Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SCAPE: Safe Charging with Adjustable Power

Wireless power transfer technology is considered as one of the promising solutions to address the energy limitation problems for end-devices, but its incurred potential risk of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) exposure is largely overlooked by most existing works. In this paper, we consider the Safe Charging with Adjustable PowEr (SCAPE) problem, namely, how to adjust the power of chargers to maximize the charging utility of devices, while assuring that EMR intensity at any location in the field does not exceed a given threshold Rt. We present novel techniques to reformulate SCAPE into a traditional linear programming problem, and then remove its redundant constraints as much as possible to reduce computational effort. Next, we propose a distributed algorithm with provable approximation ratio (1 - ε). Through extensive simulation and testbed experiments, we demonstrate that our (1 - ε)-approximation algorithm outperforms the Set-Cover algorithm by up to 23%, and has an average performance gain of 41.1% over the SCP algorithm in terms of the overall charging utility.
Relative orientation of collagen molecules within a fibril: a homology model for homo sapiens type I collagen

Type I collagen is an essential extracellular protein that plays an important structural role in tissues that require high tensile strength. However, owing to the molecule’s size, to date no experimental structural data are available for the Homo sapiens species. Therefore, there is a real need to develop a reliable homology model and a method to study the packing of the collagen molecules within the fibril. Through the use of the homology model and implementation of a novel simulation technique, we have ascertained the orientations of the collagen molecules within a fibril, which is currently below the resolution limit of experimental techniques. The longitudinal orientation of collagen molecules within a fibril has a significant effect on the mechanical and biological properties of the fibril, owing to the different amino acid side chains available at the interface between the molecules.
Contagious Anxiety: Anxious European Americans Can Transmit Their Physiological Reactivity to African Americans

During interracial encounters, well-intentioned European Americans sometimes engage in subtle displays of anxiety, which can be interpreted as signs of racial bias by African American partners. In the present research, same-race and cross-race stranger dyads (N = 123) engaged in getting-acquainted tasks, during which measures of sympathetic nervous system responses (preejection period, PEP) and heart rate variability were continuously collected. PEP scores showed that African American partners had stronger physiological linkage to European American partners who evidenced greater anxiety—greater cortisol reactivity, behavioral tension, and self-reported discomfort—which suggests greater physiological responsiveness to momentary changes in partners’ affective states when those partners were anxious. European Americans showed physiological linkage to African American and European American partners, but linkage did not vary as a function of their partner’s anxiety. Using physiological linkage offers a novel approach to understanding how affective responses unfold during dynamic intergroup interactions.
Memristor-Based Circuit Design for Multilayer Neural Networks

Memristors are promising components for applications in nonvolatile memory, logic circuits, and neuromorphic computing. In this paper, a novel circuit for memristor-based multilayer neural networks is presented, which can use a single memristor array to realize both the plus and minus weight of the neural synapses. In addition, memristor-based switches are utilized during the learning process to update the weight of the memristor-based synapses. Moreover, an adaptive back propagation algorithm suitable for the proposed memristor-based multilayer neural network is applied to train the neural networks and perform the XOR function and character recognition. Another highlight of this paper is that the robustness of the proposed memristor-based multilayer neural network exhibits higher recognition rates and fewer cycles as compared with other multilayer neural networks.
Signal transducer and activator of transcription 2 deficiency is a novel disorder of mitochondrial fission

See Dasgupta et al. (doi:10.1093/awv237) for a scientific commentary on this article. Shahni et al. identify a novel mutation in STAT2, which encodes a component of the JAK-STAT cytokine signalling pathway, in three patients with severe neurological deterioration following viral infection. STAT2 is shown to regulate mitochondrial fission, suggesting a new avenue for treatment of mitochondrial diseases and possibly common neurodegenerative disorders.
Cross‐country comparison of proportion of alcohol consumed in harmful drinking occasions using the International Alcohol Control Study

Abstract Introduction and Aims This study examines the proportion of alcohol markets consumed in harmful drinking occasions in a range of high‐, middle‐income countries and assesses the implications of these findings for conflict of interest between alcohol producers and public health and the appropriate role of the alcohol industry in alcohol policy space. Design and Methods Cross‐sectional surveys were conducted in 10 countries as part of the International Alcohol Control study. Alcohol consumption was measured using location‐ and beverage‐specific measures. A level of consumption defined as harmful use of alcohol was chosen and the proportion of the total market consumed in these drinking occasions was calculated for both commercial and informal alcohol. Results In all countries, sizeable proportions of the alcohol market were consumed during harmful drinking occasions. In general, a higher proportion of alcohol was consumed in harmful drinking occasions by respondents in the middle‐income countries than respondents in the high‐income countries. The proportion of informal alcohol consumed in harmful drinking occasions was lower than commercial alcohol. Discussion and Conclusions Informal alcohol is less likely to be consumed in harmful drinking occasions compared with commercial alcohol. The proportion of commercial alcohol consumed in harmful drinking occasions in a range of alcohol markets shows the reliance of the transnational alcohol corporations on harmful alcohol use. This reliance underpins industry lobbying against effective policy and support for ineffective approaches. The conflict of interest between the alcohol industry and public health requires their exclusion from the alcohol policy space.
Image based search engine using deep learning

