Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Magic wavelengths of Ca+ ion for linearly and circularly polarized light

The dynamic dipole polarizabilities of the low-lying states of Ca+ ion for linearly and circularly polarized light are calculated by using relativistic configuration interaction plus core polarization (RCICP) approach. Present magic wavelengths for linearly polarized light agree with the available results excellently. Additional magic wavelengths have been found for circularly polarized light, which is very useful for magnetic-sublevel selective trapping.
field soil moisture measurements with Radar

-As reported in [1], the Material Characteristics in Frequency Domain coupled with a 2 layer feed-forward Neural Network, MCFD/NN, has been succ essfully applied to soil moisture determination. The results were obtained under controlled laborato ry c nditions. Extension to open field soil moistur e determination has been reported in [2] and it was s hown that the MCFD/NN approach gives accurate resul ts under an uncontrolled environment. In the present r search, open field soil moisture determination bas ed on the MCFD/NN algorithm is further explored with data obtained from a four-day campaign at the Universit y of Puerto Rico Mayagüez Campus’ baseball field. Key-Words: Ground-Penetrating Radar, Impulse Radar, Soil Moist ure, Neural Network
Ju n 20 02 MAXIMALLY INFLECTED REAL RATIONAL CURVES

We introduce and begin the topological study of real rational plane curves, all of whose inflection points are real. The existence of such curves is a corollary of results in the real Schubert calculus, and their study has consequences for the important Shapiro and Shapiro conjecture in the real Schubert calculus. We establish restrictions on the number of real nodes of such curves and construct curves realizing the extreme numbers of real nodes. These constructions imply the existence of real solutions to some problems in the Schubert calculus. We conclude with a discussion of maximally inflected curves of low degree.
Novel and Simple Synthesis Method for Submillimeter Long Vertically Aligned Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes by No-Flow Alcohol Catalytic Chemical Vapor Deposition

Using a conventional thermal chemical vapor deposition (CVD) system, ethanol vapor was enclosed in a reactor, i.e., no flow, with Co/Mo dip-coated quartz substrates to synthesize submillimeter long vertically aligned single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) films successfully. The no-flow CVD method yielded an increase in film thickness of up to 0.11 mm compared with the normal flowing gas method for 30 min of synthesis. The thermal decomposition of ethanol was investigated using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and quadrupole mass spectrometry. At CVD temperatures, ethanol decomposed mainly into ethylene, acetylene, acetaldehyde, and water. Some of these molecules could enhance SWNT growth.
ByteSTM: Java Software Transactional Memory at the Virtual Machine Level

(ABSTRACT) As chip vendors are increasingly manufacturing a new generation of multi-processor chips called multicores, improving software performance requires exposing greater concurrency in software. Since code that must be run sequentially is often due to the need for synchronization , the synchronization abstraction has a significant effect on program performance. Lock-based synchronization – the most widely used synchronization method – suffers from programability, scalability, and composability challenges. Transactional memory (TM) is an emerging synchronization abstraction that promises to alleviate the difficulties with lock-based synchronization. With TM, code that read/write shared memory objects is organized as transactions, which speculatively execute. When two transactions conflict (e.g., read/write, write/write), one of them is aborted, while the other commits, yielding (the illusion of) atomicity. Aborted transactions are restarted , after rolling-back changes made to objects. In addition to a simple programming model, TM provides performance comparable to lock-based synchronization. Software transactional memory (STM) implements TM entirely in software, without any special hardware support, and is usually implemented as a library, or supported by a compiler or by a virtual machine. In this thesis, we present ByteSTM, a virtual machine-level Java STM implementation. ByteSTM implements two STM algorithms, TL2 and RingSTM, and transparently supports implicit transactions. Program bytecode is automatically modified to support transactions: memory load/store bytecode instructions automatically switch to transactional mode when a transaction starts, and switch back to normal mode when the transaction successfully commits. Being implemented at the VM-level, it accesses memory directly and uses absolute memory addresses to uniformly handle memory. Moreover, it avoids Java garbage collection (which has a negative impact on STM performance), by manually allocating and recycling memory for transactional metadata. ByteSTM uses field-based granularity, and uses the thread header to store transactional metadata, instead of the slower Java ThreadLocal abstraction. We conducted experimental studies comparing ByteSTM with other state-of-the-art Java STMs including Deuce, ObjectFabric, Multiverse, DSTM2, and JVSTM on a set of micro-benchmarks and macro-benchmarks. Our results reveal that, ByteSTM's transactional throughput improvement over competitors ranges from 20% to 75% on micro-benchmarks and from 36% to 100% on macro-benchmarks. Without her love, care and support, I could not have completed this thesis To my parents. Without their love, trust and continued support, I could not have made their dream true iii Acknowledgments First, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Binoy Ravindran, for his continues support, help, guidance, encouragement, and trust. He believed in me …
Low Power Remote Neonatal Temperature Monitoring Device

