Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
White Light Emitting Diodes of GaN-Based Sr2SiO4:Eu and the Luminescent Properties

We have synthesized a Eu2+-activated Sr2SiO4yellow phosphor and investigated an attempt to develop white LEDs by combining it with a GaN blue LED chip. Two distinct emission bands from the GaN-based LED and the Sr2SiO4:Eu phosphor are clearly observed at 400 nm and at around 550 nm, respectively. These two emission bands combine to give a spectrum that appears white to the naked eye. Our results show that GaN (400 nm chip)-based Sr2SiO4:Eu exhibits a better luminous efficiency than that of the industrially available product InGaN (460 nm chip)-based YAG:Ce.
A Positron Emission Tomographic Study of Auditory Localization in the Congenitally Blind

We have used positron emission tomography (PET) to measure regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in sighted and congenitally blind subjects performing auditory localization tasks. During scanning, the spectral and binaural cues of localized sound were reproduced by a sound system and delivered via headphones. During tasks that required auditory localization both the sighted and blind subjects strongly activated posterior parietal areas. In addition, the blind subjects activated association areas in the right occipital cortex, the foci of which were similar to areas previously identified in visual location and motion detection experiments in sighted subjects. The blind subjects, therefore, demonstrated visual to auditory cross-modal plasticity with auditory localization activating occipital association areas originally intended for dorsal-stream visual processing. To determine the functional connectivity of pre-selected brain regions in primary and non-primary auditory and posterior parietal cortex in the two cohorts, we performed an inter-regional correlation analysis on the rCBF data set. During auditory localization in the blind subjects, rCBF activity in the right posterior parietal cortex was positively correlated with that in the right occipital region, whereas in sighted subjects correlations were generally negative. There were no significant positive occipital correlations in either cohort when reference regions in temporal or left parietal cortex were chosen. This indicates that in congenitally blind subjects the right occipital cortex participates in a functional network for auditory localization and that occipital activity is more likely to arise from connections with posterior parietal cortex.
[Histological evaluation on repair of furcation perforation in dogs using mineral trioxide aggregate].

OBJECTIVE To investigate histological response to immediate repair of different sizes of furcation perforation using MTA, Dycal and GIC. METHODS Forty-two posterior teeth in three adult beagle dogs were randomly divided into two groups, small perforation group and large perforation group. Each group was then divided into three sub-groups which were repaired with MTA, Dycal and GIC respectively. The dogs were sacrificed 4 months later, and the specimens processed and examined under the light microscope. Inflammation, epithelial proliferation, and formation of hard tissue over the material were evaluated. RESULTS In teeth repaired with MTA, five cases were free of inflammation, and the other nine cases were associated with slight or moderate inflammation. There was formation of cementum with cementoblast cells around it in four cases. In the group of Dycal, all specimens had moderate or severe inflammation. The deposition of irregular calcified tissues as well as a large quantity of inflamed cells were found in two cases of small perforation. Six cases presented epithelial proliferation. In the group of GIC, moderate or severe inflammation was seen in all cases except for one case of large perforation with fibrous tissues and sparse inflammatory cells around the material. Four cases presented epithelial proliferation. There was some relation between epithelial proliferation and size of perforation. CONCLUSION MTA is superior to GIC and Dycal for immediate repairing furcation perforation in dogs owing to its less irritation to surrounding tissues and its ability to induce the formation of hard tissues.
A tagger/lemmatiser for Dutch medical language

In this paper, we want to describe a tagger/lemmatiser for Dutch medical vocabulary, which consists of a full-form dictionary and a morphological recogniser for unknown vocabulary coupled to an expert system-like disambiguation module. Attention is also paid to the main datastructures: a lexical database and feature bundles implemented as directed acyclic graphs. some evaluation results are presented as well. The tagger/lemmatiser currently functions as a lexical front-end for a syntactic parser. For pure tagging/lemmatising purposes, a reduced tagset (not suited for sentence analysis) can be used as well.
CARI ’ 12 Some efficient methods for computing the determinants of large sparse matrices

ABSTRACT. The computation of determinants intervenes in many scientific applications, as for example in the localization of eigenvalues of a given matrix A in a domain of the complex plane. When a procedure based on the application of the residual theorem is used, the integration process leads to the evaluation of the principal argument of the complex logarithm of the function g(z) = det((z + h)I − A)/det(zI − A), and a large number of determinants is computed to insure that the same branch of the complex logarithm is followed during the integration. In this paper, we present some efficient methods for computing the determinant of a large sparse and block structured matrix. Tests conducted using randomly generated matrices show the efficiency and robustness of our methods.
Energy-Efficient Pre-Execution Techniques in Two-Step Physical Register Deallocation

