Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SMT-Based Contention-Free Task Mapping and Scheduling on 2D/3D SMART NoC with Mixed Dimension-Order Routing

SMART NoCs achieve ultra-low latency by enabling single-cycle multiple-hop transmission via bypass channels. However, contention along bypass channels can seriously degrade the performance of SMART NoCs by breaking the bypass paths. Therefore, contention-free task mapping and scheduling are essential for optimal system performance. In this article, we propose an SMT (Satisfiability Modulo Theories)-based framework to find optimal contention-free task mappings with minimum application schedule lengths on 2D/3D SMART NoCs with mixed dimension-order routing. On top of SMT’s fast reasoning capability for conditional constraints, we develop efficient search-space reduction techniques to achieve practical scalability. Experiments demonstrate that our SMT framework achieves 10× higher scalability than ILP (Integer Linear Programming) with 931.1× (ranges from 2.2× to 1532.1×) and 1237.1× (ranges from 4× to 4373.8×) faster average runtimes for finding optimum solutions on 2D and 3D SMART NoCs and our 2D and 3D extensions of the SMT framework with mixed dimension-order routing also maintain the improved scalability with the extended and diversified routing paths, resulting in reduced application schedule lengths throughout various application benchmarks.
The Impact of Nutritional and Lifestyle Changes on Body Weight, Body Composition and Cardiometabolic Risk Factors in Children and Adolescents during the Pandemic of COVID-19: A Systematic Review

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the measures taken by most countries to curb virus transmission, such as social distancing, distance learning, population, home confinement and disruption of all organized activities, has affected children and adolescents worldwide. The aim of this review was to assess the role of diet and lifestyle changes due to COVID-19 measures on body weight/composition and cardiometabolic risk factors in children and adolescents. An electronic search was conducted in PUBMED, COCHRANE, Google Scholar and SCOPUS databases up to 31 October 2021. 15 eligible studies were identified. According to the studies included in the analysis, COVID-19 measures seem to have had a negative impact on the diets and lifestyles of children and adolescents, with a consequent increase in body weight and central fat accumulation. On the other hand, the parental presence and control resulted in better glycaemic control in children with diabetes mellitus (DM) Type 1, but the effect of the pandemic in the glycaemic control of children with DM2 2 is controversial. Finally, diet and lifestyle changes had a differential impact on children’s hypertension prevalence. These findings point to the need for public policy measures to prevent obesity and its complications, to and improve diet and lifestyle during the continuing and yet unresolved COVID-19 epidemic.
A comparative study on the performance of SSDR coreless AFPM generators with conventional and Halbach magnet arrays

An axial flux permanent magnet (AFPM) generator is known to be a good candidate for both low- and high-speed applications. In this paper, a comprehensive comparison of four coreless AFPM generators is presented with conventional and Halbach magnet arrangement combined with iron and ironless rotor (epoxy). With the same coreless stator structure, four different AFPM generators with different rotor magnet arrangement and materials are compared in terms of voltage, current, power, machine weight, and power density. The analytical design approach is first presented and is subsequently validated using ANSYS Maxwell electromagnetic finite element analysis (FEA) software. Results show that AFPM machine with fully coreless topology using Halbach array with epoxy rotor can deliver similar power density but has a lower cost compared to conventional magnet array with iron rotor. Hence, this topology is favorable for low power low cost applications.
Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis and Health Assessment Based on EMD–TEO

An intelligent rolling bearing fault diagnosis method is proposed using empirical mode decomposition (EMD)–Teager energy operator (TEO) and Mahalanobis distance. EMD can adaptively decompose vibration signals into a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), which are zero mean monocomponent AM–FM signals. TEO can estimate the total mechanical energy required to generate signals. Thus, TEO exhibits good time resolution and self-adaptive ability with regard to the transient components of the signal, which is an advantage in detecting signal impact characteristics. With regard to the impulse feature of the bearing fault vibration signals, TEO can be used to detect the cyclical impulse characteristic caused by bearing failure, gain an instantaneous amplitude spectrum for each IMF component, and then identify the characteristic frequency of a single, interesting IMF component in the bearing fault by means of the Teager energy spectrum. The amplitude of the Teager energy spectrum in the inner race and outer race fault frequencies, as well as the ratio of the energy of the resonance frequency band to the total energy, were extracted as feature vectors, which were then separately used as training samples and test samples for fault diagnosis. Thereafter, the Mahalanobis distances between the real measure and the different overall types of fault samples were calculated to classify the real condition of the rolling bearing. Finally, the Mahalanobis distances were converted into CV values, which assessed the current health state of the rolling bearing. Experimental results prove that this method can accurately identify and diagnose different fault types of rolling bearings.
Development of the Tip-Leakage Flow Downstream of a Planar Cascade of Turbine Blades: Vorticity Field

