Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Arc-Jet Testing on HfB - TaSi Models: Effect of the Geometry on the Aerothermal Behaviour

Arc-jet experiments in high enthalpy hypersonic (Mach 3) non equilibrium flow were carried out on a HfB2 composite with addition of 15 vol% TaSi2, at temperatures exceeding 2000 K. The aerothermal behaviour was tested considering models having two different geometries, i.e. hemispheric and cone-shaped. The surface temperature and emissivity of the material were evaluated during the tests. Numerical computations of the nozzle flow were carried out in order to identify the flow conditions around the model and to analyze the details of thermal heating. The chemical- physical modifications were analysed after exposures. The surface emissivity changed from 0.85 to 0.5 due to surface oxidation. The maximum temperatures reached on the tip were strongly dependent on the sample geometry, being around 2300 K for the hemisphere and 2800 K for the cone. Post test SEM analyses confirmed an excellent stability for this HfB2-based material.
Towards the realistic applications of compressed sensing in radar systems

In this article we discuss certain aspects of compressed sensing application in the context of radar systems. We thoroughly analyze the framework of the paper [4] and propose the directions of generalizations. In particular we consider a rectangle time frequency grid of non-prime type, non-Allotop carrier signals of the length non-equal to the length of time grid, incoherent carrier and grid frequency units. Finally we discuss the measurement aspects, stressing that the number of measurements may be smaller then the time grid of the time frequency plain. We present the results of simulations confirming that under some condition the compressed sensing performs well in our context.
Size-Depth Tradeoffs for Threshold Circuits

The following size--depth tradeoff for threshold circuits is obtained: any threshold circuit of depth $d$ that computes the parity function on $n$ variables must have at least $n^{1 + c\theta^{-d }}$ edges, where $c>0$ and $\theta \leq 3$ are constants independent of $n$ and $d$. Previously known constructions show that up to the choice of $c$ and $\theta$ this bound is best possible. In particular, the lower bound implies an affirmative answer to the conjecture of Paturi and Saks that a bounded-depth threshold circuit that computes parity requires a superlinear number of edges. This is the first superlinear lower bound for an explicit function that holds for any fixed depth and the first that applies to threshold circuits with unrestricted weights. The tradeoff is obtained as a consequence of a general restriction theorem for threshold circuits with a small number of edges: For any threshold circuit with $n$ inputs, depth $d$, and at most $kn$ edges, there exists a partial assignment to the inputs that fixes the output of the circuit to a constant while leaving $\lfloor n/(c_1k)^{c_2\theta^{d}} \rfloor$ variables unfixed, where $c_1,c_2 > 0$ and $ \theta \leq 3$ are constants independent of $n$, $k$, and $d$. A tradeoff between the number of gates and depth is also proved: any threshold circuit of depth $d$ that computes the parity of $n$ variables has at least $(n/2)^{1/2(d-1)}$ gates. This tradeoff, which is essentially the best possible, was proved previously (with a better constant in the exponent) for the case of threshold circuits with polynomially bounded weights in [K. Siu, V. Roychowdury, and T. Kailath, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 40 (1994), pp. 455--466]; the result in the present paper holds for unrestricted weights.
Noise in Silicon Nanowires

The current-voltage and noise characteristics of bridging silicon wires have been measured at room temperature. From the linear current-voltage characteristics the bulk and contact resistance contributions are extracted and modeled. The excess noise observed at low frequencies is interpreted in terms of bulk and contact noise contributions, with the former comparable, in terms of Hooge parameter values, to the low noise levels observed in high-quality silicon devices. The contact noise is significant in some devices and is attributed to the impinging end of the bridging nanowires
Image-Processing Scheme to Detect Superficial Fungal Infections of the Skin

The incidence of superficial fungal infections is assumed to be 20 to 25% of the global human population. Fluorescence microscopy of extracted skin samples is frequently used for a swift assessment of infections. To support the dermatologist, an image-analysis scheme has been developed that evaluates digital microscopic images to detect fungal hyphae. The aim of the study was to increase diagnostic quality and to shorten the time-to-diagnosis. The analysis, consisting of preprocessing, segmentation, parameterization, and classification of identified structures, was performed on digital microscopic images. A test dataset of hyphae and false-positive objects was created to evaluate the algorithm. Additionally, the performance for real clinical images was investigated using 415 images. The results show that the sensitivity for hyphae is 94% and 89% for singular and clustered hyphae, respectively. The mean exclusion rate is 91% for the false-positive objects. The sensitivity for clinical images was 83% and the specificity was 79%. Although the performance is lower for the clinical images than for the test dataset, a reliable and fast diagnosis can be achieved since it is not crucial to detect every hypha to conclude that a sample consisting of several images is infected. The proposed analysis therefore enables a high diagnostic quality and a fast sample assessment to be achieved.
Sensitivity of Microscopy Compared to Molecular Diagnosis of P. Falciparum: Implications on Malaria Treatment in Epidemic Areas in Kenya

