Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Seven-Octave Broadband LNA MMIC Using Bandwidth Extension Techniques and Improved Active Load

This paper presents the analysis and design of a novel broadband low-noise amplifier (LNA) with larger than seven-octave bandwidth. To achieve good impedance matching, flat gain, and low noise over larger than seven-octave bandwidth, the combination technique of shunt-resistive feedback, dual inductive-peaking techniques as well as a compact improved active load supporting broadband RF biasing from dc to 20 GHz, is proposed for LNA design. The gain and noise improvement principles of the proposed technique are also analyzed theoretically. Based on the theoretical study, a three-stage LNA with larger than seven-octave bandwidth, i.e. 0.1 to 20 GHz, is designed and verified using a 0.15-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> GaAs pHEMT technology. The LNA experimental results show a high gain of 28.6 dB, good noise figure of 3.1 to 5.8 dB, and output <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P_{\mathrm {-1\,\,dB}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of 7.8 to 12.7 dBm over the broad frequency range of 0.1 to 20 GHz. The proposed LNA has a compact chip size of only 1.53 mm<sup>2</sup> including testing input/output pads.
Differential assembly of Rous sarcoma virus tetrameric and octameric intasomes is regulated by the C-terminal domain and tail region of integrase

Retrovirus integrase (IN) catalyzes the concerted integration of linear viral DNA ends into chromosomes. The atomic structures of five different retrovirus IN–DNA complexes, termed intasomes, have revealed varying IN subunit compositions ranging from tetramers to octamers, dodecamers, and hexadecamers. Intasomes containing two IN-associated viral DNA ends capable of concerted integration are termed stable synaptic complexes (SSC), and those formed with a viral/target DNA substrate representing the product of strand-transfer reactions are strand-transfer complexes (STC). Here, we investigated the mechanisms associated with the assembly of the Rous sarcoma virus SSC and STC. C-terminal truncations of WT IN (286 residues) indicated a role of the last 18 residues (“tail” region) in assembly of the tetrameric and octameric SSC, physically stabilized by HIV-1 IN strand-transfer inhibitors. Fine mapping through C-terminal truncations and site-directed mutagenesis suggested that at least three residues (Asp-268–Thr-270) past the last β-strand in the C-terminal domain (CTD) are necessary for assembly of the octameric SSC. In contrast, the assembly of the octameric STC was independent of the last 18 residues of IN. Single-site substitutions in the CTD affected the assembly of the SSC, but not necessarily of the STC, suggesting that STC assembly may depend less on specific interactions of the CTD with viral DNA. Additionally, we demonstrate that trans-communication between IN dimer–DNA complexes facilitates the association of native long-terminal repeat (LTR) ends with partially defective LTR ends to produce a hybrid octameric SSC. The differential assembly of the tetrameric and octameric SSC improves our understanding of intasomes.
Identification of Viscous and Coulomb Friction in Motion Constrained Systems

In this study, a simple and inexpensive method is developed in order to identify viscous and Coulomb frictions in systems with motion limitations. This method is used on a prototype. A series of tests are performed using position profiles with different speeds created according to motion limits in the systems. Using the data obtained from these tests, viscous and Coulomb friction characteristics are identified for both negative and positive motion directions. The method developed can also be used to determine whether the Coulomb friction is position dependent or not and the change of Coulomb friction with the position.
Design of A Filtering Monopole Antenna with Wideband Harmonic Rejection

This paper proposes a novel filtering monopole antenna with wideband harmonic rejection, which is realized by a monopole antenna based on a compact lowpass filter (LPF). The proposed filtering antenna has a wideband harmonic rejection from 2.68GHz up to 15GHz. The antenna with 3dB cutoff frequency at 2.68GHz operates normally from 1.95GHz to 2.45GHz. The designed filtering monopole antenna effectively exhibits 6.8 times of the central operating frequency and its attenuation level is less than −15dB.
Protocol for a program of research from the Aging, Community and Health Research Unit