The paper presents detailed measurements of the tip-leakage flow emerging from a planar cascade of turbine blades. Four clearances of from 1.5 to 5.5 percent of the blade chord are considered. Measurements were made at the trailing edge plane, and at two main planes 1.0 and 1.56 axial chord lengths downstream of the cascade. The results give insight into several aspects of the leakage flow including: the size and strength of the leakage vortex in relation to the size of the tip gap and the bound circulation of the blade; and the evolution of the components of vorticity as the vortex diffuses laterally downstream of the blade row. The vortex was found to have largely completed its roll-up into a nearly axisymmetric structure even at the trailing edge of the cascade. As a result, it was found that the vortex could be modelled surprisingly well with a simple model based on the diffusion of a line vortex.Copyright © 1989 by ASME
Towards a contingency theory of TQM in services ‐ How implementation varies on the basis of volume and variety

This paper explores differences in the implementation of total quality management (TQM) in different types of service process, using a typology which distinguishes between services positioned along the continua of volume and variety. A case‐study‐based analysis of the implementation of six core TQM precepts was conducted to explore differences in implementation between professional (low volume, customised) services, mass (high volume, standardised) services and service shops (positioned midway on the continua). The study revealed some significant differences in the maturity of TQM implementation in the different types of service. The results suggest that mass services are conducive to the implementation of quality measurement, SPC and preventative approaches to quality improvement. However, professional services are more conducive to the cultural managerial changes associated with TQM. Interestingly, whilst it was hypothesised that TQM practices would be most readily transferable to mass services, the results suggested that the service shop was the most conducive environment for TQM implementation.
Endosialin/CD248 may be a potential therapeutic target to prevent the invasion and metastasis in osteosarcoma

Endosialin/CD248/tumor endothelial marker 1 is classified as a C-type lectin-like transmembrane receptor, found on the plasma membrane of activated mesenchymal cells, which binds to fibronectin. Although endosialin is expressed at high levels in stem-like cells of sarcomas, its role has not been fully uncovered. The present study aimed to determine whether endosialin expression is associated with tumor progression and metastasis, and whether endosialin has the potential to act as a novel therapeutic target in osteosarcoma (OS) using MORAb-004/ontuxizumab, a humanized monoclonal antibody, which targets the type C lectin domain of endosialin. The results demonstrated that endosialin was highly expressed in OSs with metastatic disease. Furthermore, MORAb-004 had no cytostatic effect on OS cells in vitro and did not change the expression of stem cells and differentiation markers; however, it inhibited migration of OS cells. Taken together, these results suggest that endosialin may play a role in migration, and may be involved in the metastatic process of OSs. Furthermore, MORAb-004 reduces the motility of OS cells, and suppresses invasion and the development of metastatic lesions.
A Preliminary Study for Literary Rhyme Generation based on Neuronal Representation, Semantics and Shallow Parsing

In recent years, researchers in the area of Computational Creativity have studied the human creative process proposing different approaches to reproduce it with a formal procedure. In this paper, we introduce a model for the generation of literary rhymes in Spanish, combining structures of language and neural network models The results obtained with a manual evaluation of the texts generated by our algorithm are encouraging.
Defining Swelling Kinetics in Block Copolymer Thin Films: The Critical Role of Temperature and Vapour Pressure Ramp

We studied the kinetics of swelling in high-χ lamellar-forming poly(styrene)-block- poly(lactic acid) (PS-b-PLA) block copolymer (BCP) by varying the heating rate and monitoring the solvent vapour pressure and the substrate temperature in situ during solvo-thermal vapour annealing (STVA) in an oven, and analysing the resulting morphology. Our results demonstrate that there is not only a solvent vapour pressure threshold (120 kPa), but also that the rate of reaching this pressure threshold has a significant effect on the microphase separation and the resulting morphologies. To study the heating rate effect, identical films were annealed in a tetrahydrofuran (THF) vapour environment under three different ramp regimes, low (rT<1 °C/min), medium (24 °C/min), for 60, 90 and 120 min, respectively, while the solvent vapour pressure and the substrate temperature were measured in real time. The translational order improved significantly with increasing the heating rate. The solvent mass uptake calculated for the different ramp regimes during annealing is linearly proportional to time, indicating that the swelling kinetics followed Case II diffusion. Two stages of the swelling behaviour were observed: (i) diffusion at the initial stages of swelling and (ii) stress relaxation, controlled at later stages. Films with a faster rate of increase in vapour pressure (rP>2 kPa/min) reached the pressure threshold value at an early stage of the swelling and attained a good phase separation. According to our results, highly ordered patterns are only obtained when the volume fraction of the solvent exceeds the polymer volume fraction, i.e., (φs≥φp), during the swelling process, and below this threshold value (φs=0.5), the films did not obtain a good structural order, even at longer annealing times.
Geometric Distortions in Scanned Laser Displays

