Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
BINDER CHARACTERIZATION AND EVALUATION. VOLUME 1

This final report, in four volumes, of Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP) Project A-002A describes intensive investigations of the chemical and physical properties of petroleum asphalts used in the construction of highway pavements. The emphasis in the chemical studies has been to measure and understand the various interactions among molecular species that contribute to a high molecular weight-like behavior that explains the rheological behavior of asphalt. In the measurement of physical properties primary emphasis was given to the characterization of rheological behavior, that is, viscoelastic behavior as a function of temperature and loading rate. The fracture (direct tension) behavior of asphalt cement was also investigated and limited studies were conducted on fatigue behavior and other miscellaneous physical properties. Correlation of chemical and physical properties to explain the nature of asphalt in terms of a self-consistent model has been another major effort, which in the main has been accomplished. The self-consistent description of petroleum asphalt has been used further to develop predictive capability for describing the anticipated performance of asphalts in roadways. The model and predictive capability constitute the major portion of volume 1.
CHARACTERIZING PHOTORECEPTOR CHANGES IN ACUTE POSTERIOR MULTIFOCAL PLACOID PIGMENT EPITHELIOPATHY USING ADAPTIVE OPTICS

Purpose: To characterize lesions of acute posterior multifocal placoid pigment epitheliopathy (APMPPE) by multimodal imaging including adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (AOSLO). Methods: We included patients with APMPPE at different stages of evolution of the placoid lesions. Color fundus photography, spectral domain optical coherence tomography, infrared reflectance, fundus autofluorescence, and AOSLO images were obtained and registered to correlate microstructural changes. Results: Eight eyes of four patients (two women) were included and analyzed by multimodal imaging. Photoreceptor reflectivity within APMPPE lesions was more heterogeneous than in adjacent healthy areas. Hyperpigmentation on color fundus photography appeared hyperreflective on infrared reflectance and on AOSLO. Irregularity of the interdigitation zone and the photoreceptor inner and outer segment junctions (IS/OS) on spectral domain optical coherence tomography was associated with photoreceptor hyporeflectivity on AOSLO. Interruption of the interdigitation zone or IS/OS was associated with loss of photoreceptor reflectivity on AOSLO. Conclusion: Irregularities in the reflectivity of the photoreceptor mosaic are visible on AOSLO even in inactive APMPPE lesions, where the photoreceptor bands on spectral domain optical coherence tomography have recovered. Adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy combined with multimodal imaging has the potential to enhance our understanding of photoreceptor involvement in APMPPE.
ATP Consumption by Sarcoplasmic Reticulum Ca2+ Pumps Accounts for 40-50% of Resting Metabolic Rate in Mouse Fast and Slow Twitch Skeletal Muscle

The main purpose of this study was to directly quantify the relative contribution of Ca2+ cycling to resting metabolic rate in mouse fast (extensor digitorum longus, EDL) and slow (soleus) twitch skeletal muscle. Resting oxygen consumption of isolated muscles (VO2, µL/g wet weight/s) measured polarographically at 30°C was ~20% higher (P<0.05) in soleus (0.326 ± 0.022) than in EDL (0.261 ± 0.020). In order to quantify the specific contribution of Ca2+ cycling to resting metabolic rate, the concentration of MgCl2 in the bath was increased to 10 mM to block Ca2+ release through the ryanodine receptor, thus eliminating a major source of Ca2+ leak from the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR), and thereby indirectly inhibiting the activity of the sarco(endo) plasmic reticulum Ca2+-ATPases (SERCAs). The relative (%) reduction in muscle VO2 in response to 10 mM MgCl2 was similar between soleus (48.0±3.7) and EDL (42.4±3.2). Using a different approach, we attempted to directly inhibit SERCA ATPase activity in stretched EDL and soleus muscles (1.42x optimum length) using the specific SERCA inhibitor cyclopiazonic acid (CPA, up to 160 µM), but were unsuccessful in removing the energetic cost of Ca2+ cycling in resting isolated muscles. The results of the MgCl2 experiments indicate that ATP consumption by SERCAs is responsible for 40–50% of resting metabolic rate in both mouse fast- and slow-twitch muscles at 30°C, or 12–15% of whole body resting VO2. Thus, SERCA pumps in skeletal muscle could represent an important control point for energy balance regulation and a potential target for metabolic alterations to oppose obesity.
Adaptive Sector Coloring Game for Geometric Network Information-Based Inter-Cell Interference Coordination in Wireless Cellular Networks

Inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) is a promising technique to improve the performance of frequency-domain packet scheduling (FDPS) in downlink LTE/LTE-A networks. However, it is difficult to maximize the performance of FDPS using static ICIC schemes because of insufficient consideration of signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio distribution and user fairness. On the other hand, dynamic ICIC schemes based on channel state information (CSI) also have difficulty presented in the excessive signaling overhead and X2 interface latency. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we introduce a new concept of ICIC problem based on geometric network information (GNI) and propose an adaptive sector coloring game (ASCG) as a decentralized solution of the GNI-based ICIC problem. Furthermore, we develop an ASCG with a dominant strategy space noted as ASCG-D to secure a stable solution through proving the existence of Nash equilibrium. The proposed scheme provides better performance in terms of system throughput gain of up to about 44.1%, and especially of up to about 221% for the worst 10% users than static ICIC schemes. Moreover, the performance of the CSI-based ICIC, which require too much computational load and signaling overhead, is only 13.0% and 5.6% higher than that of ASCG-D regarding the total user throughput and the worst 10% user throughput, respectively. The most interesting outcome is that the signaling overhead of ASCG-D is 1/144 of dynamic ICIC schemes’ one.
New to online dating? Learning from experienced users for a successful match

Online dating arises as a popular venue for finding romantic partners in recent years. Many online dating sites adopt recommender systems to help their users. However, few of current research provides solutions to cold start problem, i.e., providing recommendations to new users. In this research, we propose a new approach of providing reciprocal online dating recommendations to new users. Specifically, we detect communities from existing users, match new users to these communities, and take advantage of reciprocal activities of those community members to provide recommendations to new users. Using data from a popular U.S. online dating site, experiments show that our approach greatly outperforms existing methods.
Does a resistance exercise session with continuous or intermittent blood flow restriction promote muscle damage and increase oxidative stress?

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to compare the effect of low-load resistance exercise (LLRE) with continuous and intermittent blood flow restriction (BFR) on the creatine kinase (CK), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), protein carbonyl (PC), thiobarbituric acid-reactive substance (TBARS) and uric acid (UA) levels in military men. The study included 10 recreationally trained men aged 19 ± 0.82 years who underwent the following experimental protocols in random order on separate days (72–96 h): 4 LLRE sessions at a 20% 1RM (one-repetition maximum [1RM]) with continuous BFR (LLRE + CBFR); 4 LLRE sessions at 20% 1RM with intermittent BFR (LLRE + IBFR) and 4 high-intensity resistance exercise (HIRE) sessions at 80% 1RM. The CK and LDH (markers of muscle damage) levels were measured before exercise (BE), 24 h post-exercise and 48 h post-exercise, and the PC, TBARS and UA (markers of oxidative stress) levels were measured BE and immediately after each exercise session. There was a significant increase in CK in the HIRE 24 post-exercise samples compared with the LLRE + CBFR and LLRE + IBFR (P = 0.035, P = 0.036, respectively), as well as between HIRE 48 post-exercise and LLRE + CBFR (P = 0.049). Additionally, there was a significant increase in CK in the LLRE + CBFR samples BE and immediately after each exercise (Δ = 21.9%) and in the HIRE samples BE and immediately after each exercise, BE and 24 post-exercise, and BE and 48 post-exercise (Δ values of 35%, 177.6%, and 177.6%, respectively). However, there were no significant changes in LDH, PC, TBARS, and UA between the protocols (P > 0.05). Therefore, a physical exercise session with continuous or intermittent BFR did not promote muscle damage; moreover, neither protocol seemed to affect the oxidative stress markers.
Epitaxial graphene on 6H-SiC and Li intercalation

