Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developmental refinement of hair cell synapses tightens the coupling of Ca2+ influx to exocytosis

Cochlear inner hair cells (IHCs) develop from pre‐sensory pacemaker to sound transducer. Here, we report that this involves changes in structure and function of the ribbon synapses between IHCs and spiral ganglion neurons (SGNs) around hearing onset in mice. As synapses matured they changed from holding several small presynaptic active zones (AZs) and apposed postsynaptic densities (PSDs) to one large AZ/PSD complex per SGN bouton. After the onset of hearing (i) IHCs had fewer and larger ribbons; (ii) CaV1.3 channels formed stripe‐like clusters rather than the smaller and round clusters at immature AZs; (iii) extrasynaptic CaV1.3‐channels were selectively reduced, (iv) the intrinsic Ca2+ dependence of fast exocytosis probed by Ca2+ uncaging remained unchanged but (v) the apparent Ca2+ dependence of exocytosis linearized, when assessed by progressive dihydropyridine block of Ca2+ influx. Biophysical modeling of exocytosis at mature and immature AZ topographies suggests that Ca2+ influx through an individual channel dominates the [Ca2+] driving exocytosis at each mature release site. We conclude that IHC synapses undergo major developmental refinements, resulting in tighter spatial coupling between Ca2+ influx and exocytosis.
Femtosecond laser fabrication of optical sensors integrated in a lab-on-a-chip

Lab-on-a-chips (LOCs) are becoming one of the most powerful tools of analytical chemistry, with a broad application in life sciences, biotechnology and drug development. They incorporate in a single substrate the functions of a biological laboratory (i.e. microfluidic channels, reservoirs, valves, pumps and sensors). Their main advantages include the possibility of working with small sample quantities (from nano- to picoliters), high sensitivity, speed of analysis and the possibility of measurement automation and standardization. Direct on-chip integration of photonic devices for detection of biomolecules flowing in the microchannels is one of the main objectives of current research in this field, which becomes particularly challenging in case of analytes that cannot be chemically labeled. In fact in this case an interferometric detection is often needed and optical devices, such as interferometers, have to be integrated. Ultrafast laser writing of waveguides in glasses proves to be a very flexible, simple and well suited method also for this kind of applications. As a post-processing technique it doesn't affect the fabrication of the fluidic part and its unique three-dimensional capabilities allow realization of devices with complex design. In this work we report on the use of femtosecond laser pulses to fabricate a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, integrated with a microfluidic channel; this provides label-free sensing, by means of refractive index measurements, of samples flowing in the microchannel.
Optimal sensor and path selection for target tracking in wireless sensor networks

This paper addresses target tracking in wireless sensor networks where the nonlinear observed system is assumed to progress according to a probabilistic state space model. Thus, we propose to improve the use of the quantized variational filtering by jointly selecting the optimal candidate sensor that participates in target localization and its best communication path to the cluster head. In the current work, firstly, we select the optimal sensor in order to provide the required data of the target and to balance the energy dissipation in the wireless sensor networks. This selection is also based on the local cluster node density and their transmission power. Secondly, we select the best communication path that achieves the highest signal-to-noise ratio at the cluster head; then, we estimate the target position using quantized variational filtering algorithm. The best communication path is designed to reduce the communication cost, which leads to a significant reduction of energy consumption and an accurate target tracking. The optimal sensor selection is based on mutual information maximization under energy constraints, which is computed by using the target position predictive distribution provided by the quantized variational filtering algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the quantized variational filtering under sensing range constraint, binary variational filtering, and the centralized quantized particle filtering. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Secrecy analysis of a NOMA system with Full Duplex and Half Duplex Relay

In 5G wireless communication networks, Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) has attracted much attention in recent years. This paper investigates physical layer security of a NOMA system with Full Duplex Relay (FDR) and Half Duplex Relay (HDR). This system consists of one eavesdropper and two legal NOMA users where a dedicated FDR (or HDR) assists far user. In order to characterize the secrecy performance of the considered scenario, new exact expressions are derived for the Secrecy Outage Probability (SOP) of both FDR and HDR systems. Monte Carlo simulations are provided to verify the derived analytical results. Simulations demonstrate that, the NOMA-FDR system attains better performance compared to the NOMA-HDR system for both users. Also, we find that far user has always poor secrecy against near user.
Common Data Exchange Standards: Determinants for Adoption at the Municipal Level

