Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Design and development of current source fed full-bridge DC-DC converter for (60V/50A)telecom power supply

This paper addresses a dual input converter (DIC) for telecom power system of 3 kW using digital control algorithm. The proposed system gives an alternative way of fusing the sources of DC in magnetic form, instead of combining in the DC electrical form, by the addition of magnetic flux that is produced in the transformer magnetic core, which works on the principle of flux additivity. A detailed design, operation and control strategy of the proposed dual input isolated full-bridge step down DC-DC converter has been completely evaluated and presented in this paper. A constant frequency phase shifted PWM switching strategy have been preferred for the generation of gate pulses using FPGA controller board. The simulation analysis of the proposed converter has been executed utilizing MATLAB Simulink environment. A prototype for the proposed converter of 1.5 kW has been developed and experimental results are presented to validate the theoretical waveform of the proposed converter.
Selection of objective function for imbalanced classification: an industrial case study

In this article we discuss the issue of selecting suitable objective function for Genetic Algorithm to solve an imbalanced classification problem. More precisely, first we discuss the need of specialized objective function to solve a real classification problem from our industrial partner and then we compare the results of our proposed objective function with commonly used candidates to serve this purpose. Our comparison is based on the analysis of real data collected during the quality control stages of the manufacturing process.
A Novel Objective Quality Assessment Method for Perceptually-Coded Cloud Gaming Video

Cloud Gaming (CG) as a viable alternative to console gaming is gaining more acceptance and growing its market share in the gaming industry. In CG, the game events are processed in the cloud and the resulting scenes are streamed as a video sequence to players. In this new paradigm, one of the most important factors that has a significant impact on user quality of experience is video quality. To address the inherent high bandwidth requirement of CG, game videos should be compressed. This compression may have a negative impact on the user’s quality of experience (QoE) and the assessment of this impact on user satisfaction is a challenging task. Over the years, many research works have investigated the objective and subjective quality of video, but none are directly suitable for the assessment of perceptual video quality in the context of CG. Other methods, such as eye-tracking weighted peak signal-to-noise ratio (EWPSNR) that may work in this context, require an eye-tracking device that is not always available. In this paper, we propose a new weighted PSNR objective quality method that does not require any eye-tracker or information from the game designer (such as the importance of objects in the game) to measure game video quality. Our evaluation based on 3 actual games show that our proposed method has 51% and 11% better correlation with the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) compared to PSNR and SSIM measures, respectively.
Mistletoes Play Different Roles in a Modular Host–Parasite Network

Antagonistic interactions between host plants and mistletoes often form complex networks of interacting species. Adequate characterization of network organization requires a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. Therefore, we assessed the distribution of interactions between mistletoes and hosts in the Brazilian Pantanal and characterized the network structure in relation to nestedness and modularity. Interactions were highly asymmetric, with mistletoes presenting low host specificity (i.e., weak dependence) and with hosts being highly susceptible to mistletoe‐specific infections. We found a non‐nested and modular pattern of interactions, wherein each mistletoe species interacted with a particular set of host species. Psittacanthus spp. infected more species and individuals and also caused a high number of infections per individual, whereas the other mistletoes showed a more specialized pattern of infection. For this reason, Psittacanthus spp. were regarded as module hubs while the other mistletoe species showed a peripheral role. We hypothesize that this pattern is primarily the result of different seed dispersal systems. Although all mistletoe species in our study are bird dispersed, the frugivorous assemblage of Psittacanthus spp. is composed of a larger suite of birds, whereas Phoradendron are mainly dispersed by Euphonia species. The larger assemblage of bird species dispersing Psittacanthus seeds may also increase the number of hosts colonized and, consequently, its dominance in the study area. Nevertheless, other restrictions on the interactions among species, such as the differential capacity of mistletoe infections, defense strategies of hosts and habitat types, can also generate or enhance the observed pattern.
The emergence of visual-based localization and navigation using smartphone sensing

The research on localization and navigation has a long history. Traditional location-based services do not work well for indoor environments. The reason is that, compared with outdoors, indoor environments are more complicated and GPS signals are not available. Furthermore, existing indoor localization systems either need to deploy extra devices or are not accurate/reliable. In this paper, we present an emerging research area of mobile crowdsensing — visual-based localization and navigation (VBLN). It makes use of citizen's smartphone cameras and other internal sensors to attain indoor localization and navigation, which proves effective and of low deployment cost. We describe and discuss the generic architecture, its characters, typical applications/systems, key challenges/techniques, as well as the open issues of VBLN.
CycleGANs Based Social Image Stylization by Emotion

