Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Mathematical Approach to the Design of Cellular Manufacturing System Considering Dynamic Production Planning and Worker Assignments

Due to increasing international competition, shorter product life-cycles, variable demand, diverse customer needs and customized products, manufacturers are forced from mass production to the production of a large product mix. Traditional manufacturing systems, such as job shops and flow lines, cannot provide such requirements efficiently coupled with flexibility to handle these changes. Cellular Manufacturing (CM) is an alternate manufacturing system combining the high throughput rates of line layouts with the flexibility offered by functional layouts (job shops). The benefits include reduced set-up times, material handling, in-process inventory, better product quality, and faster response time. The benefits of CM can only be achieved by sufficiently incorporating the real-life structural and operational features of a manufacturing plant when creating the cellular layout. This research presents integrated CM models, with an extensive coverage of important manufacturing structural and operational features. The proposed Dynamic Cellular Manufacturing Systems (DCMSs) model considers several manufacturing attributes such as multiperiod production planning, dynamic system relocation, duplicate machines, machine capacities, available time for workers, worker assignments, and machine breakdowns. The objective is to minimize total manufacturing cost comprised of holding cost, outsourcing cost, intercell material handling cost, maintenance and overhead cost, machine relocation cost as well as salary, hiring, and firing costs of the workers. Numerical examples are presented to show the performance of the model.
Fertility Status of Some Selected Floodplain Soils and the Management Recommendations on the Maximun Yield of Tomato (Lycopersicum Esculentum) in Kebbi State, Nigeria

The study was under taken to assess the fertility status of the flood plain soils of some selected local government areas of Kebbi State and recommend management practices to be provided for the maximum yield of tomatoes in Kebbi State. Soil samples were analyzed for the various physical and chemical properties following the standard procedures. The study revealed that the soils were predominantly sandy loam in texture with the mean particles composition of 715.71 gkg-1, 87.42 kg-1 and 196.87 kg-1 for sand, silt and clay, respectively. The soils contained low organic carbon of 6.0 gkg-1 and high concentration of nitrogen (0.8 gkg-1) which might be due to frequent addition of nitrogenous fertilizers on the soil. The low available phosphorus of 0.64 mgkg-1 was observed which might be due to acidity level of the soils (pH 5.6). On the basis of exchangeable bases, the soils were discovered to be low in Ca (1.51cmolkg-1), but high in Mg content (1.78 cmolkg-1). The soils contained high Na value of 0.59cmolkg-1 an indication ofsodicity hazard. The K content of 0.64 cmolkg-1 was also high in the soils of the study area. Based on the obtained values of the above parameters, the soils could be considered as medium in fertility. Based on the concentration of EC (0.55 dsm-1) ESP (6.04%) and pH 5.6, the soils could be considered to be free from salinity and sodicity at least for now, but has
CPTu-based approaches for cyclic liquefaction assessment of alluvial soil profiles

Over the years, methods to assess cyclic liquefaction potential based on piezocone penetration tests (CPTu) have been developed. This paper presents a comparative study between three CPTu-based methodologies, mainly in terms of the normalization procedures of overburden stresses, equivalent clean sand resistance, and magnitude scaling factor (MSF). Four CPTu profiles from a pilot site in southwest Portugal are thoroughly analysed with different methods, in terms of factor of safety against liquefaction, the Liquefaction Potential Index (LPI), and the Liquefaction Severity Number (LSN). The site presents very heterogeneous soil profiles, composed of alluvial deposits. Due to the presence of significant sand-silt–clay interbedded layers, the influence of transition zones and the use of different soil behaviour type index (Ic) cut-off values were also considered. From these analyses, a set of recommendations is presented for CPTu-based liquefaction assessment. Based on the extensive database of CPTu results in the pilot site area, a new classification relating LPI and LSN is proposed to assess liquefaction severity and damage.
Simulating cardiac disorders with a lumped parameter synergistic model

A lumped parameter synergistic model of the human cardiovascular system (CVS) is proposed to integrate the heart’s electrical activity with its mechanical activity. This model can represent the physiological condition of a patient in an effective way, whether it is considered normal or with some cardiac disorders. The electrical activity is coupled to the CVS model through electrocardiogram (ECG) signals in the suggested model. The variations in ECG morphology are detected by appropriate algorithms and changes parameters of the CVS model, such as systemic resistance and end-systolic pressure-volume relationship.Clinical relevance— It provides interpretation and analysis of physiological data of the cardiovascular system, both of electrical and mechanical cardiac behavior, evaluated together.
Design and modeling of a novel multi-beam piezoelectric smart structure for vibration energy harvesting