Practically unrestricted depth of focusing, great color saturation, high contrast ratio and high resolution in combination with various video standards are the major advantages of laser projection systems compared to conventional lamp projectors. Every individual pixel is created by collinear superposition of three collimated laser beams in the image. By result, the image stays also properly focused if the distance to the projector is varying or inclined or if curved surfaces are used as a projection screen. Here the laser wavelengths used cover more than 90% of all colors which are perceptible by the human eye. The laser displays like any other system suffers from some inherent distortions. The distortions may be in shape of pincushion, barrel, parallelogram, unequal sides, non- linearity, etc.These systems use high speed scanning in horizontal direction and in vertical direction with lower speed scanning to generate the required frame rate. High acceleration forces required for high scanning frequency often causes bending of the micro mirror. The reasons for such kind of abnormalities may be disturbed biaxial scanning due to misaligned mirror, misaligned SLD module with respect to the optical system, misaligned hinge, laser source misalignment and aberration in the optical system projecting the LSD image.
Teleoperation Platform for Multimodal Experimentation Common communications applied to Teleoperation.

This paper describes the design strategy of an experimental platform which works as a test bed for teleoperation. It studies the performance of the executed tasks with different configurations and settings. The two key elements of a teleoperation interface are haptics and video perception. They inform the operator about the status of the remote or virtual environment. Specific hardware has been developed for both interactions as explained in the paper. These specific hardware components allow studying different control scheme for haptic devices and visual stereoscopic images on a computer screen. Results of the tests to this date are shown at the end and up-coming experiments are proposed.
Interaction of host factors in response to yeast K2 toxin stress – attractiveness for plant protection

Killer toxin-producing yeasts are important in agriculture, as they may be used for the biological control of field and post-harvest bacterial and fungal diseases of plants. The foundation for the development and application of killer yeast as plant protection agents is understanding the mechanisms underlying killer toxin-conditioned biocontrol activity and the tolerance to toxin-driven stress. This study aimed to determine the interactions between genetic effectors of cell wall integrity (CWI) and high osmolarity glycerol (HOG) pathways under the stress conditions caused by Saccharomyces cerevisiae dsRNA-originated K2 toxin. Genetic interaction studies have used different measures of fitness including the relative growth rate and toxin susceptibility. During the research, 12 double deletion mutants were created by applying homologous recombination approach, and their growth parameters and response to toxin action were analysed. Most double gene deletion strains demonstrated insignificant (less than 30%) changes in growth rate compared to single gene mutants. Only elimination of HOG1 gene in strains Δspt3 and Δspt8 resulted in significant increase of the growth rate reaching about 0.6 h-1. K2 toxin sensitivity increased in most of the double mutants, independent of the involvement of gene products into the same or different signalling pathways thus pointing to weak interactions of gene products. HOG1 mutation alters the phenotype (from resistant to sensitive) of mutants Δrlm1, Δlrg1 and Δslm4 only and are epistatic to these CWI pathway effectors. In addition to the functional analysis, network of proteins involved in K2 toxin response was generated uncovering HOG and CWI players interconnected or acting through mediators. This study deepens insight into the K2 toxin response-modulated genetic interactions and provides data important for practical application of killer yeasts.
A class of two-sample nonparametric statistics for binary and time-to-event outcomes

We propose a class of two-sample statistics for testing the equality of proportions and the equality of survival functions. We build our proposal on a weighted combination of a score test for the difference in proportions and a weighted Kaplan–Meier statistic-based test for the difference of survival functions. The proposed statistics are fully non-parametric and do not rely on the proportional hazards assumption for the survival outcome. We present the asymptotic distribution of these statistics, propose a variance estimator, and show their asymptotic properties under fixed and local alternatives. We discuss different choices of weights including those that control the relative relevance of each outcome and emphasize the type of difference to be detected in the survival outcome. We evaluate the performance of these statistics with small sample sizes through a simulation study and illustrate their use with a randomized phase III cancer vaccine trial. We have implemented the proposed statistics in the R package SurvBin, available on GitHub (https://github.com/MartaBofillRoig/SurvBin).
The Study on Precision Enhancement at Brake Pedal Analysis