The influence of lithium (Li) exposures on monolayer graphene grown on the silicon-terminated SiC(0001) surface is investigated using low-energy electron microscopy, photoelectron spectroscopy, and micro-low-energy electron diffraction. After Li deposition, islands or Li droplets are observed on the surface, and are found to coalesce together with time. Formation of a dipole layer at the interface, interpreted to originate from Li-Si bonding, is observed directly after Li deposition, and manifested by a 2 eV shift of the C 1s and Si 2p bulk SiC peaks. This indicates that Li atoms penetrate through the graphene and carbon buffer layer directly after deposition at room temperature since three pi bands are then moreover observed at the K point, instead of the single pi band for monolayer graphene. The existence of three pi bands is interpreted as a mixture of bilayer and monolayer graphene plus a difference in doping levels due to an uneven distribution of Li atoms. Li gives rise to electron doping of the graphene and results in a lowering of the Dirac point. After annealing to a few hundred degrees Celsius, a more even Li distribution and intercalation is obtained since then two distinct pi bands appear at the K point.
Properties of wood surfaces – characterisation and measurement. A review COST Action E35 2004–2008: Wood machining – micromechanics and fracture

Abstract Wood surfaces might be considered as geometrical structures combined with position dependent chemical properties. It is possible to access surface properties only from a methodical point of view, e.g., by measuring roughness, colour, surface energy and other features. This type of characterisation remains incomplete because it does not account for the complex interactions of the properties, which are caused by the machining process. A better approach might be to describe the surface as a system of time dependent properties including the history of machining operations performed for a specific purpose. This work presents the advancements in the understanding of wood surfaces achieved in the course of the COST Action E35. The interaction between raw material, machining, and techniques of measurement will be discussed in terms of surface characteristics including the tactile properties of wood surfaces.
ANALYSIS OF STRESSES DEVELOPED IN FRP PLATED BEAMS DUE TO THERMAL EFFECTS

The paper presents a closed-form solution for the interfacial shear stresses developed between an FRP plate and beam due to thermal expansion, assuming elastic behavior and a prismatic section. Also presented is a numerical procedure for determining the interfacial shear stresses when the section is not prismatic. Additionally, the paper provides examples of the application of these approaches to FRP plated cast iron beams, illustrating the high interfacial shear and normal stresses that can develop near to the plate ends for metallic structures.
Optimal Design of Integrated Magnetics for Differential Rectifiers and Inverters

In this paper, a type of low-frequency integrated ac inductor without inductance coupling is proposed for differential rectifiers/inverters. The objective is to increase the power density of these converters by replacing their two bulky and low-frequency ac inductors with the proposed integrated ac inductor, which is much more compact. The principles of the proposed magnetic integration approach and the optimization procedures are explained in detail. An integrated inductor with 34.9% reduction in volume as compared to its discrete-inductor counterpart is designed and tested via simulations using the software Maxwell. Three integrated inductor prototypes with a core volume reduction of up to 30.9% are constructed in the laboratory and are applied to a buck differential rectifier for experimental verification. Their performance in terms of coupling effect, thermal temperature, power efficiency, and system switching frequency is examined.
Mental Health Stigma Prevention: Pilot Testing a Novel, Language Arts Curriculum-Based Approach for Youth.

BACKGROUND Researchers have emphasized the importance of integrating mental health education with academic curriculum. The focus of the current studies was Mental Health Matters (MHM), a mental health curriculum that is integrated with English language arts. It is taught by trained community member volunteers and aims to increase knowledge and decrease stigma toward individuals with mental health disorders. METHODS In Study 1, 142 sixth graders participated in MHM and completed pre- and postprogram measures of mental health knowledge, stigma, and program acceptability. Teachers also completed ratings of acceptability. Study 2 (N = 120 seventh graders) compared participants who had participated in MHM the previous year with those who had not using the same measures. RESULTS Sixth grade students and teachers rated the program as highly acceptable. Participants significantly increased their knowledge and decreased their levels of stigma. Seventh graders who had participated in MHM had significantly more mental health knowledge than peers who had not, but there were no differences in stigma. CONCLUSIONS The model appears to be acceptable to students and teachers. Future research is needed to assess the long-term effectiveness of integrating mental health education with other academic curriculum such as language arts or science.
Robust state estimation for linear systems with parametric uncertainties and quantised measurements

