Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experimental demonstration of broadband perfect invisibility cloak composed of all-dielectric materials

With the development of various recent tools to control electromagnetic wave propagation, such as transformation optics, the long-sought dream of rendering objects invisible has become a matter of practical implementation. However, the required index profile derived with such techniques leads to material properties that are not readily available in nature and, hence, various experimental simplifications and performance scarifications are inevitable. Therefore, it has been a widespread belief that perfect cloaking cannot be achieved with conventional materials. Here, we follow a different direction and provide a unique method based on scattering cancellation rather than conventional coordinate transformations, and show that perfect invisibility can be indeed achieved for any specified angular range and operational bandwidth by employing merely all-dielectric materials. The presented method is based on our recently proposed generalized Hilbert-like transform [1] that is able to eliminate the undesired scattered waves for any type of object, regardless of its shape/size, by directly tailoring the object’s scattering potential. In this direction, we show that the impinging wave on an object can be perfectly restored owing to the effective cancellation of the scattered waves emanating from the object and the surrounding index profile. We demonstrate this effect by experimental analyses conducted at the gigahertz regime. The proposed method represents an important step towards the ultimate goal of cloaking arbitrarily large objects at various wavelength regimes and may have profound implications especially in noninvasive near-field probing applications, where conventional transformation optics based cloaks fail to provide the interaction of the wave with the object.
Purine Acquisition and Synthesis by Human Fungal Pathogens

While members of the Kingdom Fungi are found across many of the world’s most hostile environments, only a limited number of species can thrive within the human host. The causative agents of the most common invasive fungal infections are Candida albicans, Aspergillus fumigatus, and Cryptococcus neoformans. During the infection process, these fungi must not only combat the host immune system while adapting to dramatic changes in temperature and pH, but also acquire sufficient nutrients to enable growth and dissemination in the host. One class of nutrients required by fungi, which is found in varying concentrations in their environmental niches and the human host, is the purines. These nitrogen-containing heterocycles are one of the most abundant organic molecules in nature and are required for roles as diverse as signal transduction, energy metabolism and DNA synthesis. The most common life-threatening fungal pathogens can degrade, salvage and synthesize de novo purines through a number of enzymatic steps that are conserved. While these enable them to adapt to the changing purine availability in the environment, only de novo purine biosynthesis is essential during infection and therefore an attractive antimycotic target.
Modern statistical and philosophical framework for uncertainty assessment in biometric performance testing

The question of estimating uncertainty in measurement is fundamental to all scientific fields. In the field of automated human recognition, lack of repeatability and reproducibility of measurements has been noted since at least the 1970s. This study discusses current approaches to estimation of measurement uncertainty within the broader context of scientific philosophy and measurement science. The authors discuss the Duhem–Quine thesis on testing holism and international standards on estimating and reporting uncertainty in laboratory measurements, then apply these concepts to the estimation of uncertainty in technology, scenario and operational testing in biometrics. The authors advocate for moving beyond the calculation of ‘coverage’ intervals as defined in the ISO/IEC ‘guidelines for the expression of uncertainty in measurement’ to full application of the concepts of uncertainty assessment.
Mesenchymal stem cells in infantile haemangioma

Background Fibro-fatty deposition commonly occurs during involution of infantile haemangioma (IH). Mesenchymal stem cells have been identified in this tumour and have been proposed to be recruited from the bone marrow and/or adjacent niches, and then give rise to the fibro-fatty tissue. The authors have recently demonstrated that the capillary endothelium of proliferating IH co-expresses primitive mesodermal, mesenchymal and neural crest markers and proposed that this same endothelium has the ability to give rise to cells of mesenchymal lineage that constitute the fibro-fatty deposition. Methods Immunohistochemistry and real-time RT-PCR were used to further characterise proliferating IHs and haemangioma explant-derived cells (HaemEDCs). Results The authors have further confirmed expression of the mesenchymal-associated proteins including preadipocyte factor-1, a mesenchymal differentiation inhibition-associated cytokine. The HaemEDCs could be differentiated into osteoblasts and adipocytes, indicating their functional potential for terminal differentiation. Discussion The collective expression of neural crest, mesenchymal and mesenchymal differentiation inhibition-associated proteins on the endothelium of proliferating IH suggests that the cells in the capillary endothelium within the lesion possess the ability to undergo terminal mesenchymal differentiation during the proliferating phase, but are inhibited from doing so.
Experimental Investigation of Photostrictive Materials for MEMS Application

Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) is an emerging technology that integrates micromachined mechanical structures with integrated circuits (IC). During the last two decades, it has grown vastly as a prominent research area among scientists and engineers. Usually the main components of MEMS are sensors, actuators, and structures with all in microscale. A photostrictive mate-rial has high potential to be used in a MEMS application to develop an ad-vanced optical actuator. A strain is induced when a photostrictive material is il-luminated by high intensity light, which is known as photostriction. This phe-nomenon can be generally described as the combined effect of the photovoltaic effect and the converge-piezoelectric effect. When an incident light strikes a photostrictive material, a photovoltage is produced and this photovoltage develops strain in the material. Lanthanum modified lead zirconate titanate (Pb, La) (Zr, Ti) O3 ceramic doped with WO3, called PLZT, is one of the photostrictive ceramics which has an advantageous use as a wireless remote control over traditional actuators. Traditional actuators require wire connections to transmit the control signal; these wires yield noise via external electromagnetic fields. Whereas, PLZT actuators can transmit the control signal without wires which can eliminate possible noise due to the external electromagnetic field. In this current research, the photostrictive effect of a thin PLZT film on a silicon wafer is investigated experimentally. The transverse deflection of the PLZT optical actuator cantilever beam has been measured for stationary continuous light as well as for pulses of light using an optical chopper at various light intensities and focused locations. Results indicate that transverse deflection increases with the increase of light intensity. Also, the maximum transverse deflection at the free end of the cantilever beam for stationary light has been found to be three times larger than that for the pulses of light.
Representation of deformable motion for compression of dynamic cardiac image data

We present a new approach for efficient estimation and storage of tissue deformation in dynamic medical image data like 3-D+t computed tomography reconstructions of human heart acquisitions. Tissue deformation between two points in time can be described by means of a displacement vector field indicating for each voxel of a slice, from which position in the previous slice at a fixed position in the third dimension it has moved to this position. Our deformation model represents the motion in a compact manner using a down-sampled potential function of the displacement vector field. This function is obtained by a Gauss-Newton minimization of the estimation error image, i. e. , the difference between the current and the deformed previous slice. For lossless or lossy compression of volume slices, the potential function and the error image can afterwards be coded separately. By assuming deformations instead of translational motion, a subsequent coding algorithm using this method will achieve better compression ratios for medical volume data than with conventional block-based motion compensation known from video coding. Due to the smooth prediction without block artifacts, particularly whole-image transforms like wavelet decomposition as well as intra-slice prediction methods can benefit from this approach. We show that with discrete cosine as well as with Karhunen-Lo`eve transform the method can achieve a better energy compaction of the error image than block-based motion compensation while reaching approximately the same prediction error energy.
Bias Dependence of the Electrical Spin Injection into GaAs from Co − Fe − B / MgO Injectors with Different MgO Growth Processes

We investigate the influence of the MgO growth process on the bias dependence of the electrical spin injection from a Co-Fe-B=MgO spin injector into a GaAs-based light-emitting diode (spin LED). With this aim, textured MgO tunnel barriers are fabricated either by sputtering or molecular-beam-epitaxy (MBE) methods. For the given growth parameters used for the two techniques, we observe that the circular polarization of the electroluminescence emitted by spin LEDs is rather stable as a function of the injected current or applied bias for the samples with sputtered tunnel barriers, whereas the corresponding circular polarization decreases abruptly for tunnel barriers grown by MBE. We attribute these different behaviors to the different kinetic energies of the injected carriers linked to differing amplitudes of the parasitic hole current flowing from GaAs to Co-Fe-B in both cases.
False-positive reduction of liver tumor detection using ensemble learning method

We proposed a novel ensemble learning method which can be applied to false-positive reduction of liver tumor detection. In many cases of the liver tumor detection, training data has some issues due to characteristics of liver tumors, and the conventional ensemble learning methods such as Bagging and AdaBoost tend to degrade sensitivity. The proposed method generates various weak classifiers based on adaptive sampling in order to enhance an ensemble effect against such issues, and can achieve accuracy satisfying requirements of liver tumor detection. We applied the method to 48 CT images and evaluated the accuracy. Results showed that the proposed method succeeded in reducing false positives greatly (from 3.96 to 1.10/image) while maintaining the required sensitivity.
Templates for Cross-Cultural and Culturally Specific Usability Testing: Results From Field Studies and Ethnographic Interviewing in Three Countries

The cultural diversity of users of technology challenges our methods for usability testing. This article suggests templates for cross-culturally and culturally specific usability testing, based on studies of usability testing in companies in Mumbai, Beijing, and Copenhagen. Study 1 was a cross-cultural field study of think-aloud testing done by usability vendor companies in the three countries. The result was a grounded theory of cultural variations in the production of a usability problem list. Study 2 was a follow-up, ethnographic interview study of how the companies typically perform usability tests. The result was the construction of templates for usability testing. The culturally specific templates were in Mumbai “user-centered evaluation,” Copenhagen “client-centered evaluation,” and Beijing “evaluator-centered evaluation. ” The findings are compared with related research, and the implications are pointed out. The templates can be seen as a simple and practical way to plan, compare, and improve the way usability testing is carried out in multiple, different cultures and countries.
Adaptive fast algorithm based on natural gradient for instantaneous blind source separation