Detection of Plasmodium species by microscopy has been the gold standard for diagnosis of malaria for more than a century. Despite the fact that there is a significant decline in the number of positive cases reported from microscopy, antimalarial drugs prescriptions are on continuous increase as patients present with symptoms of malaria. This makes it difficult to establish accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of light microscopy in diagnosis of malaria in epidemic areas. This study was designed to compare microscopy with polymerase chain reaction as diagnostic methods for malaria in three epidemic areas in Kenya. A total of 356 patients presenting with malaria symptoms were diagnosed by microscopy and dried blood filter paper spots were collected from patient in Kisii, West Pokot and Narok districts. Plasmodium falciparum DNA was extracted from the dried blood filter samples. Primers specific for the Plasmodium Species were designed and used in a two step amplification of the Pfmdr gene. The PCR products were analyzed in ethidium bromide stained 1.5% agarose gel. It was found that 72 out of 350 specimens diagnosed as negative were positive for P. falciparum by nested PCR, while 6 which were microscopy positive were confirmed so by nested PCR. This study demonstrates that there is a high level of misdiagnosis which may either lead to denial for deserved treatment or undeserved treatment. Nested PCR detection of malaria parasites is a very useful complement to microscopy although it is expensive and takes long time. Additionally, smear negative patients suspected to have malaria should be subjected to PCR diagnosis to improve rational drug use. The economic burden of misdiagnosis and mistreatment of malaria outweighs that of PCR diagnosis, hence this diagnostic mode could be tenable in the long run even in rural areas.
Patterns for integrating agile development processes and user centred design

The aim of this paper is to report the patterns that emerged as a result of conducting two studies: first, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that investigated Agile and User Centred Design Integration (AUCDI) challenges, strategies and success factors and included a total of 71 AUCDI experience reports, lessons learned, and success and failure AUCDI case studies. Second, an interview study that investigated challenges and practices faced by industrial AUCDI attempts. The patterns that emerged are related to various aspects of the integration process, for example, design, prioritizing User Centred Design (UCD) activities, usability testing, UCD practitioners, documentation and communication between the customer and the development team.
Inhaled nano- and microparticles for drug delivery

The 21st century has seen a paradigm shift to inhaled therapy, for both systemic and local drug delivery, due to the lung's favourable properties of a large surface area and high permeability. Pulmonary drug delivery possesses many advantages, including non-invasive route of administration, low metabolic activity, control environment for systemic absorption and avoids first bypass metabolism. However, because the lung is one of the major ports of entry, it has multiple clearance mechanisms, which prevent foreign particles from entering the body. Although these clearance mechanisms maintain the sterility of the lung, clearance mechanisms can also act as barriers to the therapeutic effectiveness of inhaled drugs. This effectiveness is also influenced by the deposition site and delivered dose. Particulate-based drug delivery systems have emerged as an innovative and promising alternative to conventional inhaled drugs to circumvent pulmonary clearance mechanisms and provide enhanced therapeutic efficiency and controlled drug release. The principle of multiple pulmonary clearance mechanisms is reviewed, including mucociliary, alveolar macrophages, absorptive, and metabolic degradation. This review also discusses the current approaches and formulations developed to achieve optimal pulmonary drug delivery systems.
Formal Verification of Language-Based Concurrent Noninterference

We perform a formal analysis of compositionality techniques for proving possibilistic noninterference for a while language with parallel composition. We develop a uniform framework where we express a wide range of non-interference variants from the literature and compare them w.r. t. their contracts: the strength of the security properties they ensure weighed against the harshness of the syntactic conditions they enforce. This results in a simple implementable algorithm for proving that a program has a specific noninterference property, using only compositionality, which captures uniformly several security type-system results from the literature and suggests a further improved type system. All formalism and theorems have been mechanically verified in Isabelle/HOL.
Improving a bag of words approach for skin cancer detection in dermoscopic images

