Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved power quality converter for direct torque control-based induction motor drives

This study presents the performance of a direct torque control (DTC)-based induction motor drive (IMD) with improved power quality converter at the front end. It is designed, modelled, simulated in MATLAB/simulink platform and implemented in hardware using a digital signal processor (DSP). An improved power quality converter known as Vienna rectifier is used in the system to mitigate the power quality problems at the utility interface in the DTC-IMD. The proposed Vienna rectifier is a three switch converter to improve the power quality in terms of reduced total harmonic distortion of ac mains current, power factor correction and dc-link voltage regulation. The performance of the proposed system is validated experimentally using a DSP. The performance of the system is tested for step change in input reference speed and the load torque and it is found that the power quality indices conform to IEEE-519 standard under all operating conditions.
Identification of topology errors in power system state estimation

This paper deals with the processing of topology errors in power system state estimation. An algorithm is proposed for determining a correlation index between symptoms of anomalies in the estimation process and measurements related to the network-elements suspected of being misconfigured. A method based on such an algorithm enables one to recognize the occurrence of topology errors in the real-time modeling process and to identify the misconfigurations. The proposed method has been tested on three different power systems, including a realistic network which is part of the Southern Brazil interconnected system, for various types of topological errors (inclusion, exclusion and bus-split errors). >
A survey of step length estimation models based on inertial sensors for indoor navigation systems

In many applications (i.e., navigation of vehicles in traffic, museum guide, guidance to firefighters in poor visibility, and elderly care assistance systems), location‐based services (LBS) rely on the global positioning system (GPS) for accurate positioning. LBS can be challenging to employ in an indoor environment because of the lack of a line‐of‐sight (LOS) component and other signal propagation issues. Over the last decade, researchers worldwide have been motivated to solve the problem of continuous indoor positioning in situations when GPS is ineffective. We thoroughly reviewed research conducted by many scholars and compiled this survey article, which provides a comprehensive overview of indoor pedestrian navigation systems, prevalent step length estimation models, and the current state of the art. There are two key strategies in which substantial work on indoor localization is carried out. One is a dead reckoning in which the present location of the pedestrian is calculated based on details about previous location, and the other is an inertial navigation system in which the forward acceleration from an inertial sensor strapped down to the user's body is integrated twice to establish the current location. The step length is a crucial component of the inertial sensor‐based navigation in both these strategies. For different users, step length is variable and also changes at different walking speeds for each user. As a result, the focus of this survey is on step length estimation models. The survey describes and compares various approaches to estimating step length from various perspectives, including the research method used, the length of the test path, various walking speeds, the location of the sensor device on the user's body, and the accuracy achieved in estimating step length. Because inertial sensors are embedded in smartphones, it is vital to identify the smartphone mode (i.e., phoning, texting, or pocket) during each step taken while using smartphone‐based indoor navigation. The report concludes with a quantitative evaluation of the performance of smartphone mode recognition modules. At the end, we list out challenges still to be addressed for scholars working on indoor navigation.
DUAL-INPUT ZVZCS DC-DC CONVERTER COMBINING A BHB AND A FB CELL

This Paper presents a new zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) isolated dc–dc converter which combines a boost half-bridge (BHB) cell and a full-bridge (FB) cell, so that two different type of power sources, i.e., both current fed and voltage fed, can be coupled effectively by the proposed converter for various applications, such as fuel cell and hybrid energy system. By fully using two highfrequency transformers and a shared leg of switches, number of the power devices and associated gate driver circuits can be reduced. With phase-shift control, the converter can achieve ZVS turn-on of active switches and zero-current switching (ZCS) turn-off of diodes. A 30–60 V input, 335 VDC output converter circuit is designed and simulated.
Attenuation of hepatic ischemia-reperfusion injury by adipose stem cell-derived exosome treatment via ERK1/2 and GSK-3β signaling pathways

Exosomes are an emerging therapeutic tool for the treatment of tissue injuries. In the present study, the protective effect of isolated exosomes from adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs-exo) against hepatic ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury was explored. Hepatic I/R injury was achieved by inducing ischemia for 60 min followed by reperfusion for 2 and 6 h. Pre-treatment with ADSCs-exo revealed a significant reduction in necrosis and apoptosis in liver tissue induced by I/R injury. Hypoxic oxidative stress was managed by exosome-mediated reduced reactive oxygen species and increased superoxide dismutase that in turn protected mitochondrial damage and apoptosis. Reduction in inflammatory mediators such as IL-1β and TNF-α was also observed and protection of hepatocytes from I/R injury was evidenced by a significant decrease in biochemical markers of liver damage (alanine transaminase, aspartate transaminase and lactate dehydrogenase). Exosomal prostaglandin E2 (PGE2)-mediated ERK1/2 and GSK-3β phosphorylation were revealed to increase Bcl-2 and decrease Bax expression with mitochondrial permeability transition pore-inhibition which may be considered a prime mechanism of exosome-mediated hepatoprotection. In conclusion, our results indicated that ADSCs-exo pre-treatment is effective in protecting liver I/R injury.
A three-level metallization three-phase CCD

