Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ultrafast nonlinear optics of bulk and two-dimensional materials for infrared applications

This thesis presents the results of an experimental study into the nonlinear optical properties of novel nonlinear materials at infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum for the realisation of nonlinear optical devices in the nearand mid-infrared. Because of its exceptional nonlinear optical properties and its promise of implementation in a range of mid-infrared applications graphene had a prominent place in this research. Extensive investigations in the nonlinear optical properties of single and multilayer chemical vapour deposition (CVD) graphene are presented. This study revealed that graphene presents a nonlinear phase shift due to a negative, irradiance-dependent nonlinear refraction. The high peak powers available enabled the study of both saturable absorption (SA) and two-photon absorption (2PA), identifying the irradiance limits at which the contribution of two-photon absorption exceeded that of saturable absorption. Moreover, the nonlinear optical properties of graphene-polyvinyl alcohol (G-PVA) composite films were studied. The results indicate the thermal damage of the host polymer due to graphene heating and temperature transfer. Studies in the third order nonlinear optical properties of chalcogenide glasses with the perspective of integration with graphene for the development of mid-infrared devices and applications are also performed. Of all the glasses investigated, gallium lanthanum sulphide (GLS) was found to have the most interesting nonlinear optical properties. Its optical Kerr nonlinearity was found to be approximately 35 times higher than silica and the upper limit of its two-photon absorption coefficient was the lowest of all the chalcogenide glasses analysed, implying that GLS would be an excellent candidate for ultrafast all-optical switching. Subsequently GLS was chosen as the host material for optical waveguide and device fabrication via ultrafast laser inscription (ULI). Nearand mid-infrared waveguides were successfully fabricated; fundamental features such as, refractive index profiles and material dispersion were investigated. The Zero Dispersion Wavelength (ZDW) of GLS was experimentally measured for the first time; the ZDW was determined to be between 3.66-3.71 μm for the waveguides and about 3.61 μm for the bulk. Single mode directional couplers at 1550 nm were also developed and their ultrafast all-optical switching properties were investigated, leading to the assessment of the nonlinear refractive index n2 of the ULI modified area. Furthermore, waveguides in Er doped GLS were successfully fabricated and the infrared transitions at 1550 and 2750 nm were detected opening the potential for GLS waveguide lasers.
Recursive Karcher Expectation Estimators And Geometric Law of Large Numbers

This paper studies a form of law of large numbers on Pn, the space of n × n symmetric positive-definite matrices equipped with Fisher-Rao metric. Specifically, we propose a recursive algorithm for estimating the Karcher expectation of an arbitrary distribution defined on Pn, and we show that the estimates computed by the recursive algorithm asymptotically converge in probability to the correct Karcher expectation. The steps in the recursive algorithm mainly consist of making appropriate moves on geodesics in Pn, and the algorithm is simple to implement and it offers a tremendous gain in computation time of several orders in magnitude over existing non-recursive algorithms. We elucidate the connection between the more familiar law of large numbers for real-valued random variables and the asymptotic convergence of the proposed recursive algorithm, and our result provides an example of a new form of law of large numbers for random variables taking values in a Riemannian manifold. From the practical side, the computation of the mean of a collection of symmetric positive-definite (SPD) matrices is a fundamental ingredient in many algorithms in machine learning, computer vision and medical imaging applications. We report an experiment using the proposed recursive algorithm for K-means clustering, demonstrating the algorithm’s efficiency, accuracy and stability.
Global Green New Deal and Chinese Green Economy Based on Environment and Energy Materials

2008 has seen the global financial crisis through which it is realized that a new growth mode, rather than Business as Usual, should be pursued in every country. Green New Deal, as a new economic growth mode, is generally accepted. Every country has increased the investment in green economy and made green economy a brand-new growth mode which resists economic and environmental crisis and promotes employment. Economy, environment and climates are the common problems all humans have to be faced with. Therefore, in the sense of Global Governance, Green New Deal shows a tendency to Global Green New Deal. Outstanding achievements have been made in China through the transformation of economic growth mode. Green Economy and Sustainable Development with Chinese characteristics have been gaining acceptance and approval by more and more countries.
Cell‐penetrating anti‐GFAP VHH and corresponding fluorescent fusion protein VHH‐GFP spontaneously cross the blood‐brain barrier and specifically recognize astrocytes: application to brain imaging

