Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Molecular cloning and characterization of the gene for outer membrane protein H in a Pasteurella multocida (D:4) isolate from pigs with atrophic rhinitis symptoms in Korea

A native strain of Pasteurella multocida was isolated from pigs suffering from severe atrophic rhinitis at domestic farms in Gyeonggi Province, Korea, and was identified as capsular serogroup 'D' and somatic serotype '4' by disc diffusion decapsulation and gel diffusion precipitation tests, respectively. The P. multocida (D:4) induced atrophic rhinitis in healthy pigs by the secondary infection. The gene for outer membrane protein H (ompH) of P. multocida (D:4) was cloned in Escherichia coli DH5 by PCR. The open reading frame of the ompH was composed of 1,023 bp, possibly encoding a protein with 341 amino acid residues containing a signal peptide of 20 amino acids at N-terminus, and the gene product with molecular mass of ca. 38 kDa was identified by SDS-PAGE. Hydropathy profiles indicated that there are two variable domains in the OmpH. To express the ompH in E. coli, the gene was manipulated in various ways. Expression of the truncated as well as full-length forms of the recombinant OmpH was fatal to the host E. coli BL21 (DE3). However, the truncated OmpH fused with GST was consecutively expressed in E. coli DH5. A large quantity of the fused polypeptide was purified through GST-affinity chromatography.
Hierarchical Path Computation With Flexible Ethernet In Multi-layer Multi-domain Networks

A main component of the Multi-Layer Multi-domain (MLMD) orchestration is the end-to-end path computation over the packet and optical layers. Routing in MLMD networks is complex and requires special computational elements and cooperation between different layers and domains. The goal is to optimize the utilization of Wide Area Networks (WANs) leveraging on FlexE - the new Flexible Ethernet technology which couldn’t be fully achieved from local resource allocation in a single domain. We present MLMD-PCE, a path computation engine for MLMD networks that achieves optimal routes through a hierarchical path computation. We formulate an optimization problem of traffic routing and resource assignment for FlexE-Aware and FlexE-Unaware modes and propose an approximation algorithm that runs in polynomial time. Another issue of multi-domain routing is the lack of visibility over the intra-domain typologies in the parent-PCE. To solve this problem, we use a novel mechanism to gather the intra-domain information from the child-PCEs while keeping the domain privacy. Simulation results show that MLMD-PCE carries 77% more traffic than the current Hierarchical-PCE.
Size, Topology, and Shape Optimization of Truss Structures using Symbiotic Organisms Search

Truss structures are common in the building industry. One way to contain construction costs is to implement structural optimization. Optimization has to consider cross-sectional size, area, topology, and node coordinates as design variables. However, each truss structure has numerous complex constraints and variables that make optimizing this structure complex and difficult. The metaheuristic method is efficient and effective in solving large and complex problems. This paper tested three metaheuristic algorithms: particle swarm optimization (PSO), differential evolution (DE), and symbiotic organisms search (SOS). Each algorithm was used to optimize a 10-bar planar truss structure and a 15-bar planar truss structure. SOS was found to have the best optimization results, convergence behavior, and consistency.
Sentiment Analysis by Fusing Text and Location Features of Geo-Tagged Tweets

Twitter sentiment analysis provides valuable feedback from public emotion concerning certain events or products. Current research has been focused on obtaining sentiment features from vectorized lexical and syntactic feature from tweets, without further context. In this paper, we demonstrated how vectorized location information could be combined with word embeddings to produce a hybrid representation, which has resulted in an improvement on a tweet sentiment classification task. The location information of the geo-tagged tweets provided further context, which was useful for a sentiment classification task. The tweets investigated contained a set of geo-tagged tweets. The word embeddings of these tweets were combined with the geo-tagged tweets’ vectorized location features to form a sentiment feature set of geo-tagged tweets. The sentiment feature set was incorporated into a convolution neural network and a bi-directional long short-term memory network for the tasks of training and predicting of sentiment classification labels. This hybrid representation is compared with the baseline GloVe model through a few experiments, and the results have shown that the incorporation of vectorized location information has resulted in improvement of the accuracy for the twitter sentiment classification task.
Towards Comprehensive Detection of DNS Tunnels

