Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigation of Color Phosphors for Laser-Driven White Lighting

AL-WAISAWY, SARA S. , M.S., December 2014, Electrical Engineering Investigation of Color Phosphors for Laser-Driven White Lighting Director ofThesis: Wojciech M. Jadwisienczak Solid-state white lighting devices (SSWLDs) commonly use III-nitride near-UV or blue light emitting diodes (LEDs), combined with one or more phosphors, to generate white light. These devices already offer many advantages over traditional incandescent and fluorescent light sources, including long lifetimes, environmentally friendly designs without the need for mercury, and enormous energy savings. Despite unquestionable recent commercial success and the future potential for further development, current SSWLDs suffer from the droop effect limiting the overall efficacy and a thermallyinduced shift in the peak emission wavelength of the phosphor. Thus, the overall efficiency of these devices can still be improved. One such example is to control the operating temperature of the device. When operating an LED, the temperature inevitably increases, yet the phosphor particles exhibit a loss in efficiency as the temperature of the device increases. In addition, LEDs suffer from efficiency loss and color instability with increased operating current, making high-power devices not achievable using LEDs as the excitation source. Recently, a new concept for developing SSWLD, based on laser diode (LD) substituting for LED as a pump source for exciting colour-stable phosphors, was proposed. In contrast to LEDs, laser diodes do not exhibit efficiency loss; many exhibit increased efficiency as current increases, and maintain color stability. Thus, there is a need in the art for improved solid-state white lighting devices that rely on laser 4 diodes. In this project we have characterized individual Eu(WO4)2 (red phosphor), BaMg2Al16O27:Eu,Mn (green phosphor) and (Sr,Mn)2SiO4:Eu (blue phosphor) and trichromatic white light phosphors. Characteristics of light produced with each phosphor, variations with incident light power and phosphor temperature, as well as effects from phosphor ageing, are described. Results of comparison between pumping with coherent and incoherent light at the same wavelength are also described.
Lynch Syndrome: History and Current Status

The annual worldwide incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) is 944,717 with a mortality of 492,411 [1]. Approximately 5% to 10% of this total CRC burden is due to primary Mendelian inheritance factors, making hereditary CRC a major public health problem throughout the world. These estimates of the hereditary burden of CRC may be conservative when considering the existence of low-penetrant genes such as the Ashkenazi I1307K mutation [2], the recently described autosomal recessive form of familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP)-like families due to the MYH mutation [3, 4], and the hereditary breast and colon cancer (HBCC) syndrome [5,6]. Understanding the role of genetics in the etiology of CRC has increased rapidly during the past decade, due to the prodigious advances in molecular genetics [7]. Indeed, this information has evolved so rapidly that it has outpaced the ability of physicians to keep abreast of these fast-breaking events.
Diode Laser in Otosclerosis Surgery: First Clinical Results

Objective: To evaluate the functional results of otosclerosis surgery using diode laser. Study Design: Retrospective cohort analysis. Patients: One hundred seven patients operated on for otosclerosis with a diode laser (119 ears, all primary cases) and 141 patients operated on with a conventional technique (141 ears, all primary cases). Revision cases using the diode laser were also described. Methods: Preoperative tomographic computed scan findings and intraoperative observations were collected. Pure-tone and vocal audiometry was performed preoperatively and postoperatively (at 3 mo and 1 yr). Results: In the laser group, the air-bone gap was 29 ± 0.8 dB (n= 112) preoperatively and 9 ± 0.6 dB (n = 58) at 1 year. Air conduction was improved by 22 ± 1.7 dB at 1 year (n = 58). In the conventional group, the air-bone gap was 32 ± 0.9 dB (n=127) preoperatively and 10 ± 0.6 dB (n = 127) at 1 year. Air conduction was improved by 25 ± 1.1 dB (n = 127) at 1 year. No difference of hearing gain was observed between the 2 groups at 1 year. A decreased rate of footplate fracture was observed with the diode laser (3.6%) compared with the conventional technique (21.3%). Conclusion: Diode laser is a reliable and safe device for otosclerosis surgery. The functional results were similar to those reported in other series.
Daily time management and influence of environmental factors on use of electronic planning devices in adults with mental disability