In this paper, the problem of state estimation for linear systems with bounded parametric uncertainties and quantised measurements is addressed. The quantised measurements are random variables of which the probability density functions (PDF) are closely related to the uncertain system parameters. Thus the statistical information of the quantised measurements and the deterministic bounds of the parametric uncertainties need to be incorporated in the design. Based on this, a robust estimator is proposed to minimise the worst-case expectation of the regularised residual norm over all possible parametric uncertainties. An iterative algorithm is presented to obtain the optimal solution. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed estimator.
Mid-infrared photonics enabled by 3D laser writing chalcogenide glass

Recent results from our work using ultrafast laser writing to fabricate waveguides and on-chip devices inside sulphide chalcogenide glasses are presented in this paper. Low loss single-mode (SM) and multi-mode (MM) waveguide arrays were successfully laser fabricated, for the first time to our knowledge, for operation in the whole near-IR (NIR) to mid- IR (MIR) range (1 to 11 μm wavelengths). These waveguides are demonstrated to have numerical apertures (NA) which can exceed NA=0.2, therefore also allowing for low bend losses as well as direct coupling to QC lasers. We also demonstrate the control over the waveguide mode field diameters (MFDs) (at 1/e2) by changing the waveguide core sizes and index contrasts, achieving typical values of 44 μm at 10.6 μm, down to 6 μm for telecom 1.55 μm light. The optical nonlinear properties of these waveguides have also been preliminarily investigated. Using a femtosecond (fs) optical parametric amplifier system, the optical nonlinearity of bulk gallium lanthanum sulphide (GLS) glass was first measured at 2.5 μm. The upper limits for the nonlinear properties of the laser modified material could be estimated based upon the nonlinear spectral broadening of a 2.5 μm fs pulse train coupled into SM waveguides. Further work includes the demonstration of on-chip three dimensional (3D) beam combiners for the MIR range (10.6 μm in this work), for near future implementation in astronomical observatories for stellar interferometry.
Clay Codes: Moulding MDS Codes to Yield an MSR Code

With increase in scale, the number of node failures in a data center increases sharply. To ensure availability of data, failure-tolerance schemes such as Reed-Solomon (RS) or more generally, Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) erasure codes are used. However, while MDS codes offer minimum storage overhead for a given amount of failure tolerance, they do not meet other practical needs of today's data centers. Although modern codes such as Minimum Storage Regenerating (MSR) codes are designed to meet these practical needs, they are available only in highly-constrained theoretical constructions, that are not sufficiently mature enough for practical implementation. We present Clay codes that extract the best from both worlds. Clay (short for Coupled-Layer) codes are MSR codes that offer a simplified construction for decoding/repair by using pairwise coupling across multiple stacked layers of any single MDS code. In addition, Clay codes provide the first practical implementation of an MSR code that offers (a) low storage overhead, (b) simultaneous optimality in terms of three key parameters: repair bandwidth, sub-packetization level and disk I/O, (c) uniform repair performance of data and parity nodes and (d) support for both single and multiple-node repairs, while permitting faster and more efficient repair. While all MSR codes are vector codes, none of the distributed storage systems support vector codes. We have modified Ceph to support any vector code, and our contribution is now a part of Ceph's master codebase. We have implemented Clay codes, and integrated it as a plugin to Ceph. Six example Clay codes were evaluated on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances and code parameters were carefully chosen to match known erasure-code deployments in practice. A particular example code, with storage overhead 1:25x, is shown to reduce repair network traffic by a factor of 2:9 in comparison with RS codes and similar reductions are obtained for both repair time and disk read.
Utility-Based Hybrid Memory Management