In this paper we present the design of a wearable temperature sensing device for remote neonatal monitoring. It is designed for continuous and real-time monitoring of the infants in remote rural areas, for the first few weeks after their birth. It is capable of sensing the neonate’s skin temperature with 0.1◦ C accuracy to detect the early onset of hypothermia. The sensed data is transferred securely over bluetooth low energy radio to a nearby gateway, which then relays the information to a central database for real time monitoring. The device incorporates a medical grade thermistor which is directly interfaced to a microcontroller with an integrated bluetooth low energy radio. Low power optimizations at both the circuit and software levels ensure sleep currents of only 1uA, ensuring very long battery life. The device is packaged in a baby friendly, water proof housing and is easily sterilizable and reusable.
ISPCA: IDPSO-Based Service Pool Construction Algorithm

QoS-driven web services selection plays an important role in web service composition. Since the selected services would fail down because of the dynamic network situation, this paper presents a service pool model to help users save more composite plans in one selection process. In addition, an efficient service pool construction algorithm, ISPCA, based on an Improved Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (IDPSO) is also proposed. And the third contribution of our work was that a non-uniform mutation strategy (NUMS) is introduced to the global best particle in IDPSO to enhance the quality of composite plans in service pool. The results of experimental evaluation indicate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods in execution time while selecting more combinations with better QoS performance.
Implementation of interleaved dual boost converter utilizing FPGA for PWM

Boost converter with high power has turned into the key part of the power framework that enables power to be completely used. The novel way to accomplish a decreased current ripple and voltage ripple for dc chopper is actualized. Typical boost converter is interleaved to stop high input current stress on the switches. Interleaved Dual Boost Converter has two boost converter worked in parallel and controlled utilizing interleaved strategy with same frequency and phase shift. This method permits assembling a high productive and compact converter. In this paper different parameters of the interleaved dual boost converter are contrasted with a conventional boost converter for an output of 70V, 2A. The outcomes demonstrate that this converter accomplishes a superior performance.
Fusion of multiple microphone arrays for blind source separation and localization

Motivated by potential applications such as the use of multiple robots to collaboratively localize multiple objects/events of interest through audio cues, we propose a novel solution for blind source separation (BSS) and localization using multiple microphone arrays. Unlike the existing state-of-the-art where direction of arrivals (DOAs) and locations are estimated sequentially, the proposed approach jointly estimates both by solving a constrained optimization problem, in which the dependence of the separated signals is minimized. By adopting the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), the problem can be solved in a distributed way in which only the local DOA estimates are communicated among arrays in each iteration. Because the augmented Lagrangian used in ADMM naturally forces the estimates to approach true values by adding penalties on non-optimal ones, the critical scaling and permutation problems in BSS are solved simultaneously. Simulation results further demonstrate that the estimation accuracy can be significantly improved using the proposed method.
Terrain traversability in rescue environments

3D Terrain understanding and structure estimation is a crucial issue for robots navigating rescue scenarios. Large scale 3D point clouds, even if crisp and yielding a detailed representation of the scene, provide no information about what is ground, and what is top, what can be surmounted and what can be not, what can be crossed, and what is too deep to be traversed. In this work, we propose a new preliminary method for point cloud structuring, leading to the definition of a traversability map labeled with a cost that specifies how far is the considered region from a traversable one. The representation comes with a real-time algorithm that can be used for the safe navigation of a specific robot, according to its own limitations or constraints. Here, by robot constraints, we mean the length, height, weight of the robot, together with its kinematics constraints (in terms of ground mobility). We present results of the method with experiments taken on different scenarios, furthermore we illustrate the pros and contras of relying only on points cloud data set, without resorting to a surface reconstruction.
GNSS-based Positioning: Attacks and countermeasures

Increasing numbers of mobile computing devices, user-portable, or embedded in vehicles, cargo containers, or the physical space, need to be aware of their location in order to provide a wide range of commercial services. Most often, mobile devices obtain their own location with the help of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), integrating, for example, a global positioning system (GPS) receiver. Nonetheless, an adversary can compromise location-aware applications by attacking the GNSS-based positioning: It can forge navigation messages and mislead the receiver into calculating a fake location. In this paper, we analyze this vulnerability and propose and evaluate the effectiveness of countermeasures. First, we consider replay attacks, which can be effective even in the presence of future cryptographic GNSS protection mechanisms. Then, we propose and analyze methods that allow GNSS receivers to detect the reception of signals generated by an adversary, and then reject fake locations calculated because of the attack. We consider three diverse defense mechanisms, all based on knowledge, in particular, own location, time, and Doppler shift, receivers can obtain prior to the onset of an attack. We find that inertial mechanisms that estimate location can be defeated relatively easy. This is equally true for the mechanism that relies on clock readings from off-the-shelf devices; as a result, highly stable clocks could be needed. On the other hand, our Doppler Shift Test can be effective without any specialized hardware, and it can be applied to existing devices.
A study of ontology convergence in a semantic Wiki

