Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Microstructural model of mechanical initiation of energetic materials

Mechanical initiation of chemical reactions in energetic materials depends on microstructural details of the materials. Several models are described in the literature that are appropriate for a continuum, such as energy dissipation from plastic flow, or shear bands. A technique is presented here for developing initiation models using relations between macroscopic variables and conditions at inter-grain contact areas in a granular material. The chemical processes that lead to initiation are included by using a 2-D numerical heat transfer model of energy flux on a surface spot of a half-space medium with multiple species chemical reactions. A number of calculations are done and the time to ignition at a given fluence is obtained as a function of spot size. Then simple kinematic relations between macroscopic stresses and the inter-grain contact forces are developed and the shearing velocity at the contact region is related to the macroscopic shear strain rate. Combining these relations leads to an ignition c.
Critical Role of Platelet Glycoprotein Ib&agr; in Arterial Remodeling

Objective— Arteriogenesis is strongly dependent on the recruitment of leukocytes, especially monocytes, into the perivascular space of growing collateral vessels. On the basis of previous findings that platelets are central players in inflammatory processes and mediate the recruitment of leukocytes, the aim of this study was to assess the role of platelets in a model of arterial remodeling. Approach and Results— C57Bl6 wild-type mice, IL4-R/Iba mice lacking the extracellular domain of the glycoprotein Ib&agr; (GPIb&agr;) receptor, and mice treated with antibodies to block GPIb&agr; or deplete circulating platelets were studied in peripheral arteriogenesis. Using a novel model of intravital 2-photon and epifluorescence imaging, we visualized and quantified the interaction of platelets with leukocytes and the vascular endothelium in vivo. We found that transient platelet adhesion to the endothelium of collateral vessels was a major event during arteriogenesis and depended on GPIb&agr;. Furthermore, leukocyte recruitment was obviously affected in animals with defective platelet GPIb&agr; function. In IL4-R/Iba mice, transient and firm leukocyte adhesion to the endothelium of collateral vessels, as well as leukocyte accumulation in the perivascular space, were significantly reduced. Furthermore, we detected platelet–leukocyte aggregates within the circulation, which were significantly reduced in IL4-R/Iba animals. Finally, platelet depletion and loss of GPIb&agr; function resulted in poor reperfusion recovery as determined by laser Doppler imaging. Conclusions— Thus, GPIb&agr;-mediated interactions between platelets and endothelial cells, as well as leukocytes, support innate immune cell recruitment and promote arteriogenesis-establishing platelets as critical players in this process.
Simulating Organogenesis in COMSOL: Tissue Mechanics

During growth, tissue expands and deforms. Given its elastic properties, stresses emerge in an expanding and deforming tissue. Cell rearrangements can dissipate these stresses and numerous experiments confirm the viscoelastic properties of tissues [1]-[4]. On long time scales, as characteristic for many developmental processes, tissue is therefore typically represented as a liquid, viscous material and is then described by the Stokes equation [5]-[7]. On short time scales, however, tissues have mainly elastic properties. In discrete cell-based tissue models, the elastic tissue properties are realized by springs between cell vertices [8], [9]. In this article, we adopt a macroscale perspective of tissue and consider it as homogeneous material. Therefore, we may use the "Structural Mechanics" module in COMSOL Multiphysics in order to model the viscoelastic behavior of tissue. Concretely, we consider two examples: first, we aim at numerically reproducing published [10] analytical results for the sea urchin blastula. Afterwards, we numerically solve a continuum mechanics model for the compression and relaxation experiments presented in [4].
LTCC lamination process using PMMA fugitive material

Integrated cavities, screen-printed passive components and channels are common parts of 3D micro-fluidic devices fabricated in low temperature co-fired ceramics (LTCC) technology. However, realization of defect-free structures without cracks, sagging of cavities or channels is challenging and strongly influenced by quality of lamination and firing processing conditions. Lamination technique based on incorporation of polymethylmethycrylate (PMMA) sacrificial volume material (SVM) for implementation of large cavities inside LTCC module is presented in this paper. Optimized firing conditions for proper burnout of SVM have been described. Influence of lamination and firing processing conditions are demonstrated in fabrication of 3-dimensional micro-fluidic device. Tested structure contains screen printed interdigital capacitor (IDC) positioned inside large cavity with dimensions 0.23 +/- 0.01 × 5.6 × 11.2 [mm3] for thickness, width and length, respectively. Obtained results show advantages of PMMA incorporation in fabrication of defect-free structures in LTCC technology.
Removal of residual cavitation nuclei to enhance histotripsy fractionation of soft tissue