While the memory footprints of cloud and HPC applications continue to increase, fundamental issues with DRAM scaling are likely to prevent traditional main memory systems, composed of monolithic DRAM, from greatly growing in capacity. Hybrid memory systems can mitigate the scaling limitations of monolithic DRAM by pairing together multiple memory technologies (e.g., different types of DRAM, or DRAM and non-volatile memory) at the same level of the memory hierarchy. The goal of a hybrid main memory is to combine the different advantages of the multiple memory types in a cost-effective manner while avoiding the disadvantages of each technology. Memory pages are placed in and migrated between the different memories within a hybrid memory system, based on the properties of each page. It is important to make intelligent page management (i.e., placement and migration) decisions, as they can significantly affect system performance.In this paper, we propose utility-based hybrid memory management (UH-MEM), a new page management mechanism for various hybrid memories, that systematically estimates the utility (i.e., the system performance benefit) of migrating a page between different memory types, and uses this information to guide data placement. UH-MEM operates in two steps. First, it estimates how much a single application would benefit from migrating one of its pages to a different type of memory, by comprehensively considering access frequency, row buffer locality, and memory-level parallelism. Second, it translates the estimated benefit of a single application to an estimate of the overall system performance benefit from such a migration.We evaluate the effectiveness of UH-MEM with various types of hybrid memories, and show that it significantly improves system performance on each of these hybrid memories. For a memory system with DRAM and non-volatile memory, UH-MEM improves performance by 14% on average (and up to 26%) compared to the best of three evaluated state-of-the-art mechanisms across a large number of data-intensive workloads.
Pantheon: the training ground for Internet congestion-control research

Internet transport algorithms are foundational to the performance of network applications. But a number of practical challenges make it difficult to evaluate new ideas and algorithms in a reproducible manner. We present the Pantheon, a system that addresses this by serving as a community "training ground" for research on Internet transport protocols and congestion control (https://pantheon.stanford.edu). It allows network researchers to benefit from and contribute to a common set of benchmark algorithms, a shared evaluation platform, and a public archive of results. We present three results showing the Pantheon's value as a research tool. First, we describe a measurement study from more than a year of data, indicating that congestion-control schemes vary dramatically in their relative performance as a function of path dynamics. Second, the Pantheon generates calibrated network emulators that capture the diverse performance of real Internet paths. These enable reproducible and rapid experiments that closely approximate real-world results. Finally, we describe the Pantheon's contribution to developing new congestion-control schemes, two of which were published at USENIX NSDI 2018, as well as data-driven neural-network-based congestion-control schemes that can be trained to achieve good performance over the real Internet.
Using deep autoencoders to learn robust domain-invariant representations for still-to-video face recognition

Video-based face recognition (FR) is a challenging task in real-world applications. In still-to-video FR, probe facial regions of interest (ROIs) are typically captured with lower-quality video cameras under unconstrained conditions, where facial appearances vary according to pose, illumination, scale, expression, etc. These video ROIs are typically compared against facial models designed with high-quality reference still ROI of each target individual enrolled to the system. In this paper, an efficient Canonical Face Representation CNN (CFR-CNN) is proposed for accurate still-to-video FR from a single sample per person, where still and video ROIs are captured in different conditions. Given a facial ROI captured under unconstrained video conditions, the CRF-CNN reconstructs it as a high-quality canonical ROI for matching that corresponds to the conditons of reference still ROIs (e.g., well-illuminated, sharp, frontal views with neutral expression). A deep autoencoder network is trained using a novel weighted loss function that can robustly generate similar face embeddings for the same subjects. Then, during operations, those face embeddings belonging to pairs of still and video ROIs from a target individual are accurately matched using a fully-connected classification network. Experimental results obtained with the COX Face and Chokepoint datasets indicate that the proposed CFR-CNN can achieve convincing level of accuracy. The computational complexity (number of operations, network parameters and layers) is significantly lower than state-of-the-art CNNs for video FR, and suggests that the CFR-CNN represents a cost-effective solution for real-time applications.