Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design of a 4-bit 1.4 Gsamples/s low power folding ADC for DS-CDMA UWB transceivers

In this paper, we present a CMOS low power folding ADC (analog to digital converter) architecture, which takes advantage of the low resolution requirement of DS-CDMA UWB transceivers to reduce the power consumption. The high sampling rate is achieved by adopting current steering folding amplifiers instead of cross coupled differential pair based folding amplifiers. Our ADC adopts both resistive interpolation and multiplication to fold the input signal, thereby, reducing the number of folding amplifiers required. When this technique is applied to higher resolution converters, the power and area savings will be even more significant. A brief analysis on the operation of the folding amplifier and a systematic method for sizing preamplifiers, folding amplifiers and comparators is presented. The ADC has been designed in 0.13 /spl mu/m IBM CMOS process. Post layout simulation shows that the spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) of our ADC is greater than 24 dB up to 540 MHz at 1.4 GS/s and consumes about 62 mW of power. The results also indicate that the proposed architecture consumes less power and achieves a higher sampling rate than existing folding ADCs.
Fuzzy implementation of Direct Torque Control of Induction machine

Fuzzy implementation of direct torque control of induction machine is presented here. Error of stator flux, error of motor electromagnetic torque and position of angle of flux are taken as fuzzy variables, voltage vector of inverter is selected through fuzzy decision. Simulation results shows that ripple content of torque is reduced compared with conventional direct torque control (DTC). It also improves torque rise time and torque response during an abrupt change in command torque.
Pseudo-randonmess and Learning in Quantum Computation

This thesis discusses the young fields of quantum pseudo-randomness and quantum learning algorithms. We present techniques for derandomising algorithms to decrease randomness resource requirements and improve efficiency. One key object in doing this is a k-design, which is a distribution on the unitary group whose kth moments match those of the unitarily invariant Haar measure. We show that for a natural model of a random quantum circuit, the distribution of random circuits quickly converges to a 2-design. We then present an efficient unitary k-design construction for any k, provided the number of qubits n satisfies k = O(n/log n). In doing this, we provide an efficient construction of a quantum tensor product expander, which is a generalisation of a quantum expander which in turn generalises classical expanders. We then discuss applications of k-designs. We show that they can be used to improve the efficiency of many existing algorithms and protocols and also find new applications to derandomising large deviation bounds. In particular, we show that many large deviation bound results for Haar random unitaries carry over to k-designs for k = poly(n). In the second part of the thesis, we present some learning and testing algorithms for the Clifford group. We find an optimal algorithm for identifying an unknown Clifford operation. We also give an algorithm to test if an unknown operation is close to a Clifford or far from every Clifford.
Modeling Visit Potential of Geographic Locations Based on Mobility Data

Every day people interact with the environment by passing or visiting geographic locations. Information about such entity-location interactions can be used in a number of applications and its value has been recognized by companies and public institutions. However, although the necessary tracking technologies such as GPS, GSM or RFID have long found their way into everyday life, the practical usage of visit information is still limited. Besides economic and ethical reasons for the restricted usage of entity-location interactions there are also two very basic problems. First, no formal definition of entity-location interaction quantities exists. Second, at the current state of technology, no tracking technology guarantees complete observations, and the treatment of missing data in mobility applications has been neglected in trajectory data mining so far. This thesis therefore focuses on the definition and estimation of quantities about the visiting behavior between mobile entities and geographic locations from incomplete mobility data. In a first step we provide an application-independent language to evaluate entity-location interactions. Based on a uniform notation, we define a family of quantities called visit potential, which contains the most basic interaction quantities and can be extended on need. By identifying the common background of all quantities we are able to analyze relationships between different quantities and to infer consistency requirements between related parameterizations of the quantities. We demonstrate the general applicability of visit potential using two real-world applications for which we give a precise definition of the employed entity-location interaction quantities in terms of visit potential. Second, this thesis provides the first systematic analysis of methods for the handling of missing data in mobility mining. We select a set of promising methods that take different approaches to handling missing data and test their robustness with respect to different scenarios. Our analyses consider different mechanisms and intensities of missing data under artificial censoring as well as varying visit intensities. We hereby analyze not only the applicability of the selected methods but also provide a systematic approach for parameterization and testing that can also be applied to the analysis of other mobility data sets. Our experiments show that only two of the tested methods supply unbiased estimates of visit potential quantities and are applicable to the domain. In addition, both methods supply unbiased estimates only of a single quantity. Therefore, it will be a future challenge to design methods for the entire collection of visit potential quantities. The topic of this thesis is motivated by applied research at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS for business applications in outdoor advertisement. We will use the outdoor advertisement scenario throughout this thesis for demonstration and experimentation.
Projections from the posteroventral cochlear nucleus to the superior olivary complex in guinea pig: Light and em observations with the PHA‐L method

