Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MEMS technology for timing and frequency control

An overview on the vise of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technologies for timing and frequency control is presented. In particular, micromechanical RF filters and reference oscillators based on recently demonstrated vibrating on-chip micromechanical resonators with Q's > 10,000 at 1.5 GHz are described as an attractive solution to the increasing count of RF components (e.g., filters) expected to be needed by future multiband, multimode wireless devices. With Q's this high in on-chip abundance, such devices might also enable a paradigm shift in the design of timing and frequency control functions, where the advantages of high-Q are emphasized, rather than suppressed (e.g., due to size and cost reasons), resulting in enhanced robustness and power savings. Indeed, as vibrating RF MEMS devices are perceived more as circuit building blocks than as stand-alone devices, and as the frequency processing circuits they enable become larger and more complex, the makings of an integrated micromechanical circuit technology begin to take shape, perhaps with a functional breadth not unlike that of integrated transistor circuits. With even more aggressive three-dimensional MEMS technologies, even higher on-chip Q's are possible, such as already achieved via chip-scale atomic physics packages, which so far have achieved Q's > 107 using atomic cells measuring only 10 mm3 in volume and consuming just 5 mW of power, all while still allowing atomic clock Allan deviations down to 10-11 at one hour
Is split manufacturing secure?

Split manufacturing of integrated circuits (IC) is being investigated as a way to simultaneously alleviate the cost of owning a trusted foundry and eliminate the security risks associated with outsourcing IC fabrication. In split manufacturing, a design house (with a low-end, in-house, trusted foundry) fabricates the Front End Of Line (FEOL) layers (transistors and lower metal layers) in advanced technology nodes at an untrusted high-end foundry. The Back End Of Line (BEOL) layers (higher metal layers) are then fabricated at the design house's trusted low-end foundry. Split manufacturing is considered secure (prevents reverse engineering and IC piracy) as it hides the BEOL connections from an attacker in the FEOL foundry. We show that an attacker in the FEOL foundry can exploit the heuristics used in typical floorplanning, placement, and routing tools to bypass the security afforded by straightforward split manufacturing. We developed an attack where an attacker in the FEOL foundry can connect 96% of the missing BEOL connections correctly. To overcome this security vulnerability in split manufacturing, we developed a fault analysis-based defense. This defense improves the security of split manufacturing by deceiving the FEOL attacker into making wrong connections.
READ: Rapid data Exploration, Analysis and Discovery

Exploratory data analysis (EDA) is the process of discovering important characteristics of a dataset or finding data-driven insights in the corresponding domain. EDA is a human intensive process involving data management, analytic flow deployment and model creation, and data visualization and interpretation. It involves extensive use of analyst time, effort, and skill in data processing as well as domain expertise. In this paper, we introduce READ, a mixed initiative system for accelerating exploratory data analysis. The key idea behind READ is to decompose the exploration process into components that can be independently specified and automated. These components can be defined, reused or extended using simple choice points that are expressed using inference rules, planning logic, and reactive user interfaces and visualization. READ uses a formal specification of the analytic process for automated model space enumeration, workflow composition, deployment, and model validation and clustering. READ aims to reduce the time required for exploration and understanding of a dataset from days to minutes.
Global tracking and disturbance rejection of a class of lower triangular systems subject to an unknown exosystem

In this paper, we study the asymptotic tracking and disturbance rejection problem for a class of uncertain nonlinear lower triangular systems subject to an uncertain exosystem. The same problem was studied before for the same class of systems with the objective of asymptotic tracking only. By utilizing a newly developed robust adaptive controller design approach, we are able to simultaneously handle the objectives of disturbance rejection and asymptotic tracking.
Long‐term recovery In critical illness myopathy is complete, contrary to polyneuropathy

Introduction: Muscle weakness in critically ill patients after discharge varies. It is not known whether the electrophysiological distinction between critical illness myopathy (CIM) and critical illness polyneuropathy (CIP) during the early part of a patient's stay in the intensive care unit (ICU) predicts long‐term prognosis. Methods: This was a prospective cohort study of mechanically ventilated ICU patients undergoing conventional nerve conduction studies and direct muscle stimulation in addition to neurological examination during their ICU stay and 1 year after ICU discharge. Results: Twenty‐six patients (7 ICU controls, 8 CIM patients, and 11 CIM/CIP patients) were evaluated 1 year after discharge from the ICU. Eighty‐eight percent (n = 7) of CIM patients recovered within 1 year compared with 55% (n = 6) of CIM/CIP patients. Thirty‐six percent (n = 4) of CIM/CIP patients still needed assistance during their daily routine (P = 0.005). Conclusions: Early electrophysiological testing predicts long‐term outcome in ICU survivors. CIM has a significantly better prognosis than CIM/CIP. Muscle Nerve 50: 431–436, 2014
A review on multitask metric learning

