Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
QCM-based sensor for volatile organic compounds characterization

Thermogravimetry (TG) or Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA) is a widely used technique to obtain information about thermal stability and composition and to monitor different thermal processes of materials. The TGA analysis is frequently used to monitor the deposition/sublimation and absorption/desorption processes of volatiles compounds in different environments: outgassing rates from degassing in space [1], dehydration and organics decomposition in minerals [2] and the fate of various materials in atmospheric environments [3]. In particular, it is possible to obtain a characterization of organic compounds by using Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM)-based sensors, equipped with an integrated heater in order to study the deposition and desorption processes. In this work, an organic compound (used as contaminant source) was characterized by using the breadboard of a QCM-based sensor, i.e. CAM (Contamination Assessment Microbalance), which shows several improvements compared to the previous Quartz Crystal Microbalance sensors used by European Space Agency (ESA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) [1,4]. CAM instrument aims to monitor contaminants and outgassing materials which are released by spacecrafts during in-orbit space missions characterizing the contaminant source by means of Thermogravimetric technique. The organic compound desorption rates and the enthalpy of sublimation (ΔHsub) were retrieved by using the Langmuir relation while the sensor regeneration was obtained by means of thermal cycles by using the integrated heaters on crystal surface. The CAM breadboard validation, the experimental procedure and results are presented, and compared previous works.
Electrophoretic Motion of a Charged Particle in a Cavity

The electrophoretic motion of a charged spherical particle located at an arbitrary position within a charged spherical cavity along the line connecting their centers is studied theoretically for the case of thin electric double layers. To solve the electrostatic and hydrodynamic governing equations, the general solutions are constructed using the two spherical coordinate systems based on the particle and cavity, and the boundary conditions are satisfied by a collocation technique. Numerical results for the electrophoretic velocity of the particle are presented for various values of the zeta potential ratio, radius ratio, and relative center-to-center distance between the particle and cavity. In the particular case of a concentric cavity, these results agree excellently with the available exact solution. The contributions from the electroosmotic flow occurring along the cavity wall and from the wallcorrected electrophoretic driving force to the particle velocity are equivalently important and can be superimposed due to the linearity of the problem. The normalized migration velocity of the particle decreases with increases in the particle-to-cavity radius ratio and its relative distance from the cavity center and increases with an increase in the cavity-to-particle zeta potential ratio. The boundary effects on the electrokinetic migration of the particle are significant and interesting.
People Detection Enrichment for Abnormal Human Activity Detection

A vibrant branch of research in computer vision that has attracted a lot of attention for decades is the human activity understanding from video. A means for accurately locating humans in image or a video is a prerequisite to the process of understanding human activities or action. This work's focus is on investigating the use of people detectors for video surveillance in Financial Banks premises so that it can eventually be used for abnormal human activity detection. An integrated framework which is made up of histogram of oriented gradient descriptors and Haar integral features is proposed thus, it is a union of Full body detector and Upper body detector. The proposed framework gives an improvement over the state of the art when applied as a case study to bank security. The technique obtained an F-score of 65.83 and precision of 73.83 and recall of 59.40 percentage points.
Sensitivity modulation of carbon-nanotube chemical sensors via quantum dot heterostructures

Carbon nanotube-quantum dot heterostructures were formed using multiwalled carbon nanotubes and CdSe quantum dots, which were trapped as networks between electrodes via dielectrophoresis. Chemical exposure to 10 ppm CuSO4 displayed a size-dependent modulation of chemical sensitivity, with the heterostructures using 2.32 nm diameter quantum dots displaying an 11.4% resistance change, while those using 2.96 nm quantum dots displayed a 14.8% change and those using 4.57 nm quantum dots a 19.2% change. These results indicate a decrease in sensitivity when compared to amine-functionalized carbon nanotubes without quantum dot decoration, which show a 47.8% resistance change. This drop is partly attributed to charge transfer between the nanotubes and the CdSe quantum dots. The demonstrated modulation of nanotube properties has potential ramifications and applications for the rapidly emerging field of nanotube-based chemical sensors.
Detecting plagiarism in micro-blogging social networks

