Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Asymmetric Mode Control of MMC to Suppress Capacitor Voltage Ripples in Low-Frequency, Low-Voltage Conditions

This paper proposes an asymmetric mode control for a modular multilevel converter (MMC) operating at low-frequency and low-output-voltage conditions. Differently from conventional symmetric operations, affected by large capacitor voltage ripples caused by the large dc-link voltage, with the proposed asymmetric mode MMC operations, one arm does not produce output current and applies the major dc-link voltage, whereas the other arm sustains almost all output current with low dc-link voltage. Variations of the power level in arms remain bounded and the MMC does not need any other power exchange technique such as high-frequency or harmonic current injection in a low-frequency/low-voltage condition to suppress the capacitor voltage ripple. The asymmetric control realization, and arm energy regulation and its optimization are presented in detail. Experimental and simulation results show that the proposed method is suitable for motor drives operating under 20 Hz.
A novel SLA-aware approach for web service composition

Changeable requirements for modern services, provided in global environment, and their constant reengineering demand dynamic composition of services which is able to estimate changes of various parameters, both functional and non-functional ones. Web Services Agreement is a convenient way to contain QoS parameters, but state-of-the-art SLA-aware methods are not able to support all classes of nonfunctional parameters and provide runtime support and dynamic reconfiguration at the same time. This paper provides a novel SLA-aware dynamic Web Services Composition Approach that allows performing such composition.
Design and optimization of distributed multiuser cooperative wireless networks

Employing multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver sides has been identified as the key enabler for high spectral efficiency in point-to-point communication, since it facilitates multiplexing of several data streams in space rather than in time/frequency. In this work, we are interested in achieving spatial multiplexing (SM) through efficient cooperative relaying schemes, even if both the transmit and receive antennas are distributed. To this end, we focus on wireless multiuser networks and aim at designing novel cooperative communication protocols, developing corresponding transmission and signal processing techniques, and optimizing the network performance. This thesis is presented in two main parts. In the first part, we consider coherent multiuser amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying, where a set of source-destination (S-D) terminal pairs communicate concurrently over the same physical channel and a set of AF relay nodes assist the communication in a half-duplex scheme. It is known that multiuser interference can be cancelled with sufficient spatial degrees of freedom, i.e. relays. When additional relays are introduced to the network, we show that further multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) gains can be achieved in a distributed manner through efficient (complex) relay gain optimizations. We choose two objective functions to maximize: sum rate and minimum link rate (max-min fairness). Moreover, it is shown that distributed diversity can be attained at the destinations through either relay selection or max-min type relay gain optimizations. Such gain allocation schemes require global knowledge of the channel coefficients between all participating nodes, which in practice may well diminish the spatial multiplexing gain. Addressing this issue, we introduce a new distributed gradient based gain allocation scheme, which substantially reduces this overhead. Key to this is the proof, that the gradient of the destination signal-tointerference-plus-noise ratio can be calculated in a distributed manner based on local channel state information (CSI) at the relays and limited feedback from the destinations. The two sine qua non assumptions for the efficiency of coherent multiuser relaying are perfect CSI knowledge per relay and globally phase-synchronous relays. We take a
A Practical System of Domain Ontology Learning Using the Web for Chinese

This paper proposes an ontology learning system model based on the Web search engine and Protege-OWL API, which emphasizes iterative learning approach by the extracted instances. We discuss taxonomic and non-taxonomic relationship learning separately in ontology learning system, and investigate the importance of verb plus noun phrase learning for extraction of activity concepts in Chinese. We also propose an algorithm of relevance measurement for extracting relation instances by binary keywords based on co-occurrence statistics. Finally, we build a practical system of ontology learning through learning relation instances of the Chinese festival ontology, and test the effectiveness of our method.
Emotion regulation and substance use frequency in women with substance dependence and borderline personality disorder receiving dialectical behavior therapy

