Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deriving Guidelines for the Design of Biomass Grate Furnaces with CFD Analysis - A New Multifuel-Low-NOx Furnace as Example

In the present work, guidelines for the design of grate furnaces in the typical size range of Austrian district heating plants (0.5 – 10.0 MWth) were derived from CFD analysis. For this purpose, a case study systematically investigating all important parameters for a successful design of a Low-NOx furnace was performed. The simulation of solid biomass combustion on the grate and turbulent reactive flow in the combustion chamber was performed via forward coupling. An empirical model was applied for thermal decomposition of the solid fuel. The calculation results were used as boundary profiles for subsequent CFD simulations of the turbulent reactive flow in the furnace. CFD modelling was based on the Realizable k-ε Model (turbulence), the Discrete Ordinates Model (radiation) and the Eddy Dissipation Model (turbulent combustion) in combination with a global 3-step reaction mechanism considering the species CH4, CO, CO2, H2, H2O and O2. NOx formation and reduction were not considered explicitly with a CFD postprocessor. The furnace was designed under Low-NOx aspects, i.e., with air staging technology and a temperature controlled primary combustion zone obtained by flue gas recirculation. As a result of the case study, a Low-NOx biomass grate furnace for a broad fuel assortment (waste wood, wood chips and bark) was developed and implemented as a pilot-scale plant. Moreover, the modular structured CFD based furnace development allows further combustion chamber geometries to be created depending on the application. Furthermore, guidelines for the design of biomass grate furnaces were derived. In general, a considerable reduction of investment and operating costs is possible by a compact furnace design as well as by reduced air and flue gas fluxes in the furnace. This can be achieved by an appropriate design of the nozzles for air and flue gas injection as well as by adjusting the geometry of the combustion chamber (e.g. barriers) in order to improve the mixing of unburned flue gas and air as well as the utilisation of the furnace volume. A staged secondary air supply leads to a strong reduction of CO emissions, but is linked with increased flue gas temperatures between the nozzles for secondary and tertiary air injection. The higher temperature peaks due to improved mixing conditions have to be considered concerning ash slagging and deposit formation. For dry fuels (e.g. waste wood) additional measures like furnace cooling and enhanced flue gas recirculation are necessary. A scaling of an optimised furnace geometry should be based on approximately constant ratios of the characteristic Reynolds numbers.
Patch-based deep learning approaches for artefact detection of endoscopic images

This paper constitutes the work in EAD2019 competition. In this competition, for segmentation (task 2) of five types of artefact, patch-based fully convolutional neural network (FCN) allied to support vector machine (SVM) classifier is implemented, aiming to contend with smaller data sets (i.e., hundreds) and the characteristics of endoscopic images with limited regions capturing artefact (e.g. bubbles, specularity). In comparison with conventional CNN and other state of the art approaches (e.g. DeepLab) while processed on whole images, this patch-based FCN appears to achieve the best.
Usability Analysis in the Liquid Galaxy Platform

With the falling price of the technology and the growing trend of cluster display-walls, User Experience (UX) becomes a topic to be taken into account with this new kind of systems. In this context, we present a study of a specific cluster displaywall, named Liquid Galaxy and developed by Google, that covers the three main aspects of usability: effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. The study was done by means of a set of tasks that users completed during UX tests, with post-task and post-tests questionnaires, while the system performance was measured. The results show positive feelings from users while using the system. In addition, we relate both system performance and user behavior to estimate whether the system will perform satisfactorily for users. According to our observations, we can see that, in general, there is an intrinsic relationship between the goodness of feelings and the quality of the performance metrics. This relationship can facilitate the inclusion of cluster display-wall systems in a broad range of scenarios with right levels of UX just by analyzing their computational characteristics. Keywords–Liquid Galaxy; User Experience; Cluster DisplayWall.
Equipotential surfaces and geodetic implications on formation of Martian moons

We determine the normal ellipsoids for the Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos, that closely approximate the equipotential surfaces in the respective gravity fields. We compare the normal ellipsoids with the actual shapes of the moons and discuss the implications on their formation. In particular, we revisit and explore the plausibility that the moons were formed out of the debris disk around Mars by material accretion under self-gravity.
HidroSiG : an interactive digitai atias of Colombia ' s hydro-ciimatoiogy

