Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Output Voltage Stabilization Control without Secondary Side Measurement for Implantable Wireless Power Transfer System

Due to the variations of mutual inductance and load, the output voltage of implantable wireless power transfer (IWPT) system is easily unstable. This paper proposes an output voltage stabilization control scheme without any secondary side measurement for IWPT system. Firstly, the voltage and current of the primary side are detected to obtain the mutual inductance and load. Then, the output voltage is predicted by the estimated mutual inductance and load. The output voltage of IWPT system eventually keep stable by adjusting the input voltage of primary side according to the estimated output voltage. Simulations and experimental results are provided to further verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.
Digital Self-Interference Cancellation Based on Blind Source Separation and Spectral Efficiency Analysis for the Full-Duplex Communication Systems

In this paper, the fundamental problem for the full-duplex communication systems, i.e., self-interference cancellation (SIC), is investigated, and a novel digital-domain SIC method based on blind source separation is proposed. This method achieves SIC by separation and has two prominent characteristics that are: 1) it is a blind method, and no training sequence or time is needed and 2) it is unaffected by the nonlinear components of the self-interference signal. Meanwhile, the critical factors for spectral efficiency (SE) are fully analyzed herein. In the simulations, the performances of the proposed method, including SIC capacity, signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, SE, and SE gain, are comprehensively evaluated and compared with least-square-based SIC algorithms. These results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain considerable performances, even the best performance in some cases.
Orbital Angular Momentum Multiplexing for Free-space Quantum Key Distribution Impaired by Turbulence

In this paper, a free-space quantum key distribution (QKD) system based on BB84 protocol is studied assuming that the transmitted quantum bits are multiplexed spatially based on orthogonal orbital angular momentum (OAM) carrying beams. The performance of such a system is estimated in terms of quantum bit error rate, outage capacity, and effective data rate taking into account the impact of error correction and privacy amplification. Based on the simulation of OAM-carrying beam propagating through atmospheric channels impaired by turbulence, the crosstalk among the multiplexed channels are investigated and its effect on the performance of the QKD system is evaluated. The presented results provide insight into the efficient design of such multiplexed QKD systems particularly in terms of the choice of the optimal average photon number per pulse and the multiplexing mode set.
Individual Differences in the Competence for Physical-Activity-Related Affect Regulation Moderate the Activity-Affect Association in Real-Life Situations.

Physical activity (PA) is positively associated with affective well-being in adults. This study investigated the moderating role of the competence for PA-related affect regulation in the PA-affect association in real-life situations. A total of 37 women and 27 men completed an ecological momentary assessment study in which the authors used accelerometers to record PA and e-diaries to collect data on affective well-being on 4 study days. They applied multilevel analyses to estimate the within-person effects of PA on affective well-being and cross-level interactions between PA (within person) and PA-related affect regulation (between persons). Results revealed cross-level interaction effects between within-person PA variations and competence for PA-related affect regulation on the affect dimensions of calmness (p < .01) and valence (p = .04). Thus, the competence for PA-related affect regulation moderates the PA-affect association in real-life situations. Therefore, individual-based PA promotion should consider these individual differences to develop tailored interventions.
Brightness Adaptive Food Recognition Using CNN

With the advance of technology, people's quality of life is getting better and better, but the number of death due to illness gradually increased. At the top ten causes of death, diabetes and kidney diseases account for the fifth and ninth respectively. The two diseases in the following treatment are strict in the diet control. At present, although there are many wearable devices able to calculate how much calories consumed, the wearing device estimating the calories and sodium content of food for the user is not yet popular since food recognition is still challenging due to the variety of their color, shape, and texture. Among them, brightness is one of the most critical problems. In view of this, we employ the brightness to calculate the reflective region, and adjust its hue and saturation without changing the texture. Hence, the region can be consistent with other nonreflective region of color consistency. In the food recognition, we use convolution neural network to extract the simple to complex features, and convert it to fisher vector through fisher kernel. Eventually, we utilize support vector machine for classification.
Poisson Vector Graphics (PVG)

This paper presents Poisson vector graphics (PVG), an extension of the popular diffusion curves (DC), for generating smooth-shaded images. Armed with two new types of primitives, called Poisson curves and Poisson regions, PVG can easily produce photorealistic effects such as specular highlights, core shadows, translucency and halos. Within the PVG framework, the users specify color as the Dirichlet boundary condition of diffusion curves and control tone by offsetting the Laplacian of colors, where both controls are simply done by mouse click and slider dragging. PVG distinguishes itself from other diffusion based vector graphics for 3 unique features: 1) explicit separation of colors and tones, which follows the basic drawing principle and eases editing; 2) native support of seamless cloning in the sense that PCs and PRs can automatically fit into the target background; and 3) allowed intersecting primitives (except for DC-DC intersection) so that users can create layers. Through extensive experiments and a preliminary user study, we demonstrate that PVG is a simple yet powerful authoring tool that can produce photo-realistic vector graphics from scratch.
Integrated Phase Locked Loop and ILFD with VCO for Robotics Transmitter