With a rapidly increasing incidence of melanoma skin cancer, there is a need for decision support systems to detect it in its early stages, which would lead to better decisions in treating it successfully. However, developing such systems is still a challenging task for researchers. Several Computer Aided-Diagnosis (CAD) systems have been proposed in the last two decades to increase the accuracy of melanoma detection. Image feature extraction is a critical step in differentiating between melanoma and normal skin lesions. In this paper, we propose to improve a bag-of-words approach by combining features consisting of the color histogram and first order moments with the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG). Experimental results show that the proposed technique significantly improves the detection accuracy, with an average sensitivity of 91% and specificity of 85%. The proposed system was validated on a dataset of 200 medically annotated images (40 melanomas and 160 non-melanomas) obtained from the database of the Hospital Pedro Hispano. [1].
Realization of FGAC model using XACML policy specification

FGAC model has been adopted by enterprise applications, for the protection of their databases. Most of these deployments are not only limited in purpose but are dependent upon various other factors including query modification algorithms and software development languages. These factors have not only limited their applicability for distributed computing environments but have also affected their widespread adoption and acceptance. Moreover, due to the absence of standard FGAC profile specification, existing FGAC authorization techniques become unsuitable for advance applications such as Web 2.0 and cannot be deployed across various platforms, thus fall short of flexibility and customizability. As a result, there is an increasing demand for standard based FGAC specification that could be easily fit into majority of computing environments. In this paper, we bring forth a policy specification (profile) for FGAC model. Our proposed specification is not restricted to database applications only; rather it is generic and flexible enough to be applied on every type of application. It explicates the ways in which organizations would be able to implement standard based fine-grained access control for nearly every application. We present the case-study - a realization of FGAC model based on the proposed policy specification followed by a complete dryrun of policy evaluation procedure.
Large deviations for random walk in a space–time product environment

We consider random walk (X n ) n≥0 on Z d in a space-time product environment a) ∈ Ω. We take the point of view of the particle and focus on the environment Markov chain (T n,Xn ω) n≥0 where T denotes the shift on Q. Conditioned on the particle having asymptotic mean velocity equal to any given ξ, we show that the empirical process of the environment Markov chain converges to a stationary process μ ∞ ξ under the averaged measure. When d ≥ 3 and ξ is sufficiently close to the typical velocity, we prove that averaged and quenched large deviations are equivalent and when conditioned on the particle having asymptotic mean velocity ξ, the empirical process of the environment Markov chain converges to μ ∞ ξ under the quenched measure as well. In this case, we show that μ ∞ ξ is a stationary Markov process whose kernel is obtained from the original kernel by a Doob h-transform.
An Adaptive Scheme for Robot Localization and Mapping with Dynamically Configurable Inter-Beacon Range Measurements

This work is motivated by robot-sensor network cooperation techniques where sensor nodes (beacons) are used as landmarks for range-only (RO) simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). This paper presents a RO-SLAM scheme that actuates over the measurement gathering process using mechanisms that dynamically modify the rate and variety of measurements that are integrated in the SLAM filter. It includes a measurement gathering module that can be configured to collect direct robot-beacon and inter-beacon measurements with different inter-beacon depth levels and at different rates. It also includes a supervision module that monitors the SLAM performance and dynamically selects the measurement gathering configuration balancing SLAM accuracy and resource consumption. The proposed scheme has been applied to an extended Kalman filter SLAM with auxiliary particle filters for beacon initialization (PF-EKF SLAM) and validated with experiments performed in the CONET Integrated Testbed. It achieved lower map and robot errors (34% and 14%, respectively) than traditional methods with a lower computational burden (16%) and similar beacon energy consumption.
Finding good composition in panoramic scenes

We introduce a new problem of automatic photo composition, and present an effective technique for finding good views within a panoramic scene. Instead of applying heuristic rules of photo composition, we propose to imitate good composition presented in the artworks of professional photographers. Our approach tries to model the composition styles of professional photographs by analyzing the structural features and the layout of visual saliency. The task of finding good photo composition through a viewfinder is formulated as a search problem, and we present a stochastic search algorithm to look for good viewing configurations and to choose suitable reference images from the collection of masterpiece photographs. Given any initial location in the panoramic scene, our algorithm is able to suggest a better view that would often yield professional-like photo composition.
Influence of the actions observed on cervical motion in patients with chronic neck pain: a pilot study