An interactive digital iiydro-climatoiogic atias of Coiombia, HidroSiG, iias been deveioped with distributed maps and time series of monthiy and iong-term average hydro-ciimatologicai variables, as part of a more comprehensive geographicai information system (GiS) and database. Maps were developed so as to capture the spatiai variabiiity of the diverse geophysicai fields resuiting from major geographic, topographic and ciimatic controis. HidroSiG contains moduies that perform diverse hydroiogicai and geomorphoiogicai estimations including: (i) extraction of geomorphological parameters of drainage channei networks and river basins from Digital Eievation Maps (DEM), (ii) estimation of iong-term and monthly water balances and other hydroclimatic variabies in river basins, (iii) estimation of extreme fiows (fioods and iow fiows) of different return periods aiong the river networi< of Coiombia by combining long-term water baiance with scaling methods, (iv) interpolation of geophysicai fields, (v) temporai anaiysis of hydroiogicai time series including standardization, autocorrelation function, Fourier spectrum and cross-correiations analysis with macro-ciimatic indices, and (vi) simuiation of rainfall-runoff processes using a hydroiogic distributed modei. The most relevant features of HidroSiG are described in terms of the methods used for hydroiogic estimations, visuaiization capabiiities, toois for analysis and interpoiation of hydro-climatic variables in space and time, geomorphotogic anaiysis and estimation from DEMs, and other features. Water resources pianning and management and diverse socio-economic sectors benefit from this freeiy avaiiabie database and computational tool.
GEOCHEMICAL AND CHEMOSTRATIGRAPHIC ASSESSMENT OF THE ALBIAN-OLIGOCENE INTERVAL OF THE NORTHERN PORTION OF SANTOS BASIN

The geochemical study of rocks, in the oil industry, is an efficient tool utilized for characterizing the organic content of rocks and possible source rocks. In the last decades it began to be used as a tool for chemical stratigraphy showing excellent results. The data analysis of total organic carbon, insoluble residue and pyrolysis results as hydrogen index, peak S1 (generated hydrocarbons) and peak S2 (hydrocarbons generated by pyrolysis), in six wells, resulted in the identification of four chemostratigraphic units, denominated A, B, C and D in the northern portion of the Santos Basin. The organic matter of units A and D was characterized as type III and units B and C as a mixture II / III. Units B and C showed potential for immature generation in this area. These potentially generating units would in the generation window at a depth of 5000m.
Collecting Representative Social Media Samples from a Search Engine by Adaptive Query Generation

Studies in computational social science often require collecting data about users via a search engine interface: a list of keywords is provided as a query to the interface and documents matching this query are returned. The validity of a study will hence critically depend on the representativeness of the data returned by the search engine. In this paper, we develop a multi-objective approach to build queries yielding documents that are both relevant to the study and representative of the larger population of documents. We then specify measures to evaluate the relevance and the representativeness of documents retrieved by a query system. Using these measures, we experiment on three real-world datasets and show that our method outperforms baselines commonly used to solve this data collection problem.
H Government Fragmentation and Public Goods Provision

We investigate the effects of territorial government fragmentation on the quality of public services. We argue that an increase in the number of regional governments has two effects: (1) it redistributes fiscal and administrative resources to underserved regions and (2) encourages yardstick competition. Extreme government fragmentation, however, limits efficiency gains by reducing administrative capacity, economies of scale, and enabling capture. We test this argument using original data on the number of regional governments in sub-Saharan Africa (1960–2012). Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find robust evidence for an initial increase in the quality of services provision following regional government splits, which levels off at high levels of regional fragmentation. Three distinct difference-in-difference analyses of microlevel, georeferenced data on health outcomes in Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda further support our theoretical argument.
ENGINEERING PROPERTIES OF COMPOSITES CONTAINING POLYURETHANE , WHEAT STALK AND CORN STALK ASH , PEANUT SHELL ASH , FLY ASH , SAWDUST , PERLITE , BARITE AND GYPSUM

In this study, engineering properties of composites containing polyurethane, wheat stalk and corn stalk ash, peanut shell ash, fly ash, sawdust, perlite, barite and gypsum are investigated. Radiation absorption, unit weights, ultrasonic pulse velocities, thermal insulation coefficients of the specimens produced in standard 16x16x4 cm molds were found. All tests were found to be in accordance with standards. Also, it was found out that specimen no. 3 has the lowest thermal insulation coefficient. It was found out that specimens containing more sawdust have higher unit weight. Specimens with high thermal insulation coefficient and unit weight were found to have low capacity of ultrasonic sound absorption. This case was explained with spaceless structure of materials. It was found that specimen no.3 with the lowest ultrasonic pulse velocity has the lowest thermal insulation coefficient. Unit weight for the same specimen was found to be under average. It was found that specimens containing peanut shell ash have higher radiation absorption rates. This study showed that wheat stalks, corn stalks and peanut shells can be recycled for economy by burning process in appropriate environment. Also, this composite can protect people from negative effects of radiation when used in medical buildings and X-ray rooms.
Assimilator for Visually Impaired : A Survey

