Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Four-quadrant flyback converter for direct audio power amplification

This paper presents a bidirectional, four-quadrant flyback converter for use in direct audio power amplification. When compared to the standard class-D switching-mode audio power amplifier with separate power supply, the proposed four-quadrant flyback converter provides simple and compact solution with high efficiency, higher level of integration, lower component count, less board space and eventually lower cost. Both peak and average current-mode control for use with 4Q flyback power converters are described and compared. Integrated magnetics is presented which simplifies the construction of the auxiliary power supplies for control biasing and isolated gate drives. The feasibility of the approach is proven on audio power amplifier prototype for subwoofer applications
Macss: A metadata-aware combo storage system

To improve the I/O performance of servers, replacing Hard Disk Drives (HDD) with Solid State Drives (SSD) may be the best way, for SSDs have higher throughput than HDDs in terms of write and read, especially for random access pattern. But the cost per gigabytes (GB) of SSDs is ten or more times higher than that of HDDs. So constructing storage system with HDDs and SSDs is a practical way to improve the performance while at a lower cost. In this paper, we presented Macss, a combo storage prototype with block mapping in generic block layer based on Linux Ext3/Ext2. In Macss, SSD is used as metadata keeper, read-data buffer, and synchronous write data pool. We also evaluated Macss with the benchmark and the real workload. The experimental results show that even with a small proportion of SSD, more than 35% I/O requests can be served by the SSD for real workload. As a result, the average I/O response time is reduced.
Electroacupuncture Reduces the Effects of Acute Noxious Stimulation on the Electrical Activity of Pain-Related Neurons in the Hippocampus of Control and Neuropathic Pain Rats

To study the effects of acupuncture analgesia on the hippocampus, we observed the effects of electroacupuncture (EA) and mitogen-activated protein kinase (MEK) inhibitor on pain-excited neurons (PENs) and pain-inhibited neurons (PINs) in the hippocampal area CA1 of sham or chronic constrictive injury (CCI) rats. The animals were randomly divided into a control, a CCI, and a U0126 (MEK1/2 inhibitor) group. In all experiments, we briefly (10-second duration) stimulated the sciatic nerve electrically and recorded the firing rates of PENs and PINs. The results showed that in both sham and CCI rats brief sciatic nerve stimulation significantly increased the electrical activity of PENs and markedly decreased the electrical activity of PINs. These effects were significantly greater in CCI rats compared to sham rats. EA treatment reduced the effects of the noxious stimulus on PENs and PINs in both sham and CCI rats. The effects of EA treatment could be inhibited by U0126 in sham-operated rats. The results suggest that EA reduces effects of acute sciatic nerve stimulation on PENs and PINs in the CA1 region of the hippocampus of both sham and CCI rats and that the ERK (extracellular regulated kinase) signaling pathway is involved in the modulation of EA analgesia.
Activity driven modeling of dynamic networks

Nicola Perra, Bruno Gonçalves, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, Alessandro Vespignani Department of Physics, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Department of Health Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston MA 02115 USA Linkalab, Cagliari, Italy Departament de F́ısica i Enginyeria Nuclear, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord B4, 08034 Barcelona, Spain Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, Turin 10133, Italy Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138
Enhancement of Oral Bioavailability of Curcumin by a Novel Solid Dispersion System

The objective of this study was to improve the solubility and bioavailability of curcumin by a new curcumin dripping pills (Cur-DPs) formulation using melt mixing methods. The optimal formulation consisted of Polyethoxylated 40 hydrogenated castor oil (Cremophor RH40), Poloxamer 188, and Polyethylene glycol 4000 (PEG 4000). Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD), and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) were used to verify the forming of Cur-DPs. All the physical characterization information proved the formation of Cur-DPs, and the results demonstrated the superiority of the dripping pills in dissolution rates. The pharmacokinetic study of Cur-DPs was performed in rats compared to the pure curcumin suspension. The oral bioavailability of poorly water-soluble curcumin was successfully improved by CUR-DPs. And the stability of prepared Cur-DP was also in a good state in 3 months. These results identified the Cur-DPs was an effective new approach for pharmaceutical application.
Sensorless control for synchronous motors

Permanent magnet synchronous motors are used in many industrial applications because they have several inherent advantages. However, information about the rotor position is necessary even to be able to control drive speed. Conventional speed and position detection uses encoder and resolver. These sensors significantly increase price, weight, and degrade reliability. Therefore many authors publish papers about algorithms for rotor position and speed estimation. One of state estimation possibility is using extended Kalman filter. Conventional algorithms based on EKF are developed using a simple model of permanent magnet synchronous motor, thereby provide bad performance in the low speed range. Extended Kalman filter using an interior permanent magnet synchronous motor model is described in this paper. This model makes possible for EKF to operate in low speeds. Second part of this paper describes an algorithm Model Reference Adaptive system (MRAS).
DCU@TRECMed 2012: Using adhoc Baselines for Domain-Specific Retrieval

