Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A nation-wide experiment: fuel tax cuts and almost free public transport for three months in Germany -- Report 1 Study design, recruiting and participation

In spring 2022, the German federal government agreed on a set of measures that aim at reducing households' financial burden resulting from a recent price increase, especially in energy and mobility. These measures include among others, a nation-wide public transport ticket for 9 EUR per month and a fuel tax cut that reduces fuel prices by more than 15% . In transportation research this is an almost unprecedented behavioral experiment. It allows to study not only behavioral responses in mode choice and induced demand but also to assess the effectiveness of transport policy instruments. We observe this natural experiment with a three-wave survey and an app-based travel diary on a sample of hundreds of participants as well as an analysis of traffic counts. In this first report, we inform about the study design, recruiting and initial participation of study participants.
Phase-tunable electron transport assisted by odd-frequency Cooper pairs in topological Josephson junctions

We consider a finite-size topological Josephson junction formed at the edge of a two-dimensional topological insulator in proximity to conventional superconductors and study the impact of Cooper pair symmetries on the electron transport. We find that, due to the finite junction size, electron transport is highly tunable by the superconducting phase difference $\phi$ across the junction. At zero frequency and $\phi=\pi$, the setup exhibits vanishing local Andreev reflection and perfect normal transmission due to the interplay of finite junction size and formation of topological Andreev bound states in the middle of the junction. We reveal that this striking behavior enables odd-frequency Cooper pairs to become the only type of pairing inside the topological junction that contribute to transport. Our paper thus offers a highly tunable detection scheme for odd-frequency Cooper pairs.
Dynamic fingerprints of synthetic antiferromagnet nanostructures with interfacial Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction

Synthetic antiferromagnet (SAF) nanostructures with an interfacial Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction can host topologically distinct spin textures, such as skyrmions, and therefore, are regarded as promising candidates for both spintronics and magnonics applications. Here, we present comprehensive micromagnetic simulations of such material systems and discuss the rich phase diagrams that contain various types of magnetic configurations. Aside from the static properties, we further discuss the resonant excitations of the calculated magnetic states, which include individual skyrmions and skyrmioniums. Finally, the internal modes of SAF skyrmion clusters are studied and discussed in the context of magnetic sensing applications based on the dynamic fingerprint in broadband ferromagnetic resonance measurements.
Robustness assessment of complex networks using the idle network

Network robustness is an essential system property to sustain functionality in the face of failures or targeted attacks. Currently, only the connectivity of the nodes unaffected by an attack is utilized to assess robustness. We propose to incorporate the properties of the emerging connectivity of the nodes affected by the attack (Idle Network), which is demonstrated to contain pertinent information about network robustness, improving its assessment accuracy. The Idle network information offers the potential to generalize models, enabling them to estimate robustness for unseen attacks.
Impact of loss function in Deep Learning methods for accurate retinal vessel segmentation

The retinal vessel network studied through fundus images contributes to the diagnosis of multiple diseases not only found in the eye. The segmentation of this system may help the specialized task of analyzing these images by assisting in the quantification of morphological characteristics. Due to its relevance, several Deep Learning-based architectures have been tested for tackling this problem automatically. However, the impact of loss function selection on the segmentation of the intricate retinal blood vessel system hasn't been systematically evaluated. In this work, we present the comparison of the loss functions Binary Cross Entropy, Dice, Tversky, and Combo loss using the deep learning architectures (i.e. U-Net, Attention U-Net, and Nested UNet) with the DRIVE dataset. Their performance is assessed using four metrics: the AUC, the mean squared error, the dice score, and the Hausdorff distance. The models were trained with the same number of parameters and epochs. Using dice score and AUC, the best combination was SA-UNet with Combo loss, which had an average of 0.9442 and 0.809 respectively. The best average of Hausdorff distance and mean square error were obtained using the Nested U-Net with the Dice loss function, which had an average of 6.32 and 0.0241 respectively. The results showed that there is a significant difference in the selection of loss function
LDoS attack detection method based on traffic time-frequency characteristics

For the traditional denial-of-service attack detection methods have complex algorithms and high computational overhead, which are difficult to meet the demand of online detection; and the experimental environment is mostly a simulation platform, which is difficult to deploy in real network environment, we propose a real network environment-oriented LDoS attack detection method based on the time-frequency characteristics of traffic data. All the traffic data flowing through the Web server is obtained through the acquisition storage system, and the detection data set is constructed using pre-processing; the simple features of the flow fragments are used as input, and the deep neural network is used to learn the timefrequency domain features of normal traffic features and generate reconstructed sequences, and the LDoS attack is discriminated based on the differences between the reconstructed sequences and the input data in the time-frequency domain. The experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately detect the attack features in the flow fragments in a very short time and achieve high detection accuracy for complex and diverse LDoS attacks; since only the statistical features of the packets are used, there is no need to parse the packet data, which can be adapted to different network environments.
A Flexible and Robust Vision Trap for Automated Part Feeder Design