Background: Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) identifies emotion dysregulation as central to the dangerous impulsivity of borderline personality disorder (BPD) including substance use disorders, and DBT targets improved emotion regulation as a primary mechanism of change. However, improved emotion regulation with DBT and associations between such improvement and behavioral outcomes such as substance use has not been previously reported. Objective: Thus, the goal of this study was to assess for improvement in emotion regulation and to examine the relationship between improvements in the emotion regulation and substance use problems following DBT treatment. Method: Emotion regulation as assessed by the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, depressed mood as assessed by the Beck Depression Inventory, and their associations with substance use frequency were investigated in 27 women with substance dependence and BPD receiving 20 weeks of DBT in an academic community outpatient substance abuse treatment program. Results: Results indicated improved emotion regulation, improved mood, and decreased substance use frequency. Further, emotion regulation improvement, but not improved mood, explained the variance of decreased substance use frequency. Conclusion and Scientific Significance: This is the first study to demonstrate improved emotion regulation in BPD patients treated with DBT and to show that improved emotion regulation can account for increased behavioral control in BPD patients. Significance and future research: Emotion regulation assessment is recommended for future studies to further clarify the etiology and maintenance of disorders associated with emotional dysregulation such as BPD and substance dependence and to further explore emotion regulation as a potential mechanism of change for clinical interventions.
Recovering the Divide: A Review of Strategy and Tactics in Business and Management

With origins in military history, strategy and tactics is a frequently used conceptual couplet in the business and management literature. This paper reviews how strategy and tactics are portrayed, identifying a dominant ‘pragmatic’ account of strategy as an expression of formal, planned ends achieved through the subordinate means of tactics. Pragmatic distinctions give rise to a range of well-known problems, in particular in strategy implementation stages. We suggest that some of these problems may be avoided when the strategy–tactics relationship is conceived differently. We elaborate two alternative distinctions: a sociological framing of tactics as mechanisms of resistance to formal, controlling strategies; and a processual perspective, which sidesteps fixed distinctions between tactics and strategy, giving rise to more fluid interrelations between both modes. Based on a review of the business and management literature, we identify key examples of each trope and conclude by drawing insights for each account on the basis of these wider discussions.
Incentive Systems in Software Organizations

This paper explains how incentive systems are defined in software development organizations and the impacts that they can have on team productivity. It also supplies a set of guidelines which is being applied in an organization for the purposes of helping managers to define and implement a reward program as part of the organizational strategy to increase the productivity of software development project teams. Besides this, it also tackles the negative impacts that these systems can cause on the productivity of teams when they are badly applied, thus generating the effect of the dysfunction of the measurement system.
Sibship Size and Educational Stratification: Reply to Mare and Chen

Mare and Chen's criticism of my paper, "Number of Siblings and Educational Mobility," may be divided into two categories: statistical/methodological and theoretical/ substantive. Since the statistical/ methodological bears the weight of their concern, I shall deal with it first. The Mare and Chen criticisms are supported by a "replication" and re-analysis using statistical techniques that are the same as, and different from, the ones I employed. One of the three data sets I analyzed, Occupational Changes in a Generation 1973 (OCG 1973), is used illustratively. My response concerning the statistical/ methodological issues is greatly simplified by pointing out a major difference between the Mare and Chen "replication" and my paper. The authors based their calculations concerning college schooling on all men, regardless of prior education (see their Table 1, tier 3; and Table 3, tier 5), thereby creating, in their analysis, the "floor" that they attribute to me and that occupies them for a number of pages. I based my analysis of college schooling (see my original Tables 5 and 9) on men who had graduated from high school. There is thus no "floor" in my calculations of college schooling among different sibsize groups. Among high school graduates, the amounts of college schooling vary across sibsize groups, but not in the extreme fashion that occurs when college schooling is related to men at all levels of prior education, as in Mare and Chen's analysis. This crucial difference in the base for the college schooling calculations negates Mare and Chen's criticism of my analysis of this level of schooling. The "artifact" is a problem in their replication, not in my original paper. I add, for the record, that there is another difference between their "replication" and my analysis. They used the same age group for analyzing all levels of education-men age 20-65. I used this age group for graded schooling, but for higher education I used the age group 25-65 on the grounds that men in their very early twenties are not at risk of accumulating many of the important years of higher education. This difference between the critics and me is relatively trivial, but it may be confusing to readers who
A structure and fast design of compact UWB antenna with upper WLAN band-notch

In this work, a structure of a compact ultra-wideband (UWB) monopole antenna implementing an upper WLAN band-notch, as well as its expedited design optimization procedure, are described. The band-notch is realized using meander-shaped slots in the radiation patch. For the sake of computational efficiency, the design procedure exploits variable-fidelity electromagnetic (EM) simulations as well as adjustment of the slot parameters by means of sequential approximate optimization.
Efficient ID-based Threshold Signature Schemes without Pairings