Antibodies normally do not cross the blood‐brain barrier (BBB) and cannot bind an intracellular cerebral antigen. We demonstrate here for the first time that a new class of antibodies can cross the BBB without treatment. Camelids produce native homodimeric heavy‐chain antibodies, the paratope being composed of a single‐variable domain called VHH. Here, we used recombinant VHH directed against human glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), a specific marker of astrocytes. Only basic VHHs (e.g., pI=9.4) were able to cross the BBB in vitro (7.8 vs. 0% for VHH with pI=7.7). By intracarotid and intravenous injections into live mice, we showed that these basic VHHs are able to cross the BBB in vivo, diffuse into the brain tissue, penetrate into astrocytes, and specifically label GFAP. To analyze their ability to be used as a specific transporter, we then expressed a recombinant fusion protein VHH‐green fluorescent protein (GFP). These “fluobodies” specifically labeled GFAP on murine brain sections, and a basic variant (pI=9.3) of the fusion protein VHH‐GFP was able to cross the BBB and to label astrocytes in vivo. The potential of VHHs as diagnostic or therapeutic agents in the central nervous system now deserves attention. —Li, T. , Bourgeois, J.‐P., Celli, S. , Glacial, F. , Le Sourd, A. ‐M. , Mecheri, S. , Weksler, B. , Romero, I. , Couraud, P.‐O. , Rougeon, F. , and Lafaye, P. Cell‐penetrating anti‐GFAP VHH and corresponding fluorescent fusion protein VHH‐GFP spontaneously cross the blood‐brain barrier and specifically recognize astrocytes: application to brain imaging. FASEB J. 26, 3969–3979 (2012). www.fasebj. org
Beyond PROLOG: software specification by grammar

I. very high level -It should be a formalism for functionally specifying software wit~6~ sp~i y~g an implementation -the programmer tells the computer what to do without telling it how to do it [Wulf 80]. The programmer's task is simp~fied since the implementatio~details are assumed by the (intelligent) language processor. Furthermore, the resulting programs are more comprehendible since they are pure functional specifications without implementation information.
Identification of RNF168 as a PML nuclear body regulator

ABSTRACT Promyelocytic leukemia (PML) protein forms the basis of PML nuclear bodies (PML NBs), which control many important processes. We have screened an shRNA library targeting ubiquitin pathway proteins for effects on PML NBs, and identified RNF8 and RNF168 DNA-damage response proteins as negative regulators of PML NBs. Additional studies confirmed that depletion of either RNF8 or RNF168 increased the levels of PML NBs and proteins, whereas overexpression induced loss of PML NBs. RNF168 partially localized to PML NBs through its UMI/MIU1 ubiquitin-interacting region and associated with NBs formed by any PML isoform. The association of RNF168 with PML NBs resulted in increased ubiquitylation and SUMO2 modification of PML. In addition, RNF168 was found to associate with proteins modified by SUMO2 and/or SUMO3 in a manner dependent on its ubiquitin-binding sequences, suggesting that hybrid SUMO–ubiquitin chains can be bound. In vitro assays confirmed that RNF168, preferentially, binds hybrid SUMO2–K63 ubiquitin chains compared with K63–ubiquitin chains or individual SUMO2. Our study identified previously unrecognized roles for RNF8 and RNF168 in the regulation of PML, and a so far unknown preference of RNF168 for hybrid SUMO–ubiquitin chains. Summary: RNF168 was identified as a negative regulator of PML nuclear bodies, and shown to associate with PML nuclear bodies and hybrid SUMO2–ubiquitin chains.
Form and Function of Early Neolithic Bifacial Stone Tools Reflects Changes in Land Use Practices during the Neolithization Process in the Levant

For many, climate change is no longer recognized as the primary cause of cultural changes in the Near East. Instead, human landscape degradation, population growth, socioeconomic adjustments, and conflict have been proposed as the mechanisms that shaped the Neolithic Revolution. However, as Bar-Yosef noted, even if there is chronological correlation between climate changes and cultural developments, what is important is to understand how Neolithic societies dealt with these improving or deteriorating environments. Changes in bifacial stone tools provide a framework for examining some of these interactions by focusing on changing land use practices during the Neolithization process. The results of microwear analysis of 40 bifacial artifacts from early Pre-Pottery Neolithic (EPPNB) levels at Motza in the Judean hills document changes during the PPNA–PPNB transition at the onset of the Levantine Moist Period (ca. 8000 cal B.C.) when conditions for agriculture improved. EPPNB villagers added heavy-duty axes to a toolkit they had used for carpentry and began to clear forests for fields and grazing lands. Sustainable forest management continued for the duration of the PPN until the cumulative effects of tree-felling and overgrazing seem to have led to landscape degradation at end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic C (PPNC), when a cold, dry climatic anomaly (6600–6000 cal B.C.) may have accelerated the reduction of woodlands. Early PPNB components at sites like Motza, with data from nearly five millennia of Neolithic occupations, show how complex hunter–gatherers and early food producers were able to establish sustainable resource management systems even as climate changed, population increased, and social relations were redefined.
A new statistical approach for joint shear strength determination of RC beam-column connections subjected to lateral earthquake loading

