Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Grinding Force of Cylindrical and Creep-Feed Grinding Modeling

This chapter presents an experimental study of grinding forces as relationship of work- piece speed v, feed rate s a and depth of cut a. For the modeling of cylindrical grinding used was response surface methodology and genetic algorithms. Modeled was the tangential force F t and the normal force F n in cylindrical grinding. The process included measure- ment of cutting forces during cylindrical grinding and later calculating their values using abovementioned techniques and determined adequate models. This chapter also exam- ines the value and character of cutting forces in the creep-feed grinding. In order to identify the impact of cutting forces on the state of the process of creep-feed grinding, according to the elements of the machining experimental tests, relationship of the tangential and normal components of the grinding force and ratio of grinding force were determined. In comparison with the traditional multi-pass grinding results, the occurrence of higher cutting forces in creep-feed grinding, especially normal components, is shown.
An Integrated Computing Environment for Bio-Molecular Networks

With the development of systems biology, more and more researchers focus on the study of biomolecular networks. In recent years, researchers in different fields have accumulated a large number of biological experimental data and algorithms for analysis and calculation of bio-molecular networks, but these data and methods are relatively independent, difficult to be utilized by biologists. Based on PSE-Bio, a problem solving environment for bioinformatics, this paper describes an integrated computing environment for bio-molecular networks in order to achieve molecular homology analysis, bio-molecular network building, querying, statistics and visualization.
Viewing the choroid: where we stand, challenges and contradictions in diabetic retinopathy and diabetic macular oedema

Diabetic macular oedema (DMO) is the leading cause of vision loss in the working‐age population. Blood–retinal barrier (BRB) dysfunction in diabetic retinopathy (DR), mainly at the level of the retinal vessels, has long been related with leakage and fluid accumulation, leading to macular oedema. However, the nourishment of the macula is provided by the choroid and a diabetic choroidopathy has been described. Therefore, there has been a growing interest in studying the role of the choroid in the pathophysiology of DR and DMO, mainly by optical coherence tomography (OCT). Nevertheless, there are conflicting results in the different studies. We summarize the results from the available studies, describe the limitations and confounding factors and discuss future procedures to avoid bias.
Active methods to improve reliability in power electronics

Reliability of power electronics is a critical issue, as most of the electrical energy is processed by power electronics. Various stressors impact the safe operation of the systems, including harsh environments, temperature variations, humidity, vibration and radiation. Physics of failure analysis uses models that describe how failure mechanisms evolve over time and induce failures. Active methods help to increase the reliability during operation. These methods rely on intelligent control that help to avoid operation conditions that affect stress that lead to failures. This paper provides an overview on recent active methods to increase the reliability of power electronics and categorizes them according to their impact on reliability, invasiveness to system operation and open research opportunities. An industry perspective taken from a survey in the end of 2016 is included to rate how promising the different methods are considered.
Suitability of Dysphonia Measurements for Telemonitoring of Parkinson's Disease

In this paper, we present an assessment of the practical value of existing traditional and nonstandard measures for discriminating healthy people from people with Parkinson's disease (PD) by detecting dysphonia. We introduce a new measure of dysphonia, pitch period entropy (PPE), which is robust to many uncontrollable confounding effects including noisy acoustic environments and normal, healthy variations in voice frequency. We collected sustained phonations from 31 people, 23 with PD. We then selected ten highly uncorrelated measures, and an exhaustive search of all possible combinations of these measures finds four that in combination lead to overall correct classification performance of 91.4%, using a kernel support vector machine. In conclusion, we find that nonstandard methods in combination with traditional harmonics-to-noise ratios are best able to separate healthy from PD subjects. The selected nonstandard methods are robust to many uncontrollable variations in acoustic environment and individual subjects, and are thus well suited to telemonitoring applications.
A framework for designing benchmarks of investigating digital forensics tools for mobile devices

With the continued growth of the mobile device market, the possibility of their use in criminal activity will only continue to increase. While the mobile device market provides a great variety of manufacturers and models causing a strong diversity, it becomes difficult for a professional investigator to choose the proper forensics tools for seizing internal data from mobile devices. Through this paper, we will give a comprehensive perspective of each popular digital forensic tool and initiate discussion towards benchmarking key features and considerations of forensic analysis techniques.
Resource-Competitive Algorithms

The point of adversarial analysis is to model the worst-case performance of an algorithm. Unfortunately, this analysis may not always reect performance in practice because the adversarial assumption can be overly pessimistic. In such cases, several techniques have been developed to provide a more refined understanding of how an algorithm performs e.g., competitive analysis, parameterized analysis, and the theory of approximation algorithms. Here, we describe an analogous technique called resource competitiveness, tailored for distributed systems. Often there is an operational cost for adversarial behavior arising from bandwidth usage, computational power, energy limitations, etc. Modeling this cost provides some notion of how much disruption the adversary can inict on the system. In parameterizing by this cost, we can design an algorithm with the following guarantee: if the adversary pays T, then the additional cost of the algorithm is some function of T. Resource competitiveness yields results pertaining to secure, fault tolerant, and efficient distributed computation. We summarize these results and highlight future challenges where we expect this algorithmic tool to provide new insights.
Hardware support for hiding cache latency