Abstract Vibration energy harvesting holds great potential to achieve long-lifetime autonomous operation of low-power electronic devices. This work is concerned with analytical and numerical modeling and analysis of a unimorph beam and a novel multi-beam energy harvesting systems. Several of the former device and two identical proof masses are utilized to design the multi-beam harvester, aiming to propose a scavenger with resonance frequency of less than 100 Hz. Accuracy of the models are verified, and extensive parametric studies are presented. Results demonstrate that the proposed multi-beam harvester is capable of generating several milliwatts of power under harmonic base acceleration of 0.4 g.
Small-Column Compression Tests on Concrete Confined by WWF

Tests on 127 × 127 × 381 mm concrete columns were carried out to study the efficacy of welded-wire fabric (WWF) as confining transverse reinforcement in columns. Three different wire spacings and a total of five wire sizes were used. The WWF was placed transversely in columns at close longitudinal spacing. The longitudinal spacing to column width ratio (S/D) varied from 0.1 to 0.3. For each of the five wire sizes, four different S/D ratios were used. This resulted in 20 reinforced column specimen designs. Each design was tested under displacement-controlled uniaxial compression with three identical specimens. The axial stress-strain curves were recorded. For the range of parameters tested, the WWF reinforcement provided varied degree of confinement to the concrete, as reflected in the varied level of enhancement of concrete strength and ductility. The S/D ratio seems to have a more dominant effect on confinement than the volumetric ratio of WWF. From the test results, a relationship between the S/D ratio .
Performance Modelling and Assessment for Social VR Conference Applications in 5G Radio Networks

One of the most challenging applications targeted by evolving (beyond-)5G technology is virtual reality (VR). Particularly, 'Social VR' applications provide a fully immersive experience and sense of togetherness to users residing at different locations. To support such applications the network must deal with huge traffic demands, while keeping end-to-end latencies low. Moreover, the radio access network must deal with the volatility and vulnerability of mmWave radio channels, where even small movements of the users may have substantial effects on the Quality of Experience. We present an integral modelling framework for feasibility assessment and performance optimization of the radio access network for Social VR applications in indoor office scenarios. Using the presented modelling approach, we conduct an extensive simulation-based assessment to determine the performance impact of head motion, the frequency band (3.5 GHz, 26 GHz) and radio network configurations, and derive the required carrier bandwidth for a range of 'Social VR' scenarios. Insights into these issues are a prerequisite for setting up guidelines for network deployment and configuration as well as for the development of (AI/ML-based) methods for dynamic resource management to optimally support Social VR applications.
Context-aware real-time assistant architecture for pervasive healthcare

The aging population profile in many countries brings into focus rising healthcare costs and pressure on conventional healthcare services. Pervasive healthcare has emerged as a viable solution capable of providing a technology-driven approach to alleviate such problems by allowing healthcare to move from the hospital-centred care to selfcare, mobile care, and at-home care. The state-of-the-art studies in this field, however, lack a systematic approach for providing comprehensive pervasive healthcare solutions from data collection to data interpretation and from data analysis to data delivery. In this thesis we introduce a Context-aware Real-time Assistant (CARA) architecture that integrates novel approaches with state-of-the-art technology solutions to provide a full-scale pervasive healthcare solution with the emphasis on context awareness to help maintaining the well-being of elderly people. CARA collects information about and around the individual in a home environment, and enables accurately recognition and continuously monitoring activities of daily living. It employs an innovative reasoning engine to provide accurate real-time interpretation of the context and current situation assessment. Being mindful of the use of the system for sensitive personal applications, CARA includes several mechanisms to make the sophisticated intelligent components as transparent and accountable as possible, it also includes a novel cloud-based component for more effective data analysis. To deliver the automated real-time services, CARA supports interactive video and medical sensor based remote consultation. Our proposal has been validated in three application domains that are rich in pervasive contexts and real-time scenarios: (i) Mobile-based Activity Recognition, (ii) Intelligent Healthcare Decision Support Systems and (iii) Home-based Remote Monitoring Systems.
Applicability of lean production with VSM to the Rioja wine sector

Lean production arose as a step towards a new era in production systems. It is a working philosophy designed to produce better products using fewer resources to obtain greater benefits. It has been applied to a wide variety of sectors different from the original automotive industry, in which it was developed. However, its application to continuous manufacturing processes of continuous products has been less, especially to the wine-production sector. The wine sector differs greatly from the automobile sector in various fundamental aspects, but it also has common fundamental aspects in its production and logistics systems. An important part of this work has consisted in studying the wineries of the Rioja region. This article analyses the applicability of lean production in the La Rioja wine sector and the results that may be obtained from its application, using value stream mapping as the main tool to identify opportunities for improvement. This piece of research shows that most of the production problems in the wine sector can be tackled using a lean production system, making certain adjustments according to the type of production. It shows the main properties of wine production from the lean viewpoint, and it improves the production and logistics systems.
Air Traffic Controller Performance and Workload Under Mature Free Flight: Conflict Detection and Resolution of Aircraft Self-Separation

