Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Direct Imaging of Low-Dimensional Nanostructures

Low-dimensional nanostructures are technologically desirable for their novel physical properties, as well as the benefits of packing density due to scale. In quantum computing, an ideal structure might consist of single dopant atoms precisely positioned a few nanometers below a surface [1]. There is also a need for truly atomic-scale interconnects and ancillary structures. However, due to their nanoscale dimensions, the physical properties of nanowires and related structures will depend on the environment in which they are embedded as well as their composition. This problem is particularly relevant for samples grown on ultra-clean surfaces, which may not survive outside of high-vacuum systems or which might be substantially affected by adatoms. The question then arises as to what happens to surface nanostructures or single dopant atoms during encapsulation or overgrowth.
A Blackboard Architecture for Workflows

Most of today’s business applications have to deal with automated workflows. In this paper, we argue that the blackboard pattern can be used to create an architecture for the development of such workflows. We illustrate how the fundamental building parts of a workflow are addressed in such an architecture. The development of a prototypical group calendaring application verified the proposed architecture. It also served as a basis for contrasting the approach with commonly used workflow control constructs.
The Model Checker SPIN

SPIN is an efficient verification system for models of distributed software systems. It has been used to detect design errors in applications ranging from high-level descriptions of distributed algorithms to detailed code for controlling telephone exchanges. The paper gives an overview of the design and structure of the verifier, reviews its theoretical foundation, and gives an overview of significant practical applications.
Adequate Usage Rate Control of Switching Cycles for DCM Buck PFC Converter

Buck power factor correction converter is widely used in low-power applications due to its specific advantages. In discontinuous conduction mode operation, the inductor current is zero during part of the switching cycle, leading to a useless period in the whole switching cycle of the power transmission. As a result, the peak value and the root-mean-square (RMS) value of the inductor current as well as the switch current are large. In addition, the current stress of the power devices is high, and so does the switching loss. A new method called adequate usage rate control of switching cycles to improve the effect of the energy transfer is proposed. Compared with the fixed duty ratio control, the critical inductance is increased, and the peak and rms current values of the main power components are reduced. Therefore, the efficiency of the converter is increased. The method brings about higher PF at low input voltages and lower PF at high input voltages. Meanwhile, a reduction of the output ripple voltage is achieved. A prototype is fabricated in the laboratory, and the experimental results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Estimating the Sizes of Populations at High Risk for HIV: A Comparison Study

Objectives Behavioral interventions are effective strategies for HIV/AIDS prevention and control. However, implementation of such strategies relies heavily on the accurate estimation of the high-risk population size. The multiplier method and generalized network scale-up method were recommended to estimate the population size of those at high risk for HIV by UNAIDS/WHO in 2003 and 2010, respectively. This study aims to assess and compare the two methods for estimating the size of populations at high risk for HIV, and to provide practical guidelines and suggestions for implementing the two methods. Methods Studies of the multiplier method used to estimate the population prevalence of men who have sex with men in China published between July 1, 2003 and July 1, 2013 were reviewed. The generalized network scale-up method was applied to estimate the population prevalence of men who have sex with men in the urban district of Taiyuan, China. Results The median of studies using the multiplier method to estimate the population prevalence of men who have sex with men in China was 4–8 times lower than the national level estimate. Meanwhile, the estimate of the generalized network scale-up method fell within the range of national level estimate. Conclusions When high-quality existing data are not readily available, the multiplier method frequently yields underestimated results. We thus suggest that the generalized network scale-up method is preferred when sampling frames for the general population and accurate demographic information are available.
Embryological development of Caiman latirostris (Crocodylia: Alligatoridae)

A standard development embryological series is the primary basis to organize information of any embryological study and is also used to determine the age of eggs and embryos in field conditions. In this article, we calibrate developmental series of the broad‐snouted caiman, Caiman latirostris, against an established series for Alligator mississippiensis. Morphometric measures and extend of the opaque‐shell banding were also related to embryo age. In earlier stages, external morphological features alone can account for embryo age, but we suggest that morphometric measurements should be introduced later in the development. Unlike morphologic and morphometric attributes, the opaque patch was not a useful age predictor. As expected, a close correlation between embryonic development of C. latirostris and A. mississippiensis was observed. genesis 46:401–417, 2008. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The two‐component systems PrrBA and NtrYX co‐ordinately regulate the adaptation of Brucella abortus to an oxygen‐limited environment

