Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The application of parametric estimation techniques to wavelength scanning interferometry

The growth in the manufacture of complex surfaces means that surface metrology has become an essential part of the manufacturing process in many industries. Wavelength scanning interferometry (WSI) is a technique that enables fast surface topography measurement. Since WSI can be implemented without the measurand or apparatus being mechanically moved, the measurement times are substantially less than other topography techniques that require mechanical movement. A variety of algorithms can be used to evaluate the spectral interferograms generated from WSI, and the choice of algorithm affects the axial (height) resolution and measurement range that can be attained. At present Fourier transform based methods are the most commonly used, but these can have a number of limitations, including problems which derive from short data lengths. In order to extend the measurement range of the WSI, frequency estimation techniques based on an auto-regressive model are introduced. In particular, the Burg method is suggested as an alternative to current algorithms and a comparison is made to Fourier-transform methods using both simulated data and experimental data of a step-height sample measured using WSI.
Enhanced Anti-Tumor Immunity by Breaking Immune Tolerance.

The immune system plays a major role in the surveillance against tumors. To avoid attack from the immune system, tumor cells adapt different strategies to escape immune surveillance. Different approaches of immunotherapy have been developed based on the understanding of these strategies. Due to the random process of T cell receptor (TCR) rearrangement, autoreactive T cells responding to self-antigens are generated during the development of T cells in the thymus. To avoid autoimmune disease, the immune system must be tolerant to self-antigens. Immune tolerance can be divided into central tolerance and peripheral tolerance. Central tolerance is imposed during the development of T cells in the thymus, while peripheral tolerance occurs after T cells are exported into the periphery. Recent studies showed that inducing immune tolerance is one of the major strategies used by tumor cells to escape from immune surveillance. Since tumor cells express self-antigens that can be expressed in the thymus, tolerance to these tumor antigens can be induced in the thymus by clonal deletion. Another important mechanism of immune tolerance involves the function of regulatory T cells (Tregs). Tregs can be produced in either the thymus or in the periphery, but act in the periphery, particularly in the target tissue. The increased number of Tregs found in cancer patients and the existence of tumor specific-Tregs indicates that these cells may suppress the
Linehaul Forecasting at TNT

This research is conducted at the Planning and Engineering department of TNT. TNT provides services for the delivery of parcels, documents and freight consignments, mainly in the business-to-business environment. TNT developed a model that is able to forecast the throughput in hubs. However, this model does not provide insight into the number of trucks that should be planned between those hubs. To assist the tactical planners, TNT wants to develop a forecast that provides the volume between locations. The goal of this forecast is to decrease the number of last-minute cancellations or ad hoc hired trucks. Moreover, such a forecast makes it easier to standardize planning procedures.
A secure hash function based on feedback iterative structure

ABSTRACT Rapid growth of internet data has created enormous security challenges on authenticity, availability and integrity protection of these outsourced data. Hash function is one of the main solutions to face these challenges. This paper proposes a feedback iterative structure of hash function which utilises the variable feedback to resist attacks. Furthermore, to accelerate message diffusion, two novel modules are designed, one for iteration and the other for truncation. Experimental results show that the proposed hash function can effectively resist existing attacks. Moreover, comparing with other existing hash functions, it displays better on statistical performance, collision resistance and avalanche.
The analysis of trade relations of Russia with Germany and France

The subject of the study is the trade relations between Russia and Germany and France in the conditions of sluggish global recession and long-term sanctions pressure on the Russian economy. The purpose of the study was to identify commodity clusters that ensure the stability of commodity relations. The source of the estimated statistical indicators is the information of the Federal customs service of the Russian Federation, and the method is the cluster analysis of the commodity agglomeration for export and import. The study identified the optimal clusters of commodity relations between Russia, Germany and France. It is shown that the trade turnover between Russia and Germany in the commodity cluster "Mineral fuel, oil and their distillation products; bituminous substances; mineral waxes" is a fundamental factor in the formation of trade relations for the EU countries. France, as a member of the European Union, will adhere to the structure of trade turnover in Germany, including through the fragmentation of saturated commodity clusters. In the context of increasing US sanctions pressure, Russia will ensure its existence in its traditional role as a "raw materials appendix" to the European Union, keeping trade relations with Germany. Keywordsimport, cluster analysis, system, structure, commodity agglomeration, turnover, export, efficiency.
Geometry Alignment for Collaborative Robots