Reinforced concrete (RC) joint shear strength models are constructed using an experimental database in conjunction with a Bayesian parameter estimation method. The experimental database consists of RC beam-column connection test subassemblies that maintained proper confinement within the joint panel. All included test subassemblies were subjected to quasi-static cyclic lateral loading and eventually experienced joint shear failure (either in conjunction with or without yielding of beam reinforcement); subassemblies with out-of-plane members and/or eccentricity between the beam(s) and the column are not included in this study. Three types of joint shear strength models are developed. The first model considers all possible influence parameters on joint shear strength. The second model contains those parameters left after a step-wise process that systematically identifies and removes the least important parameters affecting RC joint shear strength. The third model simplifies the second model for convenient application in practical design. All three models are unbiased and show similar levels of scatter. Finally, the improved performance of the simplified model for design is identified by comparison with the current ACI 352R-02 RC joint shear strength model.
A 250 nm CMOS / LDMOS Pulse-Width Modulator and Driver for space-borne GaN switch mode power amplifiers in P-Band

In this paper, the design of a single-chip RF Pulse-Width Modulator and Driver (PWMD) aimed at exciting a 80 W class-E GaN high-power stage at 435 MHz is described. For the required buffer size, avoiding potential ringing of the pulses within the buffer structure presents a major challenge in the design process. Therefore, a smaller chip capable of driving capacitive loads of up to 5 pF was initially designed, fabricated and tested. An approach based on 3D EM simulations was used to validate the test results. Based on the presented results, an enlarged chip able to drive a 80 W GaN high-power stage is currently being designed.
Calpain Regulation of Cytoskeletal Signaling Complexes in Von Willebrand Factor-stimulated Platelets

The adhesion of platelets to sites of vascular injury is critically dependent on the binding of subendothelial bound von Willebrand factor (vWf) to the platelet surface glycoprotein complexes, GP Ib-V-IX and GP IIb-IIIa (integrin αIIbβ3). There is growing evidence that the binding of vWf to these receptors is not only essential for stable platelet adhesion but is also important for the transduction of activation signals required for changes in platelet morphology, granule secretion, and platelet aggregation. In this study we have investigated signaling events induced by vWf binding to GP Ib-V-IX in both spreading and aggregated platelets. The adhesion of platelets to vWf resulted in dramatic actin filament reorganization, as assessed by immunofluorescence with fluorescein isothiocyanate-conjugated phalloidin, and the cytoskeletal recruitment of various structural proteins (talin and integrin αIIbβ3) and signaling enzymes (pp60c- src , focal adhesion kinase (FAK), phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI 3-kinase), and protein-tyrosine phosphatase (PTP)-1B). Time course experiments in both spreading and aggregated platelets revealed that talin, FAK, and PTP-1B were proteolyzed after translocation to the cytoskeleton. The proteolysis of these proteins was dependent on the presence of extracellular calcium and was specifically inhibited by pretreating platelets with the membrane-permeable calpain inhibitors calpeptin, E64d, and MDL 28,170, but not with the membrane-impermeable inhibitors leupeptin, E64, and calpastatin. The cytoskeletal translocation of signaling enzymes in vWf-stimulated platelets was abolished by pretreating platelets with an anti-GP Ib-V-IX antibody but was unaffected by blocking ligand binding to integrin αIIbβ3. In contrast, calpain activation in vWf-stimulated platelets required ligand binding to both GP Ib-V-IX and integrin αIIbβ3. The activation of calpain in both spreading and aggregated platelets resulted in a substantial decrease in the level of tyrosine phosphorylation of multiple platelet proteins and was associated with a 50–80% reduction in the amount of cytoskeletal associated talin, integrin αIIbβ3, PI 3-kinase, FAK, pp60c- src , and PTP-1B. These studies suggest a potentially important role for calpain in regulating the formation and/or stability of cytoskeletal signaling complexes in vWf-stimulated platelets. Furthermore, they demonstrate distinct roles for GP Ib-V-IX and integrin αIIbβ3 in vWf-induced signal transduction.
3D magic lenses

This work extends the metaphor of a see-through interface embodied in Magic LensesTM to 3D environments. We present two new see-through visualization techniques: jlat lenses in 3D and volumetric lenses. We discuss implementation concerns for platforms that have programmer accessible hardware clipping planes and show several examples of each visualization technique. We also examine composition of multiple lenses in 3D environments, which strengthens the flat lens metaphor, but may have no meaningful semantics in the case of volumetric lenses.
Communication via one- and two-particle operators on Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen states.