Social posts are always accompanied with one or more images to express enhanced emotion. It requires the image could produce a correct mood as text needs. However, existing image stylization methods either are not emotion-oriented or set a high threshold for user’s aesthetic background and manipulation of image editing tools. Thus, we propose a novel image stylization model to transfer social images refers to emotion embedded in posting text. Firstly, this model is trained by pairwise image and Emoji label from social networks, and the learned model could stylize the input image to create a match-able mood request by the text. Secondly, the model is built on Cycle-consistent Generative Adversarial Networks. It learns a probability distribution model to replace an art-theory driven model and leads to a data-driven solution. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method.
Long noncoding RNA AFAP1-AS1 is upregulated in NSCLC and associated with lymph node metastasis and poor prognosis

Long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) has been indicated to have an important role in various types of malignant tumors; however, only a small number of lncRNAs have been entirely elucidated. In the present study, a novel lncRNA, actin filament associated protein 1 antisense RNA 1 (AFAP1-AS1), was investigated, which is highly expressed in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction and in situ hybridization were performed to detect AFAP1-AS1 expression in frozen tissues and tissue microarrays, respectively. The results revealed that the expression level of AFAP1-AS1 was significantly increased in tumor tissues, compared with the paired non-cancerous tissues. It was also determined that the AFAP1-AS1 expression level was higher in patients with lymph node metastasis than those without lymph node metastasis (P=0.014). Kaplan-Meier analysis was conducted to evaluate the overall survival of patients with NSCLC and different expression levels of AFAP1-AS1, and the results indicated that patients with high AFAP1-AS1 expression had a reduced survival time, compared with those with low AFAP1-AS1 expression (P=0.011). Cox regression analysis was also performed to analyze the prognostic value of lncRNA AFAP1-AS1. The obtained data demonstrated that lncRNA AFAP1-AS1 was an unfavorable prognostic biomarker for NSCLC (HR: 3.12, 95% CI (1.05–9.25), P=0.040). In conclusion, it was demonstrated that lncRNA AFAP1-AS1 is overexpressed in NSCLC and an unfavorable biomarker for patients with NSCLC.
Short-term wind power data forecasting by particle swarm optimization dynamic GM(1,1) model

A particle swarm optimization (PSO) dynamic GM(1,1) model is proposed in addressing problems of poor information, low accuracy and high uncertainty in solving the short-term wind power data forecasting. The background value of the model is optimized by PSO with different fitness with other researches, the forecasting data of which can be continuously smoothed. Furthermore, a self-adaptive intelligence model is introduced in proposed model to deal with the homogeneous and non-homogeneous exponent functions to improve the forecasting accuracy. The residual model is also added to the proposed model to deduced the uncertainty brought from surroundings. The experience validates the proposed model is effective in short-term wind power output forecasting in a Belgium wind farm.
Bidirectional Communication Circuits for a 120-GHz PMF Data Link in 40-nm CMOS

Three different bidirectional polymer microwave fiber (PMF) links are presented and discussed. The proposed solutions exploit the following orthogonal signaling dimensions: wave direction, wave polarity, and signal polarity. First, a 120-GHz substrate integrated waveguide directional coupler is implemented and exploits the wave direction orthogonality. The 4-port on-board hybrid coupler achieves measured data rates of, respectively, 6 and 5.5 Gbps in the up- and down-link over a distance of 8 m. Second, a 120-GHz ortho-mode transducer (OMT) is micro-machined and exploits the wave polarity orthogonality. The micro-machined polarization duplexer has a measured isolation of 45 dB over the entire <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$F$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-band. For the horizontal and vertical paths, the insertion loss is measured with a 40-cm-long Teflon fiber and varies between −5 and −9 dB. Finally, a 120-GHz in-band full-duplex (IBFD) PMF transceiver with tunable electrical-balance duplexer (EBD) and on-chip bow-tie antenna are implemented in a 40-nm bulk CMOS technology. In this case, the duplexing principle is relying on signal polarity. The self-interference (SI) cancellation is achieved with a fully differential transformer-based EBD, resulting in a simulated SI suppression of 30 dB over a bandwidth of more than 14 GHz. The insertion loss of the duplexer is less than 11 dB from TX to fiber and less than 12 dB from fiber to RX at a frequency of 120 GHz. The balancing network provides an impedance locking range from 45 to 93 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> and 38 to 266 fF at 120 GHz. For IBFD operation, the maximum measured data rate is 6.2 Gbps. The transceiver with integrated antenna occupies an area of 1.8 mm <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> 1.53 mm and has a dc power consumption of 73 mW in total.
Seamless service migration for human-centered computing in future Internet architecture