This article presents phase locked loop (PLL) using frequency expansion technique. The oscillator uses a cross-coupled nMOSFET pair in shunt with the LC-resonator. The wide locking range divide-by-2 RLC injection-locked frequency divider (ILFD) is based on a cross-coupled oscillator. The RLC resonator is used to extend the locking range so that dual-band locking ranges can be merged in one locking range at both low and high injection powers. By utilizing pulse interpolation, the proposed architecture is capable of suppressing high-order harmonics of the reference spur as well as fundamental spur. Varactors in series with inductors are used to tune the oscillator frequency. In robotics implementation, a four-stage pulse interpolator achieves 6-dB additional spur suppression.
START: STructure-Assisted RNA Translation

ABSTRACT Cap-dependent translation initiation begins by assembly of a pre-initiation ribosomal complex that scans the 5ʹ Untranslated Region in order to localise the start codon. During this process, RNA secondary structures are melted by RNA helicases. Guenther et al reported that the yeast helicase Ded1, an orthologue of the mammalian DDX3 helicase, is responsible for this activity. When Ded1 is non-functional, RNA structures in the 5ʹUTR promote translation initiation on Alternative Translation Initiation Sites (ATIS) lead to uORF translation and consequently down-regulation of the main ORF. This mechanism is driven by the sole presence of RNA secondary structures located downstream of ATIS. Translation initiation mediated by RNA structures is found in other messenger RNAs. We propose to name this novel mechanism STructure-Assisted-RNA-Translation or START. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
IoT (Internet of Things) Based Efficiency Monitoring System for Bio-Gas Plants

In a world where people are talking about increase in the usage of non-polluting and renewable sources of energy, monitoring and controlling such biogas plants remotely becomes very important. Monitoring the properties like pH, temperature, pressure and total amount of gas produced and consumed will help in understanding the health of the biogas plant. The whole process of offline monitoring has to be replaced with an online automation system. To overcome the barrier of data connectivity issues in the rural area, GSM based data transfer has to be used. In this paper, an IoT based efficiency monitoring system for biogas plants is proposed. An Arduino micro-controller system is deployed and tested to measure the gas production and consumption. Android based application is designed to act as an SMS gateway which is a free replacement for commercial solution. A dashboard plotting the usage statistics is designed to help the plant administrator to monitor the parameters.
Ascorbic Acid Supplements and Kidney Stones Incidence Among Men and Women: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

PURPOSE The relationship of ascorbic acid (AA) supplements and risk of kidney stones among men and women is controversial. This systematic evaluation was performed to obtain comprehensive evidence about the relationship of AA supplements and risk of kidney stones among men and women. MATERIAL AND METHODS A systematic search of Pubmed, the Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Embase was performed to identify studies that exhibited the relationship of AA supplements and risk of kidney stones among men and women were published up to Mar 2017. Outcomes of interest included kidney stones incidence and risk factors. RESULTS Four studies estimating the association between AA supplements and risk of kidney stones were included for meta-analysis. The kidney stones incidence was significantly higher in men than women with AA supplements (OR= 1.62; 95% CI: 1.09 to 2.42; P=0.02). AA supplements (250-499mg/d, 1000-1499mg/d) was remarkably correlated with the risk of renal stones among men (OR= 1.14, 95% CI: 1.00 to 1.28, P=0.04; OR= 1.12, 95% CI: 1.11 to 1.13, P<0.00001; respectively). However, AA supplements (500-999 mg/d, >1500 mg/d) did not correlate with the risk of renal stones among men (OR= 1.20, 95% CI: 0.99 to 1.46, P=0.06; OR= 1.28, 95% CI: 1.00 to 1.63, P= 0.05; respectively). In addition, AA supplements (250-499mg/d, 500-999mg/d, 1000-1499mg/d, >1500mg/d) did not remarkably correlate with the risk of renal stones among women (OR= 1.00, 95% CI: 0.82 to 1.22, P=0.98; OR= 1.08, 95% CI: 0.99 to 1.18, P=0.09; OR= 0.99, 95% CI: 0.90 to 1.08, P=0.77; OR= 0.99, 95% CI: 0.99 to 1.09, P=0.88; respectively). CONCLUSIONS AA supplements was remarkably correlated with higher risk for kidney stones incidence in men, but not in women. Further multicenter, prospective and long-term follow-up RCTs are required to verify these findings.
Designing programs that check their work