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a fundamental service of the Internet, and the DNS tunnel is one of the most threatening abuses of DNS, posing a huge threat to user privacy and Internet security. Attackers conceal the information into DNS packets to evade firewalls and intrusion detection systems. Recently, newly developed DNS tunnels used by Advanced Persist Threat groups tend to use A and AAAA resource records (RRs) for transmission, making them more invisible and more threatening. Previous DNS tunnel detection approaches mainly focus on subdomains and TXT RRs, but less attention has been paid to newly developed DNS tunnels based on A and AAAA RRs. In this paper, we present a novel DNS tunnel detection method that can detect newly developed A and AAAA RR based DNS tunnels. Since DNS tunnels will transmit a large amount of encrypted or encoded data in the DNS queries and responses, we extracted novel features from domains and 4 types of RRs (A, AAAA, TXT and CNAME RRs) that are most commonly used for tunneling to measure the amount and content of information exchanged between the authoritative nameservers and the clients. We also analyze the detection capabilities when different features were used. The anomaly detection algorithm is employed on domains related features and 4 types of RRs related features, respectively. The overlaps of outliers will be marked as DNS tunnels. Our approach has been evaluated on real-world network traffic. The experimental results show that our approach can detect all DNS tunnels in the dataset with a extremely low false positive rate.
Integration, Execution and Monitoring of Business Processes with Chaincode

The digitization of business processes makes it possible to automate and monitor their execution in real-time and thus to optimize them. However, for inter-organizational business processes the lack of trust and transparency between organizations makes it difficult to realize this potential. Distributed Ledger Technology addresses this issue by design, which makes it attractive as a platform for the execution of digitized inter-organizational business processes. In research, especially the mapping of standardized business process notations on smart contract definition languages is discussed recently, to ease the process development for different kinds of stakeholders. Within this work, we present an approach for the integration, execution and monitoring of modeled business processes based on Hyperledger Fabric’s chaincode. Our aim is the reduction of required knowledge about this framework for the integration of business processes in such systems. Therefore, we introduce a reverse translation approach to enable the monitoring of processes defined within a chaincode by providing BPMN 2.0 models, that specify business processes as graphical representations.
Ka-Band Calibration-Free High Image-Rejection Up/Down Mixers With 117% Fractional IF Bandwidth for SATCOM Applications

This paper presents two Ka-band calibration-free up/down mixers, each with high image rejection ratio (IRR) for a wide band of IF frequencies covering the satellite modem frequency range (0.95-2.15 GHz). To achieve broadband IRR>30dBc, a 3-stage castle-wall polyphase filter (PPF) is used at the IF port to minimize the amplitude and phase errors (AM < ±0.2dB, PM<±1°). For local oscillator (LO) quadrature generation, a four-way quadrature divider composed of two broadside 90° couplers and one Marchand balun is used. The single-sideband (SSB) up mixer shows a 4.2-dB conversion gain (CG) with LO power of 4 dBm and an output 1-dB gain compression ( $OP_{\mathrm {1dB}}$ ) of −4.3 dBm. The image-rejection (IR) down mixer achieves a −11.6-dB CG under LO power of 5.5 dBm and an input 1-dB gain compression ( $IP_{\mathrm {1dB}}$ ) of 0 dBm. With a 1.2-V supply voltage, the SSB up mixer and IR down mixer consume 15.6 mW and 12 mW, respectively. The SSB up mixer and IR down mixer demonstrate broad IRR bandwidths at the IF frequencies (IRR>30dBc) from 0.6 to 4 GHz (148% fractional IF bandwidth) and from 0.65 to 2.5 GHz (117%), respectively, with no calibration. In addition, the RF bandwidths (IRR>30dBc) of the SSB up mixer is 27.7-33.3 GHz (18.36% fractional RF bandwidth), and the IR down mixer is 17.1-20.6 GHz (18.5%). The IRR performances are robust against process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations and Monte Carlo simulations for satellite communication (SATCOM) applications.
On Cooperative Achievable Rates of UAV Assisted Cellular Networks

