Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect Of Chemical Activation On Sorption Characteristics Of Selected Wood Samples / Vliv Chemické Aktivace Na Sorpční Charakteristiky Uhlíkatých Materiálů

Abstract Two samples of hardwood, beech and a mixture of beech and oak were pyrolyzed by continuous chemical activation with K2CO3. Two final temperatures were tested on activated samples (550 °C, 750 °C). In the same temperature regime, also non-activated original samples were pyrolyzed. The sorption for carbonaceous material was measured with a high-pressure thermal analyzer (TGA-HP50) in the presence of nitrogen and the carbon dioxide atmosphere in the range of pressure from 0,03 to 4,5 MPa, respectively from 0,03 to 2 MPa. The sorption experiments were carried out at three different temperatures - 20, 30 a 40 °C. The tests indicate that the final temperature of activation and sorption conditions (pressure, temperature) have significant impact on sorption properties of material Abstrakt Dva vzorky tvrdého dřeva, buk a směs buk/dub, byly pyrolyzovány se současnou chemickou aktivací K2CO3. Testovány byly dvě konečné teploty pyrolýzy pro aktivaci vzorků (550 °C, 750 °C). Ve stejném teplotním režimu byly pyrolyzovány i neaktivované původní vzorky. Sorpce na uhlíkové materiály byly měřeny na vysokotlakém termickém analyzátoru (TGA-HP50) v atmosféře dusíku a oxidu uhličitého v rozmezí tlaků od 0,03 do 4,5 MPa, respektive od 0,03 do 2 MPa. Sorpční experimenty probíhaly při třech teplotách - 20, 30 a 40 °C. Ukazuje se, že konečná teplota aktivace a sorpční podmínky (tlak, teplota), mají významný vliv na sorpční vlastnosti materiálu
Frame rate up conversion for multiview video

In this paper, we propose a new frame rate up conversion method for multiview video. The proposed method uses the depth map and neighboring view information for the improvement of motion estimation and compensation accuracy. In details, it decomposes a block into multiple layers with depth map. Then it estimates the occluded regions in the lower layer using their neighboring view information, which consequently leads more accurate motion estimation and compensation. The experimental results show that the proposed method highly improves the quality of the interpolated frames compared to the conventional methods.
Interval Timing in Children: Effects of Auditory and Visual Pacing Stimuli and Relationships with Reading and Attention Variables

Motor timing tasks have been employed in studies of neurodevelopmental disorders such as developmental dyslexia and ADHD, where they provide an index of temporal processing ability. Investigations of these disorders have used different stimulus parameters within the motor timing tasks that are likely to affect performance measures. Here we assessed the effect of auditory and visual pacing stimuli on synchronised motor timing performance and its relationship with cognitive and behavioural predictors that are commonly used in the diagnosis of these highly prevalent developmental disorders. Twenty-one children (mean age 9.6 years) completed a finger tapping task in two stimulus conditions, together with additional psychometric measures. As anticipated, synchronisation to the beat (ISI 329 ms) was less accurate in the visually paced condition. Decomposition of timing variance indicated that this effect resulted from differences in the way that visual and auditory paced tasks are processed by central timekeeping and associated peripheral implementation systems. The ability to utilise an efficient processing strategy on the visual task correlated with both reading and sustained attention skills. Dissociations between these patterns of relationship across task modality suggest that not all timing tasks are equivalent.
Deciphering Holland's Code

The Party Exercise found on countless career guidance websites and popularized by the best-selling, job-hunting book What Color Is Your Parachute (Bolles, 2015) purports to provide an estimate of an individual‟s Holland‟s code. This study examines whether this commonly used Party Exercise accurately predicts an individual‟s Holland‟s code (Holland, 1997). Undergraduate students (N=473) completed The Party Exercise and then the SelfDirected Search (Holland & Messer, 2013). The results of this study do not support the use of this popular “Party Exercise” as a valid estimate of an individual‟s Holland code.
Project Deliverable Report D5.1 - Writing Support and Feedback Design

(for dissemination) This report is about the way to deliver relevant feedback to students’ written production, either for free texts (e.g., essays, syntheses, notes) or chat conversation, in order for the students to build knowledge. This report presents an overview and a selection of existing models, methods and resources for: 1) the automatic analysis of learner interactions using language technologies or social network analysis (Task 5.1) and 2) the automatic analysis of learner text (Task 5.2). Secondly, a proposition of the tools to be developed for the project is presented, with their possible scenarios of use.
High-efficiency solution-processed perovskite solar cells with millimeter-scale grains

