Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nash fairness solutions for balanced TSP

In this paper, we consider a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), called Balanced Traveling Salesman Problem (BTSP) [7]. The BTSP seeks to find a tour which has the smallest max-min distance : the difference between the maximum edge cost and the minimum one. We present a Mixed Integer Program (MIP) to find optimal solutions minimizing the max-min distance for BTSP. However, minimizing only the max-min distance may lead to a tour with an inefficient total cost in many situations. Hence, we propose a fair way based on Nash equilibrium [5], [11] to inject the total cost into the objective function of the BTSP. We consider a Nash equilibrium as it is defined in a context of fair competition based on proportional-fair scheduling. For BTSP, we are interested in solutions achieving a Nash equilibrium between two players: the first aims at minimizing the total cost and the second aims at minimizing the max-min distance. We call such solutions Nash Fairness (NF) solutions. We first show that NF solutions for BTSP exist and may be more than one. We show that NF solutions are Pareto-optimal [10] and can be found by optimizing a sequence of linear combinations of the two players objectives basedon Weighted Sum Method [13]. We then focus on extreme NF solutions which are NF solutions having either the smallest value of total cost or the smallest max-min distance. Finally, we propose a Newton-based iterative algorithm which converges to extreme NF solutions in a polynomial number of iterations. Computational results on small-size instances
The control of a back-to-back power converter for small-scale reluctance synchronous generators in grid-connectedwind turbine systems

In this thesis several topics in the field of geared variable speed and fixed pitched wind turbine systems (WTS) are covered. The main focus is the layout of the power electronics and an alternative layout for small-scale WTS is introduced. This novel layout, implemented in both simulation and practice, is achieved by splitting the converters at their common DC bus and linking them through the wind turbine tower with a DC rated cable (DC-link). The grid-tie voltage source converter (VSC) is placed at ground level and the generator VSC is placed in the nacelle. DC bus voltage control is investigated in directly connected and DC-link-connected VSCs. Attention is paid to the DC bus dynamics, which is shown to be somewhat independent of the DC-link cable. Due to the strict standards for grid-tied WT and PV systems the control, design and implementation of an LCL-filter grid-tie VSCs is detailed in this research and was used extensively in the practical measurements to inject the generated power into the grid. Although this DC-link topology can work with any back-to-back VSC-connected generator topology, a reluctance synchronous generator (RSG), which has great potential for small scale systems, was used in this thesis. A non-linear current controller and an energy efficient, finite element method-based, maximum torque per ampere (MTPA) strategy was implemented, along with a hybrid saliency-based position sensorless control (PSC) technique to allow operation over the entire speed range without an encoder. PSC and encoder control of the RSG with an output du/dt LC-filter was also investigated. A non-linear wind turbine controller that can operate seamlessly in both under-rated and above-rated wind conditions was designed and implemented. This method uses maximum power point tracking (MPPT) and stall regulation to limit the systems power output without overloading the generator. ii Stellenbosch University https://scholar.sun.ac.za
Annual Energy Review 1999

A generation ago the Ford Foundation convened a group of experts to explore and assess the Nation’s energy future, and published their conclusions in A Time To Choose: America’s Energy Future (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1974). The Energy Policy Project developed scenarios of U.S. potential energy use in 1985 and 2000. Now, with 1985 well behind us and 2000 nearly on the record books, it may be of interest to take a look back to see what actually happened and consider what it means for our future. The study group sketched three primary scenarios with differing assumptions about the growth of energy use. The Historical Growth scenario assumed that U.S. energy consumption would continue to expand by 3.4 percent per year, the average rate from 1950 to 1970. This scenario assumed no intentional efforts to change the pattern of consumption, only efforts to encourage development of our energy supply. The Technical Fix scenario anticipated a “conscious national effort to use energy more efficiently through engineering know-how. " The Zero Energy Growth scenario, while not clamping down on the economy or calling for austerity, incorporated the Technical Fix efficiencies plus additional efficiencies. This third path anticipated that economic growth would depend less onmore » energy-intensive industries and more on those that require less energy, i.e., the service sector. In 2000, total energy consumption was projected to be 187 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) in the Historical Growth case, 124 quadrillion Btu in the Technical Fix case, and 100 quadrillion Btu in the Zero Energy Growth case. The Annual Energy Review 1999 reports a preliminary total consumption for 1999 of 97 quadrillion Btu (see Table 1.1), and the Energy Information Administration’s Short-Term Energy Outlook (April 2000) forecasts total energy consumption of 98 quadrillion Btu in 2000. What energy consumption path did the United States actually travel to get from 1974, when the scenarios were drawn, to the end of the century? What happened to the relationship between growth and energy consumption? How did the fuel mix change over this period? What are the effects of energy usage on our environment? What level of consumption will the United States—and the world—record in the Annual Energy Review 2025? We present this edition of the Annual Energy Review to help investigate these important questions and to stimulate and inform our thinking about what the future holds. « less
Towards Stronger Lagrangean Bounds for Stable Spanning Trees