Fast, robust, and flexible part feeding is essential for enabling automation of low volume, high variance assembly tasks. An actuated vision-based solution on a traditional vibratory feeder, referred to here as a vision trap, should in principle be able to meet these demands for a wide range of parts. However, in practice, the flexibility of such a trap is limited as an expert is needed to both identify manageable tasks and to configure the vision system. We propose a novel approach to vision trap design in which the identification of manageable tasks is automatic and the configuration of these tasks can be delegated to an automated feeder design system. We show that the trap's capabilities can be formalized in such a way that it integrates seamlessly into the ecosystem of automated feeder design. Our results on six canonical parts show great promise for autonomous configuration of feeder systems.
Rotate the ReLU to implicitly sparsify deep networks

In the era of Deep Neural Network based solutions for a variety of real-life tasks, having a compact and energy-efficient deployable model has become fairly important. Most of the existing deep architectures use Rectifier Linear Unit (ReLU) activation. In this paper, we propose a novel idea of rotating the ReLU activation to give one more degree of freedom to the architecture. We show that this activation wherein the rotation is learned via training results in the elimination of those parameters/filters in the network which are not important for the task. In other words, rotated ReLU seems to be doing implicit sparsification. The slopes of the rotated ReLU activations act as coarse feature extractors and unnecessary features can be eliminated before retraining. Our studies indicate that features always choose to pass through a lesser number of filters in architectures such as ResNet and its variants. Hence, by rotating the ReLU, the weights or the filters that are not necessary are automatically identified and can be dropped thus giving rise to significant savings in memory and computation. Furthermore, in some cases, we also notice that along with saving in memory and computation we also obtain improvement over the reported performance of the corresponding baseline work in the popular datasets such as MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN.
Online PAC-Bayes Learning

Most PAC-Bayesian bounds hold in the batch learning setting where data is collected at once, prior to inference or prediction. This somewhat departs from many contemporary learning problems where data streams are collected and the algorithms must dynamically adjust. We prove new PAC-Bayesian bounds in this online learning framework, leveraging an updated definition of regret, and we revisit classical PAC-Bayesian results with a batch-to-online conversion, extending their remit to the case of dependent data. Our results hold for bounded losses, potentially \emph{non-convex}, paving the way to promising developments in online learning.
Low resistance Ti/Si/Ti/Al/Ni/Au ohmic contact for AlGaN/GaN HEMT

This paper is dedicated to the experimental investigation of Ohmic contacts to the n+-doped region of AlGaN/GaN transistor heterostructure based on Ti/Si/Ti/Al/Ni/Au metallization. Effect of annealing temperature on the specific resistance of Ohmic contact was studied. Ohmic contact with the resistance of 3.4·10-6 Ω·cm2 was formed by optimization of the annealing temperature and introduction of the additional doping silicon layer.
AGI May 39/5

King-VanVlack, Cheryl E. , Jeffrey D. Mewburn, and Christopher K. Chapler. Receptor-mediated vascular and metabolic actions of endothelin-1 in canine small intestine. Am. J. Physiol. 276 (Gastrointest. Liver Physiol. 39): G1131– G1136, 1999. —The effects of endothelin-1 (ET-1) infusion on blood flow (Q̇G) and O2 uptake (V̇O2G) were examined in the small intestine of anesthetized dogs (n 5 10). Arterial and venous flows of a gut segment were isolated, and the segment was perfused at constant pressure. Arterial and gut venous blood samples were taken, gut perfusion pressure and Q̇G were measured, and O2 extraction ratio (OERG) and V̇O2G were calculated. ET-1 was infused (0.118 μg·kg21 ·min21 ia) throughout the experiment. In group 1 (n 5 5), ETA receptors were blocked using BQ-123 (0.143 mg·kg21 ·min21 ia) followed by blockade of ETB receptors with BQ-788 (0.145 mg· kg21 ·min21 ia). The order of ETA and ETB receptor blockade was reversed in group 2 (n 5 5). In group 1, the decrease in Q̇G observed with ET-1 infusion was partially reversed with BQ-123; no further change occurred after BQ-788 administration. In group 2, addition of BQ-788 to the infusate further decreased Q̇G, whereas addition of BQ-123 returned Q̇G to a value not different from that with ET-1 infusion alone. These data indicated that ET-1-induced vasoconstriction in the gut was mediated via ETA receptors and that this constriction was buffered by activation of ETB receptors. V̇O2G decreased in proportion to the decrease in Q̇G with ET-1, decreased further with ET-1 plus ETB receptor blockade (group 2), and increased in proportion to the increases in Q̇G with ETA receptor blockade (both groups). No changes in OERG occurred during ETA and ETB receptor antagonism in either group. This study is the first to demonstrate that a flowlimited decrease in gut V̇O2G occurred with infusion of ET-1 in gut vasculature. An intriguing and novel finding was that, during O2 limitation, OERG was only 50% of that normally associated with ischemia in this tissue.
Nucleoside Diphosphate Kinase from Myxococcu~ xanthus

