Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Effective Method for the Preparation of Stable LC Composites with High Concentration of Quantum Dots

Cholesteric liquid crystals doped with QDs present a special interest because the photonic bandgap structure of cholesteric media when combined with emission properties of QDs provides the opportunity to realize a variety of specifi c photooptical properties. Cholesteric mesophase has a 1D photonic bandgap structure, which stands for its unique optical properties such as Bragg selective light refl ection, huge optical rotation, and so on. [ 20 ] In several recent papers, the optical and photophysical properties of the cholesteric low-molar-mass and polymer liquid crystalline (LC) materials doped with QDs were demonstrated. [ 16‐18 ] For example, in recent publication, [ 16 ] the modulation of recombination lifetimes of CdSe/ZnS QDs (0.01‐0.02 wt%) dispersed in cholesteric low-molar-mass liquid crystal and time-resolved emission from QD ensembles in LC matrices with different alignment were investigated. The difference in decay time characteristics of QD’s emission depending on planar or homeotropic alignment was revealed in the case of overlapping of emission and photonic bandgap peaks. It was shown that coupling between the excitonic and the photonic cavity modes leads to the enhancement and modulation of spontaneous emission. In the papers [ 18,19 ] we have described the novel types of cholesteric QDs-doped materials with photo- and electro-tunable fl uorescence. The possibility of manipulation of fl intensity and degree of circular polarization (dissymmetry factor) was demonstrated for the fi rst time. Despite a great progress in the fi eld of the QD‐LC composites, the introduction of large concentration of QDs into liquid crystal media is still a challenging task. The most successful achievement in the area was published recently. [ 15 ] The authors of this work have offered an approach based on the surface
Euro-American Relations in the Age of Globalization: Risks and Opportunities

This special issue of De Europa on “Euro-American Relations in the Age of Globalization: Risks and Opportunities” addresses the current state of Euro-American relations by employing a set of multi-disciplinary approaches. Perhaps this is almost inevitable, given that the topic is so controversial and allows – or even demands – multiple perspectives from diﬀerent academic disciplines. The papers in this issue discuss Euro-American relations in their political, historical and linguistic complexity and oﬀer original insights into one of the key political issues of our time.
A 16-GB 640-GB/s HBM2E DRAM With a Data-Bus Window Extension Technique and a Synergetic On-Die ECC Scheme

Circuit and design techniques are presented for enhancing the performance and reliability of a 3-D-stacked high bandwidth memory-2 extension (HBM2E). A data-bus window extension technique is implemented to cope with reduced clock cycle time ranging from data-path architecture, through-silicon via (TSV) placement, and TSV-PHY alignment. A power TSV placement in the middle of array and at the chip edge along with a dedicated top metal for power mesh improves power IR drop by 62%. An on-die ECC (OD-ECC) scheme featuring a self-scrubbing function is designed to be orthogonal to system ECC. An uncorrectable bit error rate (UBER) is improved by 105 times with the proposed OD-ECC and scrubbing scheme. A memory built-in self-test (MBIST) block supports low-frequency cell and core test in a parallel manner and all channel at-speed operation with adjustable ac parameters. The proposed parallel-bit MBIST reduces test time by 66%. A 16-GB HBM2E fabricated in the second generation of 10-nm class DRAM process achieves a bandwidth up to 640 GB/s (5 Gb/s/pin) and provides a stable bit-cell operation at a high temperature (e.g., 105 ° C).
“Sustainable City”: A Steam Project Using Robotics to Bring the City of the Future to Primary Education Students

This article presents a STEAM project, “Sustainable City”, based on educational robotics whose objective is to bring the problems of climate change closer to primary school students. The participants were 30 students (aged 10–11) from 5th year of Primary Education and the project consisted of 14 sessions in which different active methodologies such as project-based learning, collaborative learning and the flipped classroom were carried out. A pre-test and a post-test were carried out and the results were better in the post-test, which indicates that the students improved their skills and increased their motivation. As a conclusion, this STEAM project, which is adapted to the Spanish LOMCE curriculum, can be a reference for other teachers to bring their students closer to the problem of environmental change through educational robotics and the use of active methodologies.
Characteristic Aspects of Formation of New Particles during the Growth of Monosize Silica Seeds

To prepare large monodisperse silica particles, it is necessary to grow silica seeds without the formation of new silica particles. Described in this paper are investigations of the characteristic aspects of formation of new particles during the growth of silica seeds through the hydrolysis and condensation of tetraethylorthosilicate. Experimental results indicated that with silica particles as seeds, under a given set of reaction conditions and total external surface area of seeds, the smaller the seed particles, the fewer the newly formed particles during seed growth. The larger the total surface area of the seeds, the fewer the newly formed particles during growth with the same diameter particles as seeds. The critical surface area of nucleation increases linearly with the diameter of seeds. Addition of a small amount of NaCl to the breeding solution can dramatically decrease the number of newly formed particles. From these experimental findings, it is believed that under the conditions of formation of new particles, seed growth during the early stage is controlled by diffusion of colloid-unstable condensed species carrying electric charges capable of overcoming electrostatic repulsion.
Prototyping with Raspberry Pi in Healthcare Domain