Semantic Wikis propose a combination of both easy collaboration and semantic expressivity; characteristics of the WikiWikiWeb and the Semantic Web respectively. In this paper we look to define and analyse the Semantic Wiki method, in order to explore the effect of different Semantic Wiki characteristics on the quality of the semantic networks authored within them. We look at a number of different Semantic Wiki implementations, including their semantic expressivity and usability. We focus on support for ontology creation, and perform an evaluation on the effect of type suggestion tools on ontology convergence within a seeded and unseeded Wiki (using Semantic MediaWiki and our own MOCA extension). We find that seeding a Wiki with typed pages and links has a strong effect on the quality of the emerging structure and that convergence tools have the potential to replicate that effect with an unseeded Wiki, but that they have limited impact on the reuse of elements from the evolving ontology.
Ultrasonic assessment of children's cortical bone anisotropy

Child cortical bone tissue is rarely studied because of the difficulty of obtaining samples. Yet the preparation and ultrasonic characterization of the small samples available, while challenging, is one of the most promising ways of obtaining information on the mechanical behavior of non-pathological children’s bone. We investigated children’s cortical bone obtained from chirurgical waste. Stiffness cœfficients were evaluated via an ultrasonic method. We observe a transverse isotropy with the plane perpendicular to the bone axis as an isotropic plane for adults and children. Stiffness cœfficients were highly correlated with age in children. Mots clefs : os cortical enfant, ultrasons, anisotropie
Periodic sensing trajectory generation for persistent monitoring

This paper presents periodic trajectory optimization method for a mobile sensor performing persistent monitoring to maintain the uncertainty in the environment at the minimum. The uncertain environment is represented by a set of deterministic spatial basis function with the stochastic temporal dynamic coefficients. An optimal control problem is formulated to determine the optimal periodic trajectory of the sensor and the uncertainty state as well as the initial condition and the period. The path induces the periodic Riccati equation and is proven to lead an arbitrary initial uncertainty state to the optimized periodic trajectory. It is also shown that the resulting optimal periodic solution can be used to develop a subopitmal filtering mechanism for the mobile sensor. A simple synthetic example is presented for preliminary demonstration the validity of the proposed methodology, producing physically meaningful sensing trajectories.
AN ALGORITHM FOR THE SOLUTION OFINVERSE KINEMATICS

In this paper we describe a general procedure to solve the posi-tional inverse kinematics problem using an interval method. The classical interval Newton method is used together with speciic developed interval cuts over the closure equations. The algorithm uses a basic branch-and-bound procedure to obtain all solutions of the inverse positional problem of arbitrary single-loop kinematic chains. Some preliminary examples are given, although still much improvement can be done in the heuristics involved and the code optimization, leaving plenty of room for future improvements .
Modeling evidence for enhanced El Nino-Southern Oscillation amplitude during the Last Glacial Maximum

(1) We present a numerical eigenmode analysis of an intermediate El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) model which is driven by present-day observed background conditions as well as by simulated background conditions for the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) about 21,000 years ago. The background conditions are obtained from two LGM simulations which were performed with the National Center for Atmospheric Research climate system model (CSM1.4) and an Earth system model of intermediate complexity (ECBilt-CLIO). Our analysis clearly shows that the leading present-day unstable recharge-discharge mode changes its stability as well as its frequency during LGM conditions. Simulated LGM background conditions were favorable to support large-amplitude self-sustained interannual ENSO variations in the tropical Pacific. Our analysis indicates that off-equatorial climate conditions as well as a shoaling of the thermocline play a crucial role in amplifying the LGM ENSO mode. INDEX TERMS: 1615 Global Change: Biogeochemical processes (4805); 3344 Meteorology and Atmospheric Dynamics: Paleoclimatology; 4215 Oceanography: General: Climate and interannual variability (3309); 4271 Oceanography: General: Physical and chemical properties of seawater; 4522 Oceanography: Physical: El Nino; KEYWORDS: ENSO, Last Glacial Maximum, eigenmode
Production of Functional Soluble Dectin-1 Glycoprotein Using an IRES-Linked Destabilized-Dihydrofolate Reductase Expression Vector