During previous couple of years, the World Wide Web (WWW) has become an extremely well-liked information source. To successfully utilize the vast quantity of information that the web provides, we want an effective way to explore it. Image data is much more voluminous than textual data, and visual information cannot be indexed by traditional strategies developed for indexing textual information. Therefore, Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has received an excellent deal of interest within the research community. A CBIR system operates on the visible features at low-level of a user's input image that makes it troublesome for the users to devise the input and additionally doesn't offer adequate retrieval results. In CBIR system, the study of the useful representation of features and appropriate similarity metrics is extremely necessary for improving the performance of retrieval task. Semantic gap has been the main issue which occurs between image pixels at low-level and semantics at high-level interpreted by humans. Among varied methods, machine learning (ML) has been explored as a feasible way to reduce the semantic gap. Inspired by the current success of deep learning methods for computer vision applications, in this paper, we aim to confront an advance deep learning method, known as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), for studying feature representations and similarity measures. In this paper, we explored the applications of CNNs towards solving classification and retrieval problems. For retrieval of similar images, we agreed on using transfer learning to apply the GoogleNet deep architecture to our problem. Extracting the last-but-one fully connected layer from the retraining of GoogleNet CNN model served as the feature vectors for each image, computing Euclidean distances between these feature vectors and that of our query image to return the closest matches in the dataset.
Robust children and adults speech identification and confidence measure based on DNN posteriorgram

This paper proposes a robust children and adults identification technique with a new confidence measure for actual use environments. Since child and female voices are similar, they are often misidentified due to unintended sounds such as clipped sounds and noises. To reduce the influence of unintended sounds, our technique generates clipped sounds artificially for training a DNN (Deep Neural Network). Our technique also replicates misidentified data to balance training data, which enables it to clearly distinguish child voice from female voice. We also describe a means to reject the remaining misidentified results in noisy environments i.e., an LSTM-based (Long Short Term Memory based) confidence measure that focuses on the difference in the Patterns of DNN posterior probability sequences (posteriorgram) between clean speech and TV noisy speech. Under TV noise, we reduced the False Rejection Ratio by 58.1% when setting the threshold to attain accuracy of 95%.
Understanding Dengue Control for Short- and Long-Term Intervention with a Mathematical Model Approach

A mathematical model of dengue diseases transmission will be discussed in this paper. Various interventions, such as vaccination of adults and newborns, the use of insecticides or fumigation, and also the enforcement of mechanical controls, will be considered when analyzing the best intervention for controlling the spread of dengue. From model analysis, we find three types of equilibrium points which will be built upon the dengue model. In this paper, these points are the mosquito-free equilibrium, disease-free equilibrium (with and without vaccinated compartment), and endemic equilibrium. Basic reproduction number as an endemic indicator has been found analytically. Based on analytical and numerical analysis, insecticide treatment, adult vaccine, and enforcement of mechanical control are the most significant interventions in reducing the spread of dengue disease infection caused by mosquitoes rather than larvicide treatment and vaccination of newborns. From short- and long-term simulation, we find that insecticide treatment is the best strategy to control dengue. We also find that, with periodic intervention, the result is not much significantly different with constant intervention based on reduced number of the infected human population. Therefore, with budget limitations, periodic intervention of insecticide strategy is a good alternative to reduce the spread of dengue.
Antiretroviral drug concentrations in hair are associated with virologic outcomes among young people living with HIV in Tanzania