The objective of this paper is to conduct a bibliometric study on the use of Raspberry Pi in the medical field. In the past several decades healthcare advancements have played a major role and Raspberry Pi being the charm with its extensive features and low cost, it is of interest to know whether the development in health care technologies with respect to Raspberry Pi has created an impact or not. A platform known as Biblioshiny has been used to collect statistical information and perform the analysis. A total of 154 journal articles have been collected from PubMed, a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM) and analysis has been made on various parameters such as top authors, countries and affiliations etc. The conclusions drawn help us to understand the usage of Raspberry Pi in the healthcare domain. The Bibliometric Analysis done indicates that there has been an increase in the research over the years and the authors from various countries have been working elaborately indicating that there has been a good amount of usage of Raspberry Pi in the healthcare domain. Overall, our results demonstrate the trending topics the authors currently working on and collaborations amongst authors and countries. Finally, this paper identifies that there are no motor themes but displays the budding keywords (or the ideas where authors have worked on) in the health care domain emerging with the prototyping of Raspberry Pi.
Boosting Supplier Innovations by Implementing New Promotor Roles

Successfully implemented innovations in firms often benefit from a set of corporate actors who promote such innovations. This is the essence of promotor theory. However, this theory was designed almost five decades ago, when most innovations were still generated internally in a firm's laboratory. In most cases today, suppliers external to the firm play a crucial role in implementing innovations. The following question thus arises: Do such externally generated innovations actually require the buying firm to have a set of promotors of its own? Relying on a benchmark and the World Café method, our research concludes that a new set of promotors tailored to supplier innovation is needed: the supplier vision promotor; the customer promotor; and a diplomatic promotor. Establishing a dedicated team of promotors may be a key to boost innovations coming from suppliers.
Computational intelligence & modeling of crop disease data in Africa

The thesis presents the application of machine learning techniques to solve a real world challenge related to pest and disease control in the agricultural sector. The research is divided into three areas: i). We developed algorithms to auto-diagnose diseases in crops using an image dataset captured with a mobile phone camera. The study looked into disease incidence and severity measurements from cassava leaf images. We applied computer vision techniques to extract visual features of color and shape combined with classification techniques. (ii). We investigated on the diagnosis of disease in crops before they become symptomatic by use of spectrograms. The experiments of this study involved growing cassava plants in a screen house where they were inoculated with disease viruses and we monitored the plants over time collecting both spectral and plant tissue for wet chemistry analysis at each time step until the plants show disease. Our models in our case GMLVQ were able to detect cassava diseases one week after virus infection can be confirmed by wet lab chemistry, but several weeks before symptoms manifest on the plants. (iii). We investigated on the development of a low-cost 3-D printed smartphone add-on spectrometer that can be used to diagnose crop diseases in the fields. Moving from a commercial spectrometer (1000 USD), the study presented a tool that should be cheap (less than 5 USD ) and usable by smallholder farmers, thus improving their livelihoods through increased crop yields and food security.
Production of phosphor (YAG : Tb) fine particles by hydrothermal synthesis in supercritical water

Rapid and continuous production of phosphor (YAG∶Tb) fine particles by hydrothermal synthesis in supercritical water was studied. At temperatures higher than the critical temperature of water, continuous and rapid (<60 s) production of YAG∶Tb fine particles was achieved. Emission spectra obtained by UV excitation of the particles were in agreement with the typical spectral pattern of YAG∶Tb. Single phase YAG∶Tb was produced by using stoichiometric mixtures of metal salts [Al(NO 3 ) 3 , Y(NO 3 ) 3 , and TbCl 3 ] as aqueous solutions with an alkali molar ratio {[OH – ]/([NO 3 – ] + [Cl – ])} of 1 and a rapid heating method. No additional thermal treatment was necessary to obtain crystalline products.
Re-Visiting Discriminator for Blind Free-Viewpoint Image Quality Assessment