As is well known, operations on one particle of an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pair cannot influence the marginal statistics of measurements on the other particle. We characterize the set of states accessible from an initial EPR state by one-particle operations and show that in a sense they allow two bits to be encoded reliably in one spin-1/2 particle: One party, «Alice,» prepares an EPR pair and sends one of the particles to another party, «Bob,» who applies one of four unitary operators to the particle, and then returns it to Alice. By measuring the two particles jointly, Alice can now reliably learn which operator Bob used
The software engineering laboratory - an operational software experience factory

For 15 years, the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) has been carrying out studies and experiments for the purpose of understand- ing, assessing, and improving software and software processes within a production software development environment at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA/GSFC). The SEL comprises three major organizations: NASA/GSFC, Flight Dynamics Division University of Maryland, Department of Computer Science Computer Sciences Corporation, Flight Dynamics Technology Group - These organizations have jointly carried out several hundred software studies, producing hundreds of reports, papers, and documents, all of which de scribe some aspect of the software engineering technology that has been analyzed in the flight dynamics environment at NASA. The studies range from small, controlled experiments (such as analyzing the effectiveness of code readingversus that of functional testing) tolarge, multiple- project studies (such as assessing the impacts of Ada on a production environment). The organization's driving goal is to improve the software process continually, so that sustained improvement may be observed in the resulting products. This paper discusses the SEL as a functioning example of an operational software experience factory and summarizes the characteristics of and major lessons learned from 15 years of SEL operations.
A fast path planning algorithm for route guidance system

Path planning is applied in a variety of ways, including transportation, telecommunications, etc. Path planning to direct vehicles to their destination in a dynamic traffic situation, with the aim of reducing the motoring time and to ensure and efficient use of available road resources is the main challenge in route guidance system. In this paper we propose a fast path algorithm for finding the best shortest paths in the road network. This is poised to minimize costs between the origin and destination nodes. The proposed algorithm was compared with the Dijkstra algorithm in order to find the best and shortest paths using a sample of Tehran city road network. Three cases were tested through simulation using the proposed algorithm. The results show that the efficiency of proposed algorithm and could reduce the cost of vehicle routing on the path planning problems.
PubTermVariants: biomedical term variants and their use for PubMed search

Term normalization is frequently used in information retrieval task to reduce variant word forms to a common form. The most general term normalization technique used in practice is stemming, however it has been found to not be completely reliable. Here we present PubTermVariants, a high-quality data-driven resource of term variant pairs that can improve search results in PubMed. For a given pair, we consider two terms to be variants if they stem to the same form, pass the hypergeometric test, and pass the morpho-semantic test. We perform manual evaluation of a subset of PubTermVariants that confirms the high quality of the candidate pairs. We further present experiments that demonstrate their usefulness for PubMed search.
The SHOGUN Machine Learning Toolbox

We have developed a machine learning toolbox, called SHOGUN, which is designed for unified large-scale learning for a broad range of feature types and learning settings. It offers a considerable number of machine learning models such as support vector machines, hidden Markov models, multiple kernel learning, linear discriminant analysis, and more. Most of the specific algorithms are able to deal with several different data classes. We have used this toolbox in several applications from computational biology, some of them coming with no less than 50 million training examples and others with 7 billion test examples. With more than a thousand installations worldwide, SHOGUN is already widely adopted in the machine learning community and beyond. SHOGUN is implemented in C++ and interfaces to MATLABTM, R, Octave, Python, and has a stand-alone command line interface. The source code is freely available under the GNU General Public License, Version 3 at http://www.shogun-toolbox.org.
Development of a test for recording both visual and auditory reaction times, potentially useful for future studies in patients on opioids therapy

OBJECTIVE Italian Road Law limits driving while undergoing treatment with certain kinds of medication. Here, we report the results of a test, run as a smartphone application (app), assessing auditory and visual reflexes in a sample of 300 drivers. The scope of the test is to provide both the police force and medication-taking drivers with a tool that can evaluate the individual's capacity to drive safely. METHODS The test is run as an app for Apple iOS and Android mobile operating systems and facilitates four different reaction times to be assessed: simple visual and auditory reaction times and complex visual and auditory reaction times. Reference deciles were created for the test results obtained from a sample of 300 Italian subjects. Results lying within the first three deciles were considered as incompatible with safe driving capabilities. RESULTS Performance is both age-related (r>0.5) and sex-related (female reaction times were significantly slower than those recorded for male subjects, P<0.05). Only 21% of the subjects were able to perform all four tests correctly. CONCLUSION We developed and fine-tuned a test called Safedrive that measures visual and auditory reaction times through a smartphone mobile device; the scope of the test is two-fold: to provide a clinical tool for the assessment of the driving capacity of individuals taking pain relief medication; to promote the sense of social responsibility in drivers who are on medication and provide these individuals with a means of testing their own capacity to drive safely.