As the decrease in processor cycle time continues to outpace the decrease in memory cycle time, even moderately sized on-chip caches may require several cycles of access time in the near future. This means that time is lost, even on a cache hit, if independent instructions cannot be scheduled after a read from memory. A novel hardware device is proposed that keeps track of the history of load instructions and predicts their targets before they are computed by the instruction pipeline. This allows the saving of several processor cycles. The storage required to implement such a device is quite large, but as the latency required to read from the first level cache grows, a moderate performance improvement is seen.
The Importance of Continuous Value Based Project Management in the Context of Requirements Engineering

Despite several scientific achievements in the last years, there are still a lot of IT projects that fail. Researchers found that one out of five IT-projects run out of time, budget or value. Major reasons for this failure are unexpected economic risk factors that emerge during the runtime of projects. In order to be able to identify emerging risks early and to counteract reasonably, financial methods for a continuous IT-project-steering are necessary, which as of today to the best of our knowledge are missing within scientific literature.
Multisensory Calibration Is Independent of Cue Reliability

Multisensory calibration is fundamental for proficient interaction within a changing environment. Initial studies suggested a visual-dominant mechanism. More recently, a cue-reliability-based model, similar to optimal cue integration, has been proposed. However, a more general, reliability-independent model of fixed-ratio adaptation (of which visual dominance is a subcase) has never been tested. Here, we studied behavior of both humans and monkeys performing a heading-discrimination task. Subjects were presented with either visual (optic-flow), vestibular (motion-platform), or combined (visual–vestibular) stimuli and required to report whether self-motion was to the right/left of straight ahead. A systematic heading discrepancy was introduced between the visual and vestibular cues, without external feedback. Cue calibration was measured by the resulting sensory adaptation. Both visual and vestibular cues significantly adapted in the direction required to reduce cue conflict. However, unlike multisensory cue integration, cue calibration was not reliability based. Rather, a model of fixed-ratio adaptation best described the data, whereby vestibular adaptation was greater than visual adaptation, regardless of relative cue reliability. The average ratio of vestibular to visual adaptation was 1.75 and 2.30 for the human and monkey data, respectively. Furthermore, only through modeling fixed-ratio adaptation (using the ratio extracted from the data) were we able to account for reliability-based cue integration during the adaptation process. The finding that cue calibration does not depend on cue reliability is consistent with the notion that it follows an underlying estimate of cue accuracy. Cue accuracy is generally independent of cue reliability, and its estimate may change with a much slower time constant. Thus, greater vestibular versus visual (fixed-ratio) adaptation suggests lower vestibular versus visual cue accuracy.
Development and validation of a taste sensitivity test in a group of healthy children.

AIM This was to validate a taste test on healthy school children. A cross-sectional study was designed to perform a standardised clinical evaluation of the gustatory sensitivity. MATERIALS AND METHODS Forty (18 males and 22 females) children were selected. Inclusion criteria were age between 5 and 12 years, absence of systemic disease and no antibiotic treatment in the last six months. The taste assessment tests were performed following a standardised protocol, repeated at two different intervals: a) tested at time 0; b) tested after 20-30 days. Tests were performed using a pipette with the sample solution: sucrose, sodium chloride, citric acid and quinine hydrochloride at different concentrations. The examiner reported in a grid the flavour perceived by the subject. A placebo (tap water) was administered in between the flavours RESULTS The majority of the subjects detected the bitter taste at the lowest concentration (mean=1.83). The sour taste was detected with the second concentration (mean=2.56). The sweet solution was detected with the most diluted concentration (mean=1.56). The salty taste has a threshold of 2 (mean=2.04), which means that the majority of subjects detected the salty solution with the second concentration. Regarding the perceived intensity, it increases with the increasing concentrations and it reaches maximum values that are inversely proportional to the threshold, corresponding to the second concentration. Moreover, no statistically significant gender differences were detected regarding the threshold values or the perceived intensity. CONCLUSION The proposed test allows for a controlled, reliable and standardised evaluation of the gustatory modality.
Dietary Acrylamide Intake and the Risk of Lymphatic Malignancies: The Netherlands Cohort Study on Diet and Cancer