Instruction pre-execution is an effective way to prefetch data. We previously proposed an instruction pre-execution scheme, which we call two-step physical register deallocation (TSD). The TSD realizes pre-execution by exploiting the difference between the amount of instruction-level parallelism available with an unlimited number of physical registers and that available with an actual number of physical registers. Although previous TSD study has successfully improved performance, it still has an inefficient energy consumption. This is because attempts are made for instructions to be pre-executed as much as possible, independently of whether or not they can significantly contribute to load latency reduction, allowing for maximal performance improvement. This paper presents a scheme that improves the energy efficiency of the TSD by pre-executing only those instructions that have great benefit. Our evaluation results using the SPECfp2000 benchmark show that our scheme reduces the dynamic pre-executed instruction count by 76%, compared with the original scheme. This reduction saves 7% energy consumption of the execution core with 2% overhead. Performance degrades by 2%, compared with that of the original scheme, but is still 15% higher than that of the normal processor without the TSD.
Shear Adhesion Strength of Gecko-Inspired Tapes on Surfaces with Variable Roughness

With the aim to gain a wider understanding on the design rules of bioinspired adhesives for application in the medical field, the adhesion of fibrillar structures on soft and stiff polymers was determined in bench top studies on surfaces with variable roughness and in ex-vivo wet tissue tests. The adhesion strength of stiff fibrillar structures was found to be dependent on the roughness of the adherent surface. For a given fibril width and density, the optimal adhesion was seen when the length of the fibrils was of the same range as that of the roughness of the surface it was tested against. Over this limit, the adherence decreased. In the case of soft adhesive structures, the same trend was observed where an optimum adhesion was seen when the size of the pillars matched that of the adherent surface roughness. This observation was attributed to an increase in surface contact. The adhesion of fibrillar structures on tissue samples in ex-vivo tests showed a similar trend with enhanced fibrillar interpenetration favoring a larger number of contacts and a stronger capillary force expected to account for the adhesion enhancement.
On the Integration of Tactile and Force Feedback

Haptic interfaces promise to add a new channel to digital communication, through the exploitation of the sense of touch, beside the traditional sense of sight and of hearing. Nonetheless, even if they firstly appeared on the market in the early nineties, they haven’t spread yet in the society as a consumer product. This is not due to the intrinsic nature of the sense of touch that is a very sophisticated sensorial system, able to perceive fine and complex time and spatial varying characteristics of the outer world, but to the limited capabilities of the nowadays available haptic systems. Indeed, if from one side they allow quite realistic rendering of “mediated contacts” (i.e. contact of an object mediated by a specific tool like a pen, scissors, screw driver etc.), on the other side they are less effective for the rendering of cases of interaction in which the human limbs contact directly the object (direct contact). The main limitation lays in the lack of a proper simultaneous elicitation of kinesthetic and tactile cues.
SEC - a lightweight event correlation tool

Event correlation has become one of the most important techniques in today's network management, and there is a clear trend to extend its use to other application domains as well. Unfortunately, existing event correlation systems are often platform-dependent and heavyweight solutions that have complicated design, being therefore difficult to deploy and maintain, and requiring extensive user training. Their complexity and size makes them often unfeasible to apply for smaller networks and for smaller event correlation tasks. Also, some systems are cumbersome to use outside the domain of network fault management. In addition, commercial event correlation products tend to be quite expensive. In this paper the author presents a lightweight, open-source, and platform independent tool for rule-based event correlation called SEC (simple event correlator), and describes its application experience.
Acquired Phototrophy through Retention of Functional Chloroplasts Increases Growth Efficiency of the Sea Slug Elysia viridis

Photosynthesis is a fundamental process sustaining heterotrophic organisms at all trophic levels. Some mixotrophs can retain functional chloroplasts from food (kleptoplasty), and it is hypothesized that carbon acquired through kleptoplasty may enhance trophic energy transfer through increased host growth efficiency. Sacoglossan sea slugs are the only known metazoans capable of kleptoplasty, but the relative fitness contributions of heterotrophy through grazing, and phototrophy via kleptoplasts, are not well understood. Fitness benefits (i.e. increased survival or growth) of kleptoplasty in sacoglossans are commonly studied in ecologically unrealistic conditions under extended periods of complete darkness and/or starvation. We compared the growth efficiency of the sacoglossan Elysia viridis with access to algal diets providing kleptoplasts of differing functionality under ecologically relevant light conditions. Individuals fed Codium fragile, which provide highly functional kleptoplasts, nearly doubled their growth efficiency under high compared to low light. In contrast, individuals fed Cladophora rupestris, which provided kleptoplasts of limited functionality, showed no difference in growth efficiency between light treatments. Slugs feeding on Codium, but not on Cladophora, showed higher relative electron transport rates (rETR) in high compared to low light. Furthermore, there were no differences in the consumption rates of the slugs between different light treatments, and only small differences in nutritional traits of algal diets, indicating that the increased growth efficiency of E. viridis feeding on Codium was due to retention of functional kleptoplasts. Our results show that functional kleptoplasts from Codium can provide sacoglossan sea slugs with fitness advantages through photosynthesis.
Dissection of Maize Kernel Composition and Starch Production by Candidate Gene Association