Fighting plagiarism can be an exhausting task. In the context of social networks, it is common that some users regularly copy the content prepared by others and exhibit them as own. In the higher education context, it is not different and it may be even more critical. In a write-to-learn approach, if students copying text of others get similar rewards as those doing the effort, it could be a cause of dis-encouragement for those working students. Despite the interest in anti-plagiarism tools, there are no anti-plagiarism libraries that allow a self-hosted solution. Existing APIs are commercial ones, and are not tailored for specific languages. The paper introduces a plagiarism detection tool developed using free resources and that has been integrated into Bolotweet, a social network for teaching support which allows to score student micro-annotations. The tool is prepared to compare micro-annotations and tell the similarity between one and others that were posted in the past. It aids the teacher to identify cheating students and also to provide consistency in the scoring. By identifying similar annotations, and informing which score was assigned, the teacher can generate similar scores to similar micro-annotations.
A Comparative Analysis of Encryption Techniques and Data Security Issues in Cloud Computing

architecture of IT enterprise. The cloud paradigm advantages and its potential for decreasing costs and reducing the time for a service that favours towards security issues. Cloud Computing is an aggregation of IT services that offered to the customer based on leasing. Though a large number of security issues are addressed, still some are not addressed and several algorithms are proposed for security issues. This paper presents a perspective of cloud computing technologies, essential characteristics, classifications, delivery models and various encryption mechanisms. A comparative study made on several encryption techniques are used for maintaining the confidentiality in the cloud. Finally, the major data security issues present in cloud computing are discussed.
Learning Event Groups with Document , Sentence , and Phrase Embeddings

Events, or occurrences that involve participants, are central to understanding text in NLP and Computational Linguistics. They describe single, specific incidents that happen. However, an event is unable to convey information beyond the boundary of the sentence it occurs in. Many times, we are not just interested in the specific event, but the larger situation that the event occurs in. Oftentimes, the larger situations are described by multiple events. So, in this paper we propose event groups, a set of events that share participants, as a semantic representation of situations. In order to gain a better understanding of event groups, we explore the Information Retrieval task of event group based querying by looking at two subtasks: defining a structure to represent event groups and defining event group similarity. Specifically, we do this by using two models that compute distributional representations of documents, sentences, and phrases to compute similarity scores between event groups, which we then compare to the true similarity scores given by human annotators. The models are evaluated with Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient and compared against a random baseline and simple upper bound.
Sleep conditions and quality of life among patients with ischemic heart disease after elective percutaneous coronary intervention

In Japan, percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is a major therapeutic intervention for ischemic heart disease (IHD). Previous studies suggested that an association of the risk of IHD caused by sleep duration was related to factors closely associated with daily activities. However, in Japan, there is no study about this relationship objectively measured using the actigraphy in patients with IHD. Moreover, there is little reported data about sleep condition and early outcomes of patient’s Health-Related Quality of Life (QOL) after PCI. This study determines the correlations between sleep conditions and QOL (measured by SF36 version 2) of 25 patients with IHD who underwent elective PCI. Data were collected seven days after PCI using night-sleep condition. Using Spearman’s rank test, the results revealed positive correlation between vitality score and longest sleep duration (ρ = 0.43, p = 0.031): social functioning (SF) score and duration of night-time sleep (ρ = 0.42, p = 0.037); total sleep duration (ρ = 0.45, p = 0.026), and longest sleep duration (ρ = 0.44, p = 0.024); mental health score and longest sleep duration (ρ = 0.54, p = 0.006). However, negative correlation was found between physical functioning score and arousal during sleep (ρ = -0.44, p = 0.027). Sleep condition was significantly correlated with QOL. In particular, SF score was positively related to night-time sleep. This seems to indicate that SF score might be related to night-time sleep condition. Moreover, the longest sleep durations were correlated with the mental component summary. The results of the study suggest that not only the length of whole sleep durations leads to better QOL, but also the increase the amount of uninterrupted sleep.
Design Criteria for Near-Field-Focused Planar Arrays

A detailed performance analysis of near-field-focused planar arrays is addressed. Design curves and performance data are shown for planar square arrays as a function of the array size, the inter-element distance, and the focal distance. The performance curves are compared with results presented in earlier studies relevant to continuous-aperture antennas, as well as with numerical results obtained from a full-wave analysis of planar microstrip arrays.
National Library of Medicine Participation Program Report

This report introduces the supervised and unsupervised approaches to disambiguate words in biomedical text that have been explored while participating in the National Library of Medicine’s Research Participation Program. We explored using biomedical information extracted from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) as features in our supervised and unsupervised approaches. Historically supervised approaches to word sense disambiguation have obtained a higher accuracy than unsupervised. We show that this is slowly changing. The unsupervised approaches are obtaining disambiguation accuracies that are comparable to that of supervised approaches.
A Heuristic Approach for Joint Batch-Routing and Channel Assignment in Hybrid-DCNs

