Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MULTI-VIEWPOINT AND OVERLAYS IN THE MPEG OMAF STANDARD

– Recent developments in immersive media have made possible the rise of new multimedia applications and services that complement the traditional ones, such as media streaming and conferencing. Omnidirectional video (a.k.a. 360-degree video) is enabling one of such new services that are progressively made available also by large media distribution portals (e.g., YouTube). With the aim of creating a standardized solution for 360-degree video streaming, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) has developed the Omnidirectional MediA Format (OMAF) second edition, or version 2, which is close to completion. The major new features of OMAFv2, compared to the first version, include (but are not limited to) the capability of using overlays and multiple omnidirectional cameras situated at different physical points (i.e., viewpoints). This paper focuses on the description of two of the new OMAFv2 features, the overlays and the multi-viewpoints, including the 360-degree video use cases enabled by these two features.
Air-Filled Stacked-Patch Antenna

This paper presents a new design of a broadband dual-polarized stacked-patch antenna having no dielectric substrates or foam materials. The patches, the groundplane with two excitation slots, and the feed lines of the antenna are cut out of metal sheet. Only some small dielectric spacers, metal posts, and bolts are used to fasten the antenna parts together. The antenna has a relative bandwidth of 24 % with the return losses better than -14 dB at both ports. The port decoupling is better than 32 dB in the entire frequency band. The designed radiator can be used as a single element of a multi-band base station antenna covering GSM1800/1900, DECT, and UMTS frequency bands.
99mTc-IOTIDA (3-iodo 2,4,6-trimethylpheyl carbamoylmethyl iminodiacetic acid) for Cholescintigraphy

Various Tc-IDA derivatives are used clinically for the assessment of the hepatocytic function, the functional status the cystic duct and gallbladder. In this study, Tc-IOTIDA was prepared and evaluated its in vivo pharmacokinetic behaviour through animal studies. The radioilabeling efficiency of Tc-IOTIDA was maintained with high radiochemical purity (> 95 %) at room temperature for 6 hours. The serial static image scans of rabbit administered with Tc-IOTIDA revealed that none of the tissues except the hepatobiliary system has radioactivity concentrations. Biodistribution of TcIOTIDA in rats showed that 90 % of the injected dose was excreted via the pathway of the liver. The scintigraphic views for a healthy volunteer revealed that the most of the administrated radioactivity is accumulated in the liver. Further evaluations for Tc-IOTIDA including the resistance to the competitive effects against bilirubin and sophisticated chemical studies for kit formulation are needed. In conclusion, TcIOTIDA can be used as a potential hepatobiliary imaging agent for the evaluation of the functional status of the hepatocytes and the patency of the biliary duct.
RAFT based Key-Value Store with Transaction Support

In this project, we present a highly consistent, fault tolerant distributed key-value store. It adapts the raft consensus algorithm broadly in the system and supports concurrent transactions across shards. Each operation on the store is handled by a set of coordinators as a raft group. The keys in the store are partitioned across shards and each shard maintains multiple replicas forming their own raft groups. The distributed transaction across shards is achieved using two-phase commit protocol with two-phase locking to guarantee atomicity and serializability.
Prevalence of Noroviruses among Detected Enteric Viruses in Egyptian Aquatic Environment