The focus of this paper is to design an efficient and secure solution addressing the key escrow problem in ID-based signature schemes, i.e., the Private Key Generator (PKG) knows the user’s private key, which damages the essential requirement–“non-repudiation” property of signature schemes. In this paper, we proposed two ID-based threshold signature schemes, which both reach Girault’s trusted level 3, and in which there exists only one PKG in our ID-based threshold signature schemes. In particular, the second scheme has another good property: it does not require trusting any particular party at any time. Compared with the previous schemes, our schemes do not need to compute pairings, which make them be more efficient than those schemes. Furthermore, our ID-based signature schemes increase the availability of the signing agency and the difficulty for the adversary to learn the private key.
Network Coding-Aware Routing in Wireless Networks

A recent approach-COPE, presented by Katti (Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 2006, pp. 243-254)-for improving the throughput of unicast traffic in wireless multihop networks exploits the broadcast nature of the wireless medium through opportunistic network coding. In this paper, we analyze throughput improvements obtained by COPE-type network coding in wireless networks from a theoretical perspective. We make two key contributions. First, we obtain a theoretical formulation for computing the throughput of network coding on any wireless network topology and any pattern of concurrent unicast traffic sessions. Second, we advocate that routing be made aware of network coding opportunities rather than, as in COPE, being oblivious to it. More importantly, our model considers the tradeoff between routing flows close to each other for utilizing coding opportunities and away from each other for avoiding wireless interference. Our theoretical formulation provides a method for computing source-destination routes and utilizing the best coding opportunities from available ones so as to maximize the throughput. We handle scheduling of broadcast transmissions subject to wireless transmit/receive diversity and link interference in our optimization framework. Using our formulations, we compare the performance of traditional unicast routing and network coding with coding-oblivious and coding-aware routing on a variety of mesh network topologies, including some derived from contemporary mesh network testbeds. Our evaluations show that a route selection strategy that is aware of network coding opportunities leads to higher end-to-end throughput when compared to coding-oblivious routing strategies.
Interlinked Isohedral Tilings of 3 D Space Roman Fuchs

Di erent isohedral tilings of the Euclidian Space are studied in this paper. Using the Voronoi zone in various lattices, we derived toroidal shapes that interlink with each other to ll space completely. The tile of main interest was the 3-segment ring-tile, for which we found several linear approximations.
Le dimensioni "deeply" e "broadly" nella ricerca educativa. Lezioni apprese da una ricerca su valutazione e governance nelle scuole

Nel contributo, la riflessione sulle opportunita e sui rischi derivanti dall’impiego dei metodi misti nella ricerca educativa prende le mosse dall’analisi di una indagine empirica, “Valutazione e governance della scuola. Verso un sistema valutativo context-based ”, finalizzata a conoscere le pratiche valutative agite nelle scuole nella prospettiva di sviluppare una governance efficace dell’istituto scolastico. La questione e affrontata sul piano epistemologico, soffermandosi dapprima sulle ragioni che rendono i mixed methods particolarmente appropriati per la ricerca in ambito educativo e precisando poi le resistenze culturali ancora presenti nel contesto italiano. Il superamento della distinzione rigida fra quantitativo e qualitativo, ampiamente sostenuto in letteratura internazionale sebbene a tutt’oggi oggetto di dibattito, e argomentato con riferimento specifico al dispositivo metodologico progettato e implementato nell’indagine presa in esame. Gli elementi e gli spunti emersi sul piano concreto sono poi riletti in modo critico al fine di arricchire il frame teorico di riferimento.
Percutaneous Vertebroplasty for Pathological Vertebral Compression Fractures Secondary to Multiple Myeloma--Medium-Term and Long-Term Assessment of Pain Relief and Quality of Life.

BACKGROUND In patients with multiple myeloma (MM) there is a high risk of compression fractures of the spine. In the majority of cases, the method of treatment is percutaneous vertebroplasty (PV) or kyphoplasty (PK). The number of studies verifying their efficacy in MM is still relatively small. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study has been to assess medium- and long-term pain relief as well as improvement in the quality of life (QL) after PV in MM cases. MATERIAL AND METHODS There was a prospective group of 34 MM cases in which a total of 131 vertebral bodies were augmented by means of PV. It was possible to follow up 22 patients who agreed to take part in the assessment. Their level of daily activity and the level of pain were assessed using the Oswestry Back Pain scale and a visual analogue scale (VAS) before PV and at a later date (medium-term follow up was a mean of 10 months after the last operation). Five out of eight cases in which 4.5-5 years had elapsed since the first PV were tested again (long-term follow-up). RESULTS Relief of pain and improvement of QL, assessed a mean of 10 months after PV, proved to be statistically significant. On the average, pain decreased by 4.7 points as measured on the VAS scale and the average improvement in the QL measured on the Oswestry scale was 27.7%. There were no neurological or general complications. After 4.5-5 years, there has not been any significant change in the level of pain relief or the improvement in the QL in the 5 cases in which long-term assessment was possible. CONCLUSIONS In MM cases, PV is a simple, effective and safe method for the treatment of vertebral infiltration and compression fractures, giving permanent long-term pain relief and concomitant improvement in the QL.
Testing Model-Processing Tools for Embedded Systems