Abstract : This paper describes the first participation of DCU in the TREC Medical Records Track (TRECMed) 2012. We performed initial experiments on the 2011 TRECMed data based on the BM25 retrieval model. Surprisingly, we found that the standard BM25 model with default parameters performs comparable to the best automatic runs submitted to TRECMed 2011 and our experiments would have ranked among the top four out of 29 participating groups. We expected that some form of domain adaptation would increase performance. However results on the 2011 data proved otherwise: query expansion decreased performance, and filtering and reranking by term proximity also decreased performance slightly. We submitted four runs based on the BM25 retrieval model to TRECMed 2012 using standard BM25, standard query expansion, result filtering, and concept-based query expansion. Official results for 2012 confirm that domain-specific knowledge, as applied by us, does not increase performance compared to the BM25 baseline.
Visual Guided Approach-to-grasp for Humanoid Robots

Vision based control for robots has been an active area of research for more than 30 years and significant progresses in the theory and application have been reported (Hutchinson et al., 1996; Kragic & Christensen, 2002; Chaumette & Hutchinson, 2006). Vision is a very important non-contact measurement method for robots. Especially in the field of humanoid robots, where the robot works in an unstructured and complex environment designed for human, visual control can make the robot more robust and flexible to unknown changes in the environment (Hauck et al., 1999). Humanoid robot equipped with vision system is a typical hand-eye coordination system. With cameras mounted on the head, the humanoid robot can manipulate objects with his hands. Generally, the most common task for the humanoid robot is the approach-to-grasp task (Horaud et al., 1998). There are many aspects concerned with the visual guidance of a humanoid robot, such as vision system configuration and calibration, visual measurement, and visual control. One of the important issues in applying vision system is the calibration of the system, including camera calibration and head-eye calibration. Calibration has received wide attentions in the communities of photogrammetry, computer vision, and robotics (Clarke & Fryer, 1998). Many researchers have contributed elegant solutions to this classical problem, such as Faugeras and Toscani, Tsai, Heikkila and Silven, Zhang, Ma, Xu. (Faugeras & Toscani, 1986; Tsai, 1987; Heikkila & Silven, 1997; Zhang, 2000; Ma, 1996; Xu et al., 2006a). Extensive efforts have been made to achieve the automatic or self calibration of the whole vision system with high accuracy (Tsai & Lenz, 1989). Usually, in order to gain a wide field of view, the humanoid robot employs cameras with lens of short focal length, which have a relatively large distortion. This requires a more complex nonlinear model to represent the distortion and makes the accurate calibration more difficult (Ma et al., 2003). Another difficulty in applying vision system is the estimation of the position and orientation of an object relative to the camera, known as visual measurement. Traditionally, the position of a point can be determined with its projections on two or more cameras based on epipolar geometry (Harley & Zisserman, 2004). Han et al. measured the pose of a door knob relative to the end-effector of the manipulator with a specially designed mark attached on the knob
Oil Price and Exchange Rate Relationship for ASEAN-5 Countries: A Panel Study Approach

The goal of this paper is to estimate the long run effects of real oil price and real interest rate differential on real exchange rate for a monthly panel of ASEAN-5 countries from 1983 to 2012. The modeling exercise begins with the determination of the stationarity condition of the variables which are found to be integrated of order one. Using several panel cointegration tests, the paper finds evidence of cointegration among the three variables. Finally, using pooled mean group estimator, the paper finds a negative and statistically significant impact of real oil price on real exchange rate for ASEAN-5 countries, implying that increase in real oil price leads to real exchange rate appreciation.
Does micro-variability make models more complex? a comparison between diffusive and linear evidence accumulation

Most theories of how decisions are made assume that the accumulation of evidence from the environment is a noisy process. Recently, models have been proposed which do not have this micro-variability, and as a result are simple in the sense of being analytically tractable. We use a global model analysis method called landscaping to show that in terms of flexibility, simply removing micro-variability does not necessarily make a model more simple. Our landscaping also highlights an experimental design which might be helpful in discriminating between different response models.
An Empirical Investigation of the Determinants of Attention to Attributes in Choice Experiments

Recent results showed that taking into account attention to attributes in random utility models leads to better fitting models. In this paper, we study a proposition to model attention to attributes instead of monitoring it. We test this model considering attention as a choice. The results show that these factors have a low power of prediction of stated attention to single attributes.
Transferring PoS-tagging and lemmatization tools from spoken to written Dutch corpus development