Large-crystal perovskite films The performance of organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite planar solar cells has steadily improved. One outstanding issue is that grain boundaries and defects in polycrystalline films degrade their output. Now, two studies report the growth of millimeter-scale single crystals. Nie et al. grew continuous, pinhole-free, thin iodochloride films with a hot-casting technique and report device efficiencies of 18%. Shi et al. used antisolvent vapor-assisted crystallization to grow millimeter-scale bromide and iodide cubic crystals with charge-carrier diffusion lengths exceeding 10 mm. Science, this issue p. 522, p. 519 Solution processing techniques enable the growth of high-quality, large-area perovskite crystals for solar cells. State-of-the-art photovoltaics use high-purity, large-area, wafer-scale single-crystalline semiconductors grown by sophisticated, high-temperature crystal growth processes. We demonstrate a solution-based hot-casting technique to grow continuous, pinhole-free thin films of organometallic perovskites with millimeter-scale crystalline grains. We fabricated planar solar cells with efficiencies approaching 18%, with little cell-to-cell variability. The devices show hysteresis-free photovoltaic response, which had been a fundamental bottleneck for the stable operation of perovskite devices. Characterization and modeling attribute the improved performance to reduced bulk defects and improved charge carrier mobility in large-grain devices. We anticipate that this technique will lead the field toward synthesis of wafer-scale crystalline perovskites, necessary for the fabrication of high-efficiency solar cells, and will be applicable to several other material systems plagued by polydispersity, defects, and grain boundary recombination in solution-processed thin films.
Multiuser transmit optimization for multicarrier broadcast channels: asymptotic FDMA capacity region and algorithms

We derive optimal and suboptimal multiuser transmit-optimization methods for a multicarrier broadcast channel with intersymbol interference under the frequency-division multiple-access (FDMA) restriction. The general FDMA-based multicarrier broadcast problem is formulated as a maximum weighted rate-sum problem. Given each user's subchannel assignment, the optimal transmit strategy is achieved by multilevel waterfilling. Unfortunately, the problem of finding the optimal subchannel assignments is combinatorial. However, by relaxing the FDMA restriction, we obtain a convex reformulation that allows for efficient computation of the optimal solution, and therefore, a characterization of the FDMA capacity region for a broadcast channel. If all users share the same transmission medium, we prove that the optimal frequency partitioning among the users has an ordered structure that can be exploited to significantly reduce the computational complexity. To make multiuser transmit-optimization schemes practical for applications with relatively fast time-varying user data-rate requirements or priorities, further reduction in computational complexity is necessary. This is achieved by restricting the energy distribution to be constant across the used subchannels. Simulations indicate the low-complexity constant-energy methods presented are very robust, and suffer from negligible performance loss.
Transfer Entropy Expressions for a Class of Non-Gaussian Distributions

Transfer entropy is a frequently employed measure of conditional co-dependence in non-parametric analysis of Granger causality. In this paper, we derive analytical expressions for transfer entropy for the multivariate exponential, logistic, Pareto (type I – IV) and Burr distributions. The latter two fall into the class of fat-tailed distributions with power law properties, used frequently in biological, physical and actuarial sciences. We discover that the transfer entropy expressions for all four distributions are identical and depend merely on the multivariate distribution parameter and the number of distribution dimensions. Moreover, we find that in all four cases the transfer entropies are given by the same decreasing function of distribution dimensionality.
A Comprehensive User-level Checkpointing Strategy for MPI Applications ∗

As computational clusters increase in size, their mean-time-to-failure reduces drastically. After a failure, most MPI checkpointing solutions require a restart with the same number of nodes. This necessitates the availability of multiple spare nodes, leading to poor resource utilization. Moreover, most techniques require a central storage for storing checkpoints. This results in a bottleneck and severely limits the scalability of checkpointing. We propose a scalable fault-tolerant MPI based on LAM/MPI which supports user-level checkpointing, migration, and replication. Our contributions extend the existing state of fault-tolerant MPI with asynchronous replication, eliminating the need for central or network storage. We evaluate both centralized storage and SAN-based solutions and show that they are not scalable, particularly after 64 CPUs. Our migration strategy is the first to make no assumptions on restart topologies, eliminating the need for spare nodes. We demonstrate the low overhead of our checkpointing and replication scheme with the NAS Parallel Benchmarks and the High Performance LINPACK benchmark with tests up to 256 nodes. We show that checkpointing and replication can be achieved with much lower overhead than current techniques and near transparency to the end user while still providing fault resilience. ∗This research was funded in part by NSF IGERT grant 9987598, NSF ITR grant 0081696, MEDC Michigan Life Science Corridor Grant, Institute for Scientific Computing at Wayne State University, Sun Microsystems, and New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research.
Application of functional specification and operational safety conventional methods for a networked control system suitable qualitative analysis