Remanent bubble nuclei generated by primary cavitation collapse can limit the efficiency of histotripsy softtissue fractionation. When these residual bubbles persist from one histotripsy pulse to the next, they can seed the repetitive nucleation of cavitation bubbles at a discrete set of sites within the focal volume. This effect-referred to as cavitation memory- manifests in inefficient lesion formation, because certain sites within the focal volume are overtreated whereas others remain undertreated. Although the cavitation memory effect can be passively mitigated by using a low pulse repetition frequency (PRF) that affords remanent nuclei sufficient time for dissolution between successive pulses, this low PRF also results in slow lesion production. As such, it would be highly desirable to maintain the high per-pulse efficiency associated with low pulse rates when much higher PRFs are utilized. In this vein, we have developed a strategy for the active removal of the remanent bubble nuclei following primary cavitation collapse, using low-amplitude ultrasound sequences (termed bubble-removal sequences) to stimulate the aggregation and subsequent coalescence of these bubbles. In this study, bubbleremoval sequences were incorporated in high-PRF histotripsy treatment (100 Hz) of a red blood cell tissue-mimicking phantom that allows for the visualization of lesion development in real time. A series of reference treatments were also conducted at the low PRF of 1 Hz to provide a point of comparison for which cavitation memory effects are minimal. It was found that bubble-removal sequences as short as 1 ms are capable of maintaining the efficacious lesion development characteristics associated with the low PRF of 1 Hz when the much higher pulse rate of 100 Hz is used. These results were then extended to the treatment of a large volume within the tissue phantom, and optimal bubble-removal sequences identified for the singlefocal- spot case were utilized to homogenize a 10 × 10 mm region at high rate.
CMI: An Information-Theoretic Contrast Measure for Enhancing Subspace Cluster and Outlier Detection

In many real world applications data is collected in multi-dimensional spaces, with the knowledge hidden in subspaces (i.e., subsets of the dimensions). It is an open research issue to select meaningful subspaces without any prior knowledge about such hidden patterns. Standard approaches, such as pairwise correlation measures, or statistical approaches based on entropy, do not solve this problem; due to their restrictive pairwise analysis and loss of information in discretization they are bound to miss subspaces with potential clusters and outliers. In this paper, we focus on finding subspaces with strong mutual dependency in the selected dimension set. Chosen subspaces should provide a high discrepancy between clusters and outliers and enhance detection of these patterns. To measure this, we propose a novel contrast score that quantifies mutual correlations in subspaces by considering their cumulative distributions— without having to discretize the data. In our experiments, we show that these high contrast subspaces provide enhanced quality in cluster and outlier detection for both synthetic and real world data.
An integrated finite element simulation of cardiomyocyte function based on triphasic theory

In numerical simulations of cardiac excitation-contraction coupling, the intracellular potential distribution and mobility of cytosol and ions have been mostly ignored. Although the intracellular potential gradient is small, during depolarization it can be a significant driving force for ion movement, and is comparable to diffusion in terms of net flux. Furthermore, fluid in the t-tubules is thought to advect ions to facilitate their exchange with the extracellular space. We extend our previous finite element model that was based on triphasic theory to examine the significance of these factors in cardiac physiology. Triphasic theory allows us to study the behavior of solids (proteins), fluids (cytosol) and ions governed by mechanics and electrochemistry in detailed subcellular structures, including myofibrils, mitochondria, the sarcoplasmic reticulum, membranes, and t-tubules. Our simulation results predicted an electrical potential gradient inside the t-tubules at the onset of depolarization, which corresponded to the Na+ channel distribution therein. Ejection and suction of fluid between the t-tubules and the extracellular compartment during isometric contraction were observed. We also examined the influence of t-tubule morphology and mitochondrial location on the electrophysiology and mechanics of the cardiomyocyte. Our results confirm that the t-tubule structure is important for synchrony of Ca2+ release, and suggest that mitochondria in the sub-sarcolemmal region might serve to cancel Ca2+ inflow through surface sarcolemma, thereby maintaining the intracellular Ca2+ environment in equilibrium.
Solid State Power Amplifier Linearization Using the Concept of Best Approximation in Hilbert Spaces

Using the mathematical concept of best approximation in Hilbert spaces a predistorter structure is suggested to compensate both AM/AM and AM/PM conversion characteristics of a solid state power amplifier. To verify the effects of this linearization we generally consider it in a QAM signal transmission in an additive white Gaussian noise channel. The results are compared with the ideal linear case
An Examination of the Prevalence, Consumer Profiles, and Patterns of Energy Drink Use, With and Without Alcohol, in Australia.

