Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biologically inspired materials for electro-responsive coatings and the photo-oxidation of water

Evolving out of research on biomineralization, a new field devoted to studying the interactions between inorganic materials and proteins is emerging. In natural systems, proteins are responsible for the assembly of complex hierarchical structures such as the nacre of abalone. Tools such as phage and yeast display libraries have enabled the combinatorial screening of peptides against a multitude of materials to which natural systems typically have no exposure. These techniques have yielded peptides that can bind and assemble technologically relevant materials such as gold and CdS. In this work, combinatorial phage and yeast display libraries are used to identify peptide sequences that bind to electrode materials and metal oxides. As in nature, it is observed that the context of a particular peptide dramatically influences its properties. While a peptide sequence may exhibit good adhesion to a particular surface when displayed on yeast, the same peptide may have little affinity towards that same surface when displayed on bacteriophage. To probe the interactions between peptides and materials in a context-free environment, rationally designed synthetic peptides were screened against a number of inorganic materials. A synthetic peptide, covalently linked to either microspheres, quantum dots, or a polymer, was able to mediate adhesion of those entities to electrode surfaces. In nature, proteins play important roles beyond biomineralization. For example, membrane proteins contain voltage-gated ion channels that open and close in response to a voltage bias. Inspired by the electro-responsive activity of ion channels, the interactions between peptides, surfaces and electric fields was investigated. The peptide sequences that exhibited significant adhesion to metal oxides were dominated by positively charged residues. A high voltage, pulsed electric field was used to overcome the inherent negative charge of the metal oxide electrode surface, thereby controlling peptide adhesion to an electrode surface. Drawing further inspiration from the way nature employs peptides, a synthetic photocatalytic system for water oxidation was developed using photosystem II (PSII) as a model. Proteins form the structural scaffold for PSII, assembling dye molecules as well as the metal-oxo catalytic center; furthermore, peptides play an active role in shuttling charge throughout PSIL. The D1 peptide in PSII is an electro-responsive peptide of sorts, releasing plastiquinone upon the two electron reduction of the molecule. The system developed in this work uses: iridium oxide as a metal-oxo catalyst assembled by a peptide expressed on the M13 bacteriophage; metalloporphyrin photosensitizers that are covalently assembled on the protein framework of the bacteriophage; and a synthetic Ce(IV) dipicolinate electron accepting molecule. The electron accepting molecule, developed to fill the role of plastiquinone in PSII, is believed to be the first non-sacrificial electron acceptor capable of driving the metalloporphyrin-sensitized photocatalytic…
Exploring reuse of industrial wastewater from exhaust dyebaths by solar-based photo-Fenton treatment

The aim of the research under discussion in the present paper is to study the decolorization and mineralization of textile industrial wastewaters from exhaust dyebaths by means of a solar photo-Fenton treatment. The exhaust dyebaths were grouped according to the fibers and dyeing recipes used, so as to verify the effectiveness of the photo-Fenton treatment on each dyeing process separately. Next, the results previously achieved were compared to those obtained by mixing all the exhaust baths together, as is common practice when treating the industrial textile effluents from dyeing and finishing procedures. After their neutralization and filtration, photo-Fenton-treated exhaust dyebaths and mixtures were reused to prepare laboratory dyeing samples. These techniques on the reuse of wastewaters were tested on several fibers by using the same dyeing procedure that was originally applied, as well as in different dyeing processes and for most fiber types. The results achieved showed that the reutilization of the aforementioned effluents, either in new exhaust dyebaths or in some other textile industrial operations, was of some considerable importance. Water consumption would be significantly reduced as well as the wastewater levies for the firms. Furthermore, the contaminating effect of the industrial effluents to be dealt with would be also diminished, reaping environmental and economic benefits.
Numerical Simulation of Gas-Solid Flow in a Precalciner of Cement Industry

Precalciner, in which endothermic raw meal calcination and exothermic fuel combustion proceed simultaneously, is a key equipment in dry process of cement production. To increase the precalcination degree and reduce the energy consumption, more and more attentions have been paid on modeling gas-solid flow field in precalciners. However, most of them aimed at just qualitative studies lacking in necessary further quantitative analysis of precalciner performance parameters. In this paper, combining qualitative studies and quantitative analysis, the gas-solid flow field was carried out aiming at an actual precalciner under operational-based boundary conditions. In Euler coordinate system the gas phase is expressed with k-ε model, in Lagrange coordinate system the solid phase is expressed with Discrete Phase Model(DPM), and the random effects of turbulence on the particle dispersion is accounted for with Discrete Random Walk (DRW) model. The predicted gas velocity field agrees well with the measured result, and the calculated raw meal concentration distribution is consistent with the actul condition. The results predicted that there is a simple spraying-liked flow field in the precalciner, with not only a non-uniform particle dispersion condition but also a low solid residence-time and residence-time ratio between solid and gas.
Analysis on Static Character of Piezoelectric Tubular Composite Actuator