In the last years the growth of the robotic and industrial automation market has been exponential and all the projections indicate that this market and, more in general, the level of automation in manufacturing industry will further increment in the near future. For this reason, the robot motion planning process is playing an increasingly important role in the production engineering field and therefore, software applications for robot path planning simulation and optimization are becoming essential in manufacturing. One of the issues in the virtual simulation of robot motions lies in the fact that the virtual environment doesn’t always correspond to the real one and this discrepancy can be critical, especially in designing collision free paths. For this reason, it’s necessary to align the virtual geometry with respect to the real environment in order to compute consistent robot paths. This work aims to solve the problem of aligning virtual environments to match their real counterparts. Here is presented a method that uses a collaborative robot to get a set of inspection points by letting the robot touch certain surfaces while monitoring the joint values, and then updates the positions of corresponding virtual objects. In this thesis is also introduced a variation of that method, capable of handling large inspections sets, such as point cloud generated by 3D scanners.
Multiple antenna system and channel estimation for multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing in ultra-wideband systems

Multiband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been deployed for practical implementation of low cost and low power Ultra-Wideband (UWB) devices due to its ability to mitigate the narrowband interference and multipath fading effects. In order to achieve high data rates, the deployment of multiple antenna techniques into a UWB system has gained considerable research interest. In a UWB system, both the spatial and multipath diversities exist in UWB system can be exploited via the use of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna system and Space-Time Codes (STC) by leveraging Alamouti scheme. This work shows that MIMO system outperforms Alamouti technique in providing a power combining gain in the receiver. Given that channel estimation for timefrequency multiplexed such as a multiband OFDM system is unexplored largely, this thesis also addresses this issue. In literature, most of the conventional Channel Frequency Response (CFR) estimations require either pre-storing a large matrix or performing real-time matrix inversion. In general, these requirements are prohibitive for practical implementation of UWB devices. In this thesis, the implementation issues of STC-based on Alamouti scheme are investigated for the multiband OFDM system. The research quantifies and analyses existing channel estimation in frequency domain such as Least-Square (LS) and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) techniques. Consequently, low-complexity channel estimation based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) technique is developed for multiband OFDM system evaluates under modified Saleh-Valuenzela (S-V) channel modelling represents the realistic wireless indoor environment. This work implies that the SVD technique gives an improvement of 3-5 dB compared to LS technique. Even though SVD performs similarly to MMSE, it managed to reduce significantly the complexity by or to 57.8%.
MiniSLR: A fully automated miniature satellite laser ranging ground station

Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) has evolved from a geodesy tool to a widely used mission support system. Currently, about 80 satellite missions depend on continuous laser ranging data to derive exact position information, among them several Earth observation and many navigation satellites. Even more satellites have used SLR measurements in their early orbit phase to calibrate or verify their on-board navigation. In the future, the demand for laser ranging measurements may rise further, as more and more operators of small satellites, or even the proposed mega-constellations, realize the potential of this technique for obtaining centimetre-precise orbit information during and even after the mission. On board, only a small and light-weight retroreflector is required. On the ground, a world-wide network of around forty stations is available for tracking (International Laser Ranging Service, ILRS). However, many current ILRS stations are at their limit in terms of number of tracked satellites. Furthermore, the world-wide coverage is rather uneven, with many productive stations in Europe and Asia, only a few in Africa and the Americas and none at very high latitudes (north or south). A few new stations are under construction, more are being planned around the world. The German Aerospace Center is currently developing a new, small and inexpensive SLR system that may be very well suited for the further expansion of the laser ranging network. The whole system is housed in a 2m x 2m x 1.5m box, which is fully sealed and weather proof. It contains not only the mount with transmitter and receiver telescope and the laser, but also all data acquisition and experiment control systems. Our own control software, which is already used in two other SLR systems, will be used to operate the system completely autonomously. Using an infrared laser at low pulse energies avoids problems with aircraft safety. Compared to current SLR stations, which often occupy a whole observatory building and are operated by on-site staff, this miniSLR system will cut both installation and operating costs significantly. This contribution will present the set-up and first tests with the miniSLR system.
Randomized Security Patrolling for Link Flooding Attack Detection