BACKGROUND There has been a significant growth in the energy drink (ED) market in Australia and around the world; however, most research investigating the popularity of ED and alcohol and energy drink (AED) use has focused on specific subpopulations such as university students. The aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence, consumption patterns, and sociodemographic correlates of ED and combined AED use among a representative Australian population sample. METHODS A computer-assisted telephone interview survey (n = 2,000) was undertaken in March-April 2013 of persons aged 18 years and over. Half of the interviews were obtained through randomly generated landline telephone numbers and half through mobile phones. Approximately half of the sample was female (55.5%; n = 1,110) and the mean age of participants was 45.9 (range 18 to 95, SD 20.0). RESULTS Less than 1 in 6 Australians reported ED use (13.4%, n = 268) and 4.6% (n = 91) reported AED use in the past 3 months. Majority of ED and AED users consumed these beverages monthly or less. ED and AED users are more likely to be aged 18 to 24 years, live in a metropolitan area, and be moderate risk or problem gamblers. AED consumers are more likely to report moderate levels of psychological distress. CONCLUSIONS Our findings in relation to problem gambling and psychological distress are novel and require further targeted investigation. Health promotion strategies directed toward reducing ED and AED use should focus on young people living in metropolitan areas and potentially be disseminated through locations where gambling takes place.
Inflammation and In-Stent Restenosis: The Role of Serum Markers and Stent Characteristics in Carotid Artery Stenting

Background Carotid angioplasty and stenting (CAS) may currently be recommended especially in younger patients with a high-grade carotid artery stenosis. However, evidence is accumulating that in-stent restenosis (ISR) could be an important factor endangering the long-term efficacy of CAS. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of inflammatory serum markers and procedure-related factors on ISR as diagnosed with duplex sonography. Methods We analyzed 210 CAS procedures in 194 patients which were done at a single university hospital between May 2003 and June 2010. Periprocedural C-reactive protein (CRP) and leukocyte count as well as stent design and geometry, and other periprocedural factors were analyzed with respect to the occurrence of an ISR as diagnosed with serial carotid duplex ultrasound investigations during clinical long-term follow-up. Results Over a median of 33.4 months follow-up (IQR: 14.9–53.7) of 210 procedures (mean age of 67.9±9.7 years, 71.9% male, 71.0% symptomatic) an ISR of ≥70% was detected in 5.7% after a median of 8.6 months (IQR: 3.4–17.3). After multiple regression analysis, leukocyte count after CAS-intervention (odds ratio (OR): 1.31, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.02–1.69; p = 0.036), as well as stent length and width were associated with the development of an ISR during follow-up (OR: 1.25, 95% CI: 1.05–1.65, p = 0.022 and OR: 0.28, 95% CI: 0.09–0.84, p = 0.010). Conclusions The majority of ISR during long-term follow-up after CAS occur within the first year. ISR is associated with periinterventional inflammation markers and influenced by certain stent characteristics such as stent length and width. Our findings support the assumption that stent geometry leading to vessel injury as well as periprocedural inflammation during CAS plays a pivotal role in the development of carotid artery ISR.
Distortion Optimized Multipath Video Streaming

This paper addresses the problem of choosing the best streaming policy for distortion optimal multipath video delivery, under delay constraints. The streaming policy consists in a joint selection of the video packets to be transmitted, as well as their sending time, and the transmission path. A simple streaming model is introduced, which takes into account the video packet importance, and the dependencies among packets, and allows to compute the quality perceived by the receiver, as a function of the streaming policy. We derive an optimization problem based on the video abstraction model, under the assumption that the server knows the state of the network. A detailed analysis of the timing constraints in multipath video streaming provides helpful insights that lead to an efficient algorithm to solve the NP-hard policy optimization problem. We eventually propose a fast heuristic-based algorithm, that still provides close to optimal performance. Thanks to its limited complexity, this novel algorithm is finally implemented in live streaming scenarios, where it only induces a negligible distortion penalty compared to the optimal strategy. Simulation results finally show that the proposed scheduling solutions perform better than common scheduling algorithms, and represent very efficient strategies for both stored and live video streaming scenarios.
Network Structure Influences Speech Production

Network science provides a new way to look at old questions in cognitive science by examining the structure of a complex system, and how that structure might influence processing. In the context of psycholinguistics, clustering coefficient-a common measure in network science-refers to the extent to which phonological neighbors of a target word are also neighbors of each other. The influence of the clustering coefficient on spoken word production was examined in a corpus of speech errors and a picture-naming task. Speech errors tended to occur in words with many interconnected neighbors (i.e., higher clustering coefficient). Also, pictures representing words with many interconnected neighbors (i.e., high clustering coefficient) were named more slowly than pictures representing words with few interconnected neighbors (i.e., low clustering coefficient). These findings suggest that the structure of the lexicon influences the process of lexical access during spoken word production.
New methods for handling the range dependence of the clutter spectrum in non-sidelooking monostatic STAP radars