Many initiatives have been carried out by governments around the world which have aimed to define common ICT standards for the public sector. However, the majority of data exchange conducted among public administrations is still based on paper or proprietary data formats. Public ICT is therefore lacking integration. The widespread use of common standards is especially hard to achieve in federally organized countries. Determinants for the adoption of common data exchange standards in such countries are identified in this paper. A conceptual model is drawn from a review of the literature and analyzed in a qualitative case study which is carried out in 13 municipalities of the German federal system. Seven determinants for the adoption of data exchange standards are identified. The paper concludes with practical implications on how the adoption of common data exchange standards can be increased.
Atomistic simulations of metal surfaces under high electric fields

Modern society runs largely on electricity, and where there is electricity there are electric fields. As the boundaries of technology are pushed forward, stronger and stronger electric fields are either required, or appear due to unwanted effects. Examples of such applications, where very high electric fields are utilised include particle accelerators and atom probes. To further be able to improve on such techniques, it is necessary to gain a good understanding of the processes that are involved. Because it is often difficult, if not impossible, to observe these processes with high resolution in experiments, one needs to consider the use of atomistic simulations instead. This thesis provides an extension to classical molecular dynamics by describing an implementation where several electronic effects are considered when dealing with metal surfaces under high electric fields. These effects include the charging of surface atoms, field electron emission and the resulting resistive heating, as well as field evaporation of both neutral and charged atoms. In addition to the implementation details, the thesis also contains a brief background of the physics involved in these processes. Using the implementation, it is observed that a surface protrusion may grow on an initially flat surface in the presence of a near-surface void when a strong external electric field is applied. The growth is very rapid, resulting finally catastrophic breakage. This mechanism may explain the appearance of field emitters on otherwise pristine samples, and the instability of measured field emission currents. Simulations also reveal that high aspect ratio protrusions are subject to Rayleigh instability due to the temperature rise caused by field electron emission currents. As a result a large fraction of the protrusion can break off. The model also allows for the study of the trajectories of field evaporated ions from a surface, as they are accelerated in the electric field. From the simulations we see that even changes in the surface morphology on the atomic scale may result in aberrations in atom probe tomography experiments.
Development and evaluation of novel molecularly imprinted thin-films for phenol and application of direct spectroscopic detection for petrogenic contaminants adsorbed to molecularly imprinted films

Phenol and alkylphenols are priority water pollutants from oil extraction, pyrolysis, and industry. The adsorption of phenols is required for the separations in analytical chemistry and industry. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are novel adsorbents with the template shaped binding sites. A MIP has to be prepared in film format to be combined with an analytical technique to accomplish rapid and direct detection of phenols and other water pollutants. Films from MIP particles and monolithic films, having 20 and 100 μm thicknesses and bound to a glass slide, were fabricated by UV-initiated radical polymerization between two inert surfaces. The morphology, thickness, and porosity of MIP films were studied by scanning electron microscopy and gravimetric analysis. Porosity was rendered using alcohol-water mixtures as a solvent and, in some instances, polyethyleneglycol and polyvinylacetate as solvent modifiers. Many MIPs for phenol were synthesized through non-covalent imprinting by hydrogen bonding and hydrophobic interactions. The MIP components included functional monomer (itaconic acid, 4-vinylpyridine, and styrene) and solvent, cross-linker (ethylene glycol dimethacrylate, triethylene glycol dimethacrylate, divinylbenzene, pentaerythritol triacrylate—PETA), and template (phenol, xylene). The binding and imprinting properties of the MIPs were assessed based on adsorption capacities and cross-binding towards other phenolics and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). A MIP with increased styrene content and xylene along with a copolymer of divinylbenzene and PETA, both acting by hydrophobic interactions, can be recommended for practical applications. The higher content of styrene and/or more hydrophobic monomers such as divinylbenzene increased the binding capacity. The hydrophilicity of PETA rendered water compatibility to the films. The modest imprinting effect is attributed to a tight polymer network formed with PETA as well as xylene as a hydrophobic template. Alcohol-water mixtures promoted the imprinting by hydrophobic interactions and, concurrently, lead to homogeneous, porous, and rigid morphology of the films. Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy with silver nanoparticles, and fluorimetry, were unsuccessfully attempted for the direct detection of phenol on MIP films because of the low sensitivity and MIP background issues. The direct fluorimetric detection of light PAHs, as another group of pollutants from oil, was showen to be sensitive and selective, when front-face illumination geometry, 100 μm thick films, and synchronous scanning were used.
Fluid-Particle Separation of Magnetorheological (MR) Fluid in MR Machining Application