The efferent neural projections from posteroventral cochlear nucleus to the superior olivary complex in guinea pig were examined with the Phaseolus vulgaris—leucoagglutinin anterograde tract‐tracing method. Light microscopic analysis demonstrated that the posteroventral cochlear nucleus of guinea pig bilaterally projects to the superior paraolivary nucleus and the rostral, medioventral, and lateroventral periolivary regions. Ipsilaterally, the posteroventral cochlear nucleus projects to the lateral superior olive, the caudal periolivary region, and areas immediately surrounding the capsule of the lateral superior olive. Contralaterally, the posteroventral cochlear nucleus projects to the medial nucleus of the trapezoid body. All of these projection axons travel in the trapezoid body and their terminals make, primarily, en passant endings upon their targets. Exclusively within the contralateral medial nucleus of the trapezoid body, some neurons terminate also in calyceal endings.
Hyaluronic acid production and CD44 expression in cultured dermal fibroblasts of patients with non‐insulin‐dependent diabetes mellitus with and without chronic ulcers on the lower extremity

It is well known that hyaluronic acid and its principal receptor, CD44, are implicated in the regulation of the tissue repair process, but their role in the formation of chronic diabetic ulcers has not been studied. Hyaluronic acid metabolism and CD44 expression are regulated by lactate, where their increased production is considered to affect the properties of fibroblasts in non‐insulin‐dependent diabetes mellitus. The aim of our work was to investigate the possible role of hyaluronic acid and CD44, and their regulation by lactate, in the abnormal wound healing of diabetes. Fibroblasts were derived from uninjured skin from four non‐insulin‐dependent diabetic patients with ulcers and four without ulcers; and from four healthy age‐matched volunteers. We observed that diabetic fibroblasts of both groups produced more L‐lactate (∼30%) and incorporated more 3H‐glucosamine into the medium hyaluronic acid (∼28%) than controls. Fibroblasts of the diabetic group with ulcers, unlike those of the group without ulcers, showed significant increases in the high molecular weight hyaluronic acid accumulation in the pericellular matrix (30.5%, p < 0.01) and CD44 expression (27.0%, p < 0.05). Exogenous L‐lactate dose‐dependently, and equally for all fibroblasts lines, stimulated the accumulation of medium hyaluronic acid (3.7‐fold) and CD44 expression (1.5‐fold). However, fibroblasts from diabetic patients with ulcers were more (1.4‐fold) sensitive to L‐lactate in terms of CD44 expression, and responded to L‐lactate by the increased accumulation of high molecular weight hyaluronic acid in the pericellular matrix (32.1%, p < 0.01). We propose that specific properties of fibroblasts from diabetic patients with ulcers may be involved in the increased susceptibility of these patients to chronic ulceration.
Cases in Five Small to Medium Sized Software Enterprises (SMEs)

KM Systems are a more recent type of organisational information system developed to facilitate data, information and KM. KMS are manifested in a variety of implementations and the range of technologies available to organisations in supporting KM is extensive. The majority of organisations use a combination of tools to support and strengthen the organisational knowledge cycle; these include document repositories, expertise databases and discussion forums. However recent economic instability has meant that SMEs lack the fundamental financial and systemic capacity to introduce innovative KM practices and technologies. Consequently, using multiple case studies, this study presents a comprehensive view of the KM approach, identifying both routine and non-routine modes of knowledge processing for small software organisations, addressing the mix usage associated with supporting knowledge requirements, in order to improve the organisation’s ability to make the “right” decision and subsequently be more flexible in the face of change.
Viewpoints: A Framework for Integrating Multiple Perspectives in System Development

This paper outlines a framework which supports the use of multiple perspectives in system development, and provides a means for developing and applying systems design methods. The framework uses "viewpoints" to partition the system specification, the development method and the formal representations used to express the system specifications. This VOSE (viewpoint-oriented systems engineering) framework can be used to support the design of heterogeneous and composite systems. We illustrate the use of the framework with a small example drawn from composite system development and give an account of prototype automated tools based on the framework.
Using Perturbation Theory to Compute the Morphological Similarity of Diffusion Tensors