Distance metric plays an important role in machine learning which is crucial to the performance of a range of algorithms. Metric learning, which refers to learning a proper distance metric for a particular task, has attracted much attention in machine learning. In particular, multi-task learning deals with the scenario where there are multiple related metric learning tasks. By jointly training these tasks, useful information is shared among the tasks, which significantly improves their performances. This paper reviews the literature on multi-task metric learning. Various methods are investigated systematically and categorized into four families. The central ideas of these methods are introduced in detail, followed by some representative applications. Finally, we conclude the review and propose a number of future work directions.
The Knowledge Accumulation and Transfer in Open-Source Software (OSS) Development

We examine the learning curves of individual software developers in Open-Source Software (OSS) Development. We collected the dataset of multi-year code change histories from the repositories for 20 open source software projects involving more than 200 developers. We build and estimate regression models to assess individual developers' learning progress (in reducing the likelihood they make a bug). Our estimation results show that developer's coding and indirect bug-fixing experiences do not decrease bug ratios while bug-fixing experience can lead to the decrease of bug ratio of learning progress. We also find that developer's coding and bug-fixing experiences in other projects do not decrease the developer's bug ratio in a focal project. We empirically confirm the moderating effects of bug types on learning progress. Developers exhibit learning effects for some simple bug types (e.g., Wrong literals) or bug types with many instances (e.g., Wrong if conditionals). The results may have managerial implications and provoke future research on project management about allocating resources on tasks that add new code versus tasks that debug and fix existing code.
The expectant management of early pregnancies of uncertain site.

The role of expectant management was evaluated in 80 women in whom clinical examination, including vaginal ultrasound, had failed to identify the location of an early pregnancy. In 45 cases, spontaneous resolution of the pregnancy products occurred. A normal intra-uterine pregnancy was diagnosed in 12 patients. A total of 23 patients underwent active therapeutic measures due to an ectopic pregnancy (n = 16) or a spontaneous abortion (n = 7). The effectiveness of different diagnostic measures to identify patients suitable for expectant management was analysed. In 33/34 patients (97%) with a relative daily human chorionic gonadotrophin (HCG) change of < -5%, and a serum progesterone concentration of < 20 nmol/l, spontaneous resolution of the pregnancy products occurred. Among 46 cases, with a relative daily HCG change of > -5% and/or serum progesterone > 20 nmol/l, active therapeutic measures were carried out in 22 cases (48%), a normal intra-uterine pregnancy was diagnosed in 12 cases (26%) and spontaneous resolution of the pregnancy products occurred in 12 cases (26%). In conclusion, the combination of a single progesterone assay and serial HCG determinations retrospectively identified early pregnancies of uncertain location in whom expectant management was a safe management option.
Genistein-Induced Histomorphometric and Hormone Secreting Changes in the Adrenal Cortex in Middle-Aged Rats

The soybean phytoestrogen, genistein, is increasingly consumed as an alternative therapeutic for age-related diseases, namely cardiovascular conditions, cancer and osteoporosis. Besides estrogenic/antiestrogenic action, this isoflavone exerts a prominent inhibitory effect on tyrosine kinase and the steroidogenic enzyme families, thus affecting hormonal homeostasis. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of genistein on: histomorphometric features of the adrenal cortex, blood concentrations of aldosterone, corticosterone and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and adrenal tissue corticosterone content in orchidectomized middle-aged male rats. Sixteen-month-old Wistar rats were divided into sham-operated (SO), orchidectomized (Orx) and genistein-treated orchidectomized (Orx+G) groups. Genistein (30 mg/kg/day) was administered subcutaneously for three weeks, while the control groups received the vehicle alone. The adrenal cortex was analysed histologically and morphometrically. Circulating concentrations of aldosterone, corticosterone and DHEA, as well as adrenal tissue corticosterone levels, were determined by immunoassay. When compared to the SO group, orchidectomy decreased the ZG and ZR cell volume by 43% and 29%, respectively (P < 0.05). Serum concentrations of aldosterone and DHEA were markedly lower [13% and 41%, respectively (P < 0.05)], while serum and adrenal tissue levels of corticosterone did not change after orchidectomy. Orchidectomy followed by genistein treatment increased the ZG, ZF and ZR cell volume by 54%, 34% and 77%, respectively (P < 0.05), compared to the untreated orchidectomized group. Histological analysis revealed noticeable vacuolization of the ZG and ZF cells in the Orx+G group. Serum aldosterone and corticosterone concentrations together with adrenal tissue corticosterone were 47%, 31% and 44% lower, respectively (P < 0.05), whereas serum DHEA concentration was 342% higher (P < 0.05) in this group in comparison with the Orx group. This study shows that in orchidectomized middle-aged rats, genistein can cause the shunting of metabolic pathways in the adrenals, supporting DHEA secretion and inhibiting corticosterone and aldosterone secretion.
Recombinant modified vaccinia virus Ankara-based malaria vaccines