Model-based development is increasingly becoming the method of choice for developing embedded systems for applications in automotive and aerospace industries. It relies on tool-suites consisting of a variety of model-processing tools like simulators, model-translators and code-generators. The correctness of these tools used in the development process is a key requirement for safety critical applications. This paper proposes a novel testing methodology for the rigorous verification of model processing tools. The proposed methodology takes as input the syntactic and semantic meta-model of a modeling language, expressed in the form of inference rules. Using a coverage criteria over this meta-model, it generates test-models, and test-inputs for these test-models. Apart from testing the syntactic aspects of the translation, our method aims at testing subtle semantic interactions of the modeling language that are potentially mistranslated by the model-processing tools. We illustrate the methodology with a simple prototypical process calculus. We also report on the experiments carried out with Stateflow, a variant of hierarchical state-machines implemented in the Matlab/Simulink tool-suite
Classifying Structural MRI Scans of Patients with Major Depressive Disorder

The goal of this paper is to determine if machine learning algorithms can be applied to distinguish differences between structural MRI brain scans of patients with Major Depressive Disorder and those of healthy patients. A large range of standard machine learning techniques were tested in this study. While a majority of these suffer from the small size of the dataset we used and thus are prone to overfitting, it appears that Deep Belief Nets can be trained for this classifying task with a reasonable accuracy. I. PROBLEM STATEMENT Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a serious mental ailment that affects 10-25% of women and 5-12% of men. Symptoms include headaches, irritability, a feeling of worthlessness, and thoughts of suicide. Although 2/3 of people diagnosed with MDD at some point in their life recover completely, family members may be 1.5 to 3 times more likely to develop this condition. Currently, the diagnosis of MDD relies upon self-reported experiences of a patient. These diagnoses are often biased. MDD patients may deny that their feelings are abnormal. For this reason, it is critical that unbiased tests be developed to diagnose this disorder. Recent research using machine learning on medical images, such as fMRI and MRI scans, has proved to be successful for many diagnosis algorithms, such as drug addiction [1]; Ecker et. al. [2] recently used support vector machines (SVM) on MRI scans to diagnose autism with accuracies over 80%. In this paper, we will discuss several algorithms we used to classify structural MR images of patients with MDD and controls. In the future, these algorithms may be used to develop a clinical diagnosis for MDD and may even provide insight on the causes of this disorder.
Relations Between Graphs Jan Hubička

Given two graphsG = (VG, EG) andH = (VH , EH), we ask under which conditions there is a relationR ⊆ VG × VH that generates the edges of H given the structure of the graphG. This construction can be seen as a form of multihomomorphis m. It generalizes surjective homomorphisms of graphs and naturally leads to n o io s of R-retractions, Rcores, and R-cocores of graphs. Both R-cores and R-cocores o f graphs are unique up to isomorphism and can be computed in polynomial time.
Student Understanding of the Cartesian Connection: An Exploratory Study

The topic of multiple representations of functions is important in secondary school mathematics curricula, yet many students leave high school lacking an understanding of the connections among these representations. Research results are presented from a study in which students' understandings of the connections between algebraic and graphical representations of functions were examined. Responses from 178 students, enrolled in 1 st-year algebra through calculus, revealed an overwhelming reliance on algebraic representations, even on tasks for which a graphical representation seemed more appropriate. The findings indicate that for familiar routine problems many students have mastered the connections between the algebraic and graphical representations; however, such mastery appeared to be superficial at best.
Motivation to teach: the case of Arab teachers in Israel

Abstract This paper describes an attempt to identify factors influencing teachers’ motivation in the Arab education system. In-depth interviews with 10 school principals, 15 teachers and 3 counsellors, yielded three themes influencing Arab teachers’ motivation: (1) Arab culture, (2) the school climate and (3) government policies. Arab teachers try to meet both government requirements and the minority Arab society’s expectations that they will shape students’ academic achievements, national identity and culture. Deficient resources and Arab principals’ detached management styles augment the difficulty, negatively influencing teachers’ motivation. Suggestions are given to improve government policies and Arab principals’ work and thus to enhance teachers’ motivation.