Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developing magnetorheological finishing (MRF) technology for the manufacture of large-aperture optics in megajoule class laser systems

Over the last eight years we have been developing advanced MRF tools and techniques to manufacture meter-scale optics for use in Megajoule class laser systems. These systems call for optics having unique characteristics that can complicate their fabrication using conventional polishing methods. First, exposure to the high-power nanosecond and sub-nanosecond pulsed laser environment in the infrared (>27 J/cm2 at 1053 nm), visible (>18 J/cm2 at 527 nm), and ultraviolet (>10 J/cm2 at 351 nm) demands ultra-precise control of optical figure and finish to avoid intensity modulation and scatter that can result in damage to the optics chain or system hardware. Second, the optics must be super-polished and virtually free of surface and subsurface flaws that can limit optic lifetime through laser-induced damage initiation and growth at the flaw sites, particularly at 351 nm. Lastly, ultra-precise optics for beam conditioning are required to control laser beam quality. These optics contain customized surface topographical structures that cannot be made using traditional fabrication processes. In this review, we will present the development and implementation of large-aperture MRF tools and techniques specifically designed to meet the demanding optical performance challenges required in large aperture high-power laser systems. In particular, we will discuss the advances made by using MRF technology to expose and remove surface and subsurface flaws in optics during final polishing to yield optics with improve laser damage resistance, the novel application of MRF deterministic polishing to imprint complex topographical information and wavefront correction patterns onto optical surfaces, and our efforts to advance the technology to manufacture largeaperture damage resistant optics.
Is XP agile enough for the development of Web information systems

Agile methodologies are being touted as the next major paradigm shift in development of information systems. However, there is little empirical evidence to determine how well suited agile methodologies such as Extreme Programming (XP) are for fast paced web development. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study that investigates the suitability of XP for web development. Evidence from the findings would suggest that there are many benefits to be gained from using XP. However, there are also many problems in using such an approach because web development is embedded in HTML. However, as the Web becomes more object-oriented with emergence of Web services, agile methodologies such as XP will become increasingly important and more suited to web development.
THE INFLUENCE OF SALT DOMES IN DRILLING WELL ACTIVITIES

The present work discusses the challenges associated with the drilling activities in oil wells through formations affected by the presence of salt domes. These geological structures can induce large stresses in the underlying and adjacent formations, requiring the development of specific planning for drilling and maintenance of such oil wells. During drilling, due to the presence of salt, numerous reports of problems such as stuck pipe, salt dissolution, forming mechanical stops and caves arise. More specific difficulties can occur in formations around a salt dome, related to the changes in the stress field, which include problems of well instability and abnormality of pressure zones. After casing, issues involving collapsing case-structures can take place. To prevent and mitigate risks associated to this activity, it is crucial to understand the physical phenomena behind it. With such finality, the present work studies problems related to such physical mechanisms, for instance, hydrodynamic instability, more specifically, the Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) instability. This study led to the development of an analytical model to predict salt dome formation. It discusses the ways in which it can interfere positively in parameters related to the drilling activity as, for example, the tension field in the formation around the salt dome.
Hardware Implementation of Biomedical Data Encryption using FPGA

If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy. Maintaining privacy in our personal communications is something everyone desires. Without encryption, it would be very easy for sensitive data to be stolen and used malevolently. This paper presents AES encryption algorithms and a comparison between them and other encryption algorithms such as DES, RSA, and Blowfish. It also presents some statistical tests which test the randomness of the used key. A hardware implementation of the AES on the recent Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA is applied on text and biomedical images. Such device is to speed up the AES algorithm and to reduce logic area. In addition, the comparison between FPGA and Matlab is introduced.
Developing Automated Measures to Predict Incivility in Public Online Discussions on the Facebook Sites of Established News Media

Incivility in public discourse on the Internet, e.g., in user comment sections on social network sites, is discussed as a significant problem for democratic societies. Due to the massive amount of conversation data, however, it is a challenge to code these discussions manually and make valid claims about the prevalence and effects of uncivil comments. We therefore trained an automated classifier on more than 10,000 hand-coded user comments and used it to predict incivility in user comments in an extensive dataset of more than one million user comments collected on the Facebook sites of nine German news media outlets over a three-months-period in 2015. Additionally, we use the classified data to analyze a) differences in user engagement with uncivil and civil comments, b) prevalence of incivility in reactive and interactive comments as well as differences regarding the share of uncivil comments across c) different news media and d) different topics.
Comparative Analysis of Geographical Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