A safe and effective malaria vaccine is a crucial part of the roadmap to malaria elimination/eradication by the year 2050. Viral-vectored vaccines based on adenoviruses and modified vaccinia virus Ankara (MVA) expressing malaria immunogens are currently being used in heterologous prime-boost regimes in clinical trials for induction of strong antigen-specific T-cell responses and high-titer antibodies. Recombinant MVA is a safe and well-tolerated attenuated vector that has consistently shown significant boosting potential. Advances have been made in large-scale MVA manufacture as high-yield producer cell lines and high-throughput purification processes have recently been developed. This review describes the use of MVA as malaria vaccine vector in both preclinical and clinical studies in the past 5 years.
Semi Supervised Learning for Human Activity Recognition Using Depth Cameras

Human action recognition is a very active research topic in computer vision and pattern recognition. Recently, it has shown a great potential for human action recognition using the 3D depth data captured by the promising RGB-D cameras, and particularly, the Microsoft Kinect which has made high resolution real-time depth cheaply available. Several features and descriptors have been proposed for depth based action recognition, and they have given high results when recognizing the actions, but one dilemma always exists, the labeled data given, which are manually set by humans. They are not enough to build the system, especially that the use of human action recognition is mainly for surveillance of people activities. In this paper, the paucity of labeled data is addressed, by the popular semi supervision machine learning technique "co-training", which makes full use of unlabeled samples of two different independent views. Through the experiments on two popular datasets (MSR Action 3D, and MSR DailyActivity 3D), we demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms the state of art. It improves the accuracy up to 83% in case of MSR Action 3D, and up to 80% MSR DailyActivity 3D, using the same number of labeled samples.
The performance comparison of flat routing and hierarchical routing in ad hoc wireless networks in the presence of faulty nodes

The hierarchical routing protocols have been proposed to deal with the path search in wireless multi hop networks in various research works. As we know, hierarchical scheme has high complexity on the topology structure management. Some research works have researched the routing overhead in different routing protocols and others research the memory used by hierarchical cluster network. However, the robustness of the various protocols has not been researched, which means the performance of the networks in the presence of faulty nodes. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the performance of the flat routing and hierarchical routing protocols in ad hoc wireless networks. It is especially important to study the performance of the various routing protocols under some special environments, e.g. some fault nodes occurs in the networks. In this environment, we could study the robustness of different protocols.
Nonparametric Lag Selection for Time Series

A nonparametric version of the Final Prediction Error (FPE) is analysed for lag selection in nonlinear autoregressive time series under very general conditions including heteroskedasticity. We prove consistency and derive probabilities of incorrect selections that have been previously unavailable. Since it is more likely to overfit (have too many lags) than to underfit (miss some lags), a correction factor is proposed to reduce overfitting and hence increase correct fitting. For the FPE calculation, the local linear estimator is introduced in addition to the Nadaraya‐Watson estimator in order to cover a very broad class of processes. To achieve faster computation, a plug‐in band‐width is suggested for the local linear estimator. Our Monte‐Carlo study corroborates that the correction factor generally improves the probability of correct lag selection for both linear and nonlinear processes and that the plug‐in bandwidth works at least as well as its commonly used competitor. The proposed methods are applied to the Canadian lynx data and daily returns of DM/US‐Dollar exchange rates.
Multi-Access Routing Switching Scheme for Smart Multimedia Transmission over Wireless Integrated Networks

Current mobile networking technology is continuously progressing to support the demand of today’s generation of Internet users who connect about with sophisticated mobile computers and digital wireless devices. Routing protocols needs to be modified in host mobility in order that packets will be sent and delivered in its right destination. In Mobile Internet protocol, the mobile node will be able to send and receive packet from its original Home IP address to its current location regardless of the location upon connection with Internet. Through this kind of connection, packet loss is inevitable during the handover process. To solve this, numerous studies on the handover process was studied in order to minimize packet loss during the handover process. In this paper, we suggest context aware based smart distributed packet (SDP) transmission mechanism using multi-access routing switching mechanism in wireless integrated networks. We will explain and discuss the scheme that supports a distributed fast handover effectively in mobile management protocol based context-awareness. New signaling messages, smart distributed packet update messages, advanced TFRC message and reverse PBUs, are defined and utilized to hasten the handover procedure.
Antiarrhythmic Drug Combinations in the Treatment of Ventricular Tachycardia Efficacy and Electrophysiologic Effects