In this paper, we study an UAV base station (UBS) assisted cellular network that consists of a single ground macro base station (MBS), multiple UBSs, and multiple ground terminals. We assume that the MBS transmits to the UBSs and the terminals in the licensed band while the UBSs use a separate unlicensed band (e.g., Wi-Fi) to transmit to the terminals. For the utilization of the UBSs, we propose a cooperative decode–forward (DF) protocol in which multiple UBSs assist the terminals simultaneously while maintaining a predetermined interference level on the coexisting unlicensed band users. For our network setup, we formulate a joint optimization problem for minimizing the aggregate gap between the target rates and the throughputs of terminals by optimizing over the 3D positions of the UBSs and the resources (power, time, bandwidth) of the network. To solve the optimization problem, we propose an efficient nested structured algorithm based on particle swarm optimization and convex optimization methods. Extensive numerical evaluations of the proposed algorithm is performed considering various aspects to demonstrate the performance of our algorithm and the gain for utilizing UBSs.
Differential Roles for the Retinoblastoma Protein in Cycling and Quiescent Neural Populations

The Rb/E2F pathway has long been appreciated for its role regulating cell cycle progression. Emerging evidence indicates that it also influences physiological events outside of cell cycle regulation. We have previously described a requirement for Rb/E2F mediating neuronal migration; however the molecular mechanisms remain unknown, making this an ideal system to identify Rb/E2F mediated atypical gene regulation in vivo. Here we report that Rb regulates the expression of neogenin, a gene encoding a receptor involved in cell migration and axon guidance. Rb is capable of repressing E2F mediated neogenin expression while E2F3 occupies a region containing E2F consensus sites on the neogenin promoter in native chromatin. Absence of Rb results in aberrant neuronal migration and adhesion in response to netrin-1, a known ligand for neogenin. Increased expression of neogenin through ex vivo electroporation results in impaired neuronal migration similar to that detected in forebrain specific Rb deficiency. These findings show direct regulation of neogenin by the Rb/E2F pathway and demonstrate that regulation of neogenin expression is required for neural precursor migration. These studies identify a novel mechanism through which Rb regulates transcription of a gene outside of classical E2F targets to regulate events distinct from cell cycle progression.
Pushing 6TiSCH Minimal Scheduling Function (MSF) to the Limits

IEEE Std 802.15. 4-2015 Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is the de facto Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism for industrial applications. It renders communications more resilient to interference by spreading them over the time (time slotted) and the frequency (channel hopping) domains. The 6TiSCH architecture bases itself on this new MAC layer to enable high reliability communication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In particular, it manages the construction of a distributed communication schedule that continuously adapts to changes in the network. In this paper, we first provide a thorough description of the 6TiSCH architecture, the 6TiSCH Operation Sublayer (6top), and the Minimal Scheduling Function (MSF). We then study its behavior and reactivity from low to high traffic rates by employing the python-based 6TiSCH simulator. Our performance evaluation results demonstrate that the convergence pattern of MSF is the root cause of the majority of packet losses observed in the network. We also show that MSF is subject to over-provisioning of the network resources, especially in the case of varying traffic load.
Enhancement effects of chicken interleukin-2 on immune responses of H_5 subtype avian influenza virus vaccines.

In order to boost immune response of conventional vaccines,investigation was made on immunoadjuvants-eukaryotic expression plasmid(pCI-IL-2) and recombinant chicken IL-2(rChIL-2) expressed in E.coli. The adjuvants were coadministrated with H_5 subtype inactivated avian influenza virus(AIV) vaccines.Non-immunized commercial chickens were injected initially at 25-day-old and boosted 2 weeks later.Proliferation responses of chicken periphery blood lymphocytes were measured by 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenylt-etrazolium bromide(MTT) assay and the titers of specific antibodies to the H_5 vaccine by hemagglutinin inhibit(HI) test.As the results revealed,the cellular and humoral immune responses were significantly enhanced in the groups co-immunized with pCI-IL-2 or rChIL-2 compared to the group inoculated with H_5 vaccine only.No significant difference were found between the two co-immunized groups(P0.05). Peak values of MTT and HI in the rChIL-2 co-inoculated group were attained 4 weeks after initial inoculation,which was earlier than the group co-inoculated with pCI-IL-2.These results presented evidence that both pCI-IL-2 and rChIL-2 could be employed as effective immunoadjuvant to conventional vaccines against avian influenza.
Cylindrical Spoof Surface Plasmon Transmission Line Based on Via Technology