Networked control system functional analysis makes it possible to define studied system material limits, to carry out various functions and operations and to study various configurations of exploitation. This stage which makes it possible to carry out hierarchical system decomposition in material elements and/or software does not bring information on modes of failure, their effect, their occurrence and their criticality. It is thus necessary to supplement it by a second analysis taking of account dysfunctions. These two types of analyzes which constitute qualitative analysis, are complementary, and make it possible to model more accurately a networked control system. The goal of this paper is to apply various traditional methods employed in functional specification and operational safety in order to make a relevant qualitative analysis of a networked control system.
An Integration of Reputation-based and Policy-based Trust Management

Trust management is currently being tackled from two different perspectives: a “strong and crisp” approach, where decisions are founded on logical rules and verifiable properties encoded in digital credentials, and a “soft and social” approach, based on reputation measures gathered and shared by a distributed community. We analyze the differences between the two models of trust and argue that an integrated approach would improve significantly trust management systems. We support our claim with real world scenarios and illustrate how the two models are integrated in PROTUNE, the core policy specification language of the network of excellence
Comprehensive Vocational Evaluation System for Visually Impaired and Blind Persons

The purpose of this study was to validate the appropriateness of the Comprehensive Vocational Evaluation System (CVES) for evaluating the work potential and independent living levels of visually impaired and blind individuals. The CVES was administered to 237 clients of the Texas Commission for the Blind (TCB), and the results were used to predict the vocational placement and independent living levels of these clients as determined by the TCB staff. The results indicated that the CVES is significantly related to work and independent living outcomes for visually impaired and blind people.
A High Efficiency High Power Density Harmonic-Tuned Ka Band Stacked-FET GaAs Power Amplifier

A stacked-FET power amplifier (PA) with harmonic- tuned output matching network is demonstrated using a 0.15-μm Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) technology. The fabricated PA exhibits 28.5 dBm output power, 12 dB gain and 38.4% power added efficiency (PAE). To the best of our knowledge, this is for the first time stacked-FET technique is used in combining with harmonic-tuned output network to achieve high PAE and high power density simultaneously in a GaAs PA.
A Multilingual Outlook: Can Awareness-Raising about Multilingualism Affect Therapists’ Practice? A Mixed-Method Evaluation

Therapists are often unprepared to deal with their clients’ use of other languages. This study focuses on therapists’ experiences of having undertaken awareness-raising training about multilingualism. Did the training impact their practice? If so, in what areas? Adopting a mixed-method approach, quantitative data were initially collected via an online questionnaire with 88 therapy trainees and qualified therapists who underwent training in multilingualism, combined with interview data from 7 volunteers. Having identified the issues on which the training had had most and least impact in survey responses, the interviews were guided by our emergent interest into the impact of the training with potential relational complexities and unique, personal experiences in mind. A narrative-thematic analysis uncovered interrelated themes: changes, or impact of the training, with regard to Identity and Therapeutic Theory. Therapists referred to considerable transformative learning on both a personal and professional level, for instance in terms of how multilingual clients might bring different and sometimes conflicting ways of organizing events and experiences into meaningful wholes through their narratives during the session. Language switching seemed less significant in the survey, but emerged as a central theme in the interviews, especially with regard to the possibility of addressing, challenging and sometimes combining different emotional memories, cultural and existential concerns. Working across these areas triggered some therapists to consider the need for expanding their theory.
Adults Who Sext: Exploring Differences In Self-Esteem, Moral Foundations, And Personality

This study assessed the prevalence of sexting behaviors among adults, and the relationship between sexting and moral foundations, self-esteem, and individual differences. Additionally, this study examined differences in the methods used to send sext messages (mobile applications vs. text messages) and image content (e.g., face, masturbating). Respondents solicited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk completed the anonymous survey measuring “attitudes toward sexting. ” The final sample included 508 adult participants; 68% of adults reported sexting behaviors, and both mobile applications and traditional text messages were used to send sext messages. In general, individuals who scored higher on extraversion and lower on conscientiousness, agreeableness, harm, and fairness were more likely to engage in sexting behaviors. Self-esteem was not associated with any sexting behaviors. Results also found significant differences between individuals who send semi-nude and nude sext messages. Limitations and future research suggestions are discussed.
A collaborative and experiential learning model powered by real-world projects