When we ponder about technology for people with visual disabilities, two broad domains come to our mind: General technology and Assistive technology. General technology is inclusive of computers, smartphones and cell phones whereas Assistive technology consists of devices developed to help people with vision impairment or other visual disabilities. The Assistive technology comprises everything starting from screen readers for visually impaired people or screen enlargers for low vision PCs, to braille watches and braille printers. In most of the system, prototype has been developed which will ease the routine chores performed by the visually impaired individuals. We will provide most of their prototype details in this paper along with some other scenarios. There is some development in the specified field of reading printed as well as digital text. These technologies help visually impaired people to read normal text with the help of audio outputs. We will also focus our attention on those aspects which are still in development phase and are facing some critical problems. The primary motive of this technology is precise scanning and text-to-speech transformations in order to achieve efficient output.
A DISSERTATION FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Genetic studies on a starch biosynthesis gene, sug-h and the eating quality-related marker in rice (Oryza sativa L.)

··············································································· 6 INTRODUCTION········································································· 8 MATERIALS AND METHODS ····················································· 12 RESULTS ················································································· 20
Semi-automated tool for providing effective feedback on programming assignments

: Human grading of introductory programming assignments is tedious and error-prone, hence researchers have attempted to develop tools that support automatic assessment of programming code. However, most such efforts often focus only on scoring solutions, rather than assessing whether students correctly understand the problems. To aid the students improve programming skills, effective feedback on programming assignments plays an important role. Individual feedback generation is tedious and painstaking process. We present a tool that not only automatically generates the static and dynamic program analysis outcomes, but also clusters similar code submissions to provide scalable and effective feedback to the students. We studied our tool on data from introductory Java programming assignments of year 1 course in School of Information Systems. In this paper, we share the details of our tool and findings of our experiments on 261 code submissions.
Debunking blockchain myths

The explosive popularity of the blockchain paradigm has brought upon an avalanche of startups, new strategies and departments at major industrial players, societal and scientific conferences, as well as government-level initiatives in Europe. While computer science has always been trendy and any emerging technology that bursts into popularity has always been accompanied with uncertainty, the situation with blockchain is unique. The uncertainty pertaining to Java, P2P, Web Services, cloud, IoT, and other technologies has been about standardization, competition between alternative solutions, functional extensions, and understanding of technological limitations. In the case of blockchain, however, it starts with the terminology, basic assumptions, and models. The goal of this short paper is to reflect on the most common misconceptions found in non-scientific (and sometimes, also scientific) articles, and hopefully, contribute towards better understanding of the technology. 1 The rapidly evolving blockchain field Since Bitcoin [12] inception and deployment in 2009, it has been creating waves of discussions and debates about its success. In the wake of Bitcoin came Ethereum [3] that aimed to facilitate programmatic mediation between cooperating parties by defining a feature-rich language for writing mediation software. When the blockchain wave hit the world, many dozens of competing industrial initiatives and proposals for blockchain software were put forward. A number of these proposals resulted in open source implementations, such as the Hyperledger [7] and Corda [2] projects promoted by IBM and the R3 consortium, respectively. 2 The architecture of Bitcoin Bitcoin layered architecture is illustrated in Figure 1. The communication layer implements a specialized broadcast primitive in the Bitcoin P2P network. The data storage layer records all transactions in a distributed ledger implemented as a chain of blocks. The consensus layer realizes a consensus protocol through proof-of-work mining. The business logic layer implements a simple scripting language used for verifying transactions and redeeming their output. The discussion of blockchain myths in Section 3 mentions the requirements and design elements of the data storage, consensus, and business logic layers in Bitcoin and other blockchain systems.
On the Extent of Longitudinal Finger Rotation in Publicly Available Finger Vein Data Sets