Computing the morphological similarity of diffusion tensors (DTs) at neighboring voxels within a DT image, or at corresponding locations across different DT images, is a fundamental and ubiquitous operation in the postprocessing of DT images. The morphological similarity of DTs typically has been computed using either the principal directions (PDs) of DTs (i.e., the direction along which water molecules diffuse preferentially) or their tensor elements. Although comparing PDs allows the similarity of one morphological feature of DTs to be visualized directly in eigenspace, this method takes into account only a single eigenvector, and it is therefore sensitive to the presence of noise in the images that can introduce error in to the estimation of that vector. Although comparing tensor elements, rather than PDs, is comparatively more robust to the effects of noise, the individual elements of a given tensor do not directly reflect the diffusion properties of water molecules. We propose a measure for computing the morphological similarity of DTs that uses both their eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and that also accounts for the noise levels present in DT images. Our measure presupposes that DTs in a homogeneous region within or across DT images are random perturbations of one another in the presence of noise. The similarity values that are computed using our method are smooth (in the sense that small changes in eigenvalues and eigenvectors cause only small changes in similarity), and they are symmetric when differences in eigenvalues and eigenvectors are also symmetric. In addition, our method does not presuppose that the corresponding eigenvectors across two DTs have been identified accurately, an assumption that is problematic in the presence of noise. Because we compute the similarity between DTs using their eigenspace components, our similarity measure relates directly to both the magnitude and the direction of the diffusion of water molecules. The favorable performance characteristics of our measure offer the prospect of substantially improving additional postprocessing operations that are commonly performed on DTI datasets, such as image segmentation, fiber tracking, noise filtering, and spatial normalization.
A Web-based framework for fast synchronization of live video players

The increased popularity of social media and mobile devices has radically changed the way people consume multimedia content online. As an example, users can experience the same event (e.g. a sports event or a concert) together using social media, even if they are not in the same physical location. Moreover, the introduction of the HTTP Adaptive Streaming principle has made it possible to deliver video over the best-effort Internet with consistent quality, even for mobile devices. One of the challenges within this context is the synchronization of multimedia playback among geographically distributed clients. To solve this issue, we propose a Web-based framework which allows to synchronize the playback of different clients. We also present a novel hybrid approach for adaptive streaming to allow fast synchronization among different clients, which relies on HTTP/2's server push feature in combination with sub-second video segments. In this paper, we detail the proposed framework and provide a comprehensive analysis of its performance. Experiments show that the novel hybrid approach can reduce synchronization time with 19.4% compared to standard adaptive streaming over HTTP/1.1 when bandwidth is limited to 2.5 Mb/s and an RTT of 150 ms. The gain increases even more when a higher throughput is available. The obtained results entail that the proposed framework can provide quality of experience for all users watching online video together.
ERβ and PEA3 co-activate IL-8 expression and promote the invasion of breast cancer cells

Metastasis represents the major remaining cause of mortality in human breast cancer. Interleukin-8 (IL-8), a proinflammatory chemokine, plays an important role during tumor angiogenesis and metastasis. In this study, we found that IL-8 and ER beta showed positive association. Overexpression of ER beta or PEA3 could up-regulate IL-8 promoter activity, mRNA and secretion; silencing of ER beta or PEA3 decreased IL-8 mRNA and secretion. ER beta and PEA3 increased IL-8 expression through binding to the IL-8 promoter and increased cell invasion. HER2 could increase ER beta and PEA3 expression and their binding to the IL-8 promoter. We conclude that ER beta and PEA3 play important roles in tumor invasion by regulating IL-8 expression, and HER2 maybe the upstream of ER beta and PEA3 – IL-8 pathway. See commentary: A new perspective on Estrogen Receptor beta in breast cancer progression
Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes

Economic conditions shape election outcomes in the world's democracies. Good times keep parties in office, bad times cast them out. This proposition is robust, as the voluminous body of research reviewed here demonstrates. The strong findings at the macro level are founded on the economic voter, who holds the government responsible for economic performance, rewarding or punishing it at the ballot box. Although voters do not look exclusively at economic issues, they generally weigh those more heavily than any others, regardless of the democracy they vote in.
Photophosphorylation by mesophyll and bundle sheath chloroplasts of c(4) plants.