A new electrode structure for CCD's is described. This structure is three-phase with three levels of metal and considerably relaxes the demands on the photolithography. It is predicted and shown that this structure leads to devices with a high performance, a high packing density, and a high yield over very large areas. Devices with 256 and 64 elements, primarily intended for analog delay applications, have been fabricated and measured. Transfer inefficiencies of 5 × 10-5with only 5-percent background charge and a transfer noise corresponding to an interface state density in the low 109cm-2eV-1have been measured in a surface channel device. The devices may be satisfactorily operated at pulse voltages of a few volts. In bulk channel devices, transfer ineffciencies of 2.5 × 10-5have been observed, and bulk state densities of 2 × 1011cm-3have been derived.
A Meta-Omics Analysis Unveils the Shift in Microbial Community Structures and Metabolomics Profiles in Mangrove Sediments Treated with a Selective Actinobacterial Isolation Procedure

Mangrove sediment ecosystems in the coastal areas of the Yucatan peninsula are unique environments, influenced by their karstic origin and connection with the world’s largest underground river. The microbial communities residing in these sediments are influenced by the presence of mangrove roots and the trading chemistry for communication between sediment bacteria and plant roots can be targeted for secondary metabolite research. To explore the secondary metabolite production potential of microbial community members in mangrove sediments at the “El Palmar” natural reserve in Sisal, Yucatan, a combined meta-omics approach was applied. The effects of a cultivation medium reported to select for actinomycetes within mangrove sediments’ microbial communities was also analyzed. The metabolome of the microbial communities was analyzed by high-resolution liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, and molecular networking analysis was used to investigate if known natural products and their variants were present. Metagenomic results suggest that the sediments from “El Palmar” harbor a stable bacterial community independently of their distance from mangrove tree roots. An unexpected decrease in the observed abundance of actinomycetes present in the communities occurred when an antibiotic-amended medium considered to be actinomycete-selective was applied for a 30-day period. However, the use of this antibiotic-amended medium also enhanced production of secondary metabolites within the microbial community present relative to the water control, suggesting the treatment selected for antibiotic-resistant bacteria capable of producing a higher number of secondary metabolites. Secondary metabolite mining of “El Palmar” microbial community metagenomes identified polyketide synthase and non-ribosomal peptide synthetases’ biosynthetic genes in all analyzed metagenomes. The presence of these genes correlated with the annotation of several secondary metabolites from the Global Natural Product Social Molecular Networking database. These results highlight the biotechnological potential of the microbial communities from “El Palmar”, and show the impact selective media had on the composition of communities of actinobacteria.
Why subtitle speed matters: Evidence from word skipping and rereading

Abstract High subtitle speed undoubtedly impacts the viewer experience. However, little is known about how fast subtitles might impact the reading of individual words. This article presents new findings on the effect of subtitle speed on viewers’ reading behavior using word-based eye-tracking measures with specific attention to word skipping and rereading. In multimodal reading situations such as reading subtitles in video, rereading allows people to correct for oculomotor error or comprehension failure during linguistic processing or integrate words with elements of the image to build a situation model of the video. However, the opportunity to reread words, to read the majority of the words in the subtitle and to read subtitles to completion, is likely to be compromised when subtitles are too fast. Participants watched videos with subtitles at 12, 20, and 28 characters per second (cps) while their eye movements were recorded. It was found that comprehension declined as speed increased. Eye movement records also showed that faster subtitles resulted in more incomplete reading of subtitles. Furthermore, increased speed also caused fewer words to be reread following both horizontal eye movements (likely resulting in reduced lexical processing) and vertical eye movements (which would likely reduce higher-level comprehension and integration).
Integrative Proteomic and Phosphoproteomic Analyses of Pattern- and Effector-Triggered Immunity in Tomato

