Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Sparse Coding Approach to Household Electricity Demand Forecasting in Smart Grids

With the gradual deployment of smart meters in many cities around the world, new opportunities arise in reducing energy usage and improving consumers’ information and control on their electricity consumption. Central to the provision of these newer services is the ability to accurately forecast the electricity demand of individual households. Compared with load forecasting at the city level and larger system aggregates, load forecasting for individual households is a much harder problem as the loads are much more stochastic and volatile. In this paper, we study the use of sparse coding for modeling and forecasting these individual household electricity loads. The proposed methods are tested on a data set of 5000 households in a joint project with electric power board of Chattanooga, for the period from September 2011 to August 2013. We obtain 10% improvements in the accuracy of forecasting next-day total load and next-week total load when we add sparse code features in ridge regression in this difficult problem. We also evaluate more classical forecasting methods on this forecasting problem, including autoregressive integrated moving average and Holt-Winters smoothing.
Effects of Size and Morphology of TiO2 and SiO2 Airborne Nanoparticles on their Filtration through Chemical Protective Clothing

Titanium dioxide (nTiO2) and silicon dioxide (nSiO2) nanoparticles are employed in numerous products that are used daily and also in building materials such as concrete, plaster or paints. Whether during manufacturing or released by sanding or polishing, nTiO2 and nSiO2 can become airborne, exposing workers to possible health risks. Although the penetration of airborne nanoparticles through the filtering media used in respiratory protective equipment has been studied for several years with different types of airborne nanoparticles, the study of the efficiency of chemical protective clothing (CPC) materials is much more recent. Furthermore, these studies were generally conducted with polydisperse sodium chloride airborne nanoparticles, which are particles that are seldom used in the workplace. The present work focuses on the effect of the size and shape of nTiO2 and nSiO2 airborne nanoparticles on their penetration level through a sample of filtering material directly taken from a model of nonwoven CPC. The clogging effect was also evaluated and its impact on the pressure drop was determined. Results indicate that contrary to the particle size, the shape could have a significant effect on the level of penetration. Moreover, clogging due to the deposit of nanoparticles on the filtering fibers could be seen, in some cases, in terms of penetration, but did not have a significant effect on the pressure drop.
Effects of Integrated Health Management Intervention on Overweight and Obesity

Overweight or obese adults aged 20~55 years and living in Beijing more than one year were randomly divided into different management groups. A one-year integrated health management intervention was applied in the health management groups. The physical indicators and metabolic indicators changed after one-year intervention on the overweight and obese adults. The annual reduction of the physical indicators was significant in all groups (p < 0.05) except the weight loss in the placebo + general management group. The health management and the dietary supplement have statistically significant (p < 0.001, p < 0.001) effects on the annual reduction of these indicators and interactive effect between them was found on some of these indicators such as bodyweight, body mass index (BMI), body fat ratio (BFR), and hipline (p < 0.05). The dietary supplement + health management group had the best annual reduction effects for the indicators among the groups. Integrated health management interventions including both dietary supplements intervention and health management could improve metabolic indicators in overweight and obese adults together with the physical indicators, suggesting the intermediated role of metabolic indictors in controlling obesity.
Classic Spotlight: Dynamics of the Bacterial Cytoplasm

T he bacterial cytoplasm is complex and crowded with macro-molecules, providing an environment very different from the dilute solutions used in traditional in vitro biochemistry (1). The ability of different molecules to diffuse within this complex environment must inﬂuence almost every aspect of bacterial biochemistry, yet the sheer complexity of the cytoplasm makes prediction of diffusion rates extremely uncertain. E.
Clonal tracking of autoaggressive T cells in polymyositis by combining laser microdissection, single-cell PCR, and CDR3-spectratype analysis