Brucella is the causative agent of the zoonotic disease brucellosis, which is endemic in many parts of the world. The success of Brucella as pathogen relies in its ability to adapt to the harsh environmental conditions found in mammalian hosts. One of its main adaptations is the induction of the expression of different genes involved in respiration at low oxygen tension. In this report we describe a regulatory network involved in this adaptation. We show that Brucella abortus PrrBA is a functional two‐component signal transduction system that responds to the redox status and acts as a global regulator controlling the expression of the regulatory proteins NtrY, FnrN and NnrA, which are involved in the adaptation to survive at low oxygen tension. We also show that the two‐component systems PrrBA and NtrYX co‐ordinately regulate the expression of denitrification and high‐affinity cytochrome oxidase genes. Strikingly, a double mutant strain in the prrB and ntrY genes is severely impaired in growth and virulence, while the ntrY and prrB single mutant strains are similar to wild‐type B. abortus. The proposed regulatory network may contribute to understand the mechanisms used by Brucella for a successful adaptation to its replicative niche inside mammalian cells.
Fuzzy smoothing algorithms for variable structure systems

A variable structure system (VSS) is a control system implementing different control laws in different regions of the state space divided by a set of boundary manifolds. The control input switches from one control law to another when the state crosses the boundary manifolds. In general, the control input may not be smooth when switching at these boundary manifolds and may excite high frequency dynamics. This paper proposes two fuzzy rule based algorithms for smoothing the control input. The merits of these fuzzy smoothing control algorithms are illustrated by two examples: a semiactive suspension system based on optimal control and a direct drive robot arm under discrete time sliding mode control. The controller design for these two examples is a blend of traditional control theoretic approaches and fuzzy rule based approaches. >
Use of intensive care, mechanical ventilation, both, or neither by patients with acute lung injury

Objective:Reports of acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome have generally been restricted to mechanically ventilated intensive care unit patients, creating an incomplete picture of the epidemiologies of the syndromes. We sought to determine the incidence and outcomes of acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndromes throughout an entire hospital population. Design:Retrospective cohort study. Setting:A Department of Veterans Affairs medical center. Patients:All patients satisfying criteria for acute lung injury or acute respiratory distress syndrome during a 2-yr period. Interventions:None. Measurements and Main Results:There were 11,465 acute medical and surgical admissions during the study period; 156 patients had acute lung injury or acute respiratory distress syndrome. Only 74 (47%) were invasively ventilated in an intensive care unit for acute lung injury. Another 15 (10%) patients were ventilated for other reasons, 41 (26%) were admitted to an intensive care unit at approximately the time of acute lung injury onset but were not invasively ventilated, and 26 (17%) were managed with neither invasive ventilation nor admission to an intensive care unit. Four-week mortality differed by group (p = .023), ranging from 22% among those managed in an intensive care unit without invasive ventilation to 50% among those ventilated for acute lung injury or acute respiratory distress syndrome. By 2 yrs, differences in survival between groups were no longer significant. Notably, only 53 (34%) patients would have been eligible for widely cited acute lung injury intervention trials. Ten patients had a second episode of acute lung injury during the study period, equating to a 16%-per-year risk of recurrence. Conclusions:Acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome studies restricted to patients mechanically ventilated in intensive care units substantially underestimate the incidence of the syndromes. Nonventilated patients and those cared for outside of intensive care units may still be at substantial risk for death. Further characterization of previously overlooked acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome patients may suggest new therapeutic opportunities.
WO3 nanobelt doped PEDOT:PSS layers for efficient hole-injection in quantum dot light-emitting diodes

Through a facile solid-state mechanochemical method, we have prepared WO3 nanobelts with a length of ∼80 nm and a width of ∼10 nm, which were doped into PEDOT:PSS as a hybrid hole-injecting layer (HIL) for conventional red quantum dot light-emitting diodes (QLEDs). The work function (WF) of the hybrid HIL was enhanced from 4.91 to 5.25 eV and the hole-injecting barrier was decreased from 0.89 to 0.55 eV. Notably, an optimal red QLED based on the hybrid HIL PEDOT:PSS:WO3 (4.0 wt%) achieved a satisfactory reduction in the driving voltage at the luminance of 100 cd A−1 from 5.18 V (pristine PEDOT:PSS) to 2.97 V. Moreover, the optimal device exhibits a maximal current efficiency of 15.5 cd A−1 and a high external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 10.60%, which are nearly two-folds higher than those (8.0 cd A−1 and 5.82%) of the reference device based on pristine PEDOT:PSS. It was demonstrated that doping these as-prepared WO3 nanobelts into the PEDOT:PSS could be an effective route toward high-performance QLEDs.
Context-informed Knowledge Extraction from Document Collections to Support User Navigation