By photoaffinity labeling with a photolysable analog of GTP, 8-N3GTP, we were able to find at least five distinct GTP-binding proteins in Myxococcus xanthus; two of them located in the membrane and the other three in the soluble fraction. The amino-terminal sequence of the 16-kDa GTP-binding protein from the soluble fraction was determined, and the gene that encodes this protein was isolated and cloned using degenerate oligonucleotides as a probe. The DNA sequence of the gene was determined, which did not show similarity with other known proteins. The gene product was overexpressed in Escherichia coli, by using the ZacZ promoter, to a level of 13% of the soluble protein. Attempts to isolate deletion mutants were unsuccessful, although double crossing-over events leading to a deletion mutation of the gene were detected by Southern blot hybridization. This result indicates that this gene is essential for cell growth. In the following paper (Muiioz-Dorado, J., Inouye, S., and Inouye, M. (1990) J. Biol. Chem. 265,2707-2712), the gene product was biochemically characterized and identified to be a nucleoside diphosphate kinase.
New approaches as for the obtaining of scientific innovation in morphological studies of urinary bladder transitional epithelium

Objective: To demonstrate the abilities of cluster analysis in receiving of scientific innovation results in morphological study of cells of the urinary bladder urothelium. Materials and methods. There were used 10 Wistar rats; histological sections were stained with hematoxylin and eosin; electronic-microscopic studies were carried out; morphometry was performed in ImageJ and statistics – in R-medium using non-parametric methods and multivariate statistics. Results. A brief description of the main stages of cluster analysis was given; the way to determine the most important features of uroteliocytes and to reveal their heterogeneity were demonstrated, algorithms of Euclidean metrics and methods of clustering were described, the peculiarities of the use of this analysis in morphological studies were determined, an example of its use for new results was represented, the models of morphological substantiation of clustering results were given. Conclusions: 1) cluster analysis provides a scientific novelty in studies of transitional epithelium of the urinary bladder; 2) it is used in case of heterogeneity of cellular composition of urothelium that is detected with the help of variation coefficient; 3) the most significant features of urotheliocytes are their area and their nuclei area; 4) new results as for the number of clusters were obtained by method of Ward, and regarding their indicators – by k-means; 5) Euclidean metrics is the best to use; 6) to assess the adequacy of the results pairwise multiple comparisons between clusters were carried out according to their indicators; 7) results in biaxial projection characterize cellular composition of the urothelium as structural system and detect extrasystemic effects; 8) detailed characteristic of cluster analysis may be the basis in acheiving elementary knowledges on cluster analysis.
Assessing the validity of tympanic temperature to predict core temperature of firefighters in different environmental conditions

The present study examined the validity of tympanic temperature measurements as a predictor of core temperature on the fireground in different environmental conditions. Fiftyone volunteer firefighters participated in the study across four different conditions, the conditions consisted of; 1) passive (i.e., no intervention) cooling in cold ambient temperatures (0-6°C); 2) cooling (through water immersion) in cool ambient temperatures (10-12oC); 3) cooling (through water immersion) in warm ambient temperatures (21.5°C); and, 4) passive cooling in warm ambient temperatures (22°C). Firefighters wore full structural personal protective clothing while performing common firefighting duties including search and rescue tasks for 20-40 minutes. There was no difference between core and tympanic temperature immediately post-exercise across any condition. However, for all conditions, tympanic temperature dropped significantly faster than core temperature from 0 minutes, and remained significantly lower (p < 0.05) than core temperature from nine to 20 minutes post-training. The results show that there is no consistent difference between core and tympanic temperature during recovery from a simulated firefighting task across a range of different ambient conditions. Agencies should, accordingly, prioritize investigating other practical markers of core temperature as part of a broader heat stress management plan for firefighters.
Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) Information Study