Background Acrylamide, a probable human carcinogen, is present in many everyday foods. Since the finding of its presence in foods in 2002, epidemiological studies have found some suggestive associations between dietary acrylamide exposure and the risk of various cancers. The aim of this prospective study is to investigate for the first time the association between dietary acrylamide intake and the risk of several histological subtypes of lymphatic malignancies. Methods The Netherlands Cohort Study on diet and cancer includes 120,852 men and women followed-up since September 1986. The number of person years at risk was estimated by using a random sample of participants from the total cohort that was chosen at baseline (n = 5,000). Acrylamide intake was estimated from a food frequency questionnaire combined with acrylamide data for Dutch foods. Hazard ratios (HRs) were calculated for acrylamide intake as a continuous variable as well as in categories (quintiles and tertiles), for men and women separately and for never-smokers, using multivariable-adjusted Cox proportional hazards models. Results After 16.3 years of follow-up, 1,233 microscopically confirmed cases of lymphatic malignancies were available for multivariable-adjusted analysis. For multiple myeloma and follicular lymphoma, HRs for men were 1.14 (95% CI: 1.01, 1.27) and 1.28 (95% CI: 1.03, 1.61) per 10 µg acrylamide/day increment, respectively. For never-smoking men, the HR for multiple myeloma was 1.98 (95% CI: 1.38, 2.85). No associations were observed for women. Conclusion We found indications that acrylamide may increase the risk of multiple myeloma and follicular lymphoma in men. This is the first epidemiological study to investigate the association between dietary acrylamide intake and the risk of lymphatic malignancies, and more research into these observed associations is warranted.
Top-Down Query Evaluation for Well-Founded Semantics with Explicit Negation

In this paper we de ne a sound and complete top{down semantic tree characterization, that includes pruning rules, of the well{founded semantics for programs extended with explicit negation (WFSX), and compare it to other related approaches. It is amenable to a simple implementation (in appendix), and by its nature readily allows pre{processing into Prolog, showing promise as an e cient basis for further development. Because of its properties, which other competing semantics do not fully enjoy, WFSX is a natural candidate to being the semantics of choice for extended logic programs. Namely, it exhibits the structural properties: simplicity, cumulativity, rationality, relevance, partial evaluation, and polynomial complexity for DATALOG. It provides a qualitative representational expressivity that can capture a wide variety of logical reasoning forms, and serve as an instrument for programming them. SinceWFSX coincides with the well{founded semantics on normal programs, our method is applicable to it and, for ground programs, compares favourably with previous approaches. WFSX is sound wrt to the answer{ sets semantics, and it is a better aproximation to answer{sets than simply using the well{founded semantics of normal programs, plus a renaming of explicitly negated literals. Thus, our top{down method can be used as a sound one for answer{sets, that provides less incompleteness than others. We thank Esprit BR project Compulog 2 (no. 6810), and JNICT Portugal for their support.
Applying Software Development Lifecycles in Teaching Introductory Programming Courses

In this paper, we introduce a new software development method that emphasizes software testing cycles and makes a cultural change in program development. In our approach, students follow the software lifecycles to develop their programs; specifically, a student who is to write a program begins by writing a test suite and completes other development cycles. Students in programming courses usually develop "toy" programs that are superficially tested, graded, and eventually discarded. Generally, students are not worried about the quality or maintenance of their products. We believe this style of teaching programming courses leaves students unprepared for developing reliable software. Industry leaders also claimed that more than 50% of a software project's budget was spent on activities related to improving software quality. They stated the reason was the inadequate attention paid to software quality in the development phase. Our approach integrates into the existing programming courses without changing the course contents, syllabus, policies, or loads, and our model improves the students' program quality, in terms of black-box testing. Students indicated that our method helped them in understanding the problems and writing the programs, made the code easier to debug, and improved the students' code reliability and quality
International Journal of Nanomedicine Dovepress Polystyrene Nanoparticles Activate Ion Transport in Human Airway Epithelial Cells

Background: Over the last decade, nanotechnology has provided researchers with new nanometer materials, such as nanoparticles, which have the potential to provide new therapies for many lung diseases. In this study, we investigated the acute effects of polystyrene nanopar-ticles on epithelial ion channel function. Methods: Human submucosal Calu-3 cells that express cystic fibrosis transmembrane con-ductance regulator (CFTR) and baby hamster kidney cells engineered to express the wild-type CFTR gene were used to investigate the actions of negatively charged 20 nm polystyrene nanoparticles on short-circuit current in Calu-3 cells by Ussing chamber and single CFTR Cl-channels alone and in the presence of known CFTR channel activators by using baby hamster kidney cell patches. increases in short-circuit current. In turn, these short-circuit current responses were found to be biphasic in nature, ie, an initial peak followed by a plateau. EC 50 values for peak and plateau short-circuit current responses were 1457 and 315.5 ng/mL, respectively. Short-circuit current was inhibited by diphenylamine-2-carboxylate, a CFTR Cl-channel blocker. Polystyrene nanoparticles activated basolateral K + channels and affected Cl-and HCO 3-secretion. The mechanism of short-circuit current activation by polystyrene nanoparticles was found to be largely dependent on calcium-dependent and cyclic nucleotide-dependent phosphorylation of CFTR Cl-channels. Recordings from isolated inside-out patches using baby hamster kidney cells confirmed the direct activation of CFTR Cl-channels by the nanoparticles. Conclusion: This is the first study to identify the activation of ion channels in airway cells after exposure to polystyrene-based nanomaterials. Thus, polystyrene nanoparticles cannot be considered as a simple neutral vehicle for drug delivery for the treatment of lung diseases, due to the fact that they may have the ability to affect epithelial cell function and physiological processes on their own.
Modelling the self-tolerance mechanisms of T cells: An adaptive sliding mode control approach