Background: The goal of the Aging, Community and Health Research Unit (ACHRU) is to promote optimal aging at home for older adults with multimorbidity (≥2 chronic conditions) and to support their family/friend caregivers. This protocol paper reports the rationale and plan for this patient-oriented, cross-jurisdictional research program. Objectives: The objectives of the ACHRU research program are (i) to codesign integrated and person-centered interventions with older adults, family/friend caregivers, and providers; (ii) to examine the feasibility of newly designed interventions; (iii) to determine the intervention effectiveness on Triple Aim outcomes: health, patient/caregiver experience, and cost; (iv) to examine intervention context and implementation barriers and facilitators; (v) to use diverse integrated knowledge translation (IKT) strategies to engage knowledge users to support scalability and sustainability of effective interventions; and (vi) to build patient-oriented research capacity. Design: The research program was informed by the Knowledge-to-Action Framework and the Complexity Model. Six individual studies were conceptualized as integrated pieces of work. The results of the three initial descriptive studies will inform and be followed by three pragmatic randomized controlled trials. IKT and capacity building activities will be embedded in all six studies and tailored to the unique focus of each study. Conclusions: This research program will inform the development of effective and scalable person-centered interventions that are sustainable through interagency and intersectoral partnerships with community-based agencies, policy makers, and other health and social service agencies. Implementation of these interventions has the potential to transform health-care services and systems and improve the quality of life for older adults with multimorbidity and their caregivers. Trial registration: NCT02428387 (study 4), NCT02158741 (study 5), and NCT02209285 (study 6).
Dynamic Meta-Embeddings for Improved Sentence Representations

While one of the first steps in many NLP systems is selecting what pre-trained word embeddings to use, we argue that such a step is better left for neural networks to figure out by themselves. To that end, we introduce dynamic meta-embeddings, a simple yet effective method for the supervised learning of embedding ensembles, which leads to state-of-the-art performance within the same model class on a variety of tasks. We subsequently show how the technique can be used to shed new light on the usage of word embeddings in NLP systems.
Trust4App: Automating Trustworthiness Assessment of Mobile Applications

Smartphones have become ubiquitous in our everyday lives, providing diverse functionalities via millions of applications (apps) that are readily available. To achieve these functionalities, apps need to access and utilize potentially sensitive data, stored in the user's device. This can pose a serious threat to users' security and privacy, when considering malicious or underskilled developers. While application marketplaces, like Google Play store and Apple App store, provide factors like ratings, user reviews, and number of downloads to distinguish benign from risky apps, studies have shown that these metrics are not adequately effective. The security and privacy health of an application should also be considered to generate a more reliable and transparent trustworthiness score. In order to automate the trustworthiness assessment of mobile applications, we introduce the Trust4App framework, which not only considers the publicly available factors mentioned above, but also takes into account the Security and Privacy (S&P) health of an application. Additionally, it considers the S&P posture of a user, and provides an holistic personalized trustworthiness score. While existing automatic trustworthiness frameworks only consider trustworthiness indicators (e.g. permission usage, privacy leaks) individually, Trust4App is, to the best of our knowledge, the first framework to combine these indicators. We also implement a proof-of-concept realization of our framework and demonstrate that Trust4App provides a more comprehensive, intuitive and actionable trustworthiness assessment compared to existing approaches.
Output Maximization by Modeling and Simulation of Hybrid Wind/Photovoltaic Standalone Generation