2 Abstract: Two hundred and twenty clinical samples from children with ages ranging from one month to five years with acute diarrhea were collected from two hospitals. Using RT-PCR, the incidence of noroviruses (NV) was 2.2% (5/220), 32.7% (72/220) for rotaviruses (RV) and 17.7% (39/220) for astroviruses (AstV). At the same period, In 120 Nile water samples collected from inlet of three water treatment plants (WTPs) Meet Khames, Mahalet Damana and Shoha and Nile water from two sites in Salamon, the percentages of detection of RNA enteric viruses were (24.1%), (15%) and 0% for rotaviruses, astroviruses and noroviruses respectively using organic flocculation (OF) method as a secondary concentration step while the percentages were 45.8, 37.5 and 0% for rotaviruses, astroviruses and noroviruses respectively using polyethylene glycol (PEG) method as a secondary concentration step. On the other hand in 72 drinking water samples collected from the three WTPs, the percentages of detection of RNA enteric viruses were (15.2%), (5.5%) and (0%) for rotaviruses, astroviruses and noroviruses respectively using organic flocculation method as a secondary concentration step while the percentages were (22.2%), (16.6%) and (0%) for rotaviruses, astroviruses and noroviruses respectively using polyethylene glycol method as a secondary concentration step. Also, 76 sewage samples were collected from March 2008 to September 2009 from different treatment steps carried out in Meet Khames wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), in the 19 raw sewage samples the percentages of detection of RNA enteric viruses were (36.8%), (31.5%) and (0%) for rotaviruses, astroviruses and noroviruses respectively using organic flocculation method as a secondary concentration step while the percentages were (68.4%), (47.3%) and (5.2%) for rotaviruses, astroviruses and noroviruses respectively using polyethylene glycol method as a secondary concentration step. Also, in the 19 chlorinated effluent samples the percentages of detection of RNA enteric viruses were (10.5%), (15.7%) and (0%) for rotaviruses, astroviruses and noroviruses respectively using organic flocculation method as a secondary concentration step while he percentages were (21.0%), (21.0%) and (0%) for rotaviruses, astroviruses and noroviruses respectively using polyethylene glycol method as a secondary concentration step. Noroviruses are less frequent than rotaviruses and astroviruses in Egyptian clinical and environmental samples.
A Soft Alignment Model for Bug Deduplication

Bug tracking systems (BTS) are widely used in software projects. An important task in such systems consists of identifying dupli-cate bug reports, i.e., distinct reports related to the same software issue. For several reasons, reporting bugs that have already been reported is quite frequent, making their manual triage impracti-cal in large BTSs. In this paper, we present a novel deep learning network based on soft-attention alignment to improve duplicate bug report detection. For a given pair of possibly duplicate reports, the attention mechanism computes interdependent representations for each report, which is more powerful than previous approaches. We evaluate our model on four well-known datasets derived from BTSs of four popular open-source projects. Our evaluation is based on a ranking-based metric, which is more realistic than decision-making metrics used in many previous works. Achieved results demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art systems and strong baselines in different scenarios. Finally, an ablation study is performed to confirm that the proposed architecture improves the duplicate bug reports detection.
An Analytical Model of a Corporate Software-Controlled Network Switch

Implementing the almost limitless possibilities of a software-defined network requires additional study of its infrastructure level and assessment of the telecommunications aspect. The aim of this study is to develop an analytical model for analyzing the main quality indicators of modern network switches. Based on the general theory of queuing systems and networks, generated functions and Laplace-Stieltjes transforms, a three-phase model of a network switch was developed. Given that, in this case, the relationship between processing steps is not significant, quality indicators were obtained by taking into account the parameters of single-phase networks. This research identified the dependencies of service latency and service time of incoming network packets on load, as well as equations for finding the volume of a switch’s buffer memory with an acceptable probability for message loss.
Comparison of four different Inventory Models for Cost Reduction: Takoradi Technical University, Ghana in Perspective

Article History Published Online: 15June 2020 In most organizations, both production and the service industry around the world and likewise Ghana, demand for stock items are mostly uncertain hence makes forecasting quite difficult. This poses a great challenge for officers in charge of stock management to make stock orders in the right quantities and at the right time. In this paper, a model for deciding the best ordering policy to reduce the total stock cost by focusing on the stock management strategies of Takoradi Technical University is presented by the authors. The study discusses a number of models which includes the lot for lot size, economic order quantity, periodic order quantity and the WagnerWhitin algorithm. The findings reveal that, the overall annual inventory costs for a variety of stock calculated by each method shows that Wagner-Whitin algorithm is the best model for achieving optimum cost at the Takoradi Technical University.
S-Nitroso-N-acetylpenicillamine is a Potent Inhibitor of Neutrophil-Endothelial Interaction