Given a graph G = ( V , E ) and a set C of unordered pairs of edges regarded as being in conflict, a stable spanning tree in G is a set of edges T inducing a spanning tree in G , such that for each (cid:8) e i , e j (cid:9) ∈ C , at most one of the edges e i and e j is in T . The existing work on Lagrangean algorithms to the NP -hard problem of finding minimum weight stable spanning trees is limited to relaxations with the integrality property. We have recently initiated the combinatorial and polyhedral study of fixed cardinality stable sets [17], which motivates a new formulation for stable spanning trees based on Lagrangean Decomposition. By optimizing over the spanning tree polytope of G and the fixed cardinality stable set polytope of the conflict graph ˆ G = ( E , C ) in the subproblems, we are able to determine stronger Lagrangean bounds (equivalent to dualizing exponentially-many subtour elimination constraints), while limiting the number of multipliers in the dual problem to | E | . This naturally asks for more sophisticated dual algorithms, requiring the fewest iterations possible, and we derive a collection of Lagrangean dual ascent directions to this end.
Biomechanical locomotion adaptations on uneven surfaces can be simulated with a randomly deforming shoe midsole

A shoe with unsystematic perturbations, similar to natural uneven terrain, may offer an enhanced training stimulus over current unstable footwear technologies. This study compared the instability of a shoe with unpredictably random midsole deformations, an irregular surface and a control shoe-surface while treadmill walking and running. Three-dimensional kinematics and electromyography were recorded of the lower limb in 18 active males. Gait cycle characteristics, joint angles at initial ground contact and maximum values during stance, and muscle activations prior to initial contact and during loading were analysed. Perceived stability, injury-risk and energy consumption were evaluated. Instability was assessed by movement variability, muscular activations and subjective ratings. Posture alterations at initial contact revealed active adaptations in the irregular midsole and irregular surface to maintain stability while walking and running. Variability of the gait cycle and lower limb kinematics increased on the irregular surface compared to the control across locomotion types. Similarly increased variability (coefficient of variation) were found in the irregular midsole compared to the control for frontal ankle motion (walk: 31.1 and 14.9, run: 28.1 and 11.6), maximum sagittal knee angle (walk: 7.6 and 4.8, run: 2.8 and 2.4), and global gait characteristics during walking only (2.1 ± 0.5 and 1.6 ± 0.3). Tibialis anterior pre-activation reduced and gastrocnemius activation increased in the irregular midsole compared to the control across locomotion types. During running, peroneus longus activation increased in the irregular midsole and irregular surface. Results indicate random shoe midsole deformations enhanced instability relative to the control and simulated certain locomotion adaptations of the irregular surface, although less pronounced. Thus, a shoe with unpredictable instability revealed potential as a novel instability-training device.
Social and Communication Challenges for Agile Software Teams

Agile methods are being widely used in industry and government projects as a way of delivering IT software projects. We report results from a survey about agile team work and a follow-up interview study. Themes emerging from the interviews were team tension, method adaptation and cultural change. We discuss the implications of practitioners’ experiences and views, and highlight some of the social and ethical challenges for IT developers working in organisations that adopt agile methods. We take as the focus of our work, a view that cultural shifts are essential to agile working, and that these require an intensive commitment from individuals, teams and organisations.
X‐Ray Visualization Measurement of Slurry Flow in Solid Propellant Casting

Simulated solid propellant slurry containing lead sphere tracers is experimentally cast into a double circular cylinder container. During the casting, the temperature and the pressure environment has been mimicked to an actual composite solid propellant casting of solid rocket motors. X‐rays are projected on to the slurry flow from two directions and penetration images are recorded by a flat panel detector and an X‐ray image intensifier. By suppressing the mutual interference of the X‐rays, the two‐directional X‐ray photography has been successfully conducted. Using the time series data of the X‐ray images from the two directions, the identification of each tracer particle in space and time has been done and their three‐dimensional paths have been computed. From these procedures, the flow field or the velocity field inside the slurry flow, which is invisible usually, has been estimated.
15 Network-on-Chip Design

Continuous transistor scaling has enabled computer architecture to integrate increasing numbers of cores on a chip. As the number of cores on a chip and application complexity has increased, the on-chip communication bandwidth requirement increased as well. Packet-switched network on chip (NoC) is envisioned as a scalable and cost-effective communication fabric for multi-core architectures with tens and hundreds of cores. In this chapter we focus on on-chip communication architecture design and introduce the reader to some essential concepts of NoC architecture. This is followed by a discussion on the commonly used power-saving techniques used for NoCs and the drawbacks and limitations of these techniques. We then concentrate on performance optimization through intelligent mapping of applications on multi-core architectures. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of various application-speciﬁc on-chip interconnect design methods
exploration of structural connectivity in the