Dectin-1 (CLEC7A) is a C-type lectin receptor that binds to β-glucans found in fungal cell walls to act as a major pattern recognition receptor (PRR). Since β-glucans epitope is not present in human cells, we are of the opinion that Dectin-1 can have therapeutic functions against fungal infections. We thus set out to produce a soluble extracellular domain of murine Dectin-1 (called sDectin-1) in sufficient titers to facilitate such studies in mouse models. Since sDectin-1 has previously been shown to be glycosylated, we chose to produce this protein using Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells, a mammalian host cell line suitable for the high-titer production of recombinant glycoproteins. To ensure a high titer production of sDectin-1 and minimize the effects of gene fragmentation, we constructed a mammalian expression vector with a PEST-destabilized dhfr amplifiable marker downstream of an attenuated IRES element, which was in turn downstream of the sDectin-1 gene and a CMV IE promoter. Stably transfected and MTX-amplified cell pools were generated using this vector, and maximum sDectin-1 titers of 246 mg/l and 598 mg/l were obtained in shake flask batch culture and bioreactor fed-batch culture respectively. The purified recombinant sDectin-1 was shown to be glycosylated. Protein functionality was also demonstrated by its ability to bind to zymosan particles and to the cell wall of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We describe for the first time the use of an attenuated IRES-linked PEST-destabilized dhfr amplifiable marker for the production of recombinant proteins with stably amplified cell pools. With our process, we reached the highest reported titer for producing recombinant proteins smaller than 50 kDa in cell pools. sDectin-1 protein produced is glycosylated and functional. This vector design can thus be used efficiently for the high-titer production of functional recombinant proteins.
14 Airline Crew Scheduling

Crew scheduling can be defined as the problem of assigning a group of workers (a crew) to a set of tasks. The crews are typically interchangeable , although in some cases different crews possess different characteristics that affect which subsets of tasks they can complete. Crew scheduling problems appear in a number of transportation contexts. Examples include bus and rail transit, truck and rail freight transport , and freight and passenger air transportation. There are many common elements to all of these problems, including the need to cover all tasks while seeking to minimize labor costs, and a wide variety of constraints imposed by safety regulations and labor negotiations. Nonetheless , each application also has its own unique characteristics and its own research challenges. In fact, most crew scheduling research focuses on a particular application, rather than the general case. In this chapter, we focus on the airline crew scheduling problem. [For additional details on crew scheduling in the railway industry we refer the reader to Caprara et al., 1998 and for crew scheduling in mass transit systems to Wilson, 1999. ] There are a number of reasons for focusing on airlines. First, they provide a context for examining many of the elements common to all crew scheduling problems. Second, the airline problem is truly a planning problem in the sense that airlines typically have a fixed schedule that changes at most monthly. Therefore, substantial time and resources can be (and are) allocated to solving it. Third, airline crews receive substantially higher salaries than equivalent personnel in other modes of transportation; the savings associated with an improved airline crew schedule can be quite significant. Finally, a large number of restrictive rules, mandated both by the FAA (or equivalent governing agencies for non-U.S. carriers) and strong labor unions, greatly restrict the set of feasible solutions, making airline crew scheduling one
A signal disambiguation algorithm for use in multi-beam receivers

Receiver systems designed to simultaneously act on multiple wideband signals of interest must be able to differentiate between the different wideband signals of interest in the electromagnetic environment. Separation of interference sources from signals of interest relies on a system having either spatial or spectral diversity to detect and remove the interference sources. If interference sources are co-located in either frequency or space with the signal of interest classical techniques fail to resolve the signals of interest within the interference. This paper presents a new signal disambiguation algorithm with both spatial and spectral diversity that is able to act in a congested electromagnetic environment and distinguish between multiple signals of interest while rejecting noise co-located in frequency and/or space with the signals of interest.
The presence of hydrogenotrophic methanogens in the inoculum improves methane gas production in microbial electrolysis cells

High current densities in microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) result from the predominance of various Geobacter species on the anode, but it is not known if archaeal communities similarly converge to one specific genus. MECs were examined here on the basis of maximum methane production and current density relative to the inoculum community structure. We used anaerobic digester (AD) sludge dominated by acetoclastic Methanosaeta, and an anaerobic bog sediment where hydrogenotrophic methanogens were detected. Inoculation using solids to medium ratio of 25% (w/v) resulted in the highest methane production rates (0.27 mL mL−1 cm−2, gas volume normalized by liquid volume and cathode projected area) and highest peak current densities (0.5 mA cm−2) for the bog sample. Methane production was independent of solid to medium ratio when AD sludge was used as the inoculum. 16S rRNA gene community analysis using pyrosequencing and quantitative PCR confirmed the convergence of Archaea to Methanobacterium and Methanobrevibacter, and of Bacteria to Geobacter, despite their absence in AD sludge. Combined with other studies, these findings suggest that Archaea of the hydrogenotrophic genera Methanobacterium and Methanobrevibacter are the most important microorganisms for methane production in MECs and that their presence in the inoculum improves the performance.