We describe a case study in the reuse and transfer of tools in language resource development, from a corpus of spoken Dutch to a corpus of written Dutch. Once tools for a particular language have been developed, it is logical, but not trivial to reuse them for other types or registers of the language than the tools were originally designed for. This paper reviews the decisions and adaptations necessary to make this particular transfer from spoken to written language, focusing on a part-of-speech tagger and a lemmatizer. While the lemmatizer can be transferred fairly straightforwardly, the tagger needs to be adaptated considerably. We show how it can be adapted without starting from scratch. We describe how the part-of-speech tagset was adapted and how the tagger was retrained to deal with written-text phenomena it had not been trained on earlier.
The Influence of Derivational and Inflectional Morphological Awareness on the Writing of Undergraduate EFL Students: An Empirical Study

This current study aimed to investigate the influence of derivational and inflectional morphological awareness on the writing of undergraduate students studying English as a Foreign Language. They were divided in to two groups and each group comprised 200 advanced EFL learners. Explicit morphological instructions were given to group two in the classroom for full one semester whereas group one wasn't given any kind of morphological knowledge. To collect data, exactly the same lists of word-formation on different morphological processes and their use in the writing samples were administered to both the groups. The main objective of this research was to examine the correlation between the morphological awareness and the EFL writing after testing learners' reflection on word-formation. Then it also tried to explore the difference between their performances to check whether the morphological instructions improved their writing or not. The findings stated that group two students always performed far better than group one and showed a strong understanding of word-formation structure while applying and manipulating in the morphological-instructed tasks. The formulated hypothesis-the teaching of explicit morphemic rules improves not only morphological awareness to a large extent but also grammatical, intralingual, lexical and syntactic awareness that results to enhance collaboratively EFL writing competence. A promising contribution of this current study to pedagogy was that explicit teaching of morphology improved writing to a concrete, large extent and revealed clearly that it must be introduced to EFL learners from the early education so that their writing skill can be developed effectively.
USING AN EXTENDED SUFFIX TREE TO SPEED-UP SEQUENCE ALIGNMENT

An important problem in computational biology is the alignment of a given query sequence and sequences in a database to find similar (locally or globally) sequences from the database to the query. Many heuristic algorithms for this problem are based on the idea of locating a fixed-length matching pair of substrings (called a seed) to start an alignment, and then extending this alignment using dynamic programming. We generalize this idea and take it one step further in a tool we develop, namely Sequence Comparison Tool (SCT). SCT preprocesses the database to create a special generalized suffix tree from the sequences in the database. This tree extends the definition of a generalized suffix tree by containing additional information at the nodes for the length and frequency (number of occurrences) of the corresponding substrings (patterns). A pattern is regarded as significant if it is sufficiently long and it appears many times in the database. A significant pattern shared by two sequences is an indication that the sequences are locally similar. SCT ranks the sequences with respect to the number of significant patterns they share with the query sequence. SCT reduces the database by selecting a given number of sequences with the topmost ranks. It proceeds with invoking an ordinary local alignment algorithm on this reduced database. We conducted experiments on real biological sequences, and compared SCT's performance with a popular alignment tool BLAST. In these tests we used the 6-fold cross validation technique of data mining. The tests show that SCT effectively reduces the database and obtains very similar results compared to those of BLAST in approximately half the time taken by BLAST.
Adaptive Fuzzy Sliding-Mode Control Into Chattering-Free IM Drive

This paper presents an adaptive fuzzy sliding-mode controller (AFSMC) based on the boundary layer approach for speed control of an indirect field-oriented control (IFOC) of an induction motor (IM) drive. In general, the boundary layer approach leads to a tradeoff between control performances and chattering elimination. To improve the control performances, a fuzzy system is assigned as reaching control part of the fuzzy sliding-mode so that it eliminates the chattering completely in spite of the large uncertainties in the system. The applied fuzzy controller acts like a saturation function with a nonlinear slope inside thin boundary layer near the sliding surface to guarantee the stability of the system. Moreover, an adaptive law is implemented to estimate the unknown bound of uncertainty, which is obtained in the sense of Lyapunov stability theorem to minimize the control effort. The proposed AFSMC-based IM drive is implemented in real-time using DSP board TI TMS320F28335. The experimental and simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed AFSMC-based IM drive at different operating conditions.
Towards Automatically-Tuned Neural Networks