With the advancement of large-scale coordinated attacks, the adversary is shifting away from traditional distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against servers to sophisticated DDoS attacks against Internet infrastructures. Link flooding attacks (LFAs) are such powerful attacks against Internet links. Employing network measurement techniques, the defender could detect the link under attack. However, given the large number of Internet links, the defender can only monitor a subset of the links simultaneously, whereas any link might be attacked. Therefore, it remains challenging to practically deploy detection methods. This paper addresses this challenge from a game-theoretic perspective, and proposes a randomized approach (like security patrolling) to optimize LFA detection strategies. Specifically, we formulate the LFA detection problem as a Stackelberg security game, and design randomized detection strategies in consideration of the adversary's behavior, where best and quantal response models are leveraged to characterize the adversary's behavior. We employ a series of techniques to solve the nonlinear and nonconvex NP-hard optimization problems for finding the equilibrium. The experimental results demonstrate the necessity of handling LFAs from a game-theoretic perspective and the effectiveness of our solutions. We believe our study is a significant step forward in formally understanding LFA detection strategies.
Examining EFL learners’ individual antecedents on the adoption of automated writing evaluation in China

Abstract Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) has been widely applied in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in China. However, little is known about factors that influence learners’ intention to use AWE. To this end, by adding two external factors (i.e. computer self-efficacy and computer anxiety) to the technology acceptance model (TAM), we surveyed 245 Chinese college students and tested a number of proposed hypotheses using their response data. Results revealed that learners’ behavioural intention to use AWE is directly determined by perceived usefulness, attitude towards using, and computer self-efficacy; and it is indirectly influenced by learners’ perceived ease of use; learners’ computer self-efficacy and computer anxiety play no role to perceived usefulness. Instead, they significantly affect perceived ease of use. Implications of these results are discussed as well.
Analysis of Amazon Product Reviews Using Big Data- Apache Pig Tool

We live in the era of digital technologies where data is increasing day by day at a very high rate. The data is further popularly classified as ‘Big Data’ because of its velocity, veracity, variety and its huge volume. This data could be unstructured, semi-structured or structured as it is divergent in nature. In this work, we would assess various categories of Amazon Product Reviews, the large datasets that contain around 144 million reviews in total. The datasets consists of Product reviews collected from Amazon, each having various numbers of attributes of 11 different categories. The motive of this work is to find and compare the ratings of the products during the lifespan of the product reviews. Another goal of this work is to help Amazon regarding the listing of the products in their database. This work aims to relate user’s ratings and reviews to discover how beneficial and good a product is [6]. User ratings are collected and are analyzed based on different categories (datasets) which gives an insight as to which product performs good and what are the problems associated to a certain non-performing product.
A Comparison of GVF and VFC on Leaf Images

Snakes or Active contours, are algorithms that are tremendously used to achieve image segmentation by edge detection. The drawbacks in the active contour model gave rise to new external forces such as Gradient Vector Flow (GVF) and Vector Field Convolution (VFC). In the past few decades, the GVF and the VFC active contour models have been in constant comparison regarding the speed and accuracy of object detection within the image domain. This paper develops a comparison between the two models on a few sample leaf images.
On the training algorithms for Restricted Boltzmann Machine-Based Models

Deep learning techniques have been studied extensively in the last years, due to its good results related to essential tasks on a large range of applications, such as speech and face recognition, as well as objects classification. Among the most employed techniques is the Restrict Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), which are energy-based stochastic neural networks composed of two layers of neurons. , i.e., visible and hidden, whose objective is to estimate the connection weights between both layers, generally using Markov chains. Recently, the scientific community spent many efforts on sampling methods, since RBMs effectiveness is directly related to the success of the sampling process. Thereby, the present work contributes with RBMs Learning area, as well as its variants DBNs and DBMs. Further, the work covers the application of meta-heuristic methods concerning a proper fine-tune of these techniques. Moreover, the validation of the model is presented in the context of image reconstruction and pattern recognition. In general, the present work presents different approaches to training these techniques, as well as the evaluation of meta-heuristic methods efficiency in training. Finally, this thesis presents a collection of works developed by the author during the study period, which was published/submitted until the present time, concerning: (i) temperature parameter introduction in DBM formulation, (ii) DBM using adaptive temperature, (iii) DBM meta-parameters optimization through meta-heuristic techniques, and (iv) iRBM meta-parameters optimization through meta-heuristic techniques.
Timing of complementary feeding : its association with growth, diet, iron status, and eating behaviours in infants and toddlers