Cereal starch production forms the basis of subsistence for much of the world's human and domesticated animal populations. Starch concentration and composition in the maize (Zea mays ssp mays) kernel are complex traits controlled by many genes. In this study, an association approach was used to evaluate six maize candidate genes involved in kernel starch biosynthesis: amylose extender1 (ae1), brittle endosperm2 (bt2), shrunken1 (sh1), sh2, sugary1, and waxy1. Major kernel composition traits, such as protein, oil, and starch concentration, were assessed as well as important starch composition quality traits, including pasting properties and amylose levels. Overall, bt2, sh1, and sh2 showed significant associations for kernel composition traits, whereas ae1 and sh2 showed significant associations for starch pasting properties. ae1 and sh1 both associated with amylose levels. Additionally, haplotype analysis of sh2 suggested this gene is involved in starch viscosity properties and amylose content. Despite starch concentration being only moderately heritable for this particular panel of diverse maize inbreds, high resolution was achieved when evaluating these starch candidate genes, and diverse alleles for breeding and further molecular analysis were identified.
Prediction of the Thermo-Mechanical Contact Behaviour of a Graded Coating/Substrate System Using Advanced Numerical Techniques

Coatings or coating combinations are widely used to increase operating life and running performance of engineering materials. Nevertheless, the development and choice of coatings is a very complex and costly task. This selection and optimization is thus based on a recursive procedure combining experimental tests and modeling. Numerical simulation is used to analyze coating behavior, tune the geometrical configuration and define optimal thermo-mechanical properties in relation with the applied stress. The objective of the current work is to develop a 3D thermo-elastic model for coatings with graded properties. Former models dealt with isotropic layers with constant properties adhering perfectly. These last assumptions result in discontinuities in stress and temperature fields at the interface between successive layers. The increasing use of interface layers between coatings and substrates requires theoretical models to predict the thermomechanical behavior of such graded coatings. The gradation in properties of the material reduces induced thermomechanical stress discontinuities. Multigrid techniques are used to improve solver efficiency, reduce CPU time and thus permit the use of fine grids to accurately describe the variations in elastic properties.Copyright © 2005 by ASME
Simplifying MapReduce Data Processing

MapReduce is a programming model developed by Google for processing and generating large data sets in distributed environments. Many real-world tasks can be implemented by two functions, map and reduce. MapReduce plays a key role in Cloud Computing, since it decreases the complexity of the distributed programming and is easy to be developed on large clusters of common machines. Hadoop, an open-source project, is used to implement Google MapReduce architecture. It is wildly used by many applications such as Face Book, Yahoo, Twitter, and so on. However, it is difficult to decouple an application into functions of map and reduce for common users. In this paper, we develop a web-based graphic user interface for ordinary users to utilize MapReduce without the real programming. Users only have to know how to specify their tasks in target-value-action tuples. Real examples are provided for demonstration.
Timing optimization of nested loops considering code size for DSP applications

Software pipelining for nested loops remains a challenging problem for embedded system design. The existing software pipelining techniques for single loops can only explore the parallelism of the innermost loop, so the final timing performance is inferior. While multidimensional (MD) retiming can explore the outer loop parallelism, it introduces large overheads in loop index generation and code size due to transformation. We use MD retiming to model the software pipelining problem of nested loops. We show that the computation time and code size of a software-pipelined loop nest is affected by execution sequence and retiming function. The algorithm of software pipelining for nested loops technique (SPINE) is proposed to generate fully parallelized loops efficiently with the overheads as small as possible. The experimental results show that our technique outperforms both the standard software pipelining and MD retiming significantly.
Model for the dynamics of liquid penetration into porous structures and its detection with the help of changes in ultrasonic attenuation