Abstract Purpose: To describe daily time management in adults with and without mental disability and to examine differences in the level of their daily time management; to describe the possessions and use of electronic planning devices (EPDs) in activities and how environmental factors influence the use of EPDs in adults with mental disability. Methods: In a descriptive and cross-sectional design, 32 participants using EPDs and a matched comparison group of 32 healthy adults was recruited. Time-Self rating scale measuring daily time management was adapted for adults. A study specific questionnaire was applied to collect data on five ICF environmental factors. Rasch modelling, descriptive and non-parametric statistics were applied. Results: Time-S has acceptable psychometric properties for use on adults with mental disability. People with mental disability and low level of daily time management who use advanced EPDs are more influenced by environmental factors. The study group perceived that encouragement and support from professionals as well as services influence their use of EPDs. Conclusions: Time-S can safely be used for people with mental disability. EPDs do not fully compensate the needs of the target-group. Prescribers need to give considerations to this and therefore they should be provided with more knowledge about this matter. Implications for Rehabilitation The Time-S can be applied for measuring daily time management in adults. Adults with mental disability provided with EPDs are not fully compensated in daily time management. Professional support and encouragement as well as backing from the services are important factors for the use of EPDs. Because the smart phones are not prescribed as assistive technology, the need for help from professionals to facilitate daily life is stressed. Therefore, the professionals should be provided with more knowledge about the use of EPDs.
Management of crowdsourced first-person video: street view live

We present a framework for large-scale crowdsourcing of first-person viewpoint videos recorded on mobile devices. Collecting videos at a massive scale poses a number of major issues in terms of network planning. To improve the scalability with regards to the number of users, videos and geographical area and better cope with restrictions on storage, bandwidth and processing power, the framework is distributed and based on the two-layer cloudlet architecture. To mitigate the limited bandwidth in the access network, a set of decision algorithms is constructed and evaluated that are able to filter out irrelevant videos based on their metadata and given selection criteria. To illustrate the crowdsourcing framework, we present Street View Live, an application for presenting videos based on location, similar to the popular Google Street View but with up-to-date videos covering the location instead of possibly outdated images. In order to have an up-to-date view of every location, the video collection is continuously extended and updated by crowdsourcing videos from mobile devices.
CCAAT/enhancer binding protein-mediated regulation of TGFβ receptor 2 expression determines the hepatoblast fate decision

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and their derivatives are expected to be used in drug discovery, regenerative medicine and the study of human embryogenesis. Because hepatocyte differentiation from hESCs has the potential to recapitulate human liver development in vivo, we employed this differentiation method to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying human hepatocyte differentiation. A previous study has shown that a gradient of transforming growth factor beta (TGFβ) signaling is required to segregate hepatocyte and cholangiocyte lineages from hepatoblasts. Although CCAAT/enhancer binding proteins (c/EBPs) are known to be important transcription factors in liver development, the relationship between TGFβ signaling and c/EBP-mediated transcriptional regulation in the hepatoblast fate decision is not well known. To clarify this relationship, we examined whether c/EBPs could determine the hepatoblast fate decision via regulation of TGFβ receptor 2 (TGFBR2) expression in the hepatoblast-like cells differentiated from hESCs. We found that TGFBR2 promoter activity was negatively regulated by c/EBPα and positively regulated by c/EBPβ. Moreover, c/EBPα overexpression could promote hepatocyte differentiation by suppressing TGFBR2 expression, whereas c/EBPβ overexpression could promote cholangiocyte differentiation by enhancing TGFBR2 expression. Our findings demonstrated that c/EBPα and c/EBPβ determine the lineage commitment of hepatoblasts by negatively and positively regulating the expression of a common target gene, TGFBR2, respectively.
Magnesium doped carbon quantum dots synthesized by mechanical ball milling and displayed Fe3+ sensing

ABSTRACT A new method had been developed for the preparation of fluorescent Magnesium doped carbon quantum dots (Mg-CQDs) by a simple mechanical ball milling a mixture of cellulose and Mg power. The Mg-CQDs were characterized by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, UV-vis spectra, Fluorescent emission spectra and Transmission electron microscopy. And the result showed that the prepared Mg-CQDs displayed high selective and sensitive detection of iron ions with a detection limit of 50 ppb. Moreover, the idea of mechanical ball milling provided a method of large-scale industrial production to carbon quantum dots (CQDs).
Impact of Varicella-Zoster Virus on Dendritic Cell Subsets in Human Skin during Natural Infection

ABSTRACT Varicella-zoster virus (VZV) causes varicella and herpes zoster, diseases characterized by distinct cutaneous rashes. Dendritic cells (DC) are essential for inducing antiviral immune responses; however, the contribution of DC subsets to immune control during natural cutaneous VZV infection has not been investigated. Immunostaining showed that compared to normal skin, the proportion of cells expressing DC-SIGN (a dermal DC marker) or DC-LAMP and CD83 (mature DC markers) were not significantly altered in infected skin. In contrast, the frequency of Langerhans cells was significantly decreased in VZV-infected skin, whereas there was an influx of plasmacytoid DC, a potent secretor of type I interferon (IFN). Langerhans cells and plasmacytoid DC in infected skin were closely associated with VZV antigen-positive cells, and some Langerhans cells and plasmacytoid DC were VZV antigen positive. To extend these in vivo observations, both plasmacytoid DC (PDC) isolated from human blood and Langerhans cells derived from MUTZ-3 cells were shown to be permissive to VZV infection. In VZV-infected PDC cultures, significant induction of alpha IFN (IFN-α) did not occur, indicating the VZV inhibits the capacity of PDC to induce expression of this host defense cytokine. This study defines changes in the response of DC which occur during cutaneous VZV infection and implicates infection of DC subtypes in VZV pathogenesis.
Development and study of methods for estimating retinal vessel parameters using a modified local fan transform