A fast adaptive algorithm based on natural gradient is proposed in this paper to address the convergence issue in instantaneous blind source separation BSS problem in a noisy and non-stationary mixing scenario. The natural gradient technique overcomes slow convergence properties of the gradient adaptation technique when the slope of the cost function varies widely for small changes in the parameters. To speed up the convergence further we adopt one of the heuristic methods by incorporating a momentum term. Synthetically generated data as well as real world data have been considered for validation purpose. Numerical experiments on sinusoidal signals and acoustic electromechanical signals confirm the superior performance of the proposed algorithm over the conventional natural gradient algorithm NGA in both noisy and noiseless situation as well as in stationary and non-stationary mixing scenario.
“Clustering by saliency” — Unsupervised discovery of crowd activities

In this paper, we develop a novel unsupervised crowd activity discovery algorithm aiming to automatically explore latent action patterns among crowd activities and partition them into meaningful clusters. Inspired by computational model of human vision system, we present a spatiotemporal saliency-based representation to simulate visual attention mechanism and encode human-focused components in an activity stream. Combining with feature pooling, we could obtain a more compact and robust activity representation. Based on the affinity matrix of activities, N-cut is performed to generate clusters with meaningful activity patterns. We carry out experiments on our proposed HIT-BJUT dataset and another public UMN dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed unsupervised discovery method is capable of automatically mining meaningful activities from large-scale video data with mixed crowd activities.
A NALYSIS OF CMOS AND MTCMOS C IRCUITS U SING 250 N ANO M ETER T ECHNOLOGY

The low-power consumption with less delay time has become an important issue in the recent trends of VLSI. In these days, the low power systems with high speed are highly preferable everywhere. Designers need to understand how low-power techniques affect performance attributes, and have to choose a set of techniques that are consistent with these attributes . The main objective of this paper is to describe, how to achieve low power consumption with approximately same delay time in a single circuit. In this paper, we make circuits with CMOS and MTCMOS techniques and check out its power and delay characteristics. The circuits designed using MTCMOS technique gives least power consumption. All the pre-layout simulations have been performed at 250nm technology on tanner EDA tool.
Genetic Search for Feature Subset Selection: A Comparison Between CHC and GENESIS

Classification problems map an object to a particular class using a set of available features. The problem is how to choose the best subset of features that provide an accurate classification. Genetic algorithms may provide a novel yet powerful search method to automate feature subset selection on a classification problem. Two different types of genetic algorithms are compared on this domain. One of them, GENESIS, is based on the traditional simple genetic algorithm. The second, CHC, uses truncation selection, an adaptive uniform crossover operator and restarts. CHC and GENESIS have been used several times for different types of problems and demonstrate very good performance. Our results indicate that CHC yields better results on two applications. We also introduce a novel classifier, Euclidean Decision Tables.
Observer Movement and Size Constancy

It is commonly assumed that size constancy—invariance of perceived size of objects as they change retinal size because of changes in distance—depends solely on retinal stimulation and vergence, but on no other action-related signals. Distance to an object can change through displacement of either the observer or the object. The common assumption predicts that the two types of displacement should lead to the same degree of size constancy. We measured size constancy while observers viewed stationary stimuli at different distances. Changes in distance between trials were either actively produced by the observer or generated by real or simulated object displacement, with retinal stimulation held constant across the movement conditions. Responses were always closer to perfect constancy for observer than for object movement. Thus, size constancy is enhanced by information from observer displacement, and, more generally, processes thought to be purely perceptual may have unexpected components related to action.
Circulating T helper 9 cells and increased serum interleukin‐9 levels in patients with knee osteoarthritis

The purpose of this study was to examine the roles of T helper 9 (Th9) cells and the serum interleukin (IL)‐9 level in the pathogenesis of osteoarthritis (OA). The numbers of IL‐9+ CD4+ CD8− T cells, interferon (IFN)‐γ+ CD4+ CD8− T cells, IL‐4+ CD4+ CD8− T cells, and IL‐17A+ CD4+ CD8− T cells in 25 OA patients and 13 healthy controls (HC) were examined by flow cytometry. The serum concentrations of IL‐9, IL‐4, IL‐17A, and IFN‐γ were also determined. The numbers of CD4+CD45RO+ T cells, Th9 cells, Th1 cells, and Th17 cells in OA patients were significantly higher than those in HCs. Furthermore, serum IL‐9, IL‐17A, and IFN‐γ levels in OA patients were higher than those in HCs. The number of Th9 cells was positively correlated with the number of Th17 cells in OA patients. Furthermore, greater numbers of Th9 cells were positively associated with elevated C‐reactive protein, and both Th9 cells and IL‐9 levels were positively correlated with the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis index in OA patients. Th9 cell numbers and IL‐9 levels are correlated with OA patient symptoms and joint functionality and may be a marker of disease activity.
INFLAMMATORY BOWEL DISEASE AND TOXIC MEGACOLON