The dynamics of liquid penetration into porous networks is important for many processes during the production and printing of paper. One commercially available device to measure liquid penetration indirectly uses the change of ultrasonic attenuation when a specimen is brought into contact with liquid. In order to interpret results obtained by this device the generation and detection of ultra-sound are modelled as functions of the Sender and the Receiver, their material properties, their diameters and the geometry of the measurement chamber. In addition, the use of a sample-holder and of a special steel insert for measurements are covered. The efforts are mainly focussed on the spread, attenuation, reflection and scattering of ultra-sound. Further a model for the ultrasonic attenuation of pores partly filled with liquid and partly filled with gas is derived. The penetration dynamics into pores is then developed as a function of their size and shape, the material, and the solid-liquid interaction. Both aspects are combined to describe the time-dependent change in ultrasonic attenuation when liquid penetration takes place. Results predicted by the model are validated by several measurements, including the validation of the measurement chamber with different solutions of manganese-sulfate, the sample-holder with different plastics, and the steel-insert using ethanol-water blends. A nucleopore membrane, characterized by fairly cylindrical pores of well defined sizes, is used to validate the penetration dynamics. The measurements with liquids show a good correlation of measurements with the values predicted by the model. The correlation of the concentration of manganese-sulfate and its ultrasonic attenuation is confirmed by the model. The physical properties of ethanol-water blends vary largely with the concentration. This can also be seen in the measurement results. The results with the sample-holder fit well and indicate a considerable influence of the sample-holder’s thickness on the results. In the measurements with the membranes it becomes obvious that the capillary suction, as described by the Lucas-Washburn- or Bosanquet-equation, is important for the initial penetration into the pores. However this process is too fast to be measured directly, as the device can record values only after an initial delay of 8 ms. As a consequence of the capillary suction and due to the fact that the pores are sealed at one side, the pressure in the pores increases, which leads to an imbalance between the gas-pressure and the concentration of the gas dissolved in the liquid. Consequently, gas is transferred from the gas-phase into the liquid, and the gas volume is reduced. Hence the pores are filled with liquid. Additional measurements with paper show that they can be interpreted on the basis of the model. But for a quantitative description there is still a lack of precise information about the paper structure, the distribution of convex and concave surfaces, and the local distribution of the wettability.
A Typed Calculus Supporting Shallow Embeddings of Abstract Machines

machines and reductions in a system of proof terms for a version the sequent calculus. We believe that by doing so we shed light on some essential characteristics of abstract machines, proofs in sequent calculus systems, and weak normalization of λ-terms. The machines that we consider are the (callby-name) Krivine machine and a call-by-value machine that may be called a “right-to-left CEK machine” but with some modifications can be seen as a proto-ZINC machine. The formal connection we exhibit is, in fact, an embedding of the machines into the term calculus. We embed run-time data structures, such as the control stack and environment, in such a way that the operational semantics of the machine corresponds to reduction steps in the calculus. The abstract machine state, including the code that it executes, is captured as a term; the abstract machine transitions are captured as term reductions. This is in contrast to specifying the operational semantics on top of the calculus. In other words, our goal is to provide a shallow embedding of an abstract machine in a calculus/logic, as opposed to a deep embedding. This allows reasoning about the machine inside the logic itself instead of on top of it. The logical formulae that are assigned to proof terms provide a type system for the term language via the Curry-Howard isomorphism, and because of the method of embedding the machines into the terms, this type system can be directly lifted to the machine code and machine states, thereby allowing an elegant and simple formulation of safety, based on the subject reduction theorem of the calculus.
Multi-Layer People Detection using 2 D Range Data

This paper addresses the problem of detecting people using multiple layers of 2D range scans. Detecting persons is an important capacity for intelligent systems that have to interact with people. Our approach uses a supervised learning algorithm to train one classifier for each layer, which concentrates in a different body part. The classifiers are then combined in a probabilistic way to create a final robust detector. Experimental results with real data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to detect persons in cluttered environments, and its ability to deal with occlusions.
Silver nanoparticles embedded in zeolite membranes: release of silver ions and mechanism of antibacterial action

Background The focus of this study is on the antibacterial properties of silver nanoparticles embedded within a zeolite membrane (AgNP-ZM). Methods and Results These membranes were effective in killing Escherichia coli and were bacteriostatic against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. E. coli suspended in Luria Bertani (LB) broth and isolated from physical contact with the membrane were also killed. Elemental analysis indicated slow release of Ag+ from the AgNP-ZM into the LB broth. The E. coli killing efficiency of AgNP-ZM was found to decrease with repeated use, and this was correlated with decreased release of silver ions with each use of the support. Gene expression microarrays revealed upregulation of several antioxidant genes as well as genes coding for metal transport, metal reduction, and ATPase pumps in response to silver ions released from AgNP-ZM. Gene expression of iron transporters was reduced, and increased expression of ferrochelatase was observed. In addition, upregulation of multiple antibiotic resistance genes was demonstrated. The expression levels of multicopper oxidase, glutaredoxin, and thioredoxin decreased with each support use, reflecting the lower amounts of Ag+ released from the membrane. The antibacterial mechanism of AgNP-ZM is proposed to be related to the exhaustion of antioxidant capacity. Conclusion These results indicate that AgNP-ZM provide a novel matrix for gradual release of Ag+.