Inhibition of polymorphonuclear (PMN) leukocytes' adherence to the endothelium and their consequent activation represents a novel approach to the treatment of those diseases in which PMNs play an important role. In this study, we observed the effects of S-nitroso-N-acetylpenicillamine (SNAP), a nitrosothiol nitric oxide (NO) donor, on cat PMN adherence to autologous coronary vascular endothelium and activated PMN-induced vasocontraction with accompanying endothelial dysfunction. SNAP, at concentrations between 2.5 nM to 250 nM, dilated cat coronary artery rings in a concentration-dependent manner with peak vasodilator responses occurring at 50 nM. Addition of 1 nM SNAP, a concentration at which no significant vasorelaxation occurred, significantly inhibited leukotriene B4 (LTB4 activated PMN adherence to normal endothelium (p < 0.05). Inhibition of endothelial NO formation by N -nitro-L-arginine methyl ester induced a two- to three-fold increase of PMN adherence to the endothelium, which was almost comple.
European ring-test on in vivo determination of digestibility in rabbits: reproducibility of a reference method in comparison with domestic laboratory procedures

A collaborative study involving six European laboratorios from five countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain) was undertaken to assess the reproducibility of an European standard method for in vivo determination of diet digestibility and to compare the results obtained with domestic procedures. The European method was carried out on 49-day-old rabbits caged individually and fed ad libitum; it included an adaptation period of 7 days followed by a collection period of 4 days. The digestibility coefficients of dry matter (dDM), organic matter (dOM), energy (dE), crude protein (dCP), crude fibre (dCF), and the digestible energy (DE) content of two diets were measured in each laboratory by both standard and domestic methods. On the whole, 260 digestive balances were carried out on the basis of 8 to 10 rabbits minimum per diet per each method. In comparison with the laboratory procedures the standard method improved the reproducibility notably for the digestibility of dry matter (among-laboratory standard deviation: SL= 0.70 vs 0.92), crude fibre (SL=2.49 vs 5.02) and DE content (SL= 0.18 vs 0.26 MJ/kg DM).
Energy Efficient Load Balancing Aware Task Scheduling in Cloud Computing using MultiObjective Chaotic Darwinian Chicken Swarm Optimization

Scheduling of tasks in a cloud environment has larger influence on time and energy depletion. Different heuristic models were developed to solve the NP-hard task scheduling problem based on time. However, ideal task scheduling algorithms must also maximize energy efficiency with good load balancing and ensure better Quality-of-Service (QoS). An innovative multi-objective Chaotic Darwinian Chicken Swarm Optimization (CDCSO) system is suggested in this article to provide energy efficient QoS and load balancing aware task scheduling. The multi-objective CDCSO algorithm incorporates the chaotic and Darwinian Theory to the standard Chicken Swarm Optimization to increase its global exploration and maximize the convergence rate. This performance enhanced CDCSO algorithm models the cloud task scheduling problem as NP-hard and utilizes the optimization principles to solve them based on multiple objective parameters. The multi-objective fitness function used in CDCSO is modelled based on the objective parameters namely energy, cost, task completion time, response time, throughput and load balancing index. Based on this multi-objective function, the CDCSO effectively allocates the tasks to the suitable energy efficient, cost and time minimized Virtual machines (VMs) which are also optimally load balanced. CloudSim simulations were conducted and the obtained results illustrated that the proposed multi-objective CDCSO has provided better task scheduling with minimized energy, cost, time and optimal load balancing. Index Terms – Cloud Task Scheduling, Multi-Objective Problem, Chaotic Darwinian Chicken Swarm Optimization, Darwinian Theory, Energy Efficiency, Load Balancing Index, Quality-of-Service.
Modal finite element analysis of PCBs and the role of material anisotropy

Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are epoxy resin-impregnated and cured sheets of counter woven glass fabric (e.g. FR4) laminated between thin sheets of Copper. The nature of the PCB is inherently anisotropic and inhomogeneous but previous modal FEMs of PCBs have assumed isotropic, anisotropic (transversely isotropic and orthotropic) material properties and shown good correlation with test data for specific scenarios [1-3]. This paper details part of a research program aimed at gaining a better understanding of accurately modeling PCB’s dynamic behavior. New investigations into the impact of material anisotropy and, in particular, the effect of material orthogonal plane definition (Ex and Ey) on eigenfrequencies is analysed. A modal FEM of a JEDEC PCB is created, verified, and validated using well established theories by Steinberg and empirical data by others [4, 5]. The relative contributions of Ex, Ey and Ez on PCB eigenfrequencies is examined using a parametric modal FEM, analysing the role of material isotropy verses anisotropy. The impact of transversely isotropic material properties is also analysed for a typical JEDEC PCB. This analysis details the mesh density required for accurately modeling the PCB eigenfrequencies. The results show that a 100 % increase in Ez has only a 0.2 % difference in the eigenfrequency where as a 100 % increase in Ey has a 1.2 % difference in the eigenfrequency. The effect of orthotropic plane definition (alternating Ex with Ey) on the JEDEC PCB amount to a 7.95 % delta in eigenfrequency.
Taxonomic evaluation of Miscanthus nudipes (Poaceae) based on morphological and molecular evidence

Miscanthus species including the famous energy plant M . × giganteus are considered to be second-generation energy crops. Miscanthus nudipes is an endemic species from Himalaya-Hengduan Mountains and provides important germplasm for Miscanthus breeding given its high tolerance to frost and drought. However, the taxonomy of this species remains controversial in terms of intraspecific classification, with one to nine subspecies or species recognized previously. The variation patterns of the morphological characters are not understood clearly as there have been no intensive analyses of the morphological variation across individuals and populations. Here, by sampling 15 natural populations from the entire distribution area of M. nudipes , we investigate patterns of population variation based on 39 quantitative and nine qualitative morphological characters and 14 microsatellite loci, with the aim to provide a reliable taxonomic treatment of this important species. Morphological analyses from ANOVA, UPGMA and PCA indicate that M. nudipes populations show significant differences between the Himalayas and Hengduan Mountains. A neighbor-joining tree and principle coordinates analysis of the microsatellite data support the results of the morphological analyses. Based on our results, we recognize two subspecies under Miscanthus nudipes ( M. nudipes subsp. nudipes and M. nudipes subsp. yunnanensis ) and provide a taxonomic treatment for the species. We propose three diagnostic characters for the subspecies identification, i.e., the ratio of callus hair length to spikelet length, the hairiness of the panicle axis and the hairiness of the peduncle.
Cross-lingual Techniques and Use of Articulatory Features in Acoustic Modeling of Low-Resource Languages

With recent advancements in deep neural networks (DNN), there has been a significant improvement in the performance of speech recognizers. However such robust systems are mainly limited to popular languages like English, French etc. To build a robust speech recognizer in any language, large amount of transcribed speech data is required. In many of the under resourced languages like Indian and African languages, data sparsity is a critical problem in building good speech recognizers. Throughout this work, we use the term high-resource language to refer to a language having abundant resources in terms of transcribed training data and low-resource language to the one with limited training data. In this work we have tried to leverage the resources form high-resource languages to build better acoustic model for lowresource languages. We proposed three approaches to overcome the data sparsity in acoustic modeling. In the first approach, speech data was pooled from high-resource language to train acoustic model for the low-resource language. Secondly, the cross-lingual approaches of borrowing the model parameters from a well-trained model were used. In the third case, pseudo articulatory features were obtained from articulatory classifiers trained in high-resource languages.
METTL14 aggravates endothelial inflammation and atherosclerosis by increasing FOXO1 N6-methyladeosine modifications

