Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
RF remotely-powered integrated system to nullify standby power consumption in electrical appliances

In order to increase energy efficiency in electrical appliances, autonomy in WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) nodes, IoT (Internet of Things) devices and self-powered sensors, it is necessary to reduce energy consumption as much as possible. One of the main issues to solve is reduction of standby power consumption, which is not negligible due to the enormous number of appliances involved. While in standby, power management circuits are permanently on, consuming unnecessary energy. This leads designers to consider power efficiency. In this article, a different approach is introduced based on Radio Frequency to electrical energy transduction with the intention to resolve this issue. The proposed solution goes beyond the well-known concept of standby as it instead applies to electric appliances that are off. An RF powered receiver silicon IC (integrated circuit) for remotely controlled systems is presented. This includes an RF-to-DC energy converter specifically designed with a sensitivity of -18.8dBm, which allows an operating distance of up 8 meters at 900 MHz with a transmitting power of 1Watt in free space. Experimental results using a complete working prototype will be shown.
Measurement and CFD Prediction of Heat Transfer in Air-Cooled Disc-Type Electrical Machines

Accurate thermal analysis of axial flux permanent magnet (AFPM) machines is crucial in predicting maximum power output. Stator convective heat transfer is one of the most important and least investigated heat transfer mechanisms and is the focus of this paper. Experimental measurements were undertaken using a thin-film electrical heating method, providing radially resolved steady state heat transfer data from an experimental rotor-stator system designed as a geometric mockup of a through-flow ventilated AFPM machine. The measurements are compared with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations using both 2-D axisymmetric and 3-D models. These were found to give a conservative estimate of heat transfer, with inaccuracies near the edge and in the transitional flow regime. Predicted stator heat transfer was found to be relatively insensitive to the choice of turbulence model used in the CFD simulations.
Modular Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning with Decision Values

In this work we present a method for using Deep Q-Networks (DQNs) in multi-objective environments. Deep Q-Networks provide remarkable performance in single objective problems learning from high-level visual state representations. However, in many scenarios (e.g in robotics, games), the agent needs to pursue multiple objectives simultaneously. We propose an architecture in which separate DQNs are used to control the agent's behaviour with respect to particular objectives. In this architecture we introduce decision values to improve the scalarization of multiple DQNs into a single action. Our architecture enables the decomposition of the agent's behaviour into controllable and replaceable sub-behaviours learned by distinct modules. Moreover, it allows to change the priorities of particular objectives post-learning, while preserving the overall performance of the agent. To evaluate our solution we used a game-like simulator in which an agent - provided with high-level visual input - pursues multiple objectives in a 2D world.
MICROSTRUCTURE AND MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF ALUMINIUM BACK CONTACT LAYERS

The overall demand to reduce solar energy costs gives a continuous drive to reduce the thick ness of silicon wafers. Handling and bowing problems associated with thinner wafers become more and more important, as these can lead to cells cracking and thus to high y ield losses. In this paper the microstructure and m echanical properties of the aluminium on the rear side of a s olar cell are discussed. It is shown that the alum inium back contact has a complex composite-like microstructure, consis ting of five main components: 1) the back surface f ield layer; 2) a eutectic layer; 3) spherical (3 - 5 µm) hypere utectic Al-Si particles surrounded by a thin alumin um oxide layer (200 nm); 4) a bismuth-silicate glass matrix; and 5 ) pores (14 vol.%). The Young's modulus of the Al-S i particles is estimated by nanoindentation and the overall Young's modulus is estimated on the basis of bowing measu rements. These results are used as input parameters for an i mproved thermomechanical multiscale model of a silicon solar cell.
Distributive subband allocation, power and rate control for relay-assisted OFDMA cellular system with imperfect system state knowledge

In this paper, we consider distributive subband, power and rate allocation for a two-hop downlink transmission in an orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) cellular system with fixed relays which operate in decode-and-forward strategy. We take into account of the penalty of packet errors due to imperfect CSIT and system fairness by considering weighted sum goodput as our optimization objective. Based on the cluster-based architecture, we obtain a fast-converging distributive solution with only local imperfect CSIT by using decomposition of the optimization problem. To further reduce the signaling overhead and computational complexity, we propose a reduced feedback distributive solution, which can achieve asymptotically optimal performance for large number of users with arbitrarily small feedback overhead per user.We also derive asymptotic average system throughput so as to obtain useful design insights.
Integral Reinforcement Learning for Linear Continuous-Time Zero-Sum Games With Completely Unknown Dynamics