Plants have evolved a two-layered immune system consisting of pattern-triggered immunity (PTI) and effector-triggered immunity (ETI). PTI and ETI are functionally linked, but also have distinct characteristics. Unraveling how these immune systems coordinate plant responses against pathogens is crucial for understanding the regulatory mechanisms underlying plant defense. Here we report integrative proteomic and phosphoproteomic analyses of the tomato-Pseudomonas syringae (Pst) pathosystem with different Pst mutants that allow the dissection of PTI and ETI. A total of 225 proteins and 79 phosphopeptides differentially accumulated in tomato leaves during Pst infection. The abundances of many proteins and phosphoproteins changed during PTI or ETI, and some responses were triggered by both PTI and ETI. For most proteins, the ETI response was more robust than the PTI response. The patterns of protein abundance and phosphorylation changes revealed key regulators involved in Ca2+ signaling, mitogen-activated protein kinase cascades, reversible protein phosphorylation, reactive oxygen species (ROS) and redox homeostasis, transcription and protein turnover, transport and trafficking, cell wall remodeling, hormone biosynthesis and signaling, suggesting their common or specific roles in PTI and/or ETI. A NAC (NAM, ATAF, and CUC family) domain protein and lipid particle serine esterase, two PTI-specific genes identified from previous transcriptomic work, were not detected as differentially regulated at the protein level and were not induced by PTI. Based on integrative transcriptomics and proteomics data, as well as qRT-PCR analysis, several potential PTI and ETI-specific markers are proposed. These results provide insights into the regulatory mechanisms underlying PTI and ETI in the tomato-Pst pathosystem, and will promote future validation and application of the disease biomarkers in plant defense.
SignBERT: A BERT-based Deep Learning Framework for Continuous Sign Language Recognition

Continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) is a very challenging task in intelligent systems, since it requires to produce real-time responses while performing computationally intensive video analytics and language modeling. Previous studies mainly focus on adopting hidden Markov models or recurrent neural networks with a limited capability to model specific sign languages, and the accuracy can drop significantly when recognizing the signs performed by different signers with non-standard gestures or non-uniform speeds. In this work, we develop a deep learning framework named SignBERT, integrating the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) with the residual neural network (ResNet), to model the underlying sign languages and extract spatial features for CSLR. We further propose a multimodal version of SignBERT, which combines the input of hand images with an intelligent feature alignment, to minimize the distance between the probability distributions of the recognition results generated by the BERT model and the hand images. Experimental results indicate that when compared to the performance of alternative approaches for CSLR, our method has better accuracy with significantly lower word error rate on three challenging continuous sign language datasets.
Applications of expert systems in equipment selection for surface mine design

ABSTRACT The MINDER system (MINe Design using Expert Reasoning), has been developed to a prototype level in the Department of Mining Engineering, University of Nottingham. The Xi-Plus shell system has been used to create a multi-level expert system capable of accessing and controlling both commercially available mine planning software and 'in-house' programs. The expert system is used primarily for surface mining method selection and excavation and haulage equipment selection. Methods of storing knowledge, interrogating and controlling external programs, and reaching conclusions using multiple knowledgebases have been discussed in previous papers by the authors, and will be dealt with only briefly in this paper. This paper concentrates on the methods used to rank equipment, including relational operations (both with the knowledgebase and in external databases) and fuzzy logic techniques. The paper will include an example of the ranking of hydraulic excavators under UK surface coal mining conditions.
Bendable GaN high electron mobility transistors on plastic substrates

A procedure for fabricating flexible forms of high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) supported on plastic substrates is described. The process uses a combination of conventional top-down, wafer scale fabrication protocols to define a printable form of ultrathin, device quality multilayer AlGaN∕GaN single crystalline microstructures—a so-called microstructured semiconductor ink—and soft-lithographic printing methods to effect their registered transfer to a plastic substrate. These procedures yield high performance, bendable HEMT arrays that are mechanically durable—ones with effective transconductances exceeding nearly all reported forms of printed thin-film transistors.
Crowding changes appearance systematically in peripheral, amblyopic, and developing vision

Visual crowding is the disruptive effect of clutter on object recognition. Although most prominent in adult peripheral vision, crowding also disrupts foveal vision in typically-developing children and those with strabismic amblyopia. Do these crowding effects share the same mechanism? Here we exploit observations that crowded errors in peripheral vision are not random: target objects appear either averaged with the flankers (assimilation), or replaced by them (substitution). If amblyopic and developmental crowding share the same mechanism then their errors should be similarly systematic. We tested foveal vision in children aged 3-8 years with typical vision or strabismic amblyopia, and peripheral vision in typical adults. The perceptual effects of crowding were measured by requiring observers to adjust a reference stimulus to match the perceived orientation of a target ‘Vac-Man’ element. When the target was surrounded by flankers that differed by ±30°, all three groups (adults and children with typical or amblyopic vision) reported orientations between the target and flankers (assimilation). Errors were reduced with ±90° differences, but primarily matched the flanker orientation (substitution) when they did occur. A population pooling model of crowding successfully simulated this pattern of errors in all three groups. We conclude that the perceptual effects of amblyopic and developing crowding are systematic and resemble the near periphery in adults, suggesting a common underlying mechanism. Precis Crowding strongly disrupts peripheral vision, as well as the foveal vision of children with typical vision and amblyopia. We show that typically developing and amblyopic children make the same crowded errors as adults in the visual periphery, consistent with a common mechanism in all three cases.
Comparison of Modern Omnidirectional Precise Shadowing Techniques Versus Ray Tracing