As human-centered computing, cloud computing and widely existence of mobile devices are becoming rising trends in current Internet. All three aspects should be seriously considered and deeply implanted in the fundamental design of future Internet architecture. XIA (eXpressive Internet Architecture) is one of three FIA (Future Internet Architecture) projects funded by US NSF. As a clean-slate network architecture, XIA has some novel features such as evolvability, flexible routing, and intrinsic security. However, XIA has no effective method to support VM live migration and device mobility, which is the key technology to achieve seamless service migration between subnets of various data centers. This paper proposes a rendezvous agent-based VM migration support mechanism, which aims to achieve fast connection re-establishment between VM and correspondent node and lower service downtime after live migration. Furthermore, an experimental network mobility support mechanism is introduced to explore solutions to VLAN migration scenario.
A Result on Almost Sure Stability of Linear Continuous-Time Markovian Switching Systems

This work investigates the almost sure stability for linear Markovian switching systems in continuous time by using Lyapunov function method. The distribution of switching points is combined into constructing the Lyapunov function, which gives rise to the fluctuation in bounding the transient phase over the time interval confined between two successive switching points due to the randomness of their locations. Showing that the influence of the accumulated fluctuations, by averaging it out, will be negligible, is the key step in proving our stability result. Illustrative examples are included to show the effectiveness of the theoretical result.
MapReduce-based techniques for multiple object tracking in video analytics

Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) has been deployed effectively in various applications including automated video surveillance, self-driving vehicles, robotics, and medical imaging. Despite improvements in the qualitative performance (accuracy) of the existing state-of-the-art MOT methods through complex image analysis and global optimization techniques, a high computational cost is still a performance limitation. This paper focuses on achieving a high computational speed and proposes three parallel MOT techniques based on MapReduce. This paper introduces techniques that provide a parallel solution which effectively handles the challenges of time-dependencies among the various sections of the video file processed during MOT. Through performance analysis of a prototype deployed on the Amazon EC2 cloud, this paper shows that the proposed techniques provide a scalable solution for parallelizing the MOT methods and achieves an efficiency and speedup of up to 77% and 17 respectively, for a large video file, on a 20 node Hadoop cluster.
SFP: Toward a scalable, efficient, stable protocol for federation of software defined networks

As more networks deploy software defined networking (SDN) to take advantage of its benefits, including logically centralized, more flexible network-control programming, the inter-connection of such SDN-based networks has become a major remaining challenge. Traditional interconnection approaches such as BGP are designed for less flexible networks and hence can have serious efficiency, scalablity and stability issues such as the compact policy program instantiation (CPPI) issue. In this paper, we define the requirements of the inter-connection of SDN networks and propose a novel protocol, called the SDN Federation Protocol (SFP), to achieve scalable, efficient, and stable interconnection of SDN networks. Instead of being a traditional push protocol such as BGP, SFP adopts a novel pub-sub model to substantially increase flexibility, efficiency and scalability. Going beyond only packet handling, SFP introduces flexible network information spaces, such as the packet space and the flowset space, to achieve more efficient, autonomous federation of network resources spanning across multiple networks.
Machine vision assisted elimination of traffic using intelligent control

The traffic density on roads has been on an exponential rise since the advent of automobile revolution. Since then there has been some approaches for traffic management such as traffic light control based on load, traffic density calculation based on IR etc. An efficient algorithm using image processing techniques and intelligent control is proposed to completely obliterate traffic. The prototype has been developed and successfully tested using a miniature model of a rover and a wall mounted camera. In real time environments, this setup is analogous to cars with GPS and satellite cameras giving live traffic data on roads. The algorithm works in such a way that the vehicles are tuned to move at a calculated speed at which they avoid stopping at traffic signals which leads to reduction of traffic. This approach also helps us in the reduction of vehicle particulate emissions and improving the fuel efficiency, battery life in case of electric vehicles.
Metafier — A tool for annotating and structuring building metadata

Buildings often have several systems installed (i.e. different forms of Building Management Systems (BMS)), with the combined goal of providing a good comfort level for the occupants of the building. With such a goal, it would be natural for such systems to share information and collaborate in achieving this goal, but often they work as silos. Improving at scale the energy performance of buildings depends on applications breaking these silos and being portable among buildings. To enable portable building applications, the building instrumentation should be supported by a metadata layer, describing the instrumentation of the building. We have created Metafier, a tool for annotating and structuring metadata for buildings. Metafier optimizes the workflow of establishing metadata for buildings by enabling a human-in-the-loop to validate, search and group points. We have evaluated Metafier for two buildings, with different sizes, locations, ages and purposes. The evaluation was performed as a user test with three subjects with different backgrounds. The evaluation results indicates that the tool enabled the users to validate, search and group points while annotating metadata. One challenge is to get users to understand the concept of metadata for the tool to be useable. Based on our evaluation, we have listed guidelines for creating a tool for annotating building metadata.
Complementary base station clustering for cost-effective and energy-efficient cloud-RAN

