon entropy is used to find the image with the identified AE source locations and occurrence time that mostly approximate the actual ones. Experimental studies on an aluminum plate with AE events simulated by PZT actuators are performed to validate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed optimal image-based AE source identification method.
Delay in initiation of treatment after diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis in primary health care setting: eight year cohort analysis from district Faridabad, Haryana, North India.

INTRODUCTION Delay in initiation of tuberculosis (TB) treatment may have a tremendous impact on disease transmission, development of drug resistance, poor outcome and overall survival of TB patients. The delay can occur at various levels. Delay in initiation of treatment after diagnosis is mostly due to health system failure and has immense programmatic implications. It has not been studied extensively in the Indian setting. METHODS The authors did a cohort analysis of all TB patients initiated on treatment from two primary health centres (PHCs) at Ballabgarh Health and Demographic Surveillance System between January 2007 and December 2014. Diagnosis and treatment of TB in the study area was done as per the protocol envisaged in the national program. Information related to demography, details of diagnosis and treatment of TB and outcome of treatment were extracted from the TB register. Delay in initiation of treatment after diagnosis was considered if the gap between diagnosis and treatment was greater than 7 days. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were done to find the association of various factors with delay in initiation of treatment after diagnosis. RESULTS Out of 885 patients, 662 patients started treatment for pulmonary TB. Mean time interval between diagnosis and initiation of treatment was 8.95 days. Only 57.7% of pulmonary TB patients were started on treatment within 7 days of diagnosis, and an additional 24.5% were started on treatment 8-14 days after diagnosis. Patients on retreatment regimens and those residing in villages without a PHC were more likely to have delayed initiation of treatment (odds ratio (OR)=1.82 (1.3-2.7, p=0.001) and OR=1.62 (1.1-2.5, p=0.01) respectively). Delay in initiation of treatment was also associated with unfavourable treatment outcome such as default, failure or death. CONCLUSIONS There is a need to have healthcare changes related to TB care to enable initiation of treatment as early as possible. Pretreatment counselling especially for retreatment patients is of utmost importance.
Discover Relevant Environment Feature Using Concurrent Reinforcement Learning

In order to compare the policies more efficiently, we introduce a new reinforcement learning method called concurrent biased learning. This is a multi-thread learning method, in which each learning thread refers to one feature of the environment. If an agent intentionally focuses on part of these environmental features to learn a policy of a task, we call this method a biased learning; otherwise, if an agent uses all features that it perceives to learn a task, we call this unbiased learning. We present a method concerning the relevance of information in order to improve the learning of a reinforcement learning robot. We introduce a new concurrent online learning algorithm to calculate the contribution C(s) and relevance degree I(s) to quantify the relevancy of features with respect to a desired learning task. Our analysis shows that the correlation relationship of the environment features can be extracted and projected to concurrent learning threads. By comparing the contribution of these learning threads, we can evaluate the relevance degree of a feature when performing a particular learning task. ( ) i s π If the agent learns a policy with respect to one of the environmental features , we call this biased learning with respect to feature i . The biased Q-value can be denoted as . Then the Bellman update function of the biased Q-value is: i
WRPN & Apprentice: Methods for Training and Inference using Low-Precision Numerics

Today's high performance deep learning architectures involve large models with numerous parameters. Low precision numerics has emerged as a popular technique to reduce both the compute and memory requirements of these large models. However, lowering precision often leads to accuracy degradation. We describe three schemes whereby one can both train and do efficient inference using low precision numerics without hurting accuracy. Finally, we describe an efficient hardware accelerator that can take advantage of the proposed low precision numerics.
Palladium - Doped ZnO Thin Film Hydrogen Gas Sensor

Palladium – doped ZnO thin film was deposited by chemical spray pyrolysis on glass substrate to be a fast hydrogen gas sensor. The prepared ZnO films were doped by dipping in palladium chloride PdCl2 dissolved in ethanol C2H5OH. The optical properties and the surface morphology of the prepared films were studied. The sensitivity and response time behaviors of the ZnO – based gas sensor to hydrogen gas were investigated. The film sensitivity dependence on the temperature and test gas concentration were tested and the optimum operation temperature was determined at around 280 oC. The response time of 2-3 s of the doped ZnO film was highly improved compared to the slow response of few minutes of the traditional ZnO hydrogen gas sensors.
EGF receptor signaling, phosphorylation, ubiquitylation and endocytosis in tumors in vivo