Ulcerative colitis is characterized by a diffuse, continuous inflammatory process usually limited to the superficial mucosa of the colon. Crohn disease entails a more focal, transmural inflammation that can affect the colon either alone or accompanied by small bowel involvement. Both have the potential for severe, fulminating or toxic colitis (1). Since the original classification was published by Truelove and Witts in 1955, severe, acute, ulcerative colitis has been defined by the presence of six or more bloody bowel movements per day associated with temperature greater than 37.8◦C, heart rate greater than 90 beats/minute, hemoglobin less than 10.5 g/dL, and/or an erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) greater than 30 mm/hour (2). It has long been recognized that these criteria are indications for hospitalization and intravenous corticosteroid therapy (3,4). However, it is apparent that the spectrum of ulcerative colitis extends beyond the severity to necessitate hospitalization to fulminant colitis and toxic megacolon, implying progression of mucosal inflammation into deeper layers of the colon wall (5), which is a medical emergency requiring more intense and combined medical and surgical management (6). In addition to the symptomatic criteria set forth by Truelove and Witts, patients with fulminant colitis or toxic megacolon have evidence of transmural inflammation, including more profound tachycardia (heart rate greater than 120 beats/minute), fever (greater than 38◦C), hypoactive bowel sounds, hypoalbuminemia, and metabolic alkalosis, accompanied by radiologic and endoscopic evidence of transmural disease and circular muscle paralysis, which precipitates dilatation (7) (Table 156.1). Approximately 15% of patients with ulcerative colitis will have a severe flare-up that will require hospitalization (3,8). Between 6.3% and 9% will have severe colitis as their initial presentation (8). Mortality from severe colitis is less than 2%, with a colectomy rate of about 30% (2,3). The risks of surgery or colectomy with fulminant colitis or toxic megacolon have not been independently assessed, but their prognosis is, most certainly, worse than patients presenting with criteria for severe colitis alone (7).
Knowledge Management for ERP success

The business value of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and in general large software implementations has been extensively debated in both popular press and academic literature for over three decades. Despite the positive motives for adoption, various organizations have reported negative impacts from these large investments. This ‘disconnect’ between large IS investments and firms’ organizational performance may be attributable to the economic transition from an era of competitive advantage based on information to one that is based on Knowledge. This paper discusses the initial findings of a two-phased study that focuses on empirically assessing the impact of knowledge management on the success of Enterprise Resource Planning systems. The research study uses information gathered from twenty-seven public sector organizations in Queensland, Australia. Validation of the a priori model constructs through factor analysis identified two dimensions of knowledge management. Further analysis assessed the comparative differences in perceptions of knowledge management in ERP, across four employment cohorts.
An Incoherent Magnetic Field Inhibited EGF Receptor Clustering and Phosphorylation Induced by a 50-Hz Magnetic Field in Cultured FL Cells

Previously, we found that exposure to a 50-Hz magnetic field (MF) at 0.4 mT could induce epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor clustering in Chinese hamster lung (CHL) fibroblast cells and superposition of an incoherent MF with the same intensity could inhibit the effect. In the present experiment, we investigated the effects of 50-Hz MF exposure at different intensities on EGF receptor clustering and phosphorylation in human amniotic cells (FL), and explored the interaction effect of an incoherent MF. Clustering and phosphorylation of EGF receptors on cellular membrane surface were analyzed using immunofluorescence assessed by confocal microscopy and western blot technology, respectively. EGF treatment served as a positive control. The results showed that, compared with sham exposure, exposure to a 50-Hz MF at 0.1, 0.2 or 0.4 mT for 15 min could significantly induce EGF receptor clustering and enhance phosphorylation on tyrosine-1173 residue in FL cells, whereas exposure to a 0.05 mT field for 15 min did not caused a significant effect. Exposure to an incoherent MF (frequency range between 30 to 90 Hz) at 0.2 mT for the same time neither induced EGF receptor clustering nor enhanced phosphorylation of EGF receptor in FL cells. When superposed, the incoherent MF at 0.2 mT completely inhibited EGF receptor clustering and phosphorylation induced by a 50-Hz MF at 0.1 and 0.2 mT. However, the incoherent MF could not completely eliminate the effects induced by a 0.4 mT 50-Hz MF. Based on the results of this experiment, we conclude that membrane receptors could be one of the main targets where extremely-low frequency (ELF) MF interacts with cells, and the intensity threshold, in the case of EGF receptors, is between 0.05 and 0.1 mT. An incoherent MF could completely inhibit the effects induced by an ELF-MF of equal or lower intensity.