The effects of conflict detection and self-separating aircraft resolution on the mental workload and performance of en-route air traffic controllers were examined. An air traffic control simulator was used to manipulate traffic loads and traffic complexity. A mature stage of free flight was simulated by having controllers monitor self-separating aircraft. Four 30-min scenarios were created to combine moderate (11 aircraft) and heavy traffic loads (17 aircraft) in a 50-mile radius sector with the presence or absence of self-separating and conflicting aircraft. Conflicts (defined as a loss of separation of 5 nm laterally and 1,000 ft vertically) were indicated to the controller by the appearance of a red circle around each of the aircraft involved. A self-separation event was defined as an evasive maneuver (either altitude or speed change) made by 1 aircraft to avoid a potential conflict with another aircraft. Performance and workload measurements indicated that controllers had difficulty both in detecting conflicts and in recognizing self-separating events in a timely manner in saturated airspace. Controller mental workload also increased, as indexed both by subjective and secondary task measures. Implications for the design of automated tools to support controllers under free flight environments are discussed.
Clarifying Ambiguous Keywords with Personal Word Embeddings for Personalized Search

Personalized search tailors document ranking lists for each individual user based on her interests and query intent to better satisfy the user’s information need. Many personalized search models have been proposed. They first build a user interest profile from the user’s search history, and then re-rank the documents based on the personalized matching scores between the created profile and candidate documents. In this article, we attempt to solve the personalized search problem from an alternative perspective of clarifying the user’s intention of the current query. We know that there are many ambiguous words in natural language such as “Apple. ” People with different knowledge backgrounds and interests have personalized understandings of these words. Therefore, we propose a personalized search model with personal word embeddings for each individual user that mainly contain the word meanings that the user already knows and can reflect the user interests. To learn great personal word embeddings, we design a pre-training model that captures both the textual information of the query log and the information about user interests contained in the click-through data represented as a graph structure. With personal word embeddings, we obtain the personalized word and context-aware representations of the query and documents. Furthermore, we also employ the current session as the short-term search context to dynamically disambiguate the current query. Finally, we use a matching model to calculate the matching score between the personalized query and document representations for ranking. Experimental results on two large-scale query logs show that our designed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art personalization models.
The ecology of innovation and the role of Strategic Design

Inovacao nao e apenas uma condicao para diferenciacao no competitivo mercado global, mas para sobrevivencia. Criar inovacoes continuamente, entretanto, e um desafio, e requer um processo estruturante e um ecossistema de apoio, capaz de integrar inovacao da estrategia da empresa a comercializacao das solucoes no mercado. Neste sentido, o Design Estrategico oferece um caminho para orquestrar os elementos tangiveis e intangiveis necessarios para apoiar a inovacao – quer incremental ou radical. Este artigo discute a ecologia da inovacao e o papel central do Design Estrategico neste processo. Palavras-chave: ecologia da inovacao, cultura de inovacao, design estrategico.
Delayed Parasite Clearance Rates and Low Clinical and Parasitological Responses Following Treatment of Uncomplicated Falciparum Malaria With Artemether-lumefantrine in Ethiopian- Sudan Border, Western Ethiopia

BackgroundThe appearance of artemisinin-resistant parasites in Africa is catastrophic as many cases and deaths from malaria are usually reported in the continent. This study was the first to evaluate the status of artemether-lumefantrine (AL) efficacy, seventeen years after the introduction of this drug in the study area. This study aimed to assess PCR- corrected clinical and parasitological responses at 28 days following AL treatment.MethodsSixty uncomplicated falciparum malaria patients were enrolled, treated with standard doses of AL, and monitored for 28 days with clinical and parasitological assessments from September 15 to December 15, 2020. Molecular analysis was done on dried blood spots collected from each patient from day 0 and on follow-up days 1, 2, 3, 7, 14, 21, and 28. Descriptive statistics and binary logistic regressions were done using SPSS 20.0 statistical software. A p-value of less or equal to 0.05 was considered significant.ResultsSixty patients enrolled in the study, ten were lost to follow-up; and the results were analyzed for 50 patients. All of the patients were fever-free on day 3. But, two patients febrile on day 1 became febrile on day 7 of the follow-up period. Day 3 parasites positivity rate was zero and 60 % using microscopy and PCR, respectively. Parasite clearance on day 3 was more among patients ≥ 15 years as compared with < 15 years (AOR= 6.71, P=0.021). 14 of 50 patients tested were parasite positive on day 7 by PCR. In addition, 7 patients had persisted parasitemia by PCR from day 0 to day 28 of the follow-up. The PCR-corrected adequate clinical and parasitological response (ACPR) rate was 59.2 %. PCR adjusted AL treatment failures was 40.8% and it was noted as 0 early treatment failure, 10.2% late clinical failures, and 30.6% late parasitological failures. Recrudescence and new infection rate within 28 days was7/50(14%) and1/50 (2%) respectively.Conclusionartemisinin resistance is suspected in the study area as parasite positivity rate on day 3 was greater than 10%. A slow parasitological clearance was followed by low-density parasitemia persistence and recrudescences. AL treatment failure was greater than the 10% threshold for treatments in use as per WHO. These findings suggest probably a decreased sensitivity of the parasite for the artemisinin component and the partner drug and highlight the need for prompt reassessment of the efficacy of AL and other factors that may contribute to low parasite susceptibility to the drug.
A Continuity Flow Based Tomographic Reconstruction Algorithm for 4D Multi-Beam High Temporal—Low Angular Sampling