Despite a well-established role for the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) in tumorigenesis, EGFR activities and endocytosis in tumors in vivo have not been studied. We labeled endogenous EGFR with GFP by genome-editing of human oral squamous cell carcinoma cells, which were used to examine EGFR-GFP behavior in mouse tumor xenografts in vivo. Intravital multiphoton imaging, confocal imaging of cryosections and biochemical analysis revealed that localization and trafficking patterns, as well as levels of phosphorylation and ubiquitylation of EGFR in tumors in vivo closely resemble patterns and levels observed in the same cells treated with 20–200 pM EGF in vitro. Consistent with the prediction of low ligand concentrations in tumors, EGFR endocytosis was kinase-dependent and blocked by inhibitors of clathrin-mediated internalization; and EGFR activity was insensitive to Cbl overexpression. Collectively, our data suggest that a small pool of active EGFRs is sufficient to drive tumorigenesis by signaling primarily through the Ras-MAPK pathway.
In situ measurement of Larval Salamander growth using individuals marked with acrylic polymers

neW records reported here together with the recent works (1990) and Lim and Lim (1999) indicate that the letcltmma of Pulau Tioman almost certainly remains incom-known. The steep, mountainous interior and rocky coast-this island are relatively-inaccessible and large tracts of remain unexplored. Thus, it is probable that a number of species, especially small secretive taxa, remain to Equally important is the fact that many of the re-species are known from only one or two specimens, and of these, as well as others known from larger series, show Ulorphological differences from their mainland counterparts (Day 1990; Hendrickson 1966a,b; Lim and Lim 1999). Thus, it is important that series of specimens of each species be obtained and fuat appropriate morphological and molecular comparisons be made to their Malayan and Bornean counterparts to assess the ac-tu31levels of diversity and endemism. As previously noted, po-tintially undescribed species include Rana sp. (Hendrickson i966b), Cnemaspis sp. (Das and Grismer, in prep.), Dibamus ct. ;z'ijredi, Oligodon signatus (Day 1990), and Trimeresurus lintpr,"1If popeiorum (see Lim and Lim 1999). Known endemics include y, a se-~egions 'irst re-ickson a_nthey 1999). is dis-lation" rrently versity rrawak rrawak \1alay-Ansonia tiomanica (Hendrickson 1966b) and Cyrtodactylus domanensis (Das and Jim 2000). 'Acknowledgments. -For comments on the manuscript and identification we thank 1. Das. Mark-recapture studies are often used to provide valuable life history information for animal populations. However, long-term marking of larval amphibians has been problematic because of their small size, delicate skin, and ability to regenerate tissues (Cecil and Just 1978; Donnelly et al. 1994; Seale and Boraas 1974). Procedures that have been used to mark larvae include fin-clipping (Turner 1960), whole-body staining with neutral red (Guttman and Creasey 1973; Herreid and Kinney 1966), injection of mineral oil and petroleum jelly mixtures (Seale and Boraas 1974), application of fluorescent pigments with gas pressure (Ireland 1989; Tay-lor and Deegan 1982) or heat brands (Ireland 1973), and application of a Congo red and dimethyl sulfoxide paste (Ireland 1989). However, these methods are cumbersome, inhibit growth (Travis 1981), do not produce unique marks, or are only useful for short-term studies. Passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags have been used to mark newts and spadefood toads (Fasola et al. 1993; Jehle and Hodl1998) as well as metamorphic ambystomid salamanders (Ott and Scott 1999). However, these tags are too large for many larval amphibians. Toe-clipping has been the traditional method for marking amphibians (Ferner 1979), but some larvae may …
Beyond Markov Logic: Efficient Mining of Prediction Rules in Large Graphs

Graph representations of large knowledge bases may comprise billions of edges. Usually built upon human-generated ontologies, several knowledge bases do not feature declared ontological rules and are far from being complete. Current rule mining approaches rely on schemata or store the graph in-memory, which can be unfeasible for large graphs. In this paper, we introduce HornConcerto, an algorithm to discover Horn clauses in large graphs without the need of a schema. Using a standard fact-based confidence score, we can mine close Horn rules having an arbitrary body size. We show that our method can outperform existing approaches in terms of runtime and memory consumption and mine high-quality rules for the link prediction task, achieving state-of-the-art results on a widely-used benchmark. Moreover, we find that rules alone can perform inference significantly faster than embedding-based methods and achieve accuracies on link prediction comparable to resource-demanding approaches such as Markov Logic Networks.
New Equipment and Approaches for Fabrication of Uniformly-Dispersed Nanoclay Cluster/Epoxy Composites

The development of nanocomposites for different engineering applications has been going through a progressive period since the last decade. The miniaturization of devices and systems such as micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMs) and nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMs), has brought up the need of ultra-strong structural materials and composites. Research in nanoclay related polymer composites has been a hot topic in the past few years. It is believed that the use of this material to form composites is able to enhance the mechanical, thermal and electrical properties of Polyurethane (PU), Polyester (PE) and Epoxy. However, these composites have only achieved a small strength increment that is below expected potential. The difficulties are on how to produce uniformly-dispersed nanoclay/polymer composites and avoid clustering effect. In this project, a new experiment setup is proposed to mix nanoclay and epoxy together to form uniformly-dispersed nano-sized nanoclay cluster/ epoxy composites. In the experiment, it was found that the micro-hardness of the composites (with 5 wt.% of nanoclay) increased up to 50% under a controlled spinning, curing time and temperature environment.