The field of wireless sensor networks (WSN) engages a lot of associates in the research community as an interdisciplinary field of interest. This type of network is inexpensive, multifunctionally attributable to advances in microelectromechanical systems and conjointly the explosion and expansion of wireless communications. A mobile ad hoc network is a wireless network without fastened infrastructure or federal management. Due to the infrastructure-less mode of operation, mobile ad-hoc networks are gaining quality. During this work, we have performed an efficient performance study of the two major routing protocols: Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocols. We have used an accurate simulation model supported NS2 for this purpose. Our simulation results showed that AODV mitigates the drawbacks of the DSDV and provides better performance as compared to DSDV. Keywords—Routing protocols, mobility, Mobile Ad-hoc Networks, Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector, Dynamic Source Routing, Destination Sequence Distance Vector, Quality of Service.
Automated Region Growing Approach for Brain Tumor Segmentation in 3 D MR Images

The proposed paper discusses an automated region growing approach for segmenting tumor from 3D FLAIR (FLuid -Attenuated Inversion Recovery) and corresponding T2 MR brain images. For segmenting brain tumor and its components, the proposed framework exploits a technique based on multiple thresholding to obtain the seed points for applying region growing approach on volumetric images. The methodology is divided into three major phases. In first phase, preprocessing is done on 3D FLAIR images and T2 images to reduce the noise, effect of speckles and to enhance the image contrast. The next phase includes implementation of thresholding technique in order to extract the set of seed points for region growing algorithm. In order to apply thresholding technique, thresholding values have been calculated using the image formed by combination of FLAIR and T2 input images. In the final phase, region growing approach is applied using multiple seed points obtained earlier to extract tumor out of the brain image. A publicly available dataset of Glioma patients tumor from BRAT Segmentation Challenge 2012 has been used for the segmentation process and the segmentation results are evaluated against their ground truth. The experiment shows that the proposed framework detects the accurate range of slices of the brain having tumor.
Software for Plagiarism Detection in Computer Source Code

The available software for checking plagiarism is too much expensive and open source software is low and unreliable. This is a difficult problem for education sectors, not only for document plagiarism but also for computer source code plagiarism. For this reasons and because plagiarism in computer source code is very frequent, in this paper we described an application used for detection of this kind of plagiarism. This tool analyses more projects in the same time and by using an efficient algorithm it can decide if the code is unique or not. This application was developed for code refactoring and not for other kinds of plagiarism. It detects any proof of cheating and it works against different levels of similarity, low level similarities till high level ones.
Mixture of Ethanol Extract of Grape Pomade and Omija Fruit Prevents Hyperglycemia and Alleviates Oxidative Stress in Mice Fed an Obesogenic Diet

Background: A high-fat diet (HFD) is thought to be one of the main environmental factors for obesity in which oxidative stress is an important pathogenic mechanism of obesity-associated metabolic syndrome including diabetes. Polyphenol-rich food plants are known to improve obesity-related diseases. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of grape pomace (GP) and GP plus omija fruit (GPOF) on hyperglycemia and oxidative stress in diet-induced obese (DIO) mice. Methods: Male C57BL/6J mice were fed an HFD with GP (0.5%, w/w) or GPOF (0.5% GP plus 0.05% omija fruit, w/w) for 12 weeks. One gram of GP contains 0.26 mg of total flavonoid and 0.475 mg of total polyphenol, while 1 g of GPOF contains 0.2635 mg of total flavonoid and 0.491 mg of total polyphenol. Results: GP and GPOF significantly lowered fasting blood glucose level and insulin/glucagon ratio compared to HFD but increased plasma glucagon level. Supplementation with GP or GPOF improved glucose tolerance and the expressions of pancreatic insulin and glucagon while preserving α- and β-cells. GPOF in particular seems to improve insulin sensitivity by reducing plasma insulin and homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance levels. Erythrocyte glutathione peroxidase and glutathione reductase activities were significantly lower in the GPOF group than in the HFD group along with decreases in erythrocyte hydrogen peroxide and thiobarbituric acid-reactive substance levels. Conclusion: These results suggest that GPOF, which is rich in flavonoids, may be beneficial in preventing an increase in the risk factors for diabetes in obesity, including fasting hyperglycemia, glucose intolerance, and oxidative stress.
SEMANTICS OF SYNCCHARTS

SyncCharts are a visual synchronous model. SyncCharts graphical notation was designed in the mid-nineties [Andre 1996] and is now integrated in