The presented work is an investigation of fluid-particle separation phenomena and compression stress resistance performance of magnetorheological (MR) fluids under squeeze mode. The squeeze mode is very significant to MR machining application. Material used in this study was silicone oil based MR fluid with 20% volume fraction of carbonyl iron particle. Compression test was performed by integrating the developed squeeze mode testing rig with a 50 kN Universal Testing Machine (UTM). The tests were conducted at constant speed and current. Each test was conducted at an initial gap of 2 mm and was stopped at a final gap of 0.5 mm. Force-displacement data was recorded and was analysed using TestExpert® II software. Full factorials with 27 experiments were designed using Design Expert 7 software. Three factors investigated in the design of experiments were carrier fluid viscosity, supplied current, and compression speed. Responses measured were strain energy and compression stress at maximum strain. Macro images of the phenomenon were recorded and evaluated qualitatively. From the compression stress-strain results, carrier fluid viscosity was significant to vary the MR fluid properties. The observed phenomenon shows that fluid-particle separation occurred in the low viscosity carrier fluid, low compression speed and high applied current. The parameters effect on strain energy and compression stress suggests that the fluid-particle separation is significant to the squeeze mode MR fluid performance. The relationship between stress resistance performance and fluid-particle separation phenomena were significant in designing innovative MR fluid devices.
Automatic Construction of an English-Chinese Bilingual FrameNet

We propose a method of automatically constructing an English-Chinese bilingual FrameNet where the English FrameNet lexical entries are linked to the appropriate Chinese word senses. This resource can be used in machine translation and cross-lingual IR systems. We coerce the English FrameNet into Chinese using a bilingual lexicon, frame context in FrameNet and taxonomy structure in HowNet. Our approach does not require any manual mapping between FrameNet and HowNet semantic roles. Evaluation results show that we achieve a promising 82% average F-measure for the most ambiguous lexical entries.
Magnet News: You Choose the Polarity of What You Read

When was the last time you read a newspaper and was bombarded with articles you would rather not see? Current news media shows massive number of news every day. But from tragedies to happy stories, people might want to choose to read only those articles that fit their current mood. The purpose of this project is to present the Magnet News, a Web tool in which users can choose if they want to see positive or negative news. Our system monitors the sentiment of news from important newspapers using the SentiStrength, a sentiment method proposed by literature that has been proved to be efficient in previous analysis.
Indium tin oxide nanowhisker morphology control by vapour–liquid–solid glancing angle deposition

A new growth technique for indium tin oxide nanowhiskers with increased control over feature size and spacing is reported. The technique is based on a unique combination of self-catalysed vapour–liquid–solid (VLS) growth and glancing angle deposition (GLAD). This VLS–GLAD technique provides enhanced control over nanowhisker morphology as the effect of typical VLS growth parameters (e.g. flux rate, temperature) is amplified at large deposition angles characteristic of GLAD. Spatial modulation of the collimated growth flux controls trunk width, number and orientation of branches, and overall nanowhisker density. Here we report the influence of growth conditions (including deposition angle, flux rate, nominal pitch and substrate temperature) on nanowhisker morphology, with specific focus on the effect of large deposition angles. Sheet resistance and transmission of the films were measured to characterize their performance as transparent conductive oxides. Hybrid nanostructured films grown in this study include high surface area nanowhiskers protruding from a conductive film, ideal for transparent conductive electrode applications.
Delaying analogue quadrature signals in Sin / Cos encoders

Various measurement and control systems use magnetic or optical encoders that transform linear displacement and other physical quantities to an analogue quadrature signal. In this paper, we study the problem of, how to accurately delay the analogue quadrature signals in the Sin/Cos encoders within the range of ±10° with the circuit that is potentially integrable on a single chip. Such precision is needed for the efficient phase shift compensation. The typical analogue delay circuit comprises a summing amplifier and a digitally controlled variable resistor that is used to set a delay. We propose a new circuit based on the voltage divider with better linearity and a completely symmetrical range. The design procedure for the delay circuit is also presented.
Simulating three-dimensional flow in compression resin transfer molding process

Compression Resin Transfer Molding (CRTM) is a novel variation of traditional Resin Transfer Molding (RTM). It combines features of RTM, with those of traditional compression molding. The resin is introduced in the mold containing the preform in the narrow gap between the mold platen and the preform. As the resin flows in the narrow gap between mold and the preform, the mold platen squeezes the resin into the stationary preform, which also undergoes compression to create the desired fiber volume fraction. The flow field exhibits a three-dimensional character and is coupled with the fiber compression dynamics. We have modified our existing resin transfer mold filling simulation based on flow through porous media to model the resin injection in CRTM.
Ranke revisited--a simple short-wave cochlear model.