Clonal expansions of CD8+ T cells have been identified in muscle and blood of polymyositis patients by PCR techniques, including T cell receptor (TCR) complementarity-determining region (CDR)3 length analysis (spectratyping). To examine a possible pathogenic role of these clonally expanded T cells, we combined CDR3 spectratyping with laser microdissection and single-cell PCR of individual myocytotoxic T cells that contact, invade, and destroy a skeletal muscle fiber. First, we screened cDNA from muscle biopsy specimens by CDR3 spectratyping for expanded TCR β chain variable region (BV) sequences. To pinpoint the corresponding T cells in tissue, we stained cryostat sections with appropriate anti-TCR BV mAbs, isolated single BV+ T cells that directly contacted or invaded a muscle fiber by laser-assisted microdissection, and amplified their TCR BV chain sequences from rearranged genomic DNA. In this way, we could relate the oligoclonal peaks identified by CDR3-spectratype screening to morphologically characterized microdissected T cells. In one patient, a large fraction of the microdissected T cells carried a common TCR-BV amino acid CDR3 motif and conservative nucleotide exchanges in the CDR3 region, suggesting an antigen-driven response. In several cases, we tracked these T cell clones for several years in CD8+ (but not CD4+) blood lymphocytes and in two patients also in consecutive muscle biopsy specimens. During immunosuppressive therapy, oligoclonal CDR3-spectratype patterns tended to revert to more polyclonal Gaussian distribution-like patterns. Our findings demonstrate that CDR3 spectratyping and single-cell analysis can be combined to identify and track autoaggressive T cell clones in blood and target tissue. This approach should be applicable to other inflammatory and autoimmune disorders.
Effect of Shear Wave Velocity of Soil on Behavior of Mid-Rise Reinforced Concrete Frame Structures

The most significant parameter of nonlinear time history analysis is the quality of strong ground motion record which will be used. In this paper, the near-field earthquakes including the forward directivity which have been recorded from two different soil classes were scaled in accordance with the design spectrum of probability of exceedance was 10%. Following this, the nonlinear time history analyses of a typical mid-rise reinforced concrete frame structure were conducted by using the strong ground motion records which were scaled. As a result of the analyses made, the shear force, bending moment and interstory drift ratio curves of structures were acquired for each soil classes. By comparing these curves acquired for different soil classes with each other, the effect of soil characteristics on which the structure will be constructed on the results were discussed. According to this, i t has been observed that as the shear wave velocity of soil decreases, internal forces and displacements in the structure increase
Dynamic Shared Context Processing in an E-Collaborative Learning Environment

In this paper, we propose a dynamic shared context processing method based on DSC (Dynamic Shared Context) model, applied in an e-collaborative learning environment. Firstly, we present the model. This is a way to measure the relevance between events and roles in collaborative environments. With this method, we can share the most appropriate event information for each role instead of sharing all information to all roles in a collaborative work environment. Then, we apply and verify this method in our project with Google App supported e-learning collaborative environment. During this experiment, we compared DSC method measured relevance of events and roles to manual measured relevance. And we describe the favorable points from this comparison and our finding. Finally, we discuss our future research of a hybrid DSC method to make dynamical information shared more effective in a collaborative work environment.
Pipelines with internal buffers

Concurrent or overlapped processing of more than one task is a common technique used in many computer architectures to increase the throughput. A pipeline is one such form consisting of a set of hardware segments which can be operated in an overlapped fashion. The existing and many proposed pipelines assume that a task must flow synchronously, without wait or preemption, from segment to segment for its execution. In this paper we propose a pipeline model in which priority buffers are provided at every segment to control the flow of tasks. Several different priority implementations are analyzed assuming periodic arrivals of tasks. The characteristics studied are, queue size, wait time and throughput. It is shown that the theoretical maximum throughput of a pipeline is attainable with the use of internal buffers. Moreover, it is shown that a substantial degree of freedom in scheduling of tasks is achieved by these methods.
Joint link scheduling and topology control for wireless sensor networks with SINR constraints

This chapter studies the joint link scheduling and topology control problems in wireless sensor networks. Given arbitrarily located sensor nodes on a plane, the task is to schedule all the wireless links (each representing a wireless transmission) between adjacent sensors using a minimum number of timeslots. There are two requirements for these problems: first, all the links must satisfy a certain property, such as that the wireless links form a data gathering tree towards the sink node; second, all the links simultaneously scheduled in the same timeslot must satisfy the SINR constraints. This chapter focuses on various scheduling algorithms for both arbitrarily constructed link topologies and the data gathering tree topology. We also discuss possible research directions.
Use of a multi-vial mathematical model to design freeze-drying cycles for pharmaceuticals at known risk of failure

Freeze-drying is a dehydration method suitable for the stabilization of heat-labile pharmaceutical products, such as vaccines. Due to the vial-to-vial variability of heat and mass transfer during the process, the value of the critical process parameters (e.g., product temperature, sublimation rate) may be different between vials and batches often present significant product quality heterogeneity. The aim of this work was the development of a dynamic, multi-vial mathematical model making it possible to predict risk of failure of the process, defined as the percentage of vials potentially rejected by quality inspection. This tool could assist the design of freeze-drying cycle. Keywords: lyophilization; vaccines; heat and mass transfer; mathematical modeling; design space
Extraction of microsphere size from diffraction images with an STFT method