Finger vein recognition deals with the identification of a subjects based on its venous pattern within the fingers. The majority of the publicly available finger vein data sets has been acquired with the help of scanner devices that capture a single finger from the palmar side using light transmission. Some of them are equipped with a contact surface or other structures to support in finger placement. However, these means are not able to prevent all possible types of finger misplacements, in particular longitudinal finger rotation can not be averted. It has been shown that this type of finger rotation results in a non-linear deformation of the vein structure, causing severe problems to finger vein recognition systems. So far it is not known if and to which extent this longitudinal finger rotation is present in publicly available finger vein data sets. This paper evaluates the presence of longitudinal finger rotation and its extent in four publicly available finger vein data sets and provides the estimated rotation angles to the scientific public. This additional information will increase the value of the evaluated data sets. To verify the correctness of the estimated rotation angles, we furthermore demonstrate that employing a simple rotation correction, using those rotation angles, improves the recognition performance.
DESIGNED SWARMING BEHAVIOR USING OPTIMAL TRANSPORTATION NETWORKS

Models of swarming behavior aid in disaster planning, direct the actions of warehouse robots, and can map the foraging characteristics of insects. These models use the optimal behavior of individual agents to determine the behavior of the larger population. Optimal transportation is one such model that has been used to successfully describe the behavior of swarming agents. The MongeKantorovich formulation of the optimal transportation problem models the best direct route for individual agents in a swarm. The presented work investigates optimal transportation and duality in a Monge-Kantorovich formulation. We reduce the Monge-Kantorovich formulation to the linear programming problem which can be efficiently solved numerically. However this formulation is not applicable in the case where the domain of travel is restricted, so that agents must travel along a particular network of paths. For instance, robots traveling throughout a warehouse must navigate through a network of aisles, and foraging bugs may prefer to travel along premade routes. We extend the Monge-Kantorovich formulation to a network of paths which differs from transfer over a direct route. We show that this extended formulation can also be reduced to the linear programming problem. Finally, we investigate various applications of both the direct and network transfer using numerical simulations.
Performance Portability of an Unstructured Hydrodynamics Mini-application

In this work we study the parallel performance portability of BookLeaf: a recent 2D unstructured hydrodynamics mini-application. The aim of BookLeaf is to provide a self-contained and representative testbed for exploration of the modern hydrodynamics application design-space. We present a previously unpublished reference C++11 implementation of BookLeaf parallelised with MPI, alongside hybrid MPI+OpenMP and MPI+CUDA versions, and two implementations using C++11 performance portability frameworks: Kokkos and RAJA, which both target a variety of parallel back-ends. We assess the scalability of our implementations on the ARCHER Cray XC30 up to 4096 nodes (98,304 cores) and on the Ray EA system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory up to 16 nodes (64 Tesla P100 GPUs), with a particular focus on the overheads introduced by Kokkos and RAJA relative to our handwritten OpenMP and CUDA implementations. We quantify the performance portability achieved by our Kokkos and RAJA implementations across five modern architectures using a metric previously introduced by Pennycook et al. We find that our BookLeaf implementations all scale well, in particular the hybrid configurations (the MPI+OpenMP variant achieves a parallel efficiency above 0.8 running on 49,152 cores). The Kokkos and RAJA variants exhibit competitive performance in all experiments, however their CPU performance is best in memory-bound situations where the overhead introduced by the frameworks is partially shadowed by the need to wait for data. The overheads seen in the GPU experiments are extremely low. We observe overall performance portability scores of 0.928 for Kokkos and 0.876 for RAJA.
SUPER RESOLUTION RECONSTRUCTION OF CARDIAC MRI USING COUPLED DICTIONARY LEARNING

Although tremendous progress has been made in the past to get High resolution 3D cardiac MRI but still it is considered as area of concern in the medical image processing filed. The existing anisotropic 2D stack volumes are typical, and improving the resolution of these is strongly motivated by both visualization and analysis. The lack of suitable reconstruction techniques that handle non-rigid motion means that cardiac image enhancement is still often attained by simple interpolation. A novel approach is proposed in this paper which accurately precise the High resolution 3D cardiac MRI in easy way. We explore the use of example-based super-resolution, to enable high fidelity patch-based reconstruction, using training data that does not need to be accurately aligned with the target data. By moving to a patch scale, we are able to exploit the data redundancy present in cardiac image sequences, without the need for registration. To do this, dictionaries of high-resolution and low-resolution patches are co-trained on high-resolution sequences, in order to enforce a common relationship between high-and low-resolution patch representations. These dictionaries are then used to reconstruct from a low-resolution view of the same anatomy. We demonstrate marked improvements of the reconstruction algorithm over standard interpolation.