This paper illustrate the hybridsystem of both Wind energy system and Photovoltaic module, which is simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK software. In which a SEPIC (DC/DC converter) converter is used to convert the varying DC voltage to a constant output voltage by using its control mechanism. MPPT is in charge for extracting the maximum possible output power from the photovoltaic and the wind energy system. In this paper Incremental conductance (InCond) method is used as the algorithm in our MPPT block. The simulated system proposed uses a three-level, three phases, twelve pulse inverter for converting DC voltage generated by the photovoltaic model and the wind energy system to AC voltage at desired frequency and voltage level. The usage of three-level inverter reduces Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) in output voltage. Solar PV system primarily powers DC and AC loads with battery storage option. Lead-acid batteries are used due to their large availability in many sizes, low cost and well firm performance characteristics. The importance of developing MPPT (Maximum Power Tracking) algorithms is demonstrated by analyzing the effect of shading on the PV system efficiency. The main concentration here is to develop a system to make use of the renewable energy source (i.e., Photovoltaic and Wind power) which is available in the vicinity to provide power to the isolated loads and increases the efficiency of the system by implementing MPPT technique
Conflict Management for Bayesian and DST Multi-Sensor Occupancy Grid Mapping

Grid-based environment mapping and obstacle detection becomes increasingly more challenging when sensors' readings are highly contrasting. Without measurement prediction, commonly used approaches to grid fusion weight the sensor grids equally unless specified otherwise by the user. Empirically adjusted measurement weights are tailored only for certain scenarios and are not at all suited for a general purpose mapping. It therefore becomes apparent, that sensor weights need to be adjusted recursively during the map building process. We show that discrepancies between the grids can be exploited in such a manner where fusion of contradicting information will be less susceptible to sensor weighting and the accuracy of the mapped environment can be further improved. We present a realization of such a conflict resolution occupancy grid mapping, which combines grid-based mapping and situation assessment in a holistic approach.
Towards Privacy-Preserving Forensic Analysis for Time-Series Medical Data

Electronic medical record (EMR) forensics is at the forefront of both academia and industry, and has dominated increasingly important role in the fast revolutionized digital forensics area. Upon the severe financial loss and user privacy revealing caused by data breaches, protecting the forensic medical records only being mined by authorized investigators and data confidentiality is deemed essential. Standard encryption technique can ensure the end-to-end data security, yet restricting the functionality in forensic analyzing. How to proceed similarity match over forensic physiological data in a private manner is intrinsically challenging, because the natural properties of such medical data are high-dimensional and times series related. In this paper, we propose a secure framework to proceed similarity match over encrypted physiological time-series data. Our framework resorts to an advanced similarity search algorithm, aka stratified locality-sensitive hashing (SLSH) to assist an authorized forensic investigator to have in-depth understanding of physiological data with multiple perspectives. In addition, our framework adopts a scalable encrypted index construction which provides provable security guarantees. Finally, we give a discussion of our future work based on this framework. As a generic and scalable framework, our design can be easily extended to secure update and parallel processing.
Suppressing Pilot Contamination in Massive MIMO Downlink via Cross-Frame Scheduling

A novel downlink scheduling strategy for time-division duplexing massive multiple-input multiple-output networks is proposed to relieve the pilot contamination. Specifically, users of slow-channel variation and simultaneous uplink pilot transmission are scheduled in different downlink subframes for adjacent cells, and hence the pilot contamination is significantly suppressed at the price of outdated channel state information. We investigate this trade-off by deriving the distribution of downlink signal-to-interference ratio in terms of Doppler effect, which can be approximated tightly and simply by Gaussian distribution. Based on it, a learning-based algorithm is developed for robust downlink rate allocation without priori knowledge on the users’ distribution. It is shown that the proposed cross-frame strategy can effectively improve the overall downlink performance of cell-edge users.
Intelligent Reflecting Surface Enhanced Wireless Network: Joint Active and Passive Beamforming Design