The brake pedal is one of the most important parts for controlling the speed of the vehicle. Incorrect design of the brake pedal can place the driver in danger. CAE is being done for weight reduction to improve the safety of the driver and the vehicle performance and research is performed to improve the accuracy of analysis. The accuracy of the experimental and analysis values in regard to the stiffness of brake pedals, however, is still poor. Therefore, the aim of this study is to present appropriate analysis conditions based on the factors that influence the analysis in order to obtain accurate analysis results.
Turbine–Generating Unit Model Automatic Verification Tool Design Based On PMU Data

Quality control of mathematical simulation models of power system equipment is carried out by their verification. We assume verification is the process of mathematical model correctness estimation through comparison of the reference (measured) and the model response (simulated) signals with their current operating mode. The quality of power system equipment’s models affects the calculation tasks performance accuracy when determining appropriate modes and ensuring power systems reliable operation, upgrades monitoring and control efficiency in normal and abnormal modes, and also allows to find diagnostic solution to electrical equipment operational status in real time. Nowadays, power system equipment models are developed based on documents received from electric power facilities holders. The traditional approach is models’ parameters actualization by means of corresponding tests for it [2],[7]. It is quite an intensive and expensive procedure, therefore it is a rare case. In addition, it has a disadvantage related to the human factor. For this reason, the agenda is the "on-line" methods development based on PMU data [9],[10]. It is important to note that sometimes there is a need to update the model structure itself, which may have a generalized form and, thereby cause a significant error. These factors should be considered as stimuli to design the automatic verification tool for turbine-generating unit mathematical model based on PMU data. This calls for:
Age-related differences in the use of visual cues and expectancy location information in detecting driving hazards: an assessment from the ideal observer

There is a concern with an increasing ageing driving population because older drivers have a higher crash rate/mile than other age groups. An attempt to further understand this was from the perspective of visual attention driven by cues, which carry probable information of a target's location. Cues are important in driving because hazards appear in likely, rather than random, locations and drivers have an internal representation of the spatial layout of these hazards location. The ideal observer predict the optimal performance and was employed to assess the younger and older drivers ability to 'weight' these location based on different (weighted model) or equal (equal model) likelihoods of hazards appearing in certain locations. Both age-groups also participated in a series of cueing tasks with a cue indicating the likely location (70% cue validity) of the target. The 'weight' from the ideal observer was used to assess the younger and older adults ability to use the cue probability information. Both age-groups took part in peripheral (drives automatic attention) and central (drives voluntary attention) cueing tasks with varying difficulty, i.e., set-size (2 vs. 6) and luminance (contrast threshold vs. octave-below contrast threshold). The main findings were: (1) both age groups optimally used the peripheral and central cue information when there was a smaller set-size, (2) when set-size increased, the older adults sub-optimally used the peripheral cue whilst both age-groups sub-optimally used the central cue. In the driving study, the younger drivers optimally weighted the hazard's locations whilst the older driver weighted the locations equally. The suggests that the older drivers had a shortcoming in locating hazards that could potentially cause a car accident, something that requires further investigation.
EGN-Based Optimization of the APSK Constellations for the Non-Linear Fiber Channel Based on the Symbol-Wise Mutual Information

We proposean optimization scheme to maximize symbol-wise mutual information (MI) of the amplitude-phase shift keying (APSK) constellations. We optimize APSK constellations for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and non-linear fiber channel. For the fiber channel, the optimization is based on the enhanced Gaussian noise (EGN) model and is performed at the maximum modified signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the optical system. By doing so, our optimization algorithm maximizes the MI rate while the impacts of shaping on the non-linear interference noise (NLIN) power are considered. Our results show that by optimizing APSK constellations specifically for the fiber channel, significant reach improvements can be achieved. In addition, by using the mutual information formula and assuming a model for the radius of the APSK rings, we obtain an equation that provides the optimal APSK radii based on that model. After demonstrating the accuracy of this model, we compare the optimized APSKs of the AWGN and fiber channel and show that in the AWGN channels, the optimal radius of the rings grows with the ring number faster than the radii of the APSKs optimized for the fiber channel. Our results indicate that in the highly non-linear regimes of the fiber channel, geometric shaping has to be performed for the fiber since AWGN-based shaping gives poor performance.
Active power filter control using neural network technologies

A method for controlling an active power filter using neural networks is presented. Currently, there is an increase of voltage and current harmonics in power systems, caused by nonlinear loads. The active power filters (APFs) are used to compensate the generated harmonics and to correct the load power factor. The proposed control design is a pulse width modulation control (PWM) with two blocks that include neural networks. Adaptive networks estimate the reference compensation currents. On the other hand, a multilayer perceptron feedforward network (trained by a backpropagation algorithm) that works as a hysteresis band comparator is used. Two practical cases with Matlab-Simulink are presented to check the proposed control performance.