Information Technology (IT) curricula's strong application component and its focus on user centeredness and team work require that students experience directly real-world projects for real users of IT solutions. Although the merit of this IT educational tenet is universally recognized, delivering collaborative and experiential learning has its challenges. Reaching out to identify projects formulated by actual organizations adds significantly to course preparation. There is a certain level of risk involved with delivering a useful solution while, at the same time, enough room should be allowed for students to experiment with, be wrong about, review, and learn. Challenges pertaining to the real-world aspect of problem-based learning are compounded by managing student teams and assessing their work such that both individual and collective contributions are taken into account. Finally, the quality of the project releases is not the only measure of student learning. Students should be given meaningful opportunities to practice, improve, and demonstrate their communication and interpersonal skills. In this paper we present our experience with two courses in which teams of students worked on real-world projects involving three external partners. We describe how each of the challenges listed above has impacted the course requirements, class instruction, team dynamics, assessment, and learning in these courses. Course assessment and survey data from students are linked to learning outcomes and point to areas where the collaborative and experiential learning model needs improvement.
Are Your Students Working Creatively Together? Automatically Recognizing Creative Turns in Student e-Discussions

In this paper, we discuss how Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques might be brought to bear in automatically recognizing “creative reasoning” in student e-discussions. An AI-based graph-matching algorithm was used to find instances of deepening and widening, interactional categories that provide evidence of, respectively, explicit argumentation and creative reasoning. A deepening occurs when students provide further argumentation for an on-going perspective. A widening occurs, on the other hand, when a student (or students) attempts to diverge from the current perspective by either questioning it or presenting a new perspective or new idea. Given examples of deepening and widening from real e-discussions, the AI algorithm was able to successfully find similar events within new e-discussions and did so within realistic run-time expectations. Our ultimate aim is to provide a software tool for teachers that will support them in recognizing a range of important dialogic aspects of student e-discussions, such as deepening and widening.
Fine-grained preference-aware location search leveraging crowdsourced digital footprints from LBSNs

The crowdsourced digital footprints from Location Based Social Networks (LBSNs) contain not only rich information about locations, but also individual's feeling about locations and associated entities. This new data source provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to massively and cheaply collect location related information, and to subtly characterize individual's fine-grained preference about those places and associated entities. In this paper, we propose SEALs - a fine-grained preference-aware location search framework leveraging the crowdsourced traces in LBSNs. We first collect user check-ins and tips from Foursquare and use them as direct user feedback on locations. Second, we extract users' sentiment about locations and associated entities from tips to characterize their fine-grained location preference. Third, we incorporate such fine-grained user preference into personalized location ranking using tensor factorization techniques. Experimental results show that SEALs can achieve better location ranking comparing to the state-of-the-art solutions.
CAPER: Crawling and analysing Facebook for intelligence purposes

Organised crime uses information technology systems to communicate, work or expand its influence. The EU FP7 Security Research Project CAPER (Collaborative information, Acquisition, Processing, Exploitation and Reporting for the prevention of organised crime), created in cooperation with European Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), aims to build a common collaborative and information sharing platform for the detection and prevention of organised crime, which exploits Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). LEAs are becoming more inclined to using OSINT tools, and particularly tools able to manage Online Social Networks (OSNs) data. This paper presents the CAPER Facebook crawling and analysis subsystem. Heuristic algorithms have been implemented in order to extract specific properties of Facebook's social graph, in particular user interactions. To support analysis tasks specifically, extensive effort has been spent on the analysis of textual user generated content and on the recognition of named-entities, in particular person names, locations and organisations. Relationships between users and entities mentioned in posts and in related comments are created and merged into the users networks extracted from the social graph. All entity relationships are finally visualised in user-friendly network graphs.
Outage Probability versus Fairness Trade-off in Opportunistic Relay Selection with Outdated CSI

We analyze the existing trade-offs in terms of system performance versus fairness of a cooperative system based on opportunistic relay selection (ORS) and with outdated channel state information (CSI). In particular, system performance is analytically evaluated in terms of outage probability, and the fairness behavior is assessed based on the power consumption at the different relays. In order to improve the fairness behavior of ORS while keeping the selection diversity gain, we propose a relay selection mechanism where the relay with the highest normalized signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is selected for relaying the source's information. The proposed strategy is compared with existing relay selection strategies by adopting a novel graphical representation inspired by expected profit versus risk plots used in modern portfolio theory. As shown in the paper, this strategy allows operating the system in more favorable points of the outage versus fairness region.
Image quality assessment using a rotated Gaussian discrimination function

We propose a more general adapted form of an image quality metric that was introduced as the Universal Image Quality Index (UQI) [1] and later refined into the Structural Similarity Index Metric (SSIM) [2]. SSIM is a well accepted metric that has been successfully adopted by image and video quality researchers and practitioners. It has many potential applications in modern video delivery systems. This full reference based metric is simple to use, computationally efficient and is viable as a useful mechanism for rate-distortion moderation in mobile networks including mobile game based video delivery. In this paper the authors propose a modification to the treatment of the SSIM parameter space which increases the potential discrimination capability and flexibility of the SSIM approach. The new metric was tested on the LIVE database [5] and the results show a notable improvement in performance when metric value is plotted against mean opinion score (MOS) as compared to SSIM plotted against MOS.