: Background: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by disturbances in cognition and behavior surrounding eating and weight. The severity of AN combined with the absence of localized brain abnormalities suggests distributed, systemic underpinnings that may be identified using diffusion-weighted MRI (dMRI) and tractography to reconstruct white matter pathways. Methods: dMRI data acquired from female patients with AN (n = 147) and female healthy controls (HC; n = 119), aged 12-40 years, were combined across five studies. Probabilistic tractography was completed, and full cortex connectomes describing streamline counts between 84 brain regions generated and harmonized. Graph theory methods were used to describe alterations in network organization in AN. The network-based statistic tested between-group differences in brain subnetwork connectivity. The metrics strength and efficiency indexed the connectivity of brain regions (network nodes), and were compared between groups using multiple linear regression. Results: Individuals with AN, relative to HC, had reduced connectivity in a network comprising subcortical regions and greater connectivity between frontal cortical regions (p < 0.05, FWE corrected). Node-based analyses indicated reduced connectivity of the left hippocampus in patients relative to HC (p < 0.05, permutation corrected). Severity of illness, assessed by BMI, was associated with subcortical connectivity (p < 0.05, uncorrected). Conclusions: Analyses identified reduced structural connectivity of subcortical networks and regions, and stronger cortical network connectivity, amongst individuals with AN relative to HC. These findings are consistent with alterations in feeding, emotion and executive control circuits in AN, and may direct hypothesis-driven research into mechanisms of persistent restrictive eating behavior.
Perturbative renormalization of ϕ44 theory on the half space R+×R3 with flow equations

In this paper, we give a rigorous proof of the renormalizability of the massive [Formula: see text] theory on a half-space using renormalization group flow equations. We find that five counterterms are needed to make the theory finite, namely, ϕ2, ϕ∂ z ϕ, [Formula: see text], ϕΔ x ϕ, and ϕ4 for [Formula: see text]. The amputated correlation functions are distributions in position space. We consider a suitable class of test functions and prove inductive bounds for the correlation functions folded with these test functions. The bounds are uniform in the cutoff and, thus, directly lead to renormalizability.
Environmental Fate of Metal Nanoparticles in Estuarine Environments

In the last decade, metal engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) have seen an exponential use in many critical technologies and products, as well an increasing release into the environment. Coastal ecosystems worldwide may receive ENM-polluted waters and wastes, with a consequent alteration of habitats and contamination of aquatic biota. There is a scarcity of data regarding the fate of these emerging contaminants in such environments. Open issues include the determination of the sources, the quantification of the interactions with marine sediments, the bioaccumulation pathways, the ecotoxicology on marine fauna and the identification of the principal biotic and abiotic factors that may alter metal ENMs toxicity. Little is known about their potential transference into the food web, as well toxicity features and co-stressors of single or multiple ENMs under laboratory and real environmental conditions for various taxonomic phyla. This review reports current knowledge on the ecological impact of ENMs under the complex environmental conditions of estuary systems, identifies gaps in current knowledge and provides directions for future research.
Application of Deep Learning in FDTD Method

In this paper, a novel approach based on deep learning (DL) is proposed to predict electromagnetic transmission problem in two-dimensional free space. The Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method is employed to establish training data sets for the proposed model based on U-net. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach using experimental tests. It is found that the newly proposed approach could predict the electromagnetic field with satisfactory accuracy.
Posture Calibration Based Cross-View & Hard-Sensitive Metric Learning for UAV-Based Vehicle Re-Identification

Machine vision based vehicle re-identification (ReID) plays an important role in some Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Yet, most previous methods mainly focus on fixed surveillance cameras instead of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). With high flexibility, the UAV-based vehicle ReID problem has some special challenges including complicated shooting angles, low discrimination of top-down features, and large variance in vehicle scales, etc. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel structure for UAV-based vehicle ReID without license plates. Firstly, a triple-head segmentation net is proposed for segmenting UAV-captured vehicles under different heights and directions. Secondly, a posture calibration model is designed to uniform the vehicle postures based on the segmentation results, with the purpose of reducing the influence of different postures. Thirdly, the novel Cross-View & Hard-Sensitive Metric Learning (CHSML) method is proposed to train a ReID network with cross-view training constraint and hard sensitive principles; the mechanism of CHSML takes the cross-view samples of same ID as a training unit to learn the potential visual relationship in cross-view and builds a hard sensitive weight matrix to make learning more focus on hard samples, which improves the low ReID accuracy brought by cross-view or hard samples. Moreover, to facilitate the research of UAV-based vehicle ReID, a large-scale UAV-based vehicle ReID dataset called VeRi-UAV is released with 17 516 vehicles of 453 IDs. The experiments show that the proposed structure gains a better performance compared with the representative methods in the UAV-based vehicle ReID task.
PC tool development for simulating flight management process of jet airliner pilots