Most of the existing document and web search engines rely on keyword-based queries. To find matches, these queries are processed using retrieval algorithms that rely on word frequencies, topic recentness, document authority, and (in some cases) available ontologies. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to exploring text collections using a novel keywords-by-concepts (KbC) graph, which supports navigation using domain-specific concepts as well as keywords that are characterizing the text corpus. The KbC graph is a weighted graph, created by tightly integrating keywords extracted from documents and concepts obtained from domain taxonomies. Documents in the corpus are associated to the nodes of the graph based on evidence supporting contextual relevance; thus, the KbC graph supports contextually informed access to these documents. The construction of the KbC graph relies on a spreading-activation like technique which mimics the way the brain links and constructs knowledge. In this paper, we also present CoSeNa (Context-based Search and Navigation) system that leverages the KbC model as the basis for document exploration as well as contextually- informed media integration.
Theory prediction of the electronic structure, mechanical and thermodynamic properties of Ca5Pd6Ge6 under pressure

ABSTRACT The electronic structures, mechanical and thermodynamic properties of Ca5Pd6Ge6 under pressure have been investigated via the first-principles calculations. The optimised lattice constant was in good agreement with the experimental data. Resulting from the Ca-3d, Ge-4p and Pd-4d states contribution, at the Fermi level, the Ca5Pd6Ge6 exhibits metallic behaviour. The elastic constants were calculated, and the result implies that Ca5Pd6Ge6 was mechanically stable below 50 GPa. The polycrystalline modulus increases almost linearly with pressure. The B/G ratio indicated that Ca5Pd6Ge6 was brittle, and the brittle to ductile transition occurs at 2.5 GPa. Furthermore, the Debye temperature θD, the minimum thermal conductivity K was obtained. Finally, the isochoric heat capacity Cv and entropy S were evaluated by the quasi-harmonic Debye model in consideration for the temperature effect. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Postinfarction myocardial scarring in mice: molecular MR imaging with use of a collagen-targeting contrast agent.

PURPOSE To prospectively evaluate a gadolinium-based collagen-targeting contrast agent, EP-3533, for in vivo magnetic resonance (MR) imaging of myocardial fibrosis in a mouse model of healed myocardial infarction (MI). MATERIALS AND METHODS All procedures were performed in accordance with protocols approved by the animal care and use committee. MI was induced in eight mice by means of occlusion of the left anterior descending coronary artery followed by reperfusion. Four MR examinations were performed in each animal: one examination before, one examination 1 day after, and two examinations 6 weeks after the MI. For the latter two examinations, electrocardiographically gated inversion-recovery gradient-echo MR images were acquired before and serially (every 5 minutes) after the intravenous injection of either gadopentetate dimeglumine or EP-3533. The image enhancement kinetic properties of the postinfarction scar, normal myocardium, and blood were compared. RESULTS Dynamic T1-weighted MR imaging revealed the washout time constants for EP-3533 to be significantly longer than those for gadopentetate dimeglumine in regions of postinfarction scarring (mean, 194.8 minutes +/-116.8 [standard deviation] vs 25.5 minutes +/- 4.2; P < .05) and in normal myocardium (mean, 45.4 minutes +/- 16.7 vs 25.1 minutes +/- 9.7; P < .05). Findings on postmortem histologic sections stained for collagen correlated well with EP-3533-enhanced areas seen on inversion-recovery MR images. Fifty minutes after EP-3533 injection, the postinfarction scar tissue samples, as compared with the normal myocardium, had a twofold higher concentration of gadolinium. CONCLUSION Use of the gadolinium-based collagen-targeting contrast agent, EP-3533, enabled in vivo molecular MR imaging of fibrosis in a mouse model of healed postinfarction myocardial scarring.
Orthogonal MCMC algorithms

Monte Carlo (MC) methods are widely used in signal processing, machine learning and stochastic optimization. A well-known class of MC methods are Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In this work, we introduce a novel parallel interacting MCMC scheme, where the parallel chains share information using another MCMC technique working on the entire population of current states. These parallel “vertical” chains are led by random-walk proposals, whereas the “horizontal” MCMC uses a independent proposal, which can be easily adapted by making use of all the generated samples. Numerical results show the advantages of the proposed sampling scheme in terms of mean absolute error, as well as robustness w.r. t. to initial values and parameter choice.
Temporal Attention Model for Neural Machine Translation

Attention-based Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models suffer from attention deficiency issues as has been observed in recent research. We propose a novel mechanism to address some of these limitations and improve the NMT attention. Specifically, our approach memorizes the alignments temporally (within each sentence) and modulates the attention with the accumulated temporal memory, as the decoder generates the candidate translation. We compare our approach against the baseline NMT model and two other related approaches that address this issue either explicitly or implicitly. Large-scale experiments on two language pairs show that our approach achieves better and robust gains over the baseline and related NMT approaches. Our model further outperforms strong SMT baselines in some settings even without using ensembles.
In vitro transfection of bone marrow-derived dendritic cells with TATp-liposomes