Abstract : Unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) are any vehicles that are able to operate underwater without a human occupant. Smaller and cheaper autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) are today very capable and gaining users. Large autonomous underwater vehicles are more expensive but they offer capabilities in some missions and applications that no other platforms can offer. However, using unmanned underwater vehicles in marine applications provide some challenges such as noisy communication, position uncertainty and the likelihood of robot failures. In addition, standards for data and information sharing are not well defined and, as mature as it is, the unmanned underwater vehicle field is still an emerging sector. Within the last decade, interest in UUV to be part of specific military, industrial and academic missions and applications have increased due to technological innovation and the evolution of their sensor payload. Missions such as persistent surveillance, anti-submarine warfare, oceanography and mine coutermeasure are amongst those where UUV capabilities far exceed those offered by other platforms. Canadas vast coastal areas could benefit from the introduction of UUVs to perform various roles. On one hand, their use is very cost-effective. On the other hand, they offer persistence and data quality that are not achievable using traditional methods. This usefulness is even more reflected in remote environments, where deploying personnel is a very costly alternatives. In order to enable the integration of the data and information provided by a UUV it is necessary to have a look in the underlying data and information sharing standards related to them. Achievement of interoperability between multiple national and international agencies is mandatory if one seeks to use the UUV to its full potential in support of the generation of more complete maritime domain awareness.
Childbearing Across Partnerships

This chapter examines gender differences in “multipartner fertility” – i.e., having children with several partners – in Germany and Finland. The analyses focus on women and men born around 1970 who are followed until age 41. We show that multipartner fertility is more common in Finland than in Germany. However, there are large East-West differences within Germany. East Germans are less likely to have a second or third child than West Germans, but those East Germans who progress to a higher order birth often have this child with a new partner. We also find some gender differences in behaviour. Men display lower transition rates than women of having a second child with a new partner. Further, having a first child at an early age is strongly and positively associated with multipartner fertility. No consistent relationship between education and multipartner fertility was found for Germany. In Finland, however, low education is associated with elevated risks of having children with different partners.
CO2 Laser Assisted Fabrication of Micro-lensed Single-mode Optical Fiber

This paper reports the fabrication of various micro-lensed single-mode optical fibers through the use of an enhanced peak power CO2 laser beam. The end faces of the optical fibers are exposed to the CO2 laser beam to form convex, concave, and conical shape optical fiber tips. Peak power of the CO2 laser beam was varied from 0.8 W to 1.5 W depending on the shape of the optical fiber tip. We also discover the dependence of the angle of the optical fiber tip on the rotation angle and the number of CO2 laser irradiations. The angle shows an increasing trend with both these parameters. We achieve a wide range of lenticular fibers with end face angle varying from 4.47° to 8.13°. Furthermore, we investigate the emission pattern of light from the developed micro-lensed fibers. The proposed CO2 laser based optical fiber reshaping technique shows great consistency, and thus is suitable for commercial applications.
Making Learned Query Optimization Practical

Query optimization has been a challenging problem ever since the relational data model had been proposed. The role of the query optimizer in a database system is to compute an execution plan for a (relational) query expression comprised of physical operators whose implementations correspond to the operations of the (relational) algebra. There are many degrees of freedom for selecting a physical plan, in particular due to the laws of associativity, commutativity, and distributivity among the operators in the (relational) algebra, which necessitates our taking the order of operations into consideration. In addition, there are many alternative access paths to a dataset and a multitude of physical implementations for operations, such as relational joins (e.g., merge-join, nestedloop join, hash-join). Thus, when seeking to determine the best (or even a sufficiently good) execution plan there is a huge search space.
Kubernetes Scheduling: Taxonomy, Ongoing Issues and Challenges

Continuous integration enables the development of microservices-based applications using container virtualization technology. Container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, which has become the de facto standard, simplify the deployment of container-based applications. However, developing efficient and well-defined orchestration systems is a challenge. This article focuses specifically on the scheduler, a key orchestrator task that assigns physical resources to containers. Scheduling approaches are designed based on different Quality of Service (QoS) parameters to provide limited response time, efficient energy consumption, better resource utilization, and other things. This article aims to establish insight knowledge into Kubernetes scheduling, find the main gaps, and thus guide future research in the area. Therefore, we conduct a study of empirical research on Kubernetes scheduling techniques and present a new taxonomy for Kubernetes scheduling. The challenges, future direction, and research opportunities are also discussed.
Defect Recognition of Printed Circuit Board Based on YOLOv3-DenseNet Optimization Model

Accurate detection of fabrication defects of printed circuit boards (PCB) is essential for quality control of electronic products. However, due to the small feature size of PCB defects, the existing target recognition algorithms still show difficulty in processing defect detection of PCBs with complex circuit layouts. In response to this problem, we propose a novel YOLOv3-DenseNet for defect detection of PCBs. The YOLOv3-DenseNet is based on YOLOv3 with key improvements: firstly, the residual units in YOLOv3 are partially replaced by dense blocks to enhance the feature reuse of the networks; secondly, the loss function is revised by adopting the generalized intersection over union (GIOU) between the predicted box and the ground truth, to tackle the termination of optimization process when IOU is zero. Result comparison shows that the proposed YOLOv3-DenseNetoutperforms other commonly used YOLOv3 family models in term of recognition accuracy, while the model size is even smaller.