Airline pilots operating scheduled flights must consider flight safety, economical use of fuel to minimize expenditure, punctual flight operation, and passenger comfort. In this paper, we use the term “flight management skill” to denote an operational skill that takes the abovementioned factors into consideration. Research into flight management skill is limited because of high experimental costs and the availability of full-flight simulators. In order to perform flight management skill research easily, we have been developing a PC tool. The main feature of this PC tool is that it not only displays a simplified flight situation, but also records and displays the operation history as a time-series table. The PC tool does not reproduce all the components of the actual flight; we have to extract the significant factors that affect the decision-making process in an actual flight. For examinees to be able to obtain information on the flight conditions easily, the design of the PC tool interface is important. This paper demonstrates the results obtained using different styles of PC tool interface, and the discussion suggests interface guidelines. Studies have been conducted with airline pilots using the scenario of Haneda Airport runway closure due to an earthquake. We have also conducted experiments for the same scenario using a fullflight simulator. The experiments showed that essentially the same results were obtained using the PC tool and the full-flight simulator with regard to differences in decision making between inexperienced and experienced pilots.
A survey of surrogate models used in MDO

Surrogate model is a key element of the multidisciplinary design optimization(MDO). Three widely used surrogate models,Polynomial Response Surface Model,Radial Basis Function Model and Kriging Model are reviewed and discussed systematically in this paper.At the end of this paper,three surrogate models are constructed to describe the span lift distribution of an aircraft wing,and the constructions,features and coverage of these models are also discussed and evaluated.
What most influences consumers’ intention to use? Different motivation and trust stories for uber, airbnb, and taskrabbit

ABSTRACT While many factors drive the sharing economy’s growth, trust and motivations play critical roles. However, which factors are more important to young consumers? This research compares a trust model with a motivation model for predicting intention to use Airbnb, Uber, and TaskRabbit, comparing within each platform, not between them. The study uses a survey sample of Midwest United States business undergraduates (nearly all Generation Z). Each sample varies in experience levels: relatively high experience Uber respondents, very low experience TaskRabbit respondents, and medium experience for Airbnb. Results show that within Uber, the trust model predicts significantly better than the motivation model. Within Airbnb and TaskRabbit, the motivation model predicts only slightly better. By combining the trust and motivation variables into one model by platform, we find differing degrees of complementarity between the trust and motivation variables, with those for Airbnb being the most complementary in terms of predictive power and those for Uber being the least complementary. Within Airbnb and TaskRabbit, combining the trust and motivation models shows the two most significant variables were enjoyment and trusting intention. Within Uber, trusting intention and trusting beliefs in the provider were the most significant. We provide implications and directions for future research.
Compact Circularly Polarized Crossed Dipole Antenna with Wide Bandwidth and Wide Axial Ratio

A compact circularly polarized (CP) crossed dipole antenna with wide bandwidth and wide axial ratio (AR) is proposed. The proposed antenna consists of a pair of crossed dipoles, a double three-quarter rings with a 90° phase shift, four split rings resonator and four parasitic patches. The combination of the crossed dipole with a three-quarter ring can produce an AR point. It is found that the introduction of four split rings resonator on both surfaces of the substrate can increase the bandwidth, make the structure compact, and can produce an AR point at high frequency. The parasitic patch around the split ring resonant produces perturbation that combines the two AR points and introduces a new AR point. The ultimate simulation results show that the proposed antenna has a 10 dB impedance bandwidth of 69.6° (1.35-2.79 GHz) and a 3 dB AR bandwidth of 58.5% (1.4-2.56 GHz). In addition, it has a stable gain in the whole CP frequency region.
An Enhanced Face Anti-Spoofing Model using Color Texture and Corner Feature based Liveness Detection

In recent years, Biometric security systems have extended their uses. The systems are able to identify humans by analyzing their behavioural characteristics. Face recognition is the most popular biometric techniques, which widely used nowadays. They are treated as a suitable replacement for PINs and passwords for regular users. It is very easy to use a photo imposter to fake face recognition algorithm. To ensure the presence of real human face to a photograph or 2D masks, an enhanced face anti-spoofing model is proposed using Color Texture and Corner Feature based Liveness Detection (CTCF_LD). From the input video, the frames are extracted and cropped for the specific facial landmark points. The texture of the 2D masks and real face is analyzed by changing its colorspace. Then, the corner points are detected using various corner detection algorithms. Based on the corner points, the fake face is differentiated from the real face using a threshold value. Empirical study shows that the proposed CTCF_LD face anti-spoofing model with HSV_FCD algorithm gives better accuracy of 88%.