Estimation of the geometric parameters of blood vessels is an important stage in the diagnosis of many cardiovascular diseases. In this work, we describe a method for estimating the diameter of blood vessels based on a modified local fan transform. We present experimental results that show in which way the accuracy of blood vessel estimation is affected by the noise-to-signal ratio in the image under analysis, vessel curvature radius, and the number of points and angles over which the averaging is done. The method is experimentally shown to be immune to various types of noise, structural complexity of the object, and variations in the vessel curvature radius.
Modeling an Ontology for Managing Contexts in Smart Meeting Space

In recent years, computing becomes more mobile and pervasive; these changes imply that applications and services must be aware of and adapt to their changing contexts in highly dynamic environments. To allow interoperability in a context-aware computing environment (e.g. smart meeting space), it is necessary that the context terminology will be commonly understood by all the connected entities in a particular space. In this paper, we propose a context ontology model for smart meeting space. The proposed context ontology model defines seven major concepts those can be reused as well as provides the basic infrastructure to build an ontology model for smart space environments. As each smart environment may have different kinds of users, devices etc., we design domain-specific ontology for smart meeting space and implement a prototype for this ontology model using Protege 3.2[1] ontology editor and RacerPro 1.9 [2] reasoning engine. We execute queries on our ontology using SPARQL [3] query language; furthermore, we define rules using SWRL [4] and infer those rules by JESS [5] rule engine. The proposed context ontology model has been designed to improve knowledge sharing, knowledge reuse, context querying and reasoning in a smart meeting space.
Bootstrapping Security Policies for Wearable Apps Using Attributed Structural Graphs

We address the problem of bootstrapping security and privacy policies for newly-deployed apps in wireless body area networks (WBAN) composed of smartphones, sensors and other wearable devices. We introduce a framework to model such a WBAN as an undirected graph whose vertices correspond to devices, apps and app resources, while edges model structural relationships among them. This graph is then augmented with attributes capturing the features of each entity together with user-defined tags. We then adapt available graph-based similarity metrics to find the closest app to a new one to be deployed, with the aim of reusing, and possibly adapting, its security policy. We illustrate our approach through a detailed smartphone ecosystem case study. Our results suggest that the scheme can provide users with a reasonably good policy that is consistent with the user’s security preferences implicitly captured by policies already in place.
Evaluating Class Assignment Semantic Redundancy on Linked Datasets

In this work we address the concept of semantic redundancy in linked datasets considering class assignment assertions. We discuss how redundancy can be evaluated as well as the relationship between redundancy and three class hierarchy aspects: the number of instances a class has, number of class descendants and class depth. Finally, we performed an evaluation on the DBpedia dataset using SPARQL queries for data redundancy checks.
Proxy Templates for Inverse Compositional Photometric Bundle Adjustment

Recent advances in 3D vision have demonstrated the strengths of photometric bundle adjustment. By directly minimizing reprojected pixel errors, instead of geometric reprojection errors, such methods can achieve sub-pixel alignment accuracy in both high and low textured regions. Typically, these problems are solved using a forwards compositional Lucas-Kanade formulation parameterized by 6-DoF rigid camera poses and a depth per point in the structure. For large problems the most CPU-intensive component of the pipeline is the creation and factorization of the Hessian matrix at each iteration. For many warps, the inverse compositional formulation can offer significant speed-ups since the Hessian need only be inverted once. In this paper, we show that an ordinary inverse compositional formulation does not work for warps of this type of parameterization due to ill-conditioning of its partial derivatives. However, we show that it is possible to overcome this limitation by introducing the concept of a proxy template image. We show an order of magnitude improvement in speed, with little effect on quality, going from forwards to inverse compositional in our own photometric bundle adjustment method designed for object-centric structure from motion. This means less processing time for large systems or denser reconstructions under the same real-time constraints. We additionally show that this theory can be readily applied to existing methods by integrating it with the recently released Direct Sparse Odometry SLAM algorithm.
A Region Driven and Contextualized Pedestrian Detector