The fast growing mobile network data traffic poses great challenges for operators to increase their data processing capacity in base stations in an efficient manner. With the emergence of Cloud Radio Access Network (Cloud-RAN), the data processing units can now be centralized in a data center and shared among several base stations. By clustering base stations with complementary traffic patterns to the same data center, the deployment cost and energy consumption can be reduced. In this paper, we propose a two-phase framework to find optimal base station clustering schemes in a city-wide Cloud-RAN. First, we design a traffic profile for each base station, and propose an entropy-based metric to characterize the complementarity among base stations. Second, we build a graph model to represent the complementarity as link weight, and propose a distance-constrained clustering algorithm to find optimal base station clustering schemes. We evaluate the performance of our framework using two months of real-world mobile network traffic data in Milan, Italy. Results show that our framework effectively reduces 12.88% of deployment cost and 9.45% of energy consumption compared with traditional architectures, and outperforms the baseline method.
Comparison between uncut Roux-en-Y and Roux-en-Y reconstruction after distal gastrectomy for gastric cancer: A meta-analysis

AIM To compare uncut Roux-en-Y (U-RY) gastrojejunostomy with Roux-en-Y (RY) gastrojejunostomy after distal gastrectomy (DG) for gastric cancer. METHODS A literature search was conducted in Pubmed, Embase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, Science Direct, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang, and China Science and Technology Journal Database to identify studies comparing U-RY with RY after DG for gastric cancer until the end of December 2017. Pooled odds ratio or weighted mean difference with 95% confidence interval was calculated using either fixed- or random-effects models. Perioperative outcomes such as operative time, intraoperative blood loss, and hospital stay; postoperative complications such as anastomotic bleeding, stricture and ulcer, reflux gastritis/esophagitis, delayed gastric emptying, and Roux stasis syndrome; and postoperative nutritional status (serum hemoglobin, total protein, and albumin levels) were the main outcomes assessed. Meta-analyses were performed using RevMan 5.3 software. RESULTS Two randomized controlled trials and four nonrandomized observational clinical studies involving 403 and 488 patients, respectively, were included. The results of the meta-analysis showed that operative time [weighted mean difference (WMD): -12.95; 95%CI: -22.29 to -3.61; P = 0.007] and incidence of reflux gastritis/esophagitis (OR: 0.40; 95%CI: 0.20-0.80; P = 0.009), delayed gastric emptying (OR: 0.29; 95%CI: 0.14-0.61; P = 0.001), and Roux stasis syndrome (OR: 0.14; 95%CI: 0.04-0.50; P = 0.002) were reduced; and the level of serum albumin (WMD: 0.71; 95%CI: 0.24-1.19; P = 0.003) was increased in patients undergoing U-RY reconstruction compared with those undergoing RY reconstruction. No differences were found with respect to intraoperative blood loss, hospital stay, anastomotic bleeding, anastomotic stricture, anastomotic ulcer, the levels of serum hemoglobin, and serum total protein. CONCLUSION U-RY reconstruction has some clinical advantages over RY reconstruction after DG.
DC-DC converter based on the bipolar boost converter and Dickson voltage multiplier

A novel modification of DC-DC converter with a high voltage ratio is proposed. The converter consists of an input boost converter, bridge commutator and Dickson voltage multiplier. The circuit is characterized by a high voltage gain. An important advantage of the circuit is its practically rigid external characteristic in the continuous current mode (CCM). This is achieved by the absence of active power losses in the process of capacitors' recharging. An additional advantage of the proposed scheme is the low required capacitance of the voltage multiplier capacitors A detailed analysis of the proposed converters has been produced. The results of theoretical analysis are confirmed by the simulation in MATLAB/SIMULINK. Circuit verification has been made in a laboratory prototype with the output power 200W.
Controlling the Fano interference in a plasmonic lattice

We analyze the influence of near-field coupling on the formation of collective plasmon modes in a multilayer metallic nanowire array. It is shown that the spectral interference between super- and subradiant normal modes results in characteristic line shape modifications which are directly controlled by the spacing as well as the alignment of the stacked lattice planes. Moreover, a distinct near-field-induced reversal of particle plasmon hybridization is reported. Our numerical findings are in excellent agreement with experimental results.
Hardware implementation of 3-Φ PWM rectifier using DSP

Electrical energy in the form of alternating current can be converted to direct current using rectifiers. Three phase pulse width modulated rectifiers compared to diode and thyristor rectifiers offer advantages like bidirectional power flow, unity power factor, control of DC-link voltage etc. This paper deals with control of DC voltage and unity power factor operation of PWM rectifier using Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation based Vector Control technique. A transient analysis of the system is carried out. A 200V, 3φ PWM rectifier is simulated using MATLAB to verify and validate control method. A prototype of 3φ PWM rectifier is implemented using DSP TMS320F28069 and results obtained are presented.