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is envisioned to have abundant applications in future wireless networks by smartly reconfiguring the signal propagation for performance enhance- ment. Specifically, an IRS consists of a large number of low- cost passive elements each reflecting the incident signal with a certain phase shift to collaboratively achieve beamforming and suppress interference at one or more designated receivers. In this paper, we study an IRS-enhanced point-to-point multiple- input single-output (MISO) wireless system where one IRS is deployed to assist in the communication from a multi-antenna access point (AP) to a single-antenna user. As a result, the user simultaneously receives the signal sent directly from the AP as well as that reflected by the IRS. We aim to maximize the total received signal power at the user by jointly optimizing the (active) transmit beamforming at the AP and (passive) reflect beamforming by the phase shifters at the IRS. We first propose a centralized algorithm based on the technique of semidefinite relaxation (SDR) by assuming the global channel state information (CSI) available at the IRS. Since the centralized implementation requires excessive channel estimation and signal exchange overheads, we further propose a low-complexity distributed algorithm where the AP and IRS independently adjust the transmit beamforming and the phase shifts in an alternating manner until the convergence is reached. Simulation results show that significant performance gains can be achieved by the proposed algorithms as compared to benchmark schemes. Moreover, it is verified that the IRS is able to drastically enhance the link quality and&#x002F;or coverage over the conventional setup without the IRS.
Physical Activity Among Postoperative Esophageal Cancer Patients.

BACKGROUND Previous literature has reported that regular physical activity enhances health-related quality of life for cancer patients. However, there is a lack of studies that focus on physical activity among postoperative esophageal cancer patients. OBJECTIVE The aims of this study were to (1) describe the prevalence of physical activity among postoperative esophageal cancer patients, (2) explore variables related to physical activity (demographics, nutrition, dysphagia, and health-related qualify of life), and (3) examine potential reasons for inactivity among participants who scored low using case studies. METHODS In this cross-sectional design, physical activity was evaluated by the Japanese version of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire. Variables were analyzed using Spearman rank correlation coefficients, Mann-Whitney U tests, or Fisher exact tests. RESULTS Fifty-eight patients participated in this study; 79% met the recommended physical activity guidelines. Present occupational status and past leisure-time physical activity behavior before the cancer diagnosis were related to current leisure-time physical activity and meeting the guidelines postoperatively. Participants who scored 0 (little or no activity) in the questionnaire also scored low in health-related quality of life. CONCLUSIONS Participants performed especially well in physical activity related to leisure time and transportation. Positive reinforcement is needed for patients who perform adequate levels of physical activity, and reviewing the benefits of regular physical activity is encouraged for all. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE Occupational status and past leisure-time physical activity before diagnosis can be indicators for promoting physical activity among postoperative esophageal cancer patients. Inactive participants should be supported to promote both physical activity and health-related qualify of life.
UTM concept demonstrations in Fukushima; requirements for UAS-port operation with different UAS operators

In the future society, where small unmanned aerial systems (sUASs) are used in many commercial domains such as delivery services, operations of a kind of port systems, where different sUAS operators use with beyond line of sight, can be found. The authors of this paper investigated safety requirements for such a port and demonstrated a concept at the sUAS flight demonstration conducted by the Japan Unmanned System Traffic & Radio Management Consortium in October 2017 in which about 120 flights were made with 20 small sUAS including one simulated sUAS under a traffic management.
Relative Pitch Variation Algorithm for Modification of Pitch in Emotion Conversion

This paper propose an algorithm in emotion conversion of neutral speech signal to target signals like sad speech, fear speech and anger speeches. As pitch plays an important role in emotion expression, a method called Relative pitch variation is proposed for modification of pitch contour for converting neutral speech to target emotional speech. The converted Sad, Fear and Anger speech signal are obtained by modifying prosodic parameters like pitch range, pitch frequency, energy and duration contour. The target speech is compared with resultant speech obtained by modifying only the pitch contour and also have observed the improvements in quality of expression due to modification of energy and duration.
wideband low-profile Substrate-Integrated Waveguide-Based 60-GHz Magneto-Electric Dipole Antenna