To support the drastically increasing data demands, Internet giants are urged to rethink their data center design. Unfortunately, the conventional wired data centers struggle to resist to the huge volume of traffic. In this regard, we investigate a radically new methodology by augmenting the wired Data Center Network (DCN) with wireless communication (60 GHz technology). Heretofore, only few researches have dealt with the optimization of multi-hop communications in such Hybrid DCN (HDCN) infrastructures. In this paper, we address the joint routing and channel allocation issue for batched flow requests within HDCN. We propose a novel strategy named Joint Batch Routing and Channel Assignment Heuristic for HDCN (JBH-HDCN). To do so, we first formulate the problem based on an advanced Multi-Commodity Flow model with interference constraints. Then, we propose i) a heuristic-based solution to find the best sequence to process the batched flow requests, and ii) an advanced Dijkstra algorithm to jointly route and assign channels. We assess the performances of our solution JBH- HDCN under real conditions, within Cisco's MSDC infrastructure, using both: i) Altoona Facebook's DCN workload and ii) uniform traces. To do so, a full protocol stack is implemented within QualNet simulator and extensive simulations are conducted. Obtained results show that our scheme outperforms the related strategies.
Exploring the organizational adoption of Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) in the Australian public sector

Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) are becoming an increasingly important tool in helping modern organizations manage their human assets effectively. However, to date the organizational adoption of HRIS remains an under-researched phenomenon. Adopting the technology-organizationenvironment model as an analytical framework, this exploratory investigation draws on qualitative evidence collected from Australian public sector organisations to isolate the factors concerning the organizational adoption of HRIS in the public sector before discussing implications and future research
Modified quadratic koch shape slotted PIFA antenna for dual-band wireless system

In this paper, a novel planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA), operating at the Global system for mobile communication (GSM 900MHz) and Digital cellular system (DCS 1800GHz) is reported. A modified Quadratic Koch slot is realized on a conventional PIFA that brings about mode splitting which is evident from pluralism in current distribution on the radiating patch. The simulated results for the resonant frequency, |S11| dB, and radiation characteristics are presented and discussed. The impedance bandwidths of 61 MHz and 27 MHz for GSM900 and DCS1800 respectively are achieved with |S11| dB ≤ −10dB. A gain of 2.2dBi and 1.86dBi is obtained at lower and higher resonance frequency respectively.
Leptin and pregnancy: preliminary results in buffalo cows (Bubalus bubalis).

Leptin is a 16.4 kDa peptide hormone, encoded by the obese gene (ob) and synthesized mainly by adipocytes, but gene expression has been found in several additional peripheral tissues such as placenta and fetal tissues, mammary gland, brain and pituitary, stomach, skeletal muscle, duodenum, abomasum and calf rumen. Beyond the primary role in food intake and energy expenditure, leptin has been implicated in numerous regulatory functions, including glucose metabolism, lipid oxidation, endocrine system, blood pressure, haematopoiesis, angiogenesis, brain and bone development, wound healing and cell differentiation and proliferation. Recent findings suggest that leptin could be implicated in important reproductive process such as embryonic development and implantation. Thus, the aim of the present study was to verify whether the maternal blood concentrations of leptin may be related to the successful establishment and maintenance of pregnancy in buffalo. Thirteen buffalo cows that become pregnant after artificial insemination (group A) and 13 that did not conceived (group B) were used. Blood samples were collected at day 0, 14, 23, 25, 28 and 40 from both groups, plus at day 60 and 80 in pregnant animals (day 0 =AI) for leptin, progesterone (P4) and pregnancyassociated glycoproteins (PAG). Starting from day 0, plasma leptin concentrations were constantly low in all the cows that failed to conceive (3.44 ± 0.94 ng/mL), while constantly high levels were found in animals become pregnant (19.7 ± 2.85 ng/mL). The present data appear to show a relationship between the concentration of leptin in maternal blood and the ability of buffalo cows to become pregnant.
The role of natural lighting diffuseness in human visual perception

The pattern of the light that falls on the retina is a conflation of real-world sources such as illumination and reflectance. Human observers often contend with the inherent ambiguity of the underlying sources by making assumptions about what real-world sources are most likely. Here we examine whether the visual system’s assumptions about illumination match the statistical regularities of the real world. We used a custom-built multidirectional photometer to capture lighting relevant to the shading of Lambertian surfaces in hundreds of real-world scenes. We quantify the diffuseness of these lighting measurements, and compare them to previous biases in human visual perception. We find that (1) natural lighting diffuseness falls over the same range as previous psychophysical estimates of the visual system’s assumptions on diffuseness, and (2) natural lighting almost always provides lighting direction cues that are strong enough to override the human visual system’s well known assumption that light tends to come from above. A consequence of these findings is that what seem to be errors in visual perception are often actually byproducts of the visual system knowing about and using reliable properties of real-world lighting when contending with ambiguous retinal images.
Electromagnetic Wave Simulation in Fusion Plasmas

COMSOL has been used to model the propagation of electromagnetic waves in fusion plasmas. For the first time, a finite element method has been used to solve the wave propagation for realistic fusion plasma parameters in the lower hybrid and ion cyclotron frequency ranges. Moreover, for lower hybrid waves, a new efficient iterative algorithm has been developed to take into account the dispersive effects of a hot plasma. The advantages of the finite element method approach include a significant reduction of computational requirements compared to full wave spectral methods and a more accurate description of the antenna geometry, while seamlessly handling the plasma region.
Free-positioning wireless charging system for hearing aids using a bowl-shaped transmitting coil