This paper tackles the real-time pedestrian detection problem using a stationary calibrated camera. Problems frequently encountered are: a generic classifier can not be adjusted to each situation and the perspective deformations of the camera can profoundly change the appearance of a person. To avoid these drawbacks we contextualized a detector with information coming directly from the scene. Our method comprises three distinct parts. First an oracle gathers examples from the scene. Then, the scene is split in different regions and one classifier is trained for each one. Finally each detector are automatically tuned to achieve the best performances. Designed for making camera network installation procedure easier, our method is completely automatic and does not need any knowledge about the scene.
Glutathione and mitochondria

Glutathione (GSH) is the main non-protein thiol in cells whose functions are dependent on the redox-active thiol of its cysteine moiety that serves as a cofactor for a number of antioxidant and detoxifying enzymes. While synthesized exclusively in the cytosol from its constituent amino acids, GSH is distributed in different compartments, including mitochondria where its concentration in the matrix equals that of the cytosol. This feature and its negative charge at physiological pH imply the existence of specific carriers to import GSH from the cytosol to the mitochondrial matrix, where it plays a key role in defense against respiration-induced reactive oxygen species and in the detoxification of lipid hydroperoxides and electrophiles. Moreover, as mitochondria play a central strategic role in the activation and mode of cell death, mitochondrial GSH has been shown to critically regulate the level of sensitization to secondary hits that induce mitochondrial membrane permeabilization and release of proteins confined in the intermembrane space that once in the cytosol engage the molecular machinery of cell death. In this review, we summarize recent data on the regulation of mitochondrial GSH and its role in cell death and prevalent human diseases, such as cancer, fatty liver disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Design and implementation of multi-walled carbon nanotube electrodes for electrochemical sensors and thermocells

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been widely used in electrochemical sensors and thermocells due to their excellent electrochemical, mechanical, chemical, electrical, and thermal properties. Both of electrochemical sensors and thermocells rely on redox reactions happening at the interfaces of electrodes and electrolytes to realize their functions. However, achieving high-performance CNT-based electrochemical sensors and thermocells still faces challenges, notably in achieving high mass transfer coefficient, while keeping time and material consumption during fabrication processes at the minimum. To address these challenges in CNT-based electrochemical sensors, this thesis first enhances mass transfer coefficient at vertically aligned multi-walled carbon nanotube nanoelectrode arrays (VCNs), which are fabricated by encapsulating multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) arrays in epoxy and exposing tips of MWCNTs. This thesis investigates the effect of array diameter and forced convection on mass transfer coefficient at VCNs. Compared with macro-sized VCNs in stationary conditions, reducing array diameter to 50μm achieves a 3-fold enhancement of mass transfer coefficient, while introducing forced convection at a flow rate of 2000μL ·min−1 achieves a 20-fold enhancement. Theoretically, mass transfer coefficient can be further increased by reducing array diameter, increasing flow rate, and reducing channel dimension. Based on the study of VCNs, this thesis proposes a different configuration of CNTbased electrodes, namely, multi-walled carbon nanotube band electrodes (CBEs). CBEs are prepared by encapsulating MWCNT sheets in epoxy and exposing tips of MWCNTs. The band electrodes are designed with micro-sized width (≈ 200 nm) and macro-sized length (≥ 3mm) to respectively achieve high mass transfer coefficient and high response current. Compared with macro-size VCNs and individual CNT electrodes, CBEs respectively achieve a 32-fold enhancement on the mass transfer coefficient and a hundred-fold enhancement on the response current. This thesis further proposes a third kind of CNT-based electrodes, namely, multiwalled carbon nanotube sheet electrodes (CSEs), which are fabricated by pulling MWCNT sheets from spinnable MWCNT arrays and adhering them on insulating polyimide-glass substrates. Compared with other electrode fabrication processes, fabrication of CSEs requires the minimum time (few minutes) and material (no surfactant or binder material).
In vivo digital phyto imaging (IDPI) in Juglans nigra seeds.

A major disadvantage of conventional seed radiography is that the resulting image will not distinguish full-viable seeds from full-nonviable. Empty seeds will imbibe sufficient water to appear full, but these are easily distinguished by radiography before imbibition. Full seeds, both viable and nonviable, have 25 to 35% moisture content when freshly collected. This is sufficient water to confuse interpretation due to radiopacity of water density. While the full-viable seeds will germinate, the full-nonviable ones will not germinate due to physiological rather than morphological conditions, even while they maintain a moisture content sufficient to support germination. Speculation points to distribution and availability of free water and fat as promising factors to determine if an otherwise healthy seed will germinate. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) will determine these distributions. MRI is a nondestructive, noninvasive method suitable to seed research and ultimate germination of viable seeds. Although it is a widely used medical procedure, there are only limited applications to tree seed physiology. Specific differences reported in this paper are primarily the distribution and abundance of mobile hydrogen (H+) protons in bulk free water and in lipid molecules or parts of long chains. The difference in images was obtained by using fat and water suppression techniques utilising the small differences in resonant frequencies between H+ in bulk water and lipids.