Accurate measurement of perceptual quality is important for various immersive multimedia, which demand real-time quality control or quality-based bench-marking for relevant algorithms. For instance, virtual views rendering in Free-Viewpoint (FV) navigation scenarios is a typical case that introduces challenging distortions, particularly the ones around dis-occluded regions. Existing quality metrics, most of which are targeting for impairments caused by compression or network condition, fail to quantify such non-uniform structure-related distortions. Moreover, the lack of quality databases for such distortions makes it even more challenging to develop robust quality metrics. In this work, a Generative Adversarial Networks based No-Reference (NR) quality Metric, namely GANs-NRM, is proposed. We first present an approach to create masks mimicking dis-occlusions/textureless regions, which is applicable on large-scale 2D image databases publicly available in the computer vision domain. Using these synthetic data, we then train a GANs-based context renderer with the capability of rendering those masked regions. Since the naturalness of the rendered dis-occluded regions strongly relates to the perceptual quality, we assume that the discriminator of the trained GANs has an intrinsic ability for quality assessment. We thus use the features extracted from the discriminator to learn a Bag-of-Distortion-Word (BDW) codebook. We show that a quality predictor can be then well trained using only a small amount of subjective quality data for the FV views rendering. Moreover, in the proposed framework, the discriminator is also adapted as a distortion-detector to locate possible distorted regions. According to the experimental results, the proposed model outperforms significantly the state-of-the-art quality metrics. The corresponding context renderer also shows appealing visualized results over other rendering algorithms.
Geo-Parcel-Based Change Detection Using Optical and SAR Images in Cloudy and Rainy Areas

In this article, we deal with the problem of change detection in cloudy and rainy areas using multisource remote sensing images. While previous methods mostly focus on change detection on pixel or super-pixel levels, in this article, we introduce the concept of geo-parcel and use it as the basic processing unit for our change detection method. Concretely, we first extract geo-parcel from an optical high spatial resolution remote sensing image. Then, we divide each geo-parcel into fine-grained segments with refined boundaries using image segmentation methods. These fine-grained segments are used as the basic processing units for our change detection method. After that, an unsupervised learning-based method is adopted to obtain the difference map by comparing synthetic aperture radar images of two periods. Training samples with labels are automatically generated from the difference map. Finally, a deep neural network is trained using the generated samples and is further used to predict the refined change map. Experiments on the collected images from Gui’an, Guizhou Province, China demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for change detection in a cloudy and rainy area with an overall accuracy surpasses 94%.
Citrus diseases classification and area detection using image processing

This paper presents a technique for discovering and classifying major citrus diseases of economic importance. Because of the slight difference in symptoms of various plant diseases, the diagnosis requires the expert opinion of the disease detection. An inappropriate diagnosis may result in huge economic losses for farmers in terms of inputs such as pesticides. For several decades, computers have been used to provide automatic solutions rather than a manual diagnosis of plant diseases that are costly and error prone. three classes of citrus diseases with healthy class are discussed by using the top-hat enhancement method and the K-mean segmentation method. Finally, the MSVM method used to classify the leaf class. Also, the area of the diseases is evaluated. The results show an accuracy with 93.18%.
Joint Resource Allocation and 3D Aerial Trajectory Design for Video Streaming in UAV Communication Systems

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be flexibly deployed to offload cellular traffic or to provide video services for emergency scenarios without infrastructure. However, the inherent resource allocation and three-dimensional (3D) aerial trajectory design have not been formally studied. In this paper, we study the joint resource allocation and 3D aerial trajectory design for dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH)-enabled services in a UAV communication system, where a UAV is employed as a base station for multiuser video streaming. Various factors are taken into account, including video data rate, quality variation, communication outage, play interruption, etc. By adopting a video streaming utility model, two fundamental problems are formulated with different practical aims: the first problem maximizes the minimum utility for all users within a given time horizon such that max-min fairness can be provided, and the second problem minimizes the UAV operation time subject to the individual utility requirement for all users to prolong UAV endurance. To tackle the first non-convex problem, we decouple it into three sub-problems, and a three-stage iterative algorithm is proposed to obtain a suboptimal solution by solving the three sub-problems with successive convex approximation and alternating optimization techniques. An exponential search based algorithm is proposed for the second problem by utilizing the structure of the considered problem and a similar three-stage iterative algorithm. Extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance, and the results show that our proposed designs significantly outperform baseline schemes. Furthermore, our results reveal new insights of UAV movement for video streaming and unveil the tradeoff between utility and quality variance.
Depolymerization of lower rank coals by low-temperature O2 oxidation

Four lower rank coals were oxidized in 0.5 N Na2CO3 aqueous solution, into which atmospheric oxygen gas was bubbled. The reaction was carried out at 20−85 °C, and, after cooling to ambient temperature, the slurry was acidified (pH 1.3) with a 5 N HCl solution. The coals oxidized at 85 °C for 6−24 h were extracted with methanol/tetrahydrofuran mixtures of 25/75 and 50/50 in volume ratio at 30 °C under ultrasonic irradiation. The O2 oxidation dramatically enhanced the extractability of the coals, and extraction yields reached 80−90 wt % daf. Dimethyl sulfoxide and a mixture of benzene and methanol gave similar extraction yields for each oxidized coal. Pyridine showed lower extraction yields in spite of its higher hydrogen-bond-breaking ability. Extractability was, thus, better correlated with the solubility parameter of solvents than with the heat of hydrogen bond complexation. Diffuse reflectance FTIR analysis revealed that the O2 oxidation introduced carboxylic, phenolic, and alcoholic hydroxyls into the .
Comparison of the Cake Layer Removal Options during Determination of Cake Layer Resistance (Rc) in the Resistance-In-Series Model