A program correctness checker is an algorithm for checking the output of a computation. That is, given a program and an instance on which the program is run, the checker certifies whether the output of the program on that instance is correct. This paper defines the concept of a program checker. It designs program checkers for a few specific and carefully chosen problems in the class FP of functions computable in polynomial time. Problems in FP for which checkers are presented in this paper include Sorting, Matrix Rank and GCD. It also applies methods of modern cryptography, especially the idea of a probabilistic interactive proof, to the design of program checkers for group theoretic computations. Two structural theorems are proven here. One is a characterization of problems that can be checked. The other theorem establishes equivalence classes of problems such that whenever one problem in a class is checkable, all problems in the class are checkable.
Towards an Accessible Mobile Serious Game for Electronic Engineering Students with Hearing Impairments

Nowadays, serious games have become a great tool in engineering education learning process. Despite this, accessibility for hearing impaired people has not been considered as a necessary element in the development of these kind of video games. On the other hand, mobile devices are widely used in engineering classrooms as an element that supports students learning. There are initiatives that focus on apps development for engineering education support; however, these initiatives usually lack accessibility parameters for people with hearing disabilities. This paper proposes an accessible mobile serious game for electronic engineering students that have any kind of hearing impairment, and allows to introduce them to the basic laws of electrical circuits. For its design, some video games accessibility guidelines for people with this type of impairment were considered. Finally, a test was conducted to evaluate student learning.
Assessing the Effects of a Primary Control Impairment on the Cellists’ Bowing Gesture Inducing Harsh Sounds

How do cellists’ postural movements influence timbre quality during instrumental performance ? If this question seems complex at a first glance partly due to specific motor synergies for each musician, some principles of postural organization are believed to remain invariant while executing bowing gestures. In this paper, we reveal some of these common principles by investigating the effects of postural constraints on the mechanical behavior of the cellists’ right arm, and consequently on the resulting bow velocity likely to cause timbre degradation, referred to as harshness (“décharnement” in French) by cellists. The kinematical data corresponding to the execution of a single note are collected through a motion capture system, and analyzed between two postural conditions of expressive playing: A normal one and a constrained one limiting chest and head displacements involved in the cellists’ primary control. The comparison of relevant joint displacements and rotations between the two postural situations highlight the lack of coordination between spine torsion and shoulder opening as a main factor responsible for a tighter right arm gesture, potentially leading to a drop in bow velocity and consequently the production of harsh sounds.
OCR-Based Hardware Implementation for Qatari Number Plate on the Zynq SoC

Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems have become widely used for safety, security, and commercial purposes. A typical ANPR system is based on three essential stages: Number Plate Localization (NPL), Character Segmentation (CS), and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Recently, ANPR systems started to use High Definition (HD) cameras to improve the recognition rate of the system. In this paper. , a proposed OCR stage for a HD ANPR system is presented. The software implementation of the proposed algorithm was carried on as a proof of concept using MATLAB. , followed by its hardware implementation using a heterogeneous System on Chip (SoC) platform. The selected platform is Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC that consists of an ARM processor and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The stage was implemented using both processing units separately and it was found that the FPGA is capable of processing one character faster the ARM processor. The hardware implementation results show that the proposed FPGA based OCR stage recognize one character in 0.63 ms, with an accuracy of 99.5%.
Using Arabic Social Media Feeds for Incident and Emergency Management in Smart Cities

Research on Smart Cities tackles the challenges related to the rapid urban population growth combined with resources' scarcity. A key function of any Smart City initiative is to be able to continuously monitor and track a city's environment and resources so as to convert the data into intelligence for streamlining the city's operations. Social media has become one of the most popular means to allow users to communicate and share information, opinions, and sentiments about events and incidents occurring in a city. With the rapid growth and proliferation of social media platforms, there is a vast amount of user-generated content that can be used as source of information about cities. In this work, we propose the use of text mining and classification techniques to extract the intelligence needed from Arabic social media feeds, for effective incident and emergency management in smart cities. In our system, the information collected from social media feeds is processed to generate incident intelligence reports, including information such as: the event type; the event stage, the impact level, the environmental conditions on the incident scene; and the number of people impacted. Such real-time generated reports can be used by rescue teams for fast assessment and effective response to incidents and emergencies occurring in the city. The proposed algorithm was implemented and tested using datasets collected from Arabic Twitter feeds, and the obtained results are very promising.
A convolutional sequential model for network load forecasting