This paper presents an image analysis method based on a short-time-Fourier-transform (STFT) for extracting the size of polystyrene microspheres with different nominal diameters from diffraction images obtained with a newly developed diffraction imaging flow cytometer. The center frequency of STFT and its relation with the image row index are explored to extract the microspheres' diameter. We have shown that the STFT based method provides a new and rapid method for determination of microsphere sizes and their distribution using the diffraction imaging flow cytometer.
Cloning and Characterization of a Gene Cluster Involved in Cyclopentanol Metabolism in Comamonas sp. Strain NCIMB 9872 and Biotransformations Effected by Escherichia coli-Expressed Cyclopentanone 1,2-Monooxygenase

ABSTRACT Cyclopentanone 1,2-monooxygenase, a flavoprotein produced by Pseudomonas sp. strain NCIMB 9872 upon induction by cyclopentanol or cyclopentanone (M. Griffin and P. W. Trudgill, Biochem. J. 129:595-603, 1972), has been utilized as a biocatalyst in Baeyer-Villiger oxidations. To further explore this biocatalytic potential and to discover new genes, we have cloned and sequenced a 16-kb chromosomal locus of strain 9872 that is herein reclassified as belonging to the genus Comamonas. Sequence analysis revealed a cluster of genes and six potential open reading frames designated and grouped in at least four possible transcriptional units as (orf11-orf10-orf9)-(cpnE-cpnD-orf6-cpnC)-(cpnR-cpnB-cpnA)-(orf3-orf4 [partial 3′ end]). The cpnABCDE genes encode enzymes for the five-step conversion of cyclopentanol to glutaric acid catalyzed by cyclopentanol dehydrogenase, cyclopentanone 1,2-monooxygenase, a ring-opening 5-valerolactone hydrolase, 5-hydroxyvalerate dehydrogenase, and 5-oxovalerate dehydrogenase, respectively. Inactivation of cpnB by using a lacZ-Kmr cassette resulted in a strain that was not capable of growth on cyclopentanol or cyclopentanone as a sole carbon and energy source. The presence of σ54-dependent regulatory elements in front of the divergently transcribed cpnB and cpnC genes supports the notion that cpnR is a regulatory gene of the NtrC type. Knowledge of the nucleotide sequence of the cpn genes was used to construct isopropyl-β-thio-d-galactoside-inducible clones of Escherichia coli cells that overproduce the five enzymes of the cpn pathway. The substrate specificities of CpnA and CpnB were studied in particular to evaluate the potential of these enzymes and establish the latter recombinant strain as a bioreagent for Baeyer-Villiger oxidations. Although frequently nonenantioselective, cyclopentanone 1,2-monooxygenase was found to exhibit a broader substrate range than the related cyclohexanone 1,2-monooxygenase from Acinetobacter sp. strain NCIMB 9871. However, in a few cases opposite enantioselectivity was observed between the two biocatalysts.
The essentials of CAGD

Putting the G into CAGD, the authors provide a much-needed practical and basic introduction to computer-aided geometric design. This book will help readers understand and use the elements of computer-aided geometric design, curves and surfaces, without the mathematical baggage that is necessary only for more advanced work. Though only minimal background in mathematics is needed to understand the bookis concepts, the book covers an amazing array of topics such as Bezier and B-spline curves and their corresponding surfaces, subdivision surfaces, and NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines). Also included are techniques such as interpolation and least squares methods.
A Graph Drawing Algorithm for the Game of Sprouts

A graph drawing algorithm for the Game of Sprouts is presented. The algorithm guarantees that the polylines that connect graph nodes are drawn smoothly and that they maintain reasonable distance from other graph polylines. Vertices of the graph are moved using a combination of repulsive forces and smoothing forces. The repulsive forces come from all other visible graph nodes and visible polyline line segments. The smoothing forces are calculated from neighboring vertices along a polyline. A Sprouts player is not allowed to draw new polylines that cross any existing polyline, and the algorithm prevents edge crossings as the graph is transformed. The distinctive features of this algorithm is the use of smoothing forces instead of traditional spring forces, and the use of line segments as repulsive elements instead of vertices.
Low-dose x-ray phase-contrast and absorption CT using equally sloped tomography