The aim of the present pilot study was to prove if the action-observation (AOb) improved the cervical range of motion (CROM) in patients with nonspecific chronic neck pain (CNP). Double blind pilot study. A total of 28 subjects were randomly assigned to an effective-movement group (n=14) and an ineffective-movement group (n=14). The follow-up consisted of: pretreatment, posttreatment and 10 min after second measurement (motor imagery). Outcome measures were CROM, and pres-sure pain detection thresholds (PPDTs). No statistical differences were found in baseline on CROM and on the PPDT. Test for independent groups revealed significant changes in cervical rotation movement. Both groups in posttreatment (P=0.042; Cohen d=0.81) and after 10 min (P=0.019; Cohen d=0.9). For intragroup PPDT, the Wilcoxon test revealed significant effects in the effective movement at C2 of the pre to 10-min post (P=0.040). However, the ineffective movement revealed a significant reduction in PPDT in zygapophyseal joint of C5–C6 as the pre to post (P=0.010) as the pre to 10-min post (P=0.041) periods. In conclusions this pilot study demonstrated that the effective AOb produced significant changes versus ineffective AOb in the CROM and it could influences in PPT in subject with CNP immediately.
Towards Precise Simulation of Optical Elastography Technique

Optical elastography is a promising new imaging technique which utilizes optical frequency radiation to produce images of elastic modulus distribution of compliant tissue. Elastography practice is generally accomplished under the assumption of a linear stress-strain relationship in biological tissue. This assumption is not valid for most biological tissues even for small applied compressions. The nonlinear stress-strain relationship of different tissue types significantly impacts on the contrast in elastography images; so it is crucial to consider this characteristic in order to achieve a more realistic simulation of this technique. In this paper, we represent the achieved analytic expression predicting the Young modulus alterations of a soft biological tissue due to applied force in terms of some tissue’s specifications, with consideration of elastography procedure and in the case of nonlinear stress-strain relationship which is valid for most soft tissues. This model is achieved base on analytic solution of 2D elasticity problem for a circular homogeneous inclusion attached to a homogeneous infinite medium in the case of a plane-strain state.
Semantic modelling of Android malware for effective malware comprehension, detection, and classification

Malware has posed a major threat to the Android ecosystem. Existing malware detection tools mainly rely on signature- or feature- based approaches, failing to provide detailed information beyond the mere detection. In this work, we propose a precise semantic model of Android malware based on Deterministic Symbolic Automaton (DSA) for the purpose of malware comprehension, detection and classification. It shows that DSA can capture the common malicious behaviors of a malware family, as well as the malware variants. Based on DSA, we develop an automatic analysis framework, named SMART, which learns DSA by detecting and summarizing semantic clones from malware families, and then extracts semantic features from the learned DSA to classify malware according to the attack patterns. We conduct the experiments in both malware benchmark and 223,170 real-world apps. The results show that SMART builds meaningful semantic models and outperforms both state-of-the-art approaches and anti-virus tools in malware detection. SMART identifies 4583 new malware in real-world apps that are missed by most anti-virus tools. The classification step further identifies new malware variants and unknown families.
A Taxonomy of Dynamic ATC Visualizations

Air traffic control systems display information using multiple visual variables. The research described in this paper is an initial effort to develop a theory-driven approach to the characterization of user interfaces. We will focus on the displayed visual object and deliberately leave aside the interaction. In this article, we depict the state of the art in data visualization, and we characterize these systems using the Card, Mackinlay and Bertin model. This work helps characterize images more precisely, refines our understanding of the transformations of the raw data that generates them, as well as the role of perception in the interpretation of visualization.
Effects of elevated carbon dioxide and ozone on volatile terpenoid emissions and multitrophic communication of transgenic insecticidal oilseed rape ( Brassica napus )

Sari J. Himanen1, Anne-Marja Nerg1, Anne Nissinen1,2, Delia M. Pinto1, C. Neal Stewart Jr3, Guy M. Poppy4 and Jarmo K. Holopainen1 1Department of Environmental Science, University of Kuopio, P.O. Box 1627, FIN-70211 Kuopio, Finland; 2MTT Agrifood Research Finland, Plant Protection, FIN-31600 Jokioinen, Finland; 3Department of Plant Sciences, University of Tennessee, 2431 Joe Johnson Drive, Knoxville, TN 37996-4561, USA; 4School of Biological Sciences, University of Southampton, Bassett Crescent East, Southampton SO16 7PX, UK
Broadband Space Conservative On-Wafer Network Analyzer Calibrations With More Complex Load and Thru Models

An improved vector network analyzer (VNA) calibration approach is demonstrated that utilizes planar lumped short-open-load-thru standards and achieves accuracy comparable to thru-reflect-line (TRL) at high frequency, without the commonly occurring errors in TRL at low frequency. The approach relies on complex load and thru models for coplanar waveguide and microstrip standards that are not currently available in typical VNA firmware. It is shown that the RF performance changes due to variations in fabrication of load can be addressed by "calibrating" or adjusting the load model with the measured dc resistance for a particular load. Good results are shown for a wide range of substrates (GaAs, alumina, and FR-4) and frequencies to 110 GHz