Combinations of antiarrhythmic drugs are frequently used to treat refractory ventricular tachycardia (VT), but few scientific data support this practice. We examined the efficacy and electrophysiology of 110 antiarrhythmic drug combination trials at electrophysiologic study in 74 patients with recurrent ventricular tachycardia. Lidocaine was combined with quinidine in 33 trials, procainamide in 22 and encainide in 20. Propranolol was combined with quinidine in 17 trials, procainamide in 12 and encainide in six. All individual drugs tested (except propranolol, which was usually not tested individually) had failed at electrophysiologic study or clinically in the presence of usually accepted plasma concentrations. Lidocaine in combination with quinidine was effective in 3% of the trials, with procainamide in 5% and with encainide in none of the trials. Propranolol in combination with quinidine was effective in 18% of the trials, with procainamide in 17% and with encainide in none of the trials. The electrophysiologic effects of the tested drug combinations were dominated by the individual effects of the type 1 antiarrhythmic agents. We conclude that the tested antiarrhythmic drug combinations are infrequently effective in preventing VT induction at electrophysiologic study when each agent has failed individually. The addition of lidocaine or propranolol to quinidine, procainamide or encainide does not produce significant synergistic or new effects on the electrophysiologic variables analyzed.
In vitro validation of non-invasive aortic compliance measurements using MRI

Blood pressure is an important marker for the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. It provides information on valve mechanics, flow turbulence and vascular compliance (Karamanoglu et al. 1993). Additionally, pulse wave velocity (PWV), related to the arterial compliance, is an indicator of arterial stiffness (Avolio et al. 1983; London and Guerin 1999). We present in this work an experimental set-up for validating non-invasive MRI protocols used for the assessment of aortic blood flow haemodynamics. We measure PWV and compliance directly on an aortic physical model with pressure transducers and use them to validate MRI estimations.
Paying Incumbents and Customers to Enter an Industry: Buying Downloads

Success breeds success in many mass market industries, as well known products gain further consumer acceptance because of their visibility. However, new products must struggle to gain consumer’s scarce attention and initiate that virtuous cycle. The newest mass market industry, mobile apps, has these features. Success among apps is highly concentrated, in part because the “top app lists” recommend apps based on past success as measured by downloads. Consequently, in order to introduce themselves to users, new app developers attempt to gain a position on the top app lists by “buying downloads,” i.e., paying a user to download the app onto her device. We build a model to rationalize this behavior, taking into account the impact of buying downloads on top list ranking and optimal investment in buying downloads. We leverage a private dataset from one platform for buying downloads to identify the return on this investment, as a test for the assumption of the model. $100 invested will improve the ranking by 2.2%. We provide some informal tests of the two empirical predictions of the model: (1) there are two humps in the diffusion pattern of the app, and (2) early rankings are less persistent than later rankings. We estimate an empirical analog of the model to show the relative importance of buying downloads and rich heterogeneity in the market. We simulate counterfactuals to evaluate the efficiency of top-ranking lists.
Computing Aesthetics

Aesthetic judgment is one of the most valued human characteristics, being regarded as a remarkable display of intelligence. Popular knowledge tells us that it is purely cultural. In this paper, we present a brief theory according to which aesthetics depends on biological and cultural issues, namely on visual image processing. We present an implementation of this theory and the experimental results achieved. The tests were made with two purposes in mind, validating the theory and using it as a basis for the automatic generation and evaluation of images.
Curling-PCM: Application-specific wear leveling for phase change memory based embedded systems

Phase change memory (PCM) has been used as NOR flash replacement in embedded systems with its attractive features. However, the endurance of PCM keeps drifting down and greatly limits its adoption in embedded systems. As most embedded systems are application-oriented, we can better utilize PCM by exploring application-specific features such as fixed access patterns and update frequencies to prolong the lifetime of PCM. In this paper, we propose an application-specific wear leveling technique, called Curling-PCM, to evenly distribute write activities across the PCM chip in order to improve the endurance of PCM. The basic idea is to exploit application-specific features in embedded systems and periodically move the hot region across the whole PCM chip. To further reduce the overhead of moving the hot region and improve the performance of PCM-based embedded systems, a fine-grained partial wear leveling policy is proposed in Curling-PCM, by which only part of the hot region is moved during each request handling period. The experimental results show that Curling-PCM can effectively evenly distribute write traffic in PCM chips compared with previous work. We expect this work can serve as a first step towards the full exploration of application-specific features in PCM-based embedded systems.