With the development of cloud computing and big data, more and more applications are deployed in the cloud. Data center, as a management unit of computing and storage resources, consists of quantities of computing clusters, and the scale of clusters will be increased as demand grows. Even the same application will have a totally different impact on the network load when it is under clusters with different sizes, for the topology of the clusters is changed. Therefore, it is meaningful to do research on how to make use of the load of network from an application under a small cluster to predict the network load under a larger cluster, which will guide the data center on its infrastructure. In this paper, first of all, we address a new network load forecasting problem and collect network load generated by the operations of a designated computing intensive task (Terasort and GroupBy). Then we analyze the data and put forward the difficulties of the new problem. Finally, with a given set of data, we test the traditional machine learning models and the deep learning models respectively and provide a simple but effective model.
A Framework for Virtual 3D Manipulation of Face in Video

This paper presents a framework that enables a user to manipulate his/her face shape three-dimensionally in video. Existing face manipulation applications and methods have some limitations: single photo, manipulation on image domain, or limited deformation. In the proposed framework, face is tracked from video by using landmark tracking and fitting 3d morphable face model to image, and the face model is further deformed according to the user input with mesh deformation method and rendered with texture from the frame image onto the camera preview. Therefore, unlike conventional applications and researches for face manipulation, the proposed framework allows the user to perform free-form 3d deformation of face in video and to view the deformed face at various viewpoints.
Securing Road Traffic Congestion Detection by Incorporating V2I Communications

In this paper, we address the security properties of automated road congestion detection systems. SCATS, SCOOT and InSync are three examples of Adaptive Traffic Control Systems (ATCSs) widely deployed today. ATCSs minimize the unused green time and reduce traffic congestion in urban areas using different methods such as induction loops and camcorders installed at intersections. The main drawback of these system is that they cannot capture incidents outside the range of these camcorders or induction loops. To overcome this hurdle, theoretical concepts for automated road congestion alarm systems including the system architecture, communication protocol, and algorithms are proposed. These concepts incorporate secure wireless vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. The security properties of this new system are presented and then analyzed using the ProVerif protocol verification tool.
Multi-Band RF Downconversion Over Fiber With a Single Modulator

We present the theory for an experimental verification of a new technique to combine multiple microwave signals populating a wide spectrum into a single, small band for further relay or processing. The method is an extension of well-known RF-over-fiber downconversion techniques but with multiple local oscillators (LOs) to translate widely spaced signals to intermediate frequencies that are within a single, narrower, spectral band. One dual-drive Mach–Zehnder modulator is used as two parallel phase modulators with the LOs presented to one RF drive and the signals to the other. This parallel arrangement adds, rather than multiplies, the LO tones and signals, eliminating a number of cross-modulation spurs that could otherwise make it very difficult to receive only the signals of interest. We verify the link’s performance by downconverting two widely spaced <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-band signals to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$C$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-band while simultaneously relaying an existing <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$C$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-band signal on the same link and demodulating all three signals.
Simulator Sick but Still Immersed: A Comparison of Head-Object Collision Handling and Their Impact on Fun, Immersion, and Simulator Sickness

We compared three techniques for handling head-object collisions in room-scale virtual reality (VR). We developed a game whose mechanics induce such collisions which we either addressed (1) not at all, (2) by fading the screen information to black, or (3) by restricting translation, i.e. correcting the virtual offset in such a way that no penetration occurred. We measured these conditions' impact on simulator sickness, fun, and immersion perception. We found that the translation-restricted method yielded the greatest immersion value but also contributed the most to simulator sickness.
Optimization of the Reconfiguration Planning of Cyber-Physical Production Systems with Delta-Like Architecture

Data availability and modular design of modern production systems allow companies to respond flexibly to changing market conditions and process requirements. Against this background, this contribution presents tools to automatically identify energy efficient (re)configuration patterns. Therefore, market studies are used to reveal industrially relevant demand-related handling tasks and potential configurations for the well-known Delta parallel robot, as well as recent design modifications extending its field of application. In this context, optimization approaches are innovatively employed to effectively reduce the configuration space by discarding infeasible candidates and eventually solve the problem of simultaneous selection and allocation of configurations, such that a set of given handling tasks is performed in the most energy efficient way. Additionally, kinematic constraints are included in order to maintain the throughput rates of the underlying system. The approach is easily transferable to a system layout with reconfigurable, but also predetermined subsystems.