The response of the immune system to self or foreign tissues induce dynamics which lead to health or disease. The maintenance of the healthy state by the inhibition of undesirable responses to self tissues is a key property of the naturally occurring robust feedback mechanism seen within a healthy immune system. In this paper, Variable Structure Control (VSC) theory is used to design an adaptive sliding mode control to model the observed self-tolerance exhibited by a healthy immune system. A suitable sliding manifold and corresponding reachability condition are formulated based on knowledge of the healthy tolerance steady-state. Unlike existing candidate immune response functions, the proposed control function exhibits robust performance commensurate with the self-tolerance mechanisms of the immune system which have been observed experimentally.
RECENT UPDATE ON PRONIOSOMAL GEL AS TOPICAL DRUG DELIVERY SYSTEM

An existence of transdermal delivery tool, proniosomal gel, has established to showed remarkable development for lipophilic/hydrophilic drugs over additional formulations. Newer drugs of lipophilic nature emerge poor bioavailability, irregular absorption, and pharmacokinetic changes. Therefore, this novel drug delivery system has been proved advantageous over other oral and topical delivery of drug candidates to bypass such disruption. This proniosomal gel basically is a compact semi-solid liquid crystalline (gel) composed of non-ionic surfactants easily formed on dissolving the surfactant in a minimal amount of acceptable solvent and the least amount of aqueous phase and phosphate buffer. Topical application of gel under occlusive condition during which they are converted into nisomes due to hydration by water in the skin present itself. Proniosomal gels are typically present in transparent, translucent, or white semisolid gel texture, which makes them physically stable throughout storage and transport. This review provides an important overview of the preparation, formulation, evaluation, and application of proniosome gel as a drug delivery carrier.
Secure Authentication System for Public WLAN Roaming

A serious challenge for seamless roaming between independent wireless LANs (WLANs) is how best to confederate the various WLAN service providers, each having different trust relationships with individuals and each supporting their own authentication schemes, which may vary from one provider to the next. We have designed and implemented a comprehensive single sign-on (SSO) authentication architecture that confederates WLAN service providers through trusted identity providers. Users select the appropriate SSO authentication scheme from the authentication capabilities announced by the WLAN service provider, and can block the exposure of their privacy information while roaming. In addition, we have developed a compound Layer 2 and Web authentication scheme that ensures cryptographically protected access while preserving pre-existing public WLAN payment models. Our experimental results, obtained from our prototype system, show that the total authentication delay is about 2 seconds in the worst case. This time is dominated primarily by our use of industry-standard XML-based protocols, yet is still small enough for practical use.
A Performance Modeling and Optimization Analysis Tool for Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication on GPUs

This paper presents a performance modeling and optimization analysis tool to predict and optimize the performance of sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) on GPUs. We make the following contributions: 1) We present an integrated analytical and profile-based performance modeling to accurately predict the kernel execution times of CSR, ELL, COO, and HYB SpMV kernels. Our proposed approach is general, and neither limited by GPU programming languages nor restricted to specific GPU architectures. In this paper, we use CUDA-based SpMV kernels and NVIDIA Tesla C2050 for our performance modeling and experiments. According to our experiments, for 77 out of 82 test cases, the performance differences between the predicted and measured execution times are less than 9 percent; for the rest five test cases, the differences are between 9 and 10 percent. For CSR, ELL, COO, and HYB SpMV CUDA kernels, the average differences are 6.3, 4.4, 2.2, and 4.7 percent, respectively. 2) Based on the performance modeling, we design a dynamic-programming based SpMV optimal solution auto-selection algorithm to automatically report an optimal solution (i.e., optimal storage strategy, storage format(s), and execution time) for a target sparse matrix. In our experiments, the average performance improvements of the optimal solutions are 41.1, 49.8, and 37.9 percent, compared to NVIDIA's CSR, COO, and HYB CUDA kernels, respectively.