Aims: The N6-methyladenosine (m6A) modification plays an important role in various biological processes, but its role in atherosclerosis remains unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the role and mechanism of m6A modification in endothelial cell inflammation and its influence on atherosclerosis development. Methods: We constructed a stable TNF-α-induced endothelial cell inflammation model and assessed the changes in the expression of m6A modification-related proteins to identify the major factors involved in this process. The m6A-modified mRNAs were identified by methylated RNA immunoprecipitation (RIP) sequencing and forkhead box O1 (FOXO1) was selected as a potential target. Through cytological experiments, we verified whether methyltransferase-like 14 (METTL14) regulates FOXO1 expression by regulating m6A-dependent mRNA and protein interaction. The effect of METTL14 on atherosclerosis development in vivo was verified using METTL14 knockout mice. Results: These findings confirmed that METTL14 plays major roles in TNF-α-induced endothelial cell inflammation. During endothelial inflammation, m6A modification of FOXO1, an important transcription factor, was remarkably increased. Moreover, METTL14 knockdown significantly decreased TNF-α-induced FOXO1 expression. RIP assay confirmed that METTL14 directly binds to FOXO1 mRNA, increases its m6A modification, and enhances its translation through subsequent YTH N6-methyladenosine RNA binding protein 1 recognition. Furthermore, METTL14 was shown to interact with FOXO1 and act directly on the promoter regions of VCAM-1 and ICAM-1 to promote their transcription, thus mediating endothelial cell inflammatory response. In vivo experiments showed that METTL14 gene knockout significantly reduced the development of atherosclerotic plaques. Conclusion: METTL14 promotes FOXO1 expression by enhancing its m6A modification and inducing endothelial cell inflammatory response as well as atherosclerotic plaque formation. Decreased expression of METTL14 can inhibit endothelial inflammation and atherosclerosis development. Therefore, METTL14 may serve as a potential target for the clinical treatment of atherosclerosis.
Machine Learning Based Models for Prediction of Player Behavior and Purchase Decisions in Digital Games

The main goal of this thesis was the generation of machine learning models for prediction of players purchase decisions based on their behavior in a free-to-play interactive storytelling game available on the market. The motivation behind this kind of research is explained and examples of similar researches with their results and conclusions are being shown. The problem of storing and parsing huge amounts of data is presented with the technologies and tools used to solve that problem in scope of this thesis. The data for the users which have completed at least one payment has been further analyzed to determine the times of purchase in regard to the first installation of the game (absolute) and time actually spent playing (relative) with graphs to analyze the distribution of the users. The idea behind and key concepts of machine learning have been explained with a breakdown in categories (supervised, unsupervised) with brief explanation of the most popular algorithms for each of the categories. An introduction is given to the WEKA tool, which was used in classification of the users with the machine learning algorithms. The method for selecting the user subsets for the input in the machine learning algorithms have been explained, with all the features calculated for each user in the generated subset. Finally, the algorithms which have been used have been briefly introduced with detailed breakdown of the results for each of them.
Euler-Lagrange numerical model for the sulfate scale formation including the effects of adhesion and solid crystal growth

Scale deposition in downhole equipment and completion systems can cause productivity issues, with limited oil output, equipment damage and safety issues. In this context, the experiment Dynamic Tube Blocking test, for instance, allows the studying of crystal formation under different saturation, temperature and pressure conditions. However, the DTB, like other related experiments, are run with low flow rates, which are far from representing the real downhole flow environment. Furthermore, limitations arise in determining the scaling tendency of complex geometry parts such as sand control screens and valves. This work proposes a numerical model for simulating liquid-solid flow for the scaling formation process, incorporating the effects of crystal growth and adhesion. The solution is represented as a continuous fluid phase evaluated through an eulerian approach, while the crystals in solid phase are portrayed as discrete spherical particles with a lagrangian approach. Both are mathematically formulated with the Dense Discrete Phase Model (DDPM) coupled with the Discrete Element Method (DEM), resulting into a four-way interaction between the phases. The growth mechanism is simulated through User Defined Functions so that different particle functions for the diameter growth are studied in a capillary tube as well as on a heterogeneous porous medium. The constant force model represents adhesive forces, assessed through a repose angle study and then incorporated in the DTB simulation. Further calibration of the numerical model will allow the prediction of the flow reaction to scale formation phenomena like crystal growth and solids adhesion followed by deposition on a surface.