In this paper, we develop an integral reinforcement learning algorithm based on policy iteration to learn online the Nash equilibrium solution for a two-player zero-sum differential game with completely unknown linear continuous-time dynamics. This algorithm is a fully model-free method solving the game algebraic Riccati equation forward in time. The developed algorithm updates value function, control and disturbance policies simultaneously. The convergence of the algorithm is demonstrated to be equivalent to Newton's method. To implement this algorithm, one critic network and two action networks are used to approximate the game value function, control and disturbance policies, respectively, and the least squares method is used to estimate the unknown parameters. The effectiveness of the developed scheme is demonstrated in the simulation by designing an H∞ state feedback controller for a power system.
On the Reconstruction Risk of Convolutional Sparse Dictionary Learning

Sparse dictionary learning (SDL) has become a popular method for adaptively identifying parsimonious representations of a dataset, a fundamental problem in machine learning and signal processing. While most work on SDL assumes a training dataset of independent and identically distributed samples, a variant known as convolutional sparse dictionary learning (CSDL) relaxes this assumption, allowing more general sequential data sources, such as time series or other dependent data. Although recent work has explored the statistical properties of classical SDL, the statistical properties of CSDL remain unstudied. This paper begins to study this by identifying the minimax convergence rate of CSDL in terms of reconstruction risk, by both upper bounding the risk of an established CSDL estimator and proving a matching information-theoretic lower bound. Our results indicate that consistency in reconstruction risk is possible precisely in the `ultra-sparse' setting, in which the sparsity (i.e., the number of feature occurrences) is in $o(N)$ in terms of the length N of the training sequence. Notably, our results make very weak assumptions, allowing arbitrary dictionaries and dependent measurement noise. Finally, we verify our theoretical results with numerical experiments on synthetic data.
Spectroscopy of higher harmonics in dynamic atomic force microscopy

Dynamic atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a standard technique for imaging and the analysis of surfaces at the nanometre scale. In order to estimate material properties from the microscope data it is important to understand the nonlinear dynamics in the tip–sample interaction. Here, the system response of a tapping-mode atomic force microscope is investigated with numerical simulations. In the numerical model, the AFM cantilever is treated as a distributed parameter system that is capable of higher eigenmode excitation. With this multiple-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) approach the generation of higher harmonics as well as the generation of subharmonics is analysed. Under typical imaging conditions higher harmonics are generated whereas a closer approach to the specimen surface can lead to a complicated dynamics.
The Rd8 mutation of the Crb1 gene is present in vendor lines of C57BL/6N mice and embryonic stem cells, and confounds ocular induced mutant phenotypes.

PURPOSE We noted an unexpected inheritance pattern of lesions in several strains of gene-manipulated mice with ocular phenotypes. The lesions, which appeared at various stages of backcross to C57BL/6, bore resemblance to the rd8 retinal degeneration phenotype. We set out to examine the prevalence of this mutation in induced mutant mouse lines, vendor C57BL/6 mice and in widely used embryonic stem cells. METHODS Ocular lesions were evaluated by fundus examination and histopathology. Detection of the rd8 mutation at the genetic level was performed by PCR with appropriate primers. Data were confirmed by DNA sequencing in selected cases. RESULTS Analysis of several induced mutant mouse lines with ocular disease phenotypes revealed that the disease was associated 100% with the presence of the rd8 mutation in the Crb1 gene rather than with the gene of interest. DNA analysis of C57BL/6 mice from common commercial vendors demonstrated the presence of the rd8 mutation in homozygous form in all C57BL/6N substrains, but not in the C57BL/6J substrain. A series of commercially available embryonic stem cells of C57BL/6N origin and C57BL/6N mouse lines used to generate ES cells also contained the rd8 mutation. Affected mice displayed ocular lesions typical of rd8, which were detectable by funduscopy and histopathology as early as 6 weeks of age. CONCLUSIONS These findings identify the presence of the rd8 mutation in the C57BL/6N mouse substrain used widely to produce transgenic and knockout mice. The results have grave implications for the vision research community who develop mouse lines to study eye disease, as presence of rd8 can produce significant disease phenotypes unrelated to the gene or genes of interest. It is suggested that researchers screen for rd8 if their mouse lines were generated on the C57BL/6N background, bear resemblance to the rd8 phenotype, or are of indeterminate origin.
First impression based personality analysis