Tomographic reconstruction from undersampled and noisy projections is often desirable in transmission CT modalities for purposes of low-dose tomography and fast acquisition imaging. However under such conditions, due to the violation of the Nyquist sampling criteria and the presence of noise, reconstructions with acceptable accuracy may not be possible. Recent experiments in transmission electron tomography and coherent diffraction microscopy have shown that the technique of equally sloped tomography (EST), an exact tomographic method utilizing an oversampling iterative Fourier-based reconstruction, provides more accurate image reconstructions when the number of projections is significantly undersampled relative to filtered back projection and algebraic iterative methods. Here we extend this technique by developing new reconstruction algorithms which allow for the incorporation of advanced mathematical regularization constraints, such as the nonlocal means total variational model, in a manner that is consistent with experimental projections. We then evaluate the resulting image quality of the developed algorithm through simulations and experiments at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility on image quality phantoms using the x-ray absorption and phase contrast CT modalities. Both our simulation and experimental results have indicated that the method can reduce the number of projections by 60–75% in parallel beam modalities, while achieving comparable or better image quality than the conventional reconstructions. As large-scale and compact synchrotron radiation facilities are currently under rapid development worldwide, the implementation of low-dose x-ray absorption and phase-contrast CT can find broad applications in biology and medicine using these advanced x-ray sources.
Economic and Financial Report 1999 / 02 The Recursive Thick Frontier Approach to Estimating Efficiency Rien Wagenvoort and

ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL REPORTS are preliminary material circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment. Quotation of material in the Reports should be cleared with the author or authors. The views expressed are those of the individual authors, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the EIB. Individual copies of the Reports may be obtained free of charge by writing to the above address or on-line from
Corticosteroids Block Autophagy Protein Recruitment in Aspergillus fumigatus Phagosomes via Targeting Dectin-1/Syk Kinase Signaling

Aspergillus fumigatus is the predominant airborne fungal pathogen in immunocompromised patients. Genetic defects in NADPH oxidase (chronic granulomatous disease [CGD]) and corticosteroid-induced immunosupression lead to impaired killing of A. fumigatus and unique susceptibility to invasive aspergillosis via incompletely characterized mechanisms. Recent studies link TLR activation with phagosome maturation via the engagement of autophagy proteins. In this study, we found that infection of human monocytes with A. fumigatus spores triggered selective recruitment of the autophagy protein LC3 II in phagosomes upon fungal cell wall swelling. This response was induced by surface exposure of immunostimulatory β-glucans and was mediated by activation of the Dectin-1 receptor. LC3 II recruitment in A. fumigatus phagosomes required spleen tyrosine kinase (Syk) kinase–dependent production of reactive oxygen species and was nearly absent in monocytes of patients with CGD. This pathway was important for control of intracellular fungal growth, as silencing of Atg5 resulted in impaired phagosome maturation and killing of A. fumigatus. In vivo and ex vivo administration of corticosteroids blocked LC3 II recruitment in A. fumigatus phagosomes via rapid inhibition of phosphorylation of Src and Syk kinases and downstream production of reactive oxygen species. Our studies link Dectin-1/Syk kinase signaling with autophagy-dependent maturation of A. fumigatus phagosomes and uncover a potential mechanism for development of invasive aspergillosis in the setting of CGD and corticosteroid-induced immunosupression.
Characterization of an alpine tree line using airborne LiDAR data and physiological modeling

Understanding what environmental drivers control the position of the alpine tree line is important for refining our understanding of plant stress and tree development, as well as for climate change studies. However, monitoring the location of the tree line position and potential movement is difficult due to cost and technical challenges, as well as a lack of a clear boundary. Advanced remote sensing technologies such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) offer significant potential to map short individual tree crowns within the transition zone despite the lack of predictive capacity. Process‐based forest growth models offer a complementary approach by quantifying the environmental stresses trees experience at the tree line, allowing transition zones to be defined and ultimately mapped. In this study, we investigate the role remote sensing and physiological, ecosystem‐based modeling can play in the delineation of the alpine tree line. To do so, we utilize airborne LiDAR data to map tree height and stand density across a series of altitudinal gradients from below to above the tree line within the Swiss National Park (SNP), Switzerland. We then utilize a simple process‐based model to assess the importance of seasonal variations on four climatically related variables that impose non‐linear constraints on photosynthesis. Our results indicate that all methods predict the tree line to within a 50 m altitudinal zone and indicate that aspect is not a driver of significant variations in tree line position in the region. Tree cover, rather than tree height is the main discriminator of the tree line at higher elevations. Temperatures in fall and spring are responsible for the major differences along altitudinal zones, however, changes in evaporative demand also control plant growth at lower altitudes. Our results indicate that the two methods provide complementary information on tree line location and, when combined, provide additional insights into potentially endangered forest/grassland transition zones.