Dendritic cells (DC) are antigen-presenting cells uniquely capable of priming naïve T cells and cross-presenting antigens, and they determine the type of immune response elicited against an antigen. TAT peptide (TATp), is an amphipathic, arginine-rich, cationic peptide that promotes penetration and translocation of various molecules and nanoparticles into cells. TATp-liposomes (TATp-L) used for DC transfection were prepared using TATp derivatized with a lipid-terminated polymer capable of anchoring in the liposomal membrane. Here, we show that the addition of TATp to DNA-loaded liposomes increased the uptake of DNA in DC. DNA-loaded TATp-L increased the in vitro transfection efficiency in DC cultures as evidenced by a higher expression of the enhanced green fluorescent protein and bovine herpes virus type 1 glycoprotein D (gD). The de novo synthesized gD protein was immunologically stimulating when transfections were performed with TATp-L, as indicated by the secretion of interleukin 6.
Small is beautiful: discovering the minimal set of unexpected patterns

A drawback of most traditional data mining methods is that they do not leverage prior knowledge of users. In many business settings, managers and analysts have significant intuition based on several years of experience. In prior work [11, 12] we proposed methods that could discover unexpected patterns in data by using this domain knowledge in a systematic manner. In this paper we continue our focus on discovering unexpected patterns and propose new methods for discovering a minimal set of unexpected patterns that discover orders of magnitude fewer patterns and yet retain most of the truly interesting ones. We demonstrate the strengths of this approach experimentally using a case study application in a marketing domain.
Implementation of a Generic Autonomic Framework

Based on insights from the implementation of commercial products for data-centre resource management, we identified key challenges in the development of cost-effective autonomic solutions, and best practices for overcoming these challenges. In a related paper, we proposed a generic autonomic framework that complies with these best practices, and suggested ways in which existing technologies could be used to realise this framework. In this paper, we describe the actual implementation of our autonomic framework as a service-oriented architecture, and we show how the universal policy engine at its core can be configured to manage the allocation of server capacity to services of different priorities. This case study demonstrates the effectiveness of our generic approach to autonomic solution development in an area of great interest for commercial data centres, research laboratories and application service providers.
Study on autogenous shrinkage characteristic and mechanism of ultra-high performance cementitous composite

The self-designed vertical dial gauge holder was used in this paper. The influence factors of autogenous shrinkage of UHPCC, which include water-binder ratios, binder-aggregate ratios, sand ratios and fraction process of steel fiber, were mainly studied. The mechanism of autogenous shrinkage is explored by thermal analysis and pore structure analysis techniques. The results show that autogenous shrinkage of UHPCC increases with the decreasing of water-binder ratio. The autogenous shrinkage of 60d increases by 14.4% and 25.4%, when water-binder ratio decreases from 0.24 to 0.20, 0.16, respectively. Coarse aggregate has great positive effects on the autogenous shrinkage of UHPCC. Fine steel fibers have no obvious effects on the autogenous shrinkage of UHPCC. Non-evaporable water content decreases with the decreasing of water-binder ratio, which is positive effect on the autogenous shrinkage. However, the volume fraction of pores with the size range from 5 to 50 nm increases with the decreasing of water-binder ratio, which is negative effect on the autogenous shrinkage. Self-dessication effect is dominant factor in the autogenous shrinkage.
Local Search with Very Large-Scale Neighborhoods for Optimal Permutations in Machine Translation

We introduce a novel decoding procedure for statistical machine translation and other ordering tasks based on a family of Very Large-Scale Neighborhoods, some of which have previously been applied to other NP-hard permutation problems. We significantly generalize these problems by simultaneously considering three distinct sets of ordering costs. We discuss how these costs might apply to MT, and some possibilities for training them. We show how to search and sample from exponentially large neighborhoods using efficient dynamic programming algorithms that resemble statistical parsing. We also incorporate techniques from statistical parsing to improve the runtime of our search. Finally, we report results of preliminary experiments indicating that the approach holds promise.
Towards a framework for preventing community violence among youth

Abstract This article, in an effort to assist the selection and deployment of evidence-informed strategies, proposes a new conceptual framework for responding to community violence among youth. First, the phenomenon of community violence is understood in context using a new violence typology organized along a continuum. Second, the need for a new anti-community violence framework is established. Third, a framework is developed, blending concepts from the fields of public safety and public health. Fourth, evidence from systematic reviews and meta-analyses concerning community violence is summarized and categorized. Finally, an anti-violence framework populated with evidence-informed strategies is presented and discussed.