In the past few years human behavior has became a topic of high interest in computer vision field. Many researchers are still focusing on the problem of how to teach computers to identify people by face, detect their gestures, facial expressions or recognize their emotions. Personality automatic analysis was less observed until the recent, even as it could find applications in many different areas, such as security and candidate selection problems. Personality affects first impression which person leaves by communication with other people, which in its turn affects decisions people make, for example by deciding whether we like or dislike person, or choosing the right candidate for a job, since in this case personality characteristics play a role on equal basis with candidate professional skills. For testing professional skills participants can be given test assignments, but it’s very time-consuming to interview each candidate in person. The algorithm, which would provide the relevant information about personality characteristics of each candidate could save a lot of time and human resources for solving the above mentioned problem. Automatic personality analysis has gotten more attention in computer vision field under challenges organized by ChaLearn Looking at People (Chalearn LAP) group (1). In 2014 ChaLearn LAP has published a First Impression dataset, which contains short video clips with corresponding
Information systems and creativity: an empirical study

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report research that sought to understand the requirements of information systems designed to support people engaged in creative intellectual activity. The research aimed to provide empirical evidence based on a case study of a particular arena of creativity, namely electro‐acoustic music composition. However, it also sought to identify issues that may apply more widely to other arenas of human creativity.Design/methodology/approach – The research was based on a related series of three in‐depth studies of electro‐acoustic music composers at work. These studies entailed the collection of qualitative data from interviews, observations and “think aloud” protocols. These data were analysed inductively to reveal concepts and relationships that formed the basis for a model of interactions between the composers and the information systems with which they were working.Findings – The paper presents a model of relationships between information system features and use, and t.
Internal and external validity of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in a population-based sample of adults

Background. Follow-up studies of childhood ADHD have shown persistence of the disorder into adulthood, but no epidemiological data are yet available. Method. ADHD DSM-IV symptoms were obtained by self-report in an adult population-based sample of 1813 adults (aged 18–75 years), that was drawn from an automated general practitioner system used in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The structure of ADHD symptoms was analysed by means of confirmatory factor analyses. Other data used in this report are the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28), information about the presence of three core symptoms of ADHD in childhood, and about current psychosocial impairment. Results. The three-factor model that allowed for cross-loadings provided the best fit in the entire sample. This result was replicated across gender and age subsamples. Inattentive and hyperactivity symptom scores were significantly associated with measures of impairment, even after controlling for the GHQ-28. Subjects with four or more inattentive or hyperactive–impulsive symptoms were significantly more impaired than subjects with two, one and no symptoms. The prevalence of ADHD in adults was 1·0% (95% CI 0·6–1·6) and 2·5% (1·9–3·4) using a cutoff of six and four current symptoms respectively, and requiring the presence of all three core symptoms in childhood. Conclusions. These results support the internal and external validity of ADHD in adults between 18 and 75 years. ADHD is not merely a child psychiatric disorder that persists into young adulthood, but an important and unique manifestation of psychopathology across the lifespan.
A hierarchical approach to wrapper induction

With the tremendous amount of information that becomes available on the Web on a daily basis, the ability to quickly develop information agents has become a crucial problem. A vital component of any Web-based information agent is a set of wrappers that can extract the relevant data from semistructured information sources. Our novel approach to wrapper induction is based on the idea of hierarchical information extraction, which turns the hard problem of extracting data from an arbitrarily complex document into a series of easier extraction tasks. We introduce an inductive algorithm, STALKER, that generates high accuracy extraction rules based on user-labeled training examples. Labeling the training data represents the major bottleneck in using wrapper induction techniques, and our experimental results show that STALKER does significantly better then other approaches; on one hand, STALKER requires up to two orders of magnitude fewer examples than other algorithms, while on the other hand it can handle information sources that could not be wrapped by existing techniques.
A topic detection method based on Semantic Dependency Distance and PLSA

Topic detection is a hot topic in the field of text mining. In this paper, focusing on the Chinese interactive text, we explored a novel topic detection method, named SDD-PLSA, which integrates Semantic Dependency Distance (SDD) and PLSA. It not only has the advantages of PLSA, which is an efficient, effective method and is widely used in text mining, but also considers the semantic and syntax information. Thus, the problem of lacking semantic information in PLSA can be avoided. SDD-PLSA has two main steps. The first is using SDD to classify the sentences that have a high similarity in semantics into several groups according to semantic feature extraction of the interactive text. Then, a PLSA classifier is used upon the result of the first step. The experiments show that the accuracy of detection on `love' topic has been improved to 64.8% when using SDD-PLSA, better than 55.4% when using PLSA.
The Development and Psychometric Validation of an Arabic-Language Version of the Pain Catastrophizing Scale