This paper proposes a wireless power transfer system for charging hearing aids. A bowl-shaped transmitting (Tx) coil is to achieve free-positioning of wireless charging. The proposed Tx coil consists of both spiral and conical-shaped helical loops in series. A receiving coil is wound on a rectangular box made of ferrite sheets to improve coupling coefficients. It is shown that the proposed system can uniformly recharge a Li-Ion battery of the hearing aid with 30% overall efficiency in the parallel arrangement. Furthermore, even in the perpendicular arrangement, the battery can be recharged except a narrow dead zone near the center of the Tx coil.
Advanced interpretation of subsidence in Murcia (SE Spain) using A-DInSAR data - modelling and validation

Abstract. Subsidence is a natural hazard that affects wide areas in the world causing important economic costs annually. This phenomenon has occurred in the metropolitan area of Murcia City (SE Spain) as a result of groundwater overexploitation. In this work aquifer system subsidence is investigated using an advanced differential SAR interferometry remote sensing technique (A-DInSAR) called Stable Point Network (SPN). The SPN derived displacement results, mainly the velocity displacement maps and the time series of the displacement, reveal that in the period 2004–2008 the rate of subsidence in Murcia metropolitan area doubled with respect to the previous period from 1995 to 2005. The acceleration of the deformation phenomenon is explained by the drought period started in 2006. The comparison of the temporal evolution of the displacements measured with the extensometers and the SPN technique shows an average absolute error of 3.9±3.8 mm. Finally, results from a finite element model developed to simulate the recorded time history subsidence from known water table height changes compares well with the SPN displacement time series estimations. This result demonstrates the potential of A-DInSAR techniques to validate subsidence prediction models as an alternative to using instrumental ground based techniques for validation.
Electro-Optical Ring Modulator: An Ultracompact Model for the Comparison and Optimization of p-n, p-i-n, and Capacitive Junction

Silicon photonics electro-optical ring modulators are key components in short-range optical interconnects, as they can be operated at low-voltage, compatible with CMOS circuit drivers. However, a full exploration of design tradeoffs is currently lacking. In this paper, a semianalytical simulation scheme is proposed for the optimization and comparison of different kinds of silicon ring modulator junction. We first describe the physical parameters used in the conventional models of active ring resonators, and apply the model to the case of carrier depletion in the well-known p-n junction. The same approach is applied to both p-i-n and capacitive junctions, and leads to a comparison of each type of modulation junction in which the strengths and weaknesses of each configuration are highlighted. We then propose a compact optimization model that directly provides the best opto-geometrical compromise between high modulation efficiency, low optical losses and large bandwidth.
Epidemiologic and Genomic Analysis of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Epidemic in the Nebraska Region of the United States, March 2020–2021

COVID-19 emerged at varying intervals in different regions of the United States in 2020. This report details the epidemiologic and genetic evolution of Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) during the first year of the epidemic in the state of Nebraska using data collected from the Creighton Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI) health system. Statistical modelling identified age, gender, and previous history of diabetes and/or stroke as significant risk factors associated with mortality in COVID-19 patients. In parallel, the viral genomes of over 1,000 samples were sequenced. The overall rate of viral variation in the population was 0.07 mutations/day. Genetically, the first 9 months of the outbreak, which include the initial outbreak, a small surge in August and a major outbreak in November 2020 were primarily characterized by B.1. lineage viruses. In early 2021, the United Kingdom variant (B.1.1.7 or alpha) quickly became the dominant variant. Notably, surveillance of non-consensus variants detected B.1. 1.7 defining mutations months earlier in Fall 2020. This work provides insights into the regional variance and evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in the Nebraska region during the first year of the pandemic.
A Novel Efficient Forecasting of Stock Market Using Particle Swarm Optimization with Center of Mass Based Technique

This paper develops an efficient forecasting model for various stock price indices based on the previously introduced particle swarm optimization with center mass (PSOCOM) technique. The structure used in the proposed prediction models is a simple linear combiner using (PSOCOM) by minimizing its mean square error (MSE) to evaluate the proposed model. The comparison with other models such as standard PSO, Genetic algorithm, Bacterial foraging optimization, and adaptive bacterial foraging optimization had been done. The experimental results show that PSOCOM algorithms are the best among other algorithms in terms of MSE and the accuracy of prediction for some stock price indices. Whereas, the proposed forecasting model gives accurate prediction for short- and long-term prediction. As a result, the proposed stock market prediction model is more efficient from the other compared models.