Recent advances in AutoML have led to automated tools that can compete with machine learning experts on supervised learning tasks. However, current AutoML tools do not yet support modern neural networks effectively. In this work, we present a first version of AutoNet, which provides automatically-tuned feed-forward neural networks without any human intervention. We report results on datasets from the recent AutoML challenge showing that ensembling Auto-Net with Auto-sklearn can perform better than either approach alone and report the first results on winning competition datasets against human experts with automatically-tuned neural networks.
The acetylation of transcription factor HBP1 by p300/CBP enhances p16INK4A expression

HBP1 is a sequence-specific DNA-binding transcription factor with many important biological roles. It activates or represses the expression of some specific genes during cell growth and differentiation. Previous studies have exhibited that HBP1 binds to p16INK4A promoter and activates p16INK4A expression. We found that trichostatin A (TSA), an inhibitor of HDAC (histone deacetylase), induces p16INK4A expression in an HBP1-dependent manner. This result was drawn from a transactivation experiment by measuring relative luciferase activities of p16INK4A promoter with HBP1-binding site in comparison with that of the wild-type p16INK4A promoter by transient cotransfection with HBP1 into HEK293T cells and 2BS cells. HBP1 acetylation after TSA treatment was confirmed by immunoprecipitation assay. Our data showed that HBP1 interacted with histone acetyltransferase p300 and CREB-binding protein (CBP) and also recruited p300/CBP to p16INK4A promoter. HBP1 was acetylated by p300/CBP in two regions: repression domain (K297/305/307) and P domain (K171/419). Acetylation of Repression domain was not required for HBP1 transactivation on p16INK4A. However, luciferase assay and western blotting results indicate that acetylation of P domain, especially K419 acetylation is essential for HBP1 transactivation on p16INK4A. As assayed by SA-beta-gal staining, the acetylation of HBP1 at K419 enhanced HBP1-induced premature senescence in 2BS cells. In addition, HDAC4 repressed HBP1-induced premature senescence through permanently deacetylating HBP1. We conclude that our data suggest that HBP1 acetylation at K419 plays an important role in HBP1-induced p16INK4A expression.
Current telemedicine infrastructure, network, applications in India

India is a vast country of 1. 4 billion population occupying an area of 3,287,268 sq. km. It consists of 29 states and 6 Union Territories governed by a federal system. There is no national health insurance policy for the country. Government supported healthcare delivery follows a three tier system and is the primary responsibility of each state. It has been observed that there is a great deal of disparity in quality and access to healthcare between urban and rural regions. This healthcare divide needs to be bridged since most of the Indian population live in rural areas. Telemedicine is an emerging Information and Communication enabled health technology which has the potential to facilitate access to healthcare in underprivileged population if absorbed into existing healthcare delivery system. The scale of e-health services in India has been very small so far considering it's size, mostly limited to medical transcription, health awareness through portals, telemedicine, hospital management system and customer service using the internet. Telemedicine system consists of customized medical software integrated with computer hardware, along with medical diagnostic instruments connected to communication media like PSTN (Public Switch Telephone Network), ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) or VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal). Both government and private agencies are venturing into Tele- healthcare by providing hardware and software solutions. Tele-health industry is coming up and policy and standard issues are getting addressed. Government efforts are directed towards setting up standards and defining IT enabled healthcare infrastructure in the country. Recently in the year 2005 the Ministry of Health Government of India has constituted a National Task Force on Telemedicine. Human resource development in e
ELASTICIDADE DA POBREZA EM RELAÇÃO À RENDA MÉDIA E À DESIGUALDADE

The paper shows how to compute the elasticities of the poors head-count ratio (H) in relation to the mean income (() and in relation to the Gini index (G), assuming that the income distribution is lognormal, analysing how these poverty elasticities vary as functions of ( and G. The elasticities are computed for Brazil and its states in 1999, considering the distribution of per capita household income, comparing the results with those obtained by Marinho and Soares (2002) with other methodology. The two estimates show very similar patterns of variation between brazilian states. The obvious advantage of the method used in this paper is the possibility to compute the elasticities using only the values of ( and G for an income distribution. The elasticities are also computed for 2001 e 2002.
Thread-Level Information for Comment Classification in Community Question Answering

Community Question Answering (cQA) is a new application of QA in social contexts (e.g., fora). It presents new interesting challenges and research directions, e.g., exploiting the dependencies between the different comments of a thread to select the best answer for a given question. In this paper, we explored two ways of modeling such dependencies: (i) by designing specific features looking globally at the thread; and (ii) by applying structure prediction models. We trained and evaluated our models on data from SemEval-2015 Task 3 on Answer Selection in cQA. Our experiments show that: (i) the thread-level features consistently improve the performance for a variety of machine learning models, yielding state-of-the-art results; and (ii) sequential dependencies between the answer labels captured by structured prediction models are not enough to improve the results, indicating that more information is needed in the joint model.