This paper presents a cylindrical spoof surface plasmon (C-SSP) transmission line (TL) that can be easily processed by conventional via technology. The proposed C-SSP- TL consists of one via barrel, several via pads attached to it and two annular plates at the ends of the via barrel as ground planes. Such a structure is groundless, slow wave and highly transversely- confined, leading to significant footprint miniaturization and electromagnetic compatibility enhancement. Moreover, its rotational symmetry enables its easy mating with common RF connectors without additional bulky transitions. Parametric studies reveal the SSP characteristics of C-SSP unit cell. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed C-SSP- TL, which can be a promising alternative to traditional interconnects in multilayer PCBs and packages.
Peer-to-Peer Blockchain-based NFV Service Platform for End-to-End Network Slice Orchestration Across Multiple NFVI Domains

This paper presents a non-hierarchical architecture to deploy End-to-End Network Slices in a multi-domain network using an Ethereum-based Blockchain to manage the Network Slicing requests across domains. The use of Blockchain aims to look towards a collaboration vision to deploy Networks Slices using the resources to deploy them as if they would be placed under the domain of the Network Slice requester. The authors describe a possible instantiation procedure and they present results showing how much the use of Blockchain might increase the deployment time of an End-to-End Network Slice.
Two W-Band Wideband CMOS mmW PAs for Automotive Radar Transceivers

This paper presents two 55-nm CMOS power amplifiers (PAs) for W-band automotive radar applications. To reduce the parasitic capacitance, inductance and resistance of large-sized transistors, a customized millimeter-wave (mmW) power cell optimizing both the transistor structure and the connection with its surrounding components is developed. An in-situ transformer-coupled resonating peak control (RPC) technique taking into account the transistor parasitics is also proposed to achieve overall optimized bandwidth and gain. The PAs employ a cascode structure and adopt a common-gate-shorting technique to improve stability and output power. A 1-way differential PA is designed and achieves a 3-dB bandwidth (BW) of 9 GHz, a $\mathrm{P}_{sat}$ of 15.5 dBm and a peak PAE of 12.5%. Through current-mode power combining, a 2-way PA achieves a BW of 16 GHz, a $\mathrm{P}_{sat}$ of 18 dBm and a peak PAE of 12.6%.
Structural Displacement Measurement with High-speed Vision System and Retro-reflective Markers

This study proposes a vision system for structure dynamics measurement. The system captures lateral and vertical displacements at multiple points on a truss bridge model. Retro-reflective corner cube and coaxial lighting device were used to obtain high-contrast appearance of markers at long-distance measurement. The markers were aligned within the depth of field of the vision system with different slant angles so that all markers could be captured in a single field of view without occlusion. Scaling factor was calculated taking into account the slant angles of each particular marker and calibrated against a laser displacement sensor. Estimated displacement from dynamics measurement was compared against contact accelerometer. Resonant frequency and damping ratio of the structure from impulse excitation was evaluated using Fourier transform and half-power method.
Increasing Engagement with Chameleon Robots in Bartending Services

As the field of service robotics has been rapidly growing, it is expected for such robots to be endowed with the appropriate capabilities to interact with humans in a socially acceptable way. This is particularly relevant in the case of customer relationships where a positive and affective interaction has an impact on the users’ experience. In this paper, we address the question of whether a specific behavioral style of a barman-robot, acted through para-verbal and non-verbal behaviors, can affect users’ engagement and the creation of positive emotions. To that end, we endowed a barman-robot taking drink orders from human customers, with an empathic behavioral style. This aims at triggering to alignment process by mimicking the conversation partner’s behavior. This behavioral style is compared to an entertaining style, aiming at creating a positive relationship with the users, and a neutral style for control. Results suggest that when participants experienced more positive emotions, the robot was perceived as safer, so suggesting that interactions that stimulate positive and open relations with the robot may have a positive impact on the affective dimension of engagement. Indeed, when the empathic robot modulates its behavior according to the user’s one, this interaction seems to be more effective than when interacting with a neutral robot in improving engagement and positive emotions in public-service contexts.
Exploring Human attitude during Human-Robot Interaction