There has been considerable debate over the optimum age of introduction of solid foods in infants and particularly its association with nutrient and iron adequacy for growth and development as well as its impact on eating behaviours, such as feeding difficulties, dietary variety and food preferences. Since infants and toddlers are at a higher risk of developing iron deficiency anaemia, a non-invasive method of measuring haemoglobin could be a useful tool in identifying low haemoglobin levels early and prevent further deterioration of iron status. Since the adoption of the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations for exclusive breastfeeding for 6 months, there has been limited data in the UK about how the new guidelines have affected the growth, eating behaviours, dietary intake and iron status. This thesis aimed to address these gaps in the literature in 3 studies: the Brighton’s Breast-fed Babies Study, the Haemospect® Validation Study and the GO-CHILD Study.
Towards Dynamically Reconfigurable IoT Camera Virtualization for Video Analytics Edge Cloud Services

Video analytics edge computing exploiting IoT cameras has gained high attention. Running such tasks on the network edge is very challenging since video and image processing are bandwidth-hungry and computationally intensive. IoT cameras are heavily dependent on environmental factors such as the brightness of the view. In this paper, we propose an edge IoT camera virtualization architecture that enables an IoT camera to accommodate multiple application operation semantics and dynamically adjust its configuration to preserve them in the presence of environment context changes. For this, we develop an ontology-based application description model, a virtualization architecture with the container technology, and a context-aware dynamic reconfiguration scheme.
Diagnostic Guide for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Related Conditions: The 4 - Digit Diagnostic Code

A boat bow ladder comprising a mounting bracket facilely cradled to the bow of a boat preferably by means of an existing eye used to connect the bow of the boat to a trailer when transporting the boat by land. The mounting bracket accommodates manual placement and removal of the angular ladder portions of the ladder, the ladder portion comprising a bracket engaging main leg pivotally mounted adjacent one end thereof to one end of a second main leg having a plurality of rungs, the pivotal connection accommodating placement of the ladder portion in either a stored position or a use position whereby access to and from the boat is conveniently provided at the bow.
The comparing of acute effects of two training models aerobic and resistance on the clotting times in young women students

Purpose: Some of the benefits of physical activity may result from effects on hemostasis. However, the increased burden of cardiovascular complications and sudden death occurring during and immediately after exercise prompts investigation to elucidate the biological relationship between physical exercise and hemostatic function. The aim of this study was to determine effects of one bout exhaustive aerobic exercise and resistance training on the clotting times in healthy young women student. Material: Thirty trained volunteer female students of physical education were selected objectively and availability. The subjects were randomly divided into two groups of aerobic (n=15) and resistance training (n=15). Aerobic group performed exhaustive workout program on treadmill intensity 65 to 75% VO2max on treadmill. The resistance group completed three sets of 5-7 repetitions of six exercises at an intensity corresponding to 80% of 1RM. Following 12 to 14 hours of nightly fasting, venous blood samples (5 cc) were collected pre, immediately after exercise and after 60 min of recovery and analyzed for PT (Prothrombin Time) and aPTT (Activated Partial Thromboplastin Time) times. Participants were matched according to anthropometric measurements, age and VO2max. Hypothesizes were tested by using independent t, repeated measures and post-hoc test (p≤0.05). Results: One bout of the exhaustive aerobic exercise and resistance training caused significantly shortening in PT (p<0.001) and aPTT (p=0.006, p<0.001 respectively) times at immediately after exercise. Also aPTT (p=0.005, p<0.001 respectively) times significantly increased after recovery in comparison with baseline levels in two groups. No significantly differences observed in PT and aPTT between two groups in all stages. The results show that exhaustive aerobic exercise and resistance training lead to mild and transit increase in coagulation system and induced shortening clotting times. Exercise-related hypercoagulability is mainly due to an increase in coagulation factor VIII (FVIII) with no parallel alterations of other clotting factors. Conclusions: Similar to endurance exercise, FVIII activity raises following resistance exercise, and appears to be positively correlated with the volume of weight lifted. The ß-adrenergic pathway has been implicated as a possible pathway mediating an exerciseinduced increase in FVIII and decease clotting time.
Can the current products of animal origin win the challenge with the offer of new foods?

The modern breeding has so far aimed to reduce the cost of food of animal origin to allow consumption even by the poor. The concept of quality did not take into account the sui generis taste but the longest possible shelf life, a fundamental requirement for large retailers. Even "fresh" cheeses can have a commercial life of up to 30 days when "freshness" is a distant memory.