Leaves of plants possessing the C4-dicarboxylic acid CO2fixation pathway (14) are characterized by outer mesophyll cells containing granal chloroplasts and inner bundle sheath cells which contain chloroplasts with varying degrees of grana development depending on the species. As judged by Hill activities and fluorescence yield, bundle sheath chloroplasts which contain few grana have less photosystem II activity relative to photosystem I when compared to mesophyll cell chloroplasts in the same leaf (5, 11, 13, 15, 16). The deficiency in PS-II' in these bundle sheath chloroplasts is further shown by the low chl/P700 ratio in bundle sheath chloroplasts of Sorghum bicolor and Digitaria sanguinalis (1, 13) and by the near absence of pigment-protein complex II (associated with PS-II) in bundle sheath chloroplasts of S. bicolor (12). These studies show that bundle sheath chloroplasts of C4 plants which contain few grana are highly deficient in PS-II and closely resemble the PS-I particles prepared from spinach chloroplasts by digitonin treatment (1). The major deficiency in PS-II activity reported for S. bicolor bundle sheath chloroplasts, for example, has important consequences for Calvin cycle metabolism which occurs in the bundle sheath cells of this species. All carbon fixed during photosynthesis eventually passes through the Calvin cycle in the bundle sheath cells and, in view of major deficiency in PS-II, it has been suggested that NADPH is provided via malic enzyme (10, 14) and that ATP is generated via cyclic photophosphorylation (6, 14). There have been relatively few studies of photophosphorylation in chloroplasts of C4 plants (6, 8), and in these no distinction was made between mesophyll and bundle sheath origin. This paper reports studies on photophosphorylation as a measure of coupled electron flow in chloroplasts from three C4 species, S. bicolor, Zea mays and Atriplex spongiosa. The data demonstrate a major deficiency of PS-II dependent photophosphorylation in fragments obtained from bundle sheath cell chloroplasts of S. bicolor and Z. mays.
The post-auricular muscle response in children

THE DETECTION of the threshold of auditory sensation in terms of signal intensity at specified frequencies of sound has become the cornerstone of clinical audiometry. In the intelligent and co-operative patient this can be accomplished easily and accurately by recording the subjective response to a series of supraand sub-threshold stimuli. The results are plotted as the familiar pure tone audiogram. The test is readily applicable to older children. It can be attempted on a child of any age who is prepared to submit to one of the conditioning techniques in common usage. The precise age at which an individual child can be coaxed into co-operation with pure tone testing and the accuracy of the recorded results depends on the intelligence of the child, his behaviour during the test, and also on the skill and patience of the audiometrician. In the infant and young child, the pure tone is abandoned as an auditory stimulus in favour of the meaningful or interesting noise, whose frequency and intensity components are comparatively complex and ill-defined. The response expected is a reflex movement or inhibition of movement. Accuracy of observation depends on the subjective assessment of the observer and not the observed. The problems are yet more difficult in mentally and physically handicapped children whose responses may be concealed or absent and so more difficult or impossible to interpret with assurance. And yet it is in this group that the detection and management of deafness is if anything the more important, since the same degree of deafness will produce a disproportionately severe restriction of language development compared with an otherwise normal child, and so will compound the other handicaps.
A Portable Dextrous Master with Force Feedback

Dextrous masters control robots and artificial environments through hand gestures. Commercial products have open-loop control, without force feedback to the operator. There is a need for portable systems that have force feedback, but are still sufficiently compact to be desktop. In this paper we discuss a prototype master providing force feedback for the Dataglove. The master structure and its actuator characteristics are presented first. Then a control model is given based on finger parameters and joint coupling. The glove calibration is subsequently discussed, taking into account the influence of the feedback structure. The experimental setup and initial results are presented last.
Mapping of Epitopes on Human Tissue-Type Plasminogen Activator with Recombinant Deletion Mutant Proteins

Summary An antigen assay based on a monoclonal antibody directed against the light chain of tissue-type plasminogen activator (t-PA) was developed to quantify seven recombinant (r) t-PA deletion mutant proteins. These recombinant proteins were then employed to map different epitopes on t-PA which interact with a panel of twenty-three monoclonal anti-t-PA antibodies. Twenty were directed against domains on the heavy chain, two against the “finger” domain, three against the “epidermal growth factor-like” domain, five against the kringle 1 domain, and ten against the kringle 2 domain. Only three monoclonal anti-t-PA antibodies interact with the light chain. The finding that the epitopes of each of the monoclonals could be determined with the deletion mutant proteins supports the hypothesis of autonomous folding of structural domains and emphasizes the validity of the use of the recombinant t-PA-deletion mutant proteins for structure-function studies.