An integral equation for the pressure difference across the cochlear partition is derived from the classical assumptions. This equation can be solved to any desired precision by the numerical method of Lesser and Berkley. Alternately, making the usual long‐wave assumption, it can be reduced to the second‐order differential equation studied by Zwislocki and many others. Although many aspects of this solution agree with observations, the long‐wave assumption is of doubtful validity for many interesting frequencies and locations, and the behavior is more sensitive to the size of the scalae than experimental results suggest. A third approach is to make the short‐wave assumption proposed by Otto Ranke. The integral equation then can be transformed into a pair of first‐order differential equations which can easily be solved in closed form. The resulting simple formulas can be fit to most of the observations of Bekesy and others. In addition, the short‐wave theory leads to simple explanations of “paradoxical motion” and the effects of bone conduction. The phase characteristics of the theory, however, show major deviations from the experiment—a failure which, it is believed, is due not to the short‐wave approximation per se, but rather to the basic physical simplifications common to virtually all cochlear theories.
Reusing Program Investigation Knowledge for Code Understanding

Software maintenance tasks typically involve an important amount of program investigation effort on the part of software developers. To what extent can we benefit from prior program investigation activities to decrease this effort? To investigate this question, we studied the revision history of two systems to determine how knowledge derived from prior investigation activities could have been reused to support other change tasks. Our initial investigation used a tool, ConcernDetector, that can recommend sets of program elements associated with a high-level concern when elements in the set overlap with elements currently being modified. We discovered that simple overlap-based techniques for retrieving prior investigation knowledge have important limitations, and that effective reuse of prior program investigation knowledge requires analyses that can partially infer the nature and intent of a task.
Read Characteristics of Independent Double-Gate Poly-Si Nanowire SONOS Devices

This paper investigates the read operation of poly-Si nanowire silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon devices with independent double-gate (IDG) configuration. The device features oxide-nitride-oxide (ONO) stack as the charge storage medium in one of the two gated sides with pure oxide in the other. Owing to the IDG feature, the shift in the device's transfer characteristics due to a change in the amount of storage charges can be sensed with two different modes, which have one of the two gates applied with a sweeping bias (driving gate) and the other with a fixed bias (control gate). Our analysis and experimental data show that a larger memory window is obtained when the gate of the ONO side is used as the driving gate. Moreover, the memory window of this mode is essentially independent of the bias applied to the control gate. Based on this finding, a novel Flash structure featuring IDG cells with a common control gate is proposed.
A novel framework for passive macro-modeling

Passivity enforcement is an important issue for macro-modeling for passive systems from measured or simulated data. Existing convex programming based methods are too expensive and thus are ruled out for realistic application. Other methods based on iteratively fixing the passivity through perturbing the eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian matrix either suffer from convergence issue or lack optimality which will sometimes lead to unacceptable error. In this paper we propose a novel framework for macro-modeling. In addition to the traditional two-stage (fixing plus enforcement) schemes, we propose a post-enforcement optimization, which takes a passive, while potentially not-so-accurate model, as the starting point, and performs local search to find the local optimum with passivity constraint or build-in passivity guarantee. A simple yet stable passive modeling generator is proposed to produce the starting model for optimization. Two algorithms are proposed for performing constrained and unconstrained optimizations. Experiments show that the accuracy of passivity-fixed model can be significantly improved with the proposed methods.
Resynthesis of 3d tongue movements from facial data

Simultaneous measurements of tongue and facial motion, using a combination of electromagnetic articulography (EMA) and optical motion tracking, are analysed to investigate the possibility to resynthesize the subject’s tongue movements with a parametrically controlled 3D model using the facial data only. The recorded material consists of 63 VCV words spoken by one Swedish subject. The tongue movements are resynthesized using a combination of a linear estimation to predict the tongue data from the face and an inversion procedure to determine the articulatory parameters of the model.
Carbon nanotubes in drug delivery: focus on infectious diseases

Carbon nanotubes have the potential to address the challenges of combating infectious agents by both minimizing toxicity by dose reduction of standard therapeutics and allowing a multiple payload capacity to achieve both targeted activity and combating infectious strains, resistant strains in particular. One of their unique characteristics is the network of carbon atoms in the nanometer scale, allowing the creation of nano-channels via cellular membranes. This review focuses on the characterization, development, integration and application of carbon nanotubes as nanocarrier-based delivery systems and their appropriate design for achieving the desired drug delivery results in the different areas of infectious diseases. While a more extensive toxicological and pharmacological profile must be obtained, this review will focus on existing research and pre-clinical data concerning the potential use of carbon nanotubes.