This paper presents an in depth comparison of state‐of‐the‐art precise shadowing techniques for an omnidirectional point light. We chose several types of modern shadowing algorithms, starting from stencil shadow volumes, methods using traversal of acceleration structures to hardware‐accelerated ray‐traced shadows. Some methods were further improved – robustness, increased performance; we also provide the first multi‐platform implementations of some of the tested algorithms. All the methods are evaluated on several test scenes in different resolutions and on two hardware platforms – with and without dedicated hardware units for ray tracing. We conclude our findings based on speed and memory consumption. Ray‐tracing is the fastest and one of the easiest methods to implement with small memory footprint. The Omnidirectional Frustum‐Traced Shadows method has a predictable memory footprint and is the second fastest algorithm tested. Our stencil shadow volumes are faster than some newer algorithms. Per‐Triangle Shadow Volumes and Clustered Per‐Triangle Shadow Volumes are difficult to implement and require the most memory; the latter method scales well with the scene complexity and resolution. Deep Partitioned Shadow Volumes does not excel in any of the measured parameters and is suitable for smaller scenes. The source codes of the testing framework have been made publicly available.
Identity integration matters: The case of parents working from home during the COVID-19 health emergency

ABSTRACT Since February 2020, the world has faced a health emergency due to the rapid spread of COVID-19. Two of the first measures adopted by most countries to ensure social distancing were the closure of schools and childcare services, and the mandate to work from home. Millions of parents, while facing the threat of the virus infection, suddenly found themselves locked down in their homes managing workload and care load in single “crowded” spaces. This study tested whether relevant identity structures and individual differences (i.e., work-parent identity integration, identification with family, and identification with work) and contextual factors (i.e., work demands, family demands, and housing conditions) predicted parents’ professional, parental, and mental health outcomes during the lockdown. Data collected in April-2020 from 432 Italian parents working from home during the strict lockdown showed that the main predictor of all outcomes is work-parent identity integration. We provide recommendations for how professionals and organizations can support parents working from home due to COVID-19 or in future lockdowns.
Experimental Study of Symmetric Microstrip Bends and Their Compensation

An experimental study of microstrip bends is described. For right-angle corners, equivalent circuit parameters covering a wide range of frequencies, linewidths, and permittivities are presented and compared with the limited theoretical values available. The influence of mitering or rounding of the corner was investigated, and useful empirical expressions are given for the optimum miter.
A Navier-Stokes Based Strategy for the Aerodynamic Optimisation of a Turbine Cascade Using a Genetic Algorithm

The problem of turbine cascade design is considered using automatic optimisation strategies. After the profile parameterisation, two different models are considered to simulate the cascade performances: experimental correlations and a Navier-Stokes code. Interesting considerations on the optimisation algorithm can be drawn using correlations because the evaluation of the fitness is almost instantaneous. By fixing certain of the design constraints two optimised configurations are obtained using simplified correlating function or the viscous flow solver. The optimised configurations are then investigated with an accurate viscous flow computation in order to have a deeper insight into the flowfield.Copyright © 2001 by ASME
Characterization of Historic Mortars for Compatible Restoration: Case Study of South Africa

: The history of the South African construction industry dates as far back as the Castle of Good Hope (1666), Slave Lodge (1679), Robben Island (1700), Union Buildings (1913), memorials and cathedrals, among many others. These structures represent the political, slavery, liberation and religious history of South Africa and its development throughout the years, while also contributing towards economic growth through tourism. Historical buildings stand out from the rest of the modern constructions as they portray marvellous architectural designs and unique materials used for their construction. However, due to ageing and environmental conditions, they often show critical signs of deterioration, which threaten the existence of some. In attempts to rescue these national treasures, the use of Portland cement, which is considered incompatible with the original materials, has become a common practice, not only in South Africa but abroad. To avoid disparity in materials during repair of historic structures, original material characterization is therefore recommended. This paper investigates the effects of Portland cement used on the repairs of historical masonries of the Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town and buildings on Robben Island, in South Africa. The mortar samples were collected from the Castle and analyzed using the techniques such as the visual investigation, cohesion test, microscopic and titration test. It is observed that the original lime-based mortars are not compatible with the Portland cement produced mortars. It was evident on the masonry, as the repairs are repelling