A mathematical framework and accompanying numerical algorithm exploiting the continuity equation for 4D reconstruction of spatiotemporal attenuation fields from multi-angle full-field transmission measurements is presented. The algorithm is geared towards rotation-free dynamic multi-beam X-ray tomography measurements, for which angular information is sparse but the temporal information is rich. 3D attenuation maps are recovered by propagating an initial discretized density volume in time according to the advection equations using the Finite Volumes method with a total variation diminishing monotonic upstream-centered scheme (TVDMUSCL). The benefits and limitations of the algorithm are explored using dynamic granular system phantoms modelled via discrete elements and projected by an analytical ray model independent from the numerical ray model used in the reconstruction scheme. Three phantom scenarios of increasing complexity are presented and it is found that projections from only a few (unknowns:equations > 10) angles can be sufficient for characterisation of the 3D attenuation field evolution in time. It is shown that the artificial velocity field produced by the algorithm sub-iteration, which is used to propagate the attenuation field, can to some extent approximate the true kinematics of the system. Furthermore, it is found that the selection of a temporal interpolation scheme for projection data can have a significant impact on error build up in the reconstructed attenuation field.
The effectiveness of online teaching and learning tools

This study investigates how students in a distance-learning upperlevel accounting course perceive the effectiveness of different online teaching and learning (OTL) tools that are commonly used in business courses taught online. This topic is of critical importance, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed more courses to be OTL. A midsemester anonymous survey in an Accounting course at a public US university was conducted to measure students’ perceptions about different OTL course tools. Students were asked to provide their general assessment about how effective these tools were and how they believe these tools helped them learn. Analyses and discussions of the effectiveness of different tools and their link to earlier literature and how instructors can utilise the results of the OTL survey are presented.
Minimally Invasive Modified Nuss Procedure for Repair of Pectus Excavatum in Pediatric Patients: Single-Centre Retrospective Observational Study

Background: The treatment of pectus excavatum can be conservative or surgical. The aim of this study was to determine the factors influencing the outcomes of treatment after a minimally invasive Nuss corrective surgery procedure in pediatric patients. Methods: A total of 30 patient who underwent a minimally invasive Nuss corrective procedure for pectus excavatum from 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2020 were included in thisretrospective study. The collected data included thepatient’s demographic characteristics (age, sex, height, weight, body mass index—BMI, Haller index), treatment outcomes (duration of surgery, length of hospital stay, intraoperative complications, early and late complications, postoperative analgesia), and overall patient and legal guardian satisfaction two years after the procedure. Results: A total of 22 male and 8 female patients were included in the study. The median age was 15 years (interquartile range—IQR 14, 16), and the median BMI was 18.5 kg/m2 (IQR 17.7, 20.4) and 18.2 kg/m2 (IQR 16.9, 18.6) for males and females, respectively. The median CT Haller index was 3.67 (IQR 3.48, 4.09) for male and 3.69 (IQR 3.45, 3.9) for female patients. The median surgery duration was 120 min (IQR 100, 130), and the median hospital stay length was 8.5 days (IQR 8, 9.75). Indications for surgery were psychological (47%), followed by respiratory (30%) and combined respiratory-cardiac (20%) and respiratory-psychological disorders (3%). Early complications were observed in 18 patients (60%), and late complications were observed in 7 patients (23.3%). Intraoperative complications were not recorded. The most common early complications were pneumothorax and subcutaneous emphysema (30%), while late complications included bar displacement (10%) and deformity recurrence (6.6%). Overall, the procedure was successful in 93.1% of patients. Upon arrival home, 22 patients (81.5%) used analgesics for at least one day, up to a maximum of six months. A total of 23 (76.7%) operated patients determined that the surgical procedure had excellent results (grade 5), 4 (13.3%) patients report a good result (grade 4), 1(3.3%) patient reported a mediocre result, and one patient (3.3%) reported a bad result (grades 3 and 2, respectively). Conclusion: The Nuss procedure is a safe and effective method for treating funnel chest in children and adolescents. It also providesexcellent cosmetic and aesthetic results as well as subjective satisfaction with the outcome of surgical treatment.