We address the problem of detecting slow-moving targets using a non-sidelooking monostatic space-time adaptive processing (STAP) radar. The construction of optimum weights at each range implies the estimation of the clutter covariance matrix. This is typically done by straight averaging of neighboring data snapshots. The range-dependence of these snapshots generally results in poor performance. We present two new methods that handle the range-dependence by exploiting the geometry of the direction-Doppler curves.
Multi-camera Matching using Bi-Directional Cumulative Brightness Transfer Functions

The appearance of individuals captured by multiple non-overlapping cameras varies greatly due to pose and illumination changes between camera views. In this paper we address the problem of dealing with illumination changes in order to recover matching of individuals appearing at different camera sites. This task is challenging as accurately mapping colour changes between views requires an exhaustive set of corresponding chromatic brightness values to be collected, which is very difficult in real world scenarios. We propose a Cumulative Brightness Transfer Function (CBTF) for mapping colour between cameras located at different physical sites, which makes better use of the available colour information from a very sparse training set. In addition we develop a bi-directional mapping approach to obtain a more accurate similarity measure between a pair of candidate objects. We evaluate the proposed method using challenging datasets obtained from real world distributed CCTV camera networks. The results demonstrate that our bi-directional CBTF method significantly outperforms existing techniques.
Unconstrained Facial Landmark Localization with Backbone-Branches Fully-Convolutional Networks

This paper investigates how to rapidly and accurately localize facial landmarks in unconstrained, cluttered environments rather than in the well segmented face images. We present a novel Backbone-Branches Fully-Convolutional Neural Network (BB-FCN), which produces facial landmark response maps directly from raw images without relying on pre-process or sliding window approaches. BB-FCN contains one backbone and a number of network branches with each corresponding to one landmark type, and it operates in a progressive manner. Specifically, the backbone roughly detects the locations of facial landmarks by taking the whole image as input, and the branches further refine the localizations based on a local observation from the backbone's intermediate feature map. Moreover, our backbone-branches architecture does not contain full-connection layers for location regression, leading to efficient learning and inference. Our extensive experiments show that our model achieves superior performances over other state-of-the-arts under both the constrained (i.e. with face regions) and the "in the wild" scenarios.
A realistic graph-based alert correlation system

This paper introduces a graph-based attack description that comes with different analysis methods for alert correlation. The system encompasses an attack scenario detection method, an alert correlation method that recognizes multistep attacks, and graph-based classification method to extract different types of alerts. The performance analysis shows that the system can correlate a huge number of alerts more than 442000 alerts into a dozens of attack graphs. The attack graph has permitted us to extract several attack properties with high precision. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Photorefractive single-block optical system using layered thermally fixed holograms

A scheme of using carbon-dioxide laser beams to thermally fix layers of photorefractive holograms to implement a solid-state optical system in a single block of LiNbO3 crystal is suggested. In this paper, a modified gamma network is adapted to demonstrate, and a stage of such a network is constructed in a block of crystal. To limit the heating region with the shape similar to the heating beam, two carbon-dioxide laser beams of narrow width are used to laterally illuminate a layer of crystal, and additional absorbers are attached on the crystal surfaces outside the heating region to guide the heating flows. Analytical discussion based on the heat- transfer equations and the proof-of-principle experimental result are given. It can be thus seen that it is possible to package an optical system into a miniaturized single-block of photorefractive crystal.
Object based video similarity retrieval and its application to detecting anchorperson shots in news video

Semantic feature extraction of video shots and fast video sequence matching are important and required for efficient retrieval in a large video database. A novel mechanism of similarity retrieval is proposed. Similarity measure between video sequences considering the spatio-temporal variation through consecutive frames is presented. For bridging the semantic gap between low-level features and the rich meaning that users desire to capture, video shots are analyzed and characterized by the high-level feature of motion activity in compressed domain. The extracted features of motion activity are further described by the 2D-histogram that is sensitive to the spatio-temporal variation of moving objects. In order to reduce the dimensions of feature vector space in sequence matching, the discrete cosine transform (DCT) is exploited to map semantic features of consecutive frames to the frequency domain while retains the discriminatory information and preserves the Euclidean distance between feature vectors. Experiments are performed on MPEG-7 testing video streams, and the results of sequence matching show that a few DCT transformed coefficients are adequate and thus reveal the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism of video retrieval.
Synchronization of two LC- oscillators using capacitive coupling

This paper considers two oscillators (van der Pol or Robinson type) synchronized using capacitive coupling. Equations are derived for the oscillation frequency and amplitudes. They show that the frequency of synchronous oscillation is different from the frequencies of individual oscillators. The amplitudes of oscillation are also different: one oscillator becomes a master and the second oscillator becomes a slave. A method of quasilinear approximation is used to evaluate the stability of synchronous oscillation. Simulation results for a 5 GHz oscillator confirm the theoretical analysis.