This paper presents a Substrate-Integrated Waveguide-feed magneto-electric dipole antenna for millimeterwave, particularly fifth generation (5G) applications. The proposed antenna has high gain, wide bandwidth, and low profile, so it is low cost and easy to be integrated. The antenna consists of an opening cavity formed by metalized vias, which encloses a single feed magneto-electric dipole antenna. The proposed antenna achieves a simulated impedance bandwidth of 54.8% covering 45.3 GHz to 79.5 GHz. the 3-dB gain bandwidth is 50.6%. the 3-dB z-direction gain bandwidth is 35.8%. The maximum boresight gain is up to 9.7 dBi.
Thring Signatures and their Applications to Spender-Ambiguous Digital Currencies

We present threshold ring multi-signatures (thring signatures) for collaborative computation of ring signatures, present a game of existential forgery for thring signatures, and discuss uses of thring signatures in digital currencies that include spender-ambiguous cross-chain atomic swaps for confidential amounts without a trusted setup. We present an implementation of thring signatures that we call linkable spontaneous threshold anonymous group signatures, and prove the implementation existentially unforgeable.
Attribute-correlated local regions for deep relative attributes learning

Abstract. Relative attributes have a more detailed and accurate description than previous binary ones. We propose to utilize the acquired attribute-correlated local regions of image for learning deep relative attributes. Different from previous works, which usually discover the spatial extent of the corresponding attribute based on the ranking list of all the images in the image set, we first classify the images according to the presence or absence of each provided attribute. Then, we sort the images in the classified image sets using a semisupervised method and learn the most relevant regions corresponding to a specific attribute. The learned local regions in two classified image sets are integrated to obtain the final result. The images and localized regions are then fed into the pretrained convolutional neural network model for feature extraction. Therefore, the concatenation of the high-level global feature and intermediate local feature is adopted to predict the relative attributes. We show that the proposed method produces a competitive performance compared with the state of the art in relative attribute prediction on three public benchmarks.
Butein Activates Autophagy Through AMPK/TSC2/ULK1/mTOR Pathway to Inhibit IL-6 Expression in IL-1β Stimulated Human Chondrocytes

Background/Aims: Butein (2’,3,4,4’-Tetrahydroxychalcone), a polyphenol produced by several plants including Butea monoserpma, has been reported to exert potent anti-inflammatory activity but the mechanism remains unknown. In the present work we investigated the mechanism of Butein-mediated suppression of IL-6 expression in normal and human osteoarthritis (OA) chondrocytes under pathological conditions. Methods: Expression level of interleukin-6 (IL-6) protein in OA cartilage was analyzed by immunohistochemistry using a validated antibody. Chondrocytes derived from normal or OA cartilage by enzymatic digestion were pretreated with Butein followed by stimulation with interleukin-1β (IL-1β) and the levels of IL-6 mRNA were quantified by TaqMan assay and the protein levels were measured by Western immunoblotting. Autophagy activation was determined by Western blotting and confocal microscopy. Autophagy was inhibited by siRNA mediated knockdown of ATG5. Results: Expression of IL-6 protein was high in the OA cartilage compared to smooth cartilage from the same patient. OA chondrocytes and cartilage explants stimulated with IL-1β showed high level expression of IL-6 mRNA and protein. Butein increased the phosphorylation of AMPKαThr-172, TSC2Ser-1387 and ULK1Ser-317 and inhibited the phosphorylation of mTORSer-2448 and its downstream target p70S6K and increased autophagy flux that correlated with the suppression of the IL-1β mediated expression of IL-6 in normal and OA chondrocytes. In OA chondrocytes with siRNA-mediated knockdown of ATG5 expression, treatment with Butein failed to activate autophagy and abrogated the suppression of IL-1β induced IL-6 expression. Conclusion: Our findings demonstrate for the first time that Butein activate autophagy in OA chondrocytes via AMPK/TSC2/ULK1/mTOR pathway. Additionally, activation of autophagy was essential to block the IL-1β-induced expression of IL-6 in OA chondrocytes. These data support further studies to evaluate the use of Butein or compounds derived from it for the management of OA.