Objective: We assessed the relationship of self-reported adherence versus antiretroviral therapy (ART) concentrations in hair with virologic outcomes among young people living with HIV. Design: This was a cross-sectional study that enrolled young people living with HIV age 11–24 years, who attended a youth HIV clinic in Moshi, Tanzania. Methods: ART adherence was assessed by self-report, drug concentration in hair samples, and plasma HIV-1 RNA measurements. Those with virologic failure, defined as plasma HIV-1 RNA more than 400 copies/ml, had genotypic resistance assessed. Receiver operating characteristic curves were used to evaluate ART-concentration threshold cutoffs for virologic suppression, after excluding those with known high-level resistance mutations. Results: Among 280 young people enrolled, 227 were included in the final analysis. Seventy-two (32%) self-reported inadequate adherence and 91 (40%) had virologic failure. Hair ART-concentration (P < 0.001), but not self-reported adherence (P = 0.53), was associated with virologic outcome. Sixty-seven (74%) of those with virologic failure had resistance testing performed, of whom 60% had high-level resistance. Receiver operating characteristic curves demonstrated moderate or high classification performance for association with virologic suppression with specific hair ART-concentration cutoffs for lopinavir (1.8 ng/mg), efavirenz (1.04 ng/mg), and nevirapine (33.2 ng/mg). Conclusion: Hair ART-concentrations were significantly associated with virologic outcomes among young people living with HIV. ART-concentration thresholds associated with virologic suppression are proposed. Hair analysis may provide a noninvasive, cost-effective adherence assessment tool in settings with limited second and third-line treatment options.
High-quality, Standard, Controlled Healthcare Terminologies Come of Age

Controlled terminologies play an integral role in biomedical informatics applications whenever such applications use information to carry out symbolic reasoning. Early, prominent examples include Mycin [1], which included terms for clinical findings in its rules and presented diagnosis and treatment terms in its recommendations, and the Internist-1 system [2], which matched a list of symptom and physical finding terms against a knowledge base of disease terms. While PubMed [3], at the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), can carry out literature retrieval with simple text searching, it also makes use of controlled terms to focus that retrieval. Today, everything from automated health surveys to electronic health records makes use of some kind of controlled terminology to condense users’ input into a set of symbols that can be recognized and manipulated.
Wingless Signalling Alters the Levels, Subcellular Distribution and Dynamics of Armadillo and E-Cadherin in Third Instar Larval Wing Imaginal Discs

Background Armadillo, the Drosophila orthologue of vertebrate ß-catenin, plays a dual role as the key effector of Wingless/Wnt1 signalling, and as a bridge between E-Cadherin and the actin cytoskeleton. In the absence of ligand, Armadillo is phosphorylated and targeted to the proteasome. Upon binding of Wg to its receptors, the “degradation complex” is inhibited; Armadillo is stabilised and enters the nucleus to transcribe targets. Methodology/Principal Findings Although the relationship between signalling and adhesion has been extensively studied, few in vivo data exist concerning how the “transcriptional” and “adhesive” pools of Armadillo are regulated to orchestrate development. We have therefore addressed how the subcellular distribution of Armadillo and its association with E-Cadherin change in larval wing imaginal discs, under wild type conditions and upon signalling. Using confocal microscopy, we show that Armadillo and E-Cadherin are spatio-temporally regulated during development, and that a punctate species becomes concentrated in a subapical compartment in response to Wingless. In order to further dissect this phenomenon, we overexpressed Armadillo mutants exhibiting different levels of activity and stability, but retaining E-Cadherin binding. ArmS10 displaces endogenous Armadillo from the AJ and the basolateral membrane, while leaving E-Cadherin relatively undisturbed. Surprisingly, ΔNArm1–155 caused displacement of both Armadillo and E-Cadherin, results supported by our novel method of quantification. However, only membrane-targeted Myr-ΔNArm1–155 produced comparable nuclear accumulation of Armadillo and signalling to ArmS10. These experiments also highlighted a row of cells at the A/P boundary depleted of E-Cadherin at the AJ, but containing actin. Conclusions/Significance Taken together, our results provide in vivo evidence for a complex non-linear relationship between Armadillo levels, subcellular distribution and Wingless signalling. Moreover, this study highlights the importance of Armadillo in regulating the subcellular distribution of E-Cadherin
MOLECULAR DYNAMICS SIMULATION OF NANOMETRIC CUTTING

Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations of nanometric cutting of single-crystal copper were conducted to predict cutting forces and investigate the mechanism of chip formation at the nano-level. The MD simulations were conducted at a conventional cutting speed of 5 m/s and different depths of cut (0.724–2.172 nm), and cutting forces and shear angle were predicted. The effect of tool rake angles and depths of cut on the mechanism of chip formation was investigated. Tools with different rake angles, namely 0°, 5°, 10°, 15°, 30°, and 45°, were used. It was found that the cutting force, thrust force, and the ratio of the thrust force to cutting force decrease with increasing rake angle. However, the ratio of the thrust force to the cutting force is found to be independent of the depth of cut. In addition, the chip thickness was found to decrease with an increase in rake angle. As a consequence, the cutting ratio and the shear angle increase as the rake angle increases. The dislocation and subsurface deformation in the workpiece material were observed in the cutting region near the tool rake face. The adhesion of copper atoms to the diamond tool was clearly seen. The same approach can be used to simulate micromachining by significantly increasing the number of atoms in the MD model to represent cutting depths in the order of microns.
Integrated Temperature and Hydrogen Sensors with MEMS Technology