The aim of this work is to provide an automatic analysis to assess the user attitude when interacts with a companion robot. In detail, our work focuses on defining which combination of social cues the robot should recognize so that to stimulate the ongoing conversation and how. The analysis is performed on video recordings of 9 elderly users. From each video, low-level descriptors of the behavior of the user are extracted by using open-source automatic tools to extract information on the voice, the body posture, and the face landmarks. The assessment of 3 types of attitude (neutral, positive and negative) is performed through 3 machine learning classification algorithms: k-nearest neighbors, random decision forest and support vector regression. Since intra- and intersubject variability could affect the results of the assessment, this work shows the robustness of the classification models in both scenarios. Further analysis is performed on the type of representation used to describe the attitude. A raw and an auto-encoded representation is applied to the descriptors. The results of the attitude assessment show high values of accuracy (>0.85) both for unimodal and multimodal data. The outcome of this work can be integrated into a robotic platform to automatically assess the quality of interaction and to modify its behavior accordingly.
Liquid Crystal Based Parallel-Polarized Dielectric Image Guide Phase Shifter at W-Band

This paper presents a continuously tunable parallel-polarized dielectric image guide phase shifter, operating at W-Band (75 GHz to 110 GHz). The core material of the image guide is liquid crystal (LC), which is used to change the propagation constant of the guided wave. Four bias electrodes provide the field necessary to tune the LC. The parallel polarization reduces parasitic coupling to DC structures processed on the ground plane. Therefore, no stepped-impedance structure is necessary for the bias electrodes. Due to the image guide topology, the phase shifter can be used in substrate integrated environments. A maximum differential phase shift of 520° at 110 GHz is achieved with a bias voltage of ±150 V while the insertion loss is between 3.7 dB to 4.3dB. From 87GHz on, the resulting maximum Figure-of-Merit (FoM) is higher than 100°/dB, reaching a maximum of 125°/dB at 103 GHz.
HATEB-2: Reactive Planning and Decision making in Human-Robot Co-navigation

We propose a new framework combining decision making and planning in the human-robot co-navigation scenario. This new framework, called HATEB-2, introduces different modalities of planning and shift between them based on the situation at hand. These transitions are controlled by the decision making loop present on top of the planning. We also present the improvements made to human prediction and estimation along with the modifications to a few social constraints from our previous work, that are included in HATEB-2. Finally, several experiments are performed in human-robot co-navigation scenarios and results are presented. One of the modalities of HATEB-2 is used in EU-funded MuMMER [1] project (http://mummer-project.eu/).
A 20W 2-20 GHz GaN MMIC Power Amplifier Using a Decade Bandwidth Transformer-Based Power Combiner

This paper presents the design and measurement of a two-stage, 2 - 20 GHz GaN MMIC power amplifier fabricated on 100 µm silicon carbide using Qorvo's QGaN15 released process. A two-stage non-uniform distributed power amplifier having decade bandwidth is implemented as the core amplifier to achieve high power and PAE. Two of the core amplifiers are combined in parallel using a decade bandwidth on-chip transformer-based power combiner which enables the output power over the 2–20 GHz band to be significantly increased relative to current state of the art. The MMIC power amplifier is fully integrated, having on-chip DC blocking capacitors at the RF terminals and on-chip RF bias inductors while only requiring low-cost bypass capacitors at the power supply terminals. The measured PA produces 42.6 - 44.9 dBm of CW output power over the 2 - 20 GHz band with 18.0 - 29.7 % PAE using a 22 V supply voltage. The large signal gain varies between 11.6 and 13.9 dB. The design is realized in 25.8 mm2 resulting in a power density of 0.7 -1.2 W/mm2 over the full bandwidth.