Context. The Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS) is the most widely used measure of pain-specific catastrophizing. Objectives. The purpose of the present study was to develop and psychometrically evaluate an Arabic-language version of the PCS. Methods. In Study 1, 150 adult chronic nonmalignant pain patients seeking treatment at a hospital setting completed the PCS-A and a number of self-report measures assessing clinical parameters of pain, symptoms of depression, and quality of life. Study 2 employed a cold pressor pain task to examine the PCS-A in a sample of 44 healthy university students. Results. Exploratory factor analyses suggested a two-factor structure. Confirmatory factor analysis comparing the 2-factor model, Sullivan's original 3-factor model, and a 1-factor model based on the total score all provided adequate fit to the data. Cronbach's alpha coefficients across all models met or exceeded accepted standards of reliability. Catastrophizing was associated with higher levels of depression and increased pain intensity and interference. Catastrophizing predicted decreased quality of life, even after controlling for the contribution of gender, employment, depression, and pain interference. PCS-A scores were positively correlated with heightened experimental pain severity and decreased pain tolerance. Conclusion. The present results provide strong support for the psychometric properties of the PCS-A.
Size Does Matter: Why Knowledge Markets Can Fail at Scale!

In this paper, we model the community question answering (CQA) websites on Stack Exchange platform as knowledge markets, and analyze how and why these markets can fail at scale. Analyzing CQA websites as markets allows site operators to reason about the failures in knowledge markets, and design policies to prevent these failures. Our main contribution is to provide insight on knowledge market failures. We explore a set of interpretable economic production models to capture content generation dynamics in knowledge markets. The best performing of these, well-known in economic literature as Cobb-Douglas equation, provides an intuitive explanation for content generation in the knowledge markets. Specifically, it shows that (1) factors of content generation such as user participation and content dependency have constant elasticity--a percentage increase in any of the inputs leads to a constant percentage increase in the output, (2) in many markets, factors exhibit diminishing returns--the incremental, marginal output decreases as the input is incrementally increased, (3) markets vary according to their returns to scale--the increase in output resulting from a proportionate increase in all inputs, and finally (4) many markets exhibit diseconomies of scale--measures of market health decrease as a function of overall system size (number of participants)
Interactive free-hand drawing and in-between generation with DBSC

Based on our novel shape and stroke model, Disk B-spline Curve (DBSC), this demo provides user an interactive free-hand drawing system. With a digital tablet the user may draw directly onto the computer a picture whose strokes are then represented by DBSC functions. This representation will not only save space for storing and transmission, but also allow the user to manipulate strokes easily and effectively like zooming. Given two or more pictures, the system can automatically generate intermediate frames, so called in-betweens, thus forming a smooth sequence of animation.
Positron Emission Tomography studies with [11C]PBR28 in the Healthy Rodent Brain: Validating SUV as an Outcome Measure of Neuroinflammation

Molecular imaging of the 18 kD Translocator protein (TSPO) with positron emission tomography (PET) is of great value for studying neuroinflammation in rodents longitudinally. Quantification of the TSPO in rodents is, however, quite challenging. There is no suitable reference region and the use of plasma-derived input is not an option for longitudinal studies. The aim of this study was therefore to evaluate the use of the standardized uptake value (SUV) as an outcome measure for TSPO imaging in rodent brain PET studies, using [11C]PBR28. In the first part of the study, healthy male Wistar rats (n = 4) were used to determine the correlation between the distribution volume (VT, calculated with Logan graphical analysis) and the SUV. In the second part, healthy male Wistar rats (n = 4) and healthy male C57BL/6J mice (n = 4), were used to determine the test-retest variability of the SUV, with a 7-day interval between measurements. Dynamic PET scans of 63 minutes were acquired with a nanoScan PET/MRI and nanoScan PET/CT. An MRI scan was made for anatomical reference with each measurement. The whole brain VT of [11C]PBR28 in rats was 42.9 ± 1.7. A statistically significant correlation (r2 = 0.96; p < 0.01) was found between the VT and the SUV. The test-retest variability in 8 brain region ranged from 8 to 20% in rats and from 7 to 23% in mice. The interclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was acceptable to excellent for rats, but poor to acceptable for mice. In conclusion: The SUV of [11C]PBR28 showed a high correlation with VT as well as good test-retest variability. For future longitudinal small animal PET studies the SUV can thus be used to describe [11C]PBR28 uptake in healthy brain tissue. Based on the present observations, further studies are needed to explore the applicability of this approach in small animal disease models, with special regard to neuroinflammatory models.