In this work, a PdNi thin film hydrogen gas sensor with integrated Pt thin film temperature sensor was designed and fabricated using the micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) process. The integrated sensors consist of two resistors: the former, based on Pt film, is used as a temperature sensor, while the latter had the function of hydrogen sensing and is based on PdNi alloy film. The temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) in both devices was measured and the output response of the PdNi film hydrogen sensor was calibrated based on the temperature acquired by the Pt temperature sensor. The SiN layer was deposited on top of Pt film to inhibit the hydrogen diffusion and reduce consequent disturbance on temperature measurement. The TCR of the PdNi film and the Pt film was about 0.00122/K and 0.00217/K, respectively. The performances of the PdNi film hydrogen sensor were investigated with hydrogen concentrations from 0.3% to 3% on different temperatures from 294.7 to 302.2 K. With the measured temperature of the Pt resistor and the TCR of the PdNi film, the impact of the temperature on the performances of the PdNi film hydrogen sensor was reduced. The output response, response time and recovery time of the PdNi film hydrogen sensors under the hydrogen concentration of 0.5%, 1.0%, 1.5% and 2.0% were measured at 313 K. The output response of the PdNi thin film hydrogen sensors increased with increasing hydrogen concentration while the response time and recovery time decreased. A cycling test between pure nitrogen and 3% hydrogen concentration was performed at 313 K and PdNi thin film hydrogen sensor demonstrated great repeatability in the cycling test.
Audio Properties of Perceived Boundaries in Music

Data mining tasks such as music indexing, information retrieval, and similarity search, require an understanding of how listeners process music internally. Many algorithms for automatically analyzing the structure of recorded music assume that a large change in one or another musical feature suggests a section boundary. However, this assumption has not been tested: while our understanding of how listeners segment melodies has advanced greatly in the past decades, little is known about how this process works with more complex, full-textured pieces of music, or how stable this process is across genres. Knowing how these factors affect how boundaries are perceived will help researchers to judge the viability of algorithmic approaches with different corpora of music. We present a statistical analysis of a large corpus of recordings whose formal structure was annotated by expert listeners. We find that the acoustic properties of boundaries in these recordings corroborate findings of previous perceptual experiments. Nearly all boundaries correspond to peaks in novelty functions, which measure the rate of change of a musical feature at a particular time scale. Moreover, most of these boundaries match peaks in novelty for several features at several time scales. We observe that the boundary-novelty relationship can vary with listener, time scale, genre, and musical feature. Finally, we show that a boundary profile derived from a collection of novelty functions correlates with the estimated salience of boundaries indicated by listeners.
E-Government Information Systems and Cloud Computing (Readiness and Analysis)

A new wave of the IT revolution, e-government, presents a tremendous opportunity to move forward providing higher quality, and cost-effective government services as well as creating a better relationship between citizens and government. The literature review, presented in this paper however, indicated that e-government readiness is a major concern, and that currently there is little availability of comprehensive assessment methods for e-government readiness and most of the assessment frameworks, reviewed for this study, are varied in terms of philosophies, objectives, methodologies, approaches, and results. To this end, this research aims to develop a comprehensive framework of associated guidelines and tools to support E-government Information Systems (EGIS) readiness, with a specific focus on the EGIS migration to the Cloud Computing provisioning model.
A Z-Source-Derived Coupled-Inductor-Based High Voltage Gain Microinverter

Microinverters require high voltage gain capability for interfacing the low dc voltage output of photovoltaic (PV) module to single-phase ac grid. A two-stage nonisolated inverter is proposed in this paper, with a first boost stage and a second traditional pulse width modulated grid-tied inverter stage. The proposed boost stage consists of a coupled inductor added with a voltage multiplier to achieve the required high voltage gain at high efficiency and to operate over a wide input voltage range. Among the coupled inductor topologies, adding a clamp circuit is a common solution to limit the voltage spike caused by leakage inductance. In the proposed converter, the resonance between the coupled inductor and voltage multiplier is used to address the issue of voltage spike, thereby reducing both component count and device voltage stress. Detailed analysis and design procedure of the proposed converter is presented in this paper. Experimental results of a 250-W microinverter are presented to validate the proposed converter.
In-vitro human sclera structure analysis using tissue optical immersion effect

Far-zone speckles statistical and correlation properties has been investigated in the case of He- Ne laser light scattering by the human sclera samples. Application of some agents such as Trazograph (or Verographin) leads to the decrease of the tissue turbidity and allows us to study the transition from strong scattering mode to weak scattering mode. Usage of this technique in combination with the spatial speckle correlometry gives the possibility for analysis of the sclera's scattering structure for different stages of its turbidity decay. Potentialities of such a method are discussed.