The resistance-in-series (RIS) model should be used cautiously, particularly in the experimental determination of the cake layer resistance (Rc) which is determined by calculation of a series of flux data that are obtained empirically before and after removing the cake layer on the membrane surface. However, the calculated Rc values are very dependent upon the cleaning methods used for removing the cake layer. Therefore, this study investigated how the various cleaning methods influence the determination of Rc. Four different cleaning methods were used: water rinsing in a shaker, manual water rinsing, ultrasonication, and sponge scrubbing. For the hydrophilic membrane, sponge scrubbing removed the cake layer completely, whereas the other methods showed removal efficiencies ranging from 79% to 99%. For the hydrophobic membrane, none of the options achieved complete cake layer removal. In addition, sponge scrubbing was not the best option for cake removal, indicating that even a method with the potential to completely remove the cake layer on a specific membrane is not universal for every kind of membrane. Consequently, a standardized method for cake layer removal to determine cake resistance (Rc) is needed for correct interpretation of the fouling phenomena with the RIS model.
Compact Low-Loss Chip-to-Waveguide and Chip-to-Chip Packaging Concept Using EBG Structures

This letter presents a novel approach for packaging millimeter-wave (mmW) and terahertz (THz) circuits. The proposed technique relies on using an on-chip coupling structure that couples the signal to a quarter-wavelength cavity, which in turn couples to either a waveguide (WG) or another chip. The solution also uses a periodic electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure that controls the electromagnetic wave and prevents field leakage in undesired directions. The proposed solution is fabricated and demonstrated at the $D$ -band (110–170 GHz), and the measurement results show that it achieves a minimum insertion loss of 0.8 and a 3-dB bandwidth extending from 124 to 161 GHz. The proposed approach does not require any galvanic contacts and can be used for packaging integrated circuits in WG modules as well as for chip-to-chip communication.
Comparative analysis of antioxidative potentials of extracts of defatted unfermented and fermented locust beans

Preliminary investigation on antioxidative potentials of defatted fermented locust bean extract in comparison to defatted non-fermented locust bean was conducted. Qualitative antioxidative assessment on the extract was accomplished by screening the phytochemical endowment, and similar bioactive components. Also some antioxidative indices: relative reducing power (mg ascorbic acid reducing activity equivalent per mg sample), radical scavenging activity(%) and free amino acids (mg glycine activity equivalent per mg sample), were quantitatively evaluated. Phytochemical screening results showed that the defatted fermented samples were characterized with high strength presence of bioactive compounds notably phenolic compounds, saponins, peptides, amino acid and reductones. However, alkaloids and flavonoids were not detected. UV-Spectral characteristics of the extracts corroborated same. Similarly, quantitative antioxidative markers evaluated showed that the antioxidative capacity in terms of relative reducing power (23.40-29.50), and radical scavenging activity (82-89) on 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) of defatted fermented locust bean extracts were high in comparison to the low antioxidative capacity in terms of relative reducing power 10.00-13.30) and radical scavenging activity (53-57) of the corresponding defatted unfermented locust bean extract. In addition the free amino acid of the defatted fermented locust bean extracts were high (1.66-3.30) in comparison to the low (0.215-0.3) free amino acid of the defatted unfermented locust bean extract. The result of total phenolic content was variable. Also, the antioxidant activity rate content, and EC50 of the extract were evaluated. This study demonstrated high antioxidant endowment of fermented locust beans in comparison to non-fermented locust beans. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.3329/bjsir.v49i4. 22632 Bangladesh J. Sci. Ind. Res. 49(4), 275-280, 2014
Hypergraph edge elimination - A symbolic phase for Hermitian eigensolvers based on rank-1 modifications

It is customary to identify sparse matrices with the corresponding adjacency or incidence graphs. For the solution of a linear system of equations using Gaussian elimination, the representation by its adjacency graph allows a symbolic factorization that can be used to predict memory footprints and enables the determination of near-optimal elimination orderings based on heuristics. The Hermitian eigenvalue problem on the other hand seems to evade such treatment at ﬁrst glance due to its inherent iterative nature. In this paper we prove this assertion wrong by revealing a tight connection of Hermitian eigensolvers based on rank-1 modiﬁcations with a symbolic edge elimination procedure. A symbolic calculation based on the incidence graph of the matrix can be used in analogy to the symbolic phase of Gaussian elimination to develop heuristics which reduce memory footprint and computations. Yet, we also show that the question of an optimal elimination strategy remains NP-complete, in analogy to the linear systems case.