The static character of piezoelectric composite actuator with four tubes is studied. Taking into account the non-uniform electric field distribution in piezoelectric tube, the bending deflection, axial strain, output axial force and bending moment are discussed. The results calculated by proposed method are compared to that calculated by traditional thin wall theory and the proposed method is more accurate and reasonable. A prototype actuator was fabricated and tested to validate the theory results. The theoretic result and tested results agree well with each other. This research provides theoretical guidance and basis for the design of piezoelectric tubular composites actuators.
Perceived exertion in fatiguing illness: Gulf War veterans with chronic fatigue syndrome.

PURPOSE It has been reported that ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) are elevated in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). We have challenged this notion by examining perceived exertion in civilian females with CFS and expressing the data relative to exercise capacity (%[OV0312]O(2max)). The purpose of the present investigation was to further examine RPE during exercise in a unique population of CFS patients, Gulf veterans (GV). METHODS Thirty-four GV (N = 15 CFS, 42 +/- 8 yr; N = 19 healthy, 43 +/- 5 yr) performed a maximal exercise test on a cycle ergometer. After a 3-min warm-up, exercise intensity increased by 30 W every minute until exhaustion. RPE were obtained during the last 15 s of each minute using Borg's CR-10 scale. RESULTS With the exception of peak [OV0312]E, there were no significant differences in any peak exercise variables. Repeated measures ANOVA revealed significantly higher RPE at each power output examined (F(1,32) = 16.4, P < 0.001). Group differences in RPE remained significant when analyzed relative to peak [OV0312]O(2) (F(1,32) = 7.2, P = 0.01). Both group main effects and the interaction were eliminated when self-reported fatigue symptoms were controlled for in the analyses. Power functions for RPE as a function of relative oxygen consumption were not different between groups and were significantly greater than a linear value of 1.0 (1.6 +/- 0.3 for both groups, P < 0.02). CONCLUSIONS Our results show that RPE are greater in GV with CFS regardless of whether the data were expressed in terms of absolute or relative exercise intensity. However, self-reported fatigue associated with CFS eliminated the group differences. These results suggest that GV with CFS were unique compared with their civilian counterparts. Future research aimed at determining the influence of preexisting fatigue on RPE during exercise is warranted.
Odor-modulated orientation in walking male cockroaches Periplaneta americana, and the effects of odor plumes of different structure

SUMMARY The location of distant resources using odor information usually also requires information on the flow of air (or water) through the environment together with the expression of internally programmed steering responses. The orientation responses of virgin male Periplaneta americana L. to wind and the female sex-pheromone component (-)-periplanone-B were video-recorded in a laboratory wind tunnel and quantified. P. americana males showed no preferred walking orientation when released in zero wind in the absence of pheromone. When introduced into 25 cm s-1 wind in the absence of pheromone, 79% of males walked downwind. Upon introduction to a plume of (-)-periplanone-B in wind, 100% of males walked upwind in the pheromone plume to the source. Males were then challenged with wind-borne plumes of (-)-periplanone-B of four different temporal/spatial structures. In nearly all cases, the only statistically significant changes in behavioral parameters measured from their walking tracks were observed from males tracking the treatment consisting of the most turbulent plume. The plume-tracking performances of males challenged with the other three less turbulent plumes were visually and quantitatively similar, regardless of the width. Males tracking all four plumes showed evidence of turns resulting from multiple mechanisms. Some of the observed maneuvers were temporally regular counterturns, suggesting steering according to an ongoing internal program, while others could have been triggered by encountering the change in odor concentration between pheromone and clean air at the lateral boundary of the plume or chemotactically upon the detection of changes in odor concentration.
Consideration of the residual stress distributions in fatigue crack growth calculations for assessing welded steel joints

To better understand the crack closure and propagation, an analytical model is established. The residual stress effect on fatigue crack growth equations has been considered using the residual stress intensity factor (SIF) (Kres). The joint geometries, residual stress distributions (σres) and residual stress ratio (Rres) were considered also. Kres are calculated using the analytical weight function (WF) method and different residual stress distributions. It is to be emphasized that the current approach is little investigated. This is because the WF has already been developed to calculate SIF for an existing crack. The current approach calculates Kres for the crack that initiates and propagates until failure. Different stress distributions have been used, and Rres is defined. The validity of using the WF has been shown. SIF due to applied load (Kapp) and applied stress ratio (Rapp) have been considered. Fatigue crack growth rate was investigated in accordance with the current approach. The results have been verified and benchmarked.
EXTENT OF HEALING OF CRACKED NORMAL STRENGTH CONCRETE. TECHNICAL NOTE

The goal of this research is to investigate the extent of healing of cracked concrete. A feedback-controlled test was used to generate a crack with a controlled width in concrete specimens. Water permeability was evaluated by a low-pressure water permeability test (WPT). Elastic wave signal transmission measurements were performed immediately after cracking and repeated after 100 days of WPT. Immediately after cracking, water permeability increased and the signal transmission decreased with increasing initial crack width. The water permeability of cracked specimens decreased significantly, whereas the signal transmission increased with time. Both permeability and transmission measurements suggest autogenous healing of the cracks. However, the recovery in signal transmission with crack healing is not as spectacular as changes in permeability, inferring only partial mechanical healing of the cracks.
French and German Corpora for Audience-based Text Type Classification

This paper presents some of the results of the CLASSYN project which investigated the classification of text according to audience-related text types. We describe the design principles and the properties of the French and German linguistically annotated corpora that we have created. We report on tools used to collect the data and on the quality of the syntactic annotation. The CLASSYN corpora comprise two text collections to investigate general text types difference between scientific and popular science text on the two domains of medical and computer science.
Optimal scheduling of QoE-aware HTTP adaptive streaming

Recently HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) has been leading the trend in the delivery of video content over Internet. The scope of this technology describes that a video is segmented into small intervals and encoded in different qualities for adapting the variance of network bandwidth. This method allows the client adjusting the quality of the requested stream dynamically. To the best of our knowledge, most heuristic algorithms proposed for HAS run a risk of freezing in video playback and thus induce a poor Quality of Experience (QoE). Therefore, how to maintain a good user experience becomes a more challenging task for the service provider. In this paper, we propose a optimal scheduling of QoE-aware HAS method which achieves the following QoE requirements. (1) Avoiding video streaming freezing (i.e. the client buffer underflow). (2) Minimizing the initial delay before the video streaming starts playing. Testing by the video Aladdin, experimental results show that our method can find the best QoE service for HAS under various QoE requirements and resource constraints.
TSDF Manifolds: A Scalable and Consistent Dense Mapping Approach

In many applications, maintaining a consistent dense map of the environment is key to enabling robotic platforms to perform higher level decision making. Several works have addressed the challenge of creating precise dense 3D maps. However, during operation over longer missions, reconstructions can easily become inconsistent due to accumulated camera tracking error and delayed loop closure. Without explicitly addressing the problem of map consistency, recovery from such distortions tends to be difficult. We present a novel system for dense 3D mapping which addresses the challenge of building consistent maps while dealing with scalability. Central to our approach is the representation of the environment as a manifold map, comprised of overlapping TSDF volumes. These volumes are localized through feature-based bundle adjustment. Our main contribution is to use a probabilistic measure to identify stable regions in the map, and fuse the contributing subvolumes. This approach allows us to reduce map growth while still maintaining consistency. We demonstrate the proposed system on publicly available datasets, as well as on a number of our own datasets, and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach for building consistent and scalable maps.
Risk prediction for weed infestation using classification rules

This paper proposes a fuzzy classification system for the risk of infestation by weeds in agricultural zones considering the variability of weeds. The inputs of the system are features of the infestation extracted from estimated maps by kriging for the weed seed production and weed coverage, and from the competitiveness, inferred from narrow and broad-leaved weeds. Furthermore, a Bayesian network classifier is used to extract rules from data which are compared to the fuzzy rule set obtained on the base of specialist knowledge. Results for the risk inference in a maize crop field are presented and evaluated by the estimated yield loss.
Relation Extraction from Wikipedia Using Subtree Mining

The exponential growth and reliability of Wikipedia have made it a promising data source for intelligent systems. The first challenge of Wikipedia is to make the encyclopedia machine-processable. In this study, we address the problem of extracting relations among entities from Wikipedia's English articles, which in turn can serve for intelligent systems to satisfy users' information needs. Our proposed method first anchors the appearance of entities in Wikipedia articles using some heuristic rules that are supported by their encyclopedic style. Therefore, it uses neither the Named Entity Recognizer (NER) nor the Coreference Resolution tool, which are sources of errors for relation extraction. It then classifies the relationships among entity pairs using SVM with features extracted from the web structure and subtrees mined from the syntactic structure of text. The innovations behind our work are the following: a) our method makes use of Wikipedia characteristics for entity allocation and entity classification, which are essential for relation extraction; b) our algorithm extracts a core tree, which accurately reflects a relationship between a given entity pair, and subsequently identifies key features with respect to the relationship from the core tree. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through evaluation of manually annotated data from actual Wikipedia articles.
On the Scaling Behavior of HDA

HDA* is a simple, parallelization of A* where work is asynchronously distributed among the nodes by a global hash function. Using up to 1024 cores on a large distributed memory cluster, we evaluate HDA* for a domain-independent planner as well an application-specific 24-puzzle solver. We show that HDA* scales fairly well on a large cluster using up to 1024 cores. Our analysis of the scaling behavior shows that on a cluster of multicore nodes, using only a subset of the available cores and leaving some cores idle can, surprisingly, lead to better results.
Universal emulations with sublogarithmic slowdown

The existence of bounded degree networks which can emulate the computation of any bounded degree network of the same size with logarithmic slowdown is well-known. The butterfly is an example of such a universal network. Leiserson was the first to introduce the concept of an area-universal network: a network with VLSI layout area A which can emulate any network of the same size and layout area with logarithmic slowdown. His results imply the existence of an N-node network with layout area O(N log/sup 2/ N) which can emulate any N-node planar network with O(log N) slowdown. The main results of this paper are: There exists an N-node network with layout area O(N log/sup 2/ N) which can emulate any N-node planar network with O(loglogN) slowdown. The N-node butterfly (and hypercube) can emulate any network with VLSI layout area N/sup 2-/spl epsiv// (/spl epsiv/>0) with O(loglogN) slowdown. We also discuss sublogarithmic bounds for the slowdown of emulations of arbitrary bounded degree networks. <<ETX>>
Cross-assistive approach for PDR and Wi-Fi positioning

In indoor positioning using Wi-Fi, there is a problem that the accuracy is not stable by the occurrence of large errors. Large errors tend to occur when density of wireless LAN access points is low or the radio wave condition is unstable. Furthermore, as for positioning utilising smartphone, it takes a while to scan Wi-Fi beacons. Thereby, errors tend to occur while user is moving. Because it is difficult to observe exactly Wi-Fi beacons. Accordingly, the authors proposed Cross-Assistive Approach for PDR and Wi-Fi Positioning. First of all, fingerprinting that is often used Wi-Fi positioning is improved by confining fingerprints to location where is estimated by PDR. As a result, this approach improved the accuracy about 2 meters. Furthermore, in order to correct accumulated errors in PDR, the authors proposed a method that corrects PDR with accurate Wi-Fi positioning results. Additionally, the authors proposed a method that estimates the accuracy of Wi-Fi positioning results. The mean error of accurate Wi-Fi results estimated by the accuracy estimating method was 0.98 meters. Thus, the accuracy estimating method detected accurate Wi-Fi positioning results effectively. In the comprehensive evaluation, our approach improved an existing Wi-Fi method about 3.4 meters by assisted PDR with Wi-Fi positioning and assisted Wi-Fi positioning with PDR cooperatively. Moreover, this approach enabled accumulated errors in PDR to be corrected.
The Design and Implementation of the Cicada Wireless Sensor Network Indoor Localization System

The wireless sensor network based localization system - Cicada is designed to support the location- awareness in indoor environment. The system is based on TDOA (time difference of arrival) between radio frequency and ultrasonic to measure the distances, uses the SWF(slide window filter) and least square fitting for the rough distance correction, adopts the UKF (unscented Kalman filter) to ultimately estimate the coordinates, and then sends the coordinate values to the network to provide location services. The system has several notable merits: it not only can provide the coordinates within 5 cm average deviation either for static object or for mobile object, but also can support multiple objects at the same time; it not only has a nearly omni-directional working area, but also be convenient for deployment and portability. Compared with other indoor localization system, the Cicada system adopts a more accurate algorithm and the whole system is more portable and convenient to deploy. Experiment results show the system can well satisfy the requirements in smart space.
Techniques for Growing and Mounting Small Single Crystals of Refractory Compounds

An apparatus is described for growing single crystals in a small droplet of melt at temperatures up to 1,600° C. The droplet, held by capillarity at the junction of a thermocouple, can be observed during the process through a binocular microscope. The heating is by means of a high-frequency current that can be separated by a filter from the thermocouple electromotive force, allowing the electromotive force to be measured continuously. The apparatus is therefore suitable also for determining melting points. <i The process of mounting and grinding the single-crystal specimens for X-ray diffraction and a simple but versatile micromanipulator to facilitate these procedures are described.
Smooth and time-optimal trajectory planning for industrial manipulators along specified paths

This paper presents a method for determining smooth and time-optimal path-constrained trajectories for robotic manipulators. The desired smoothness of the trajectory is imposed through limits on the actuator jerks. The third derivative of the path parameter with respect to time, the pseudo-jerk, is the controlled input. The limits on the actuator torques translate into state-dependent limits on the pseudo-acceleration. The time-optimal control objective is cast as an optimization problem by using cubic splines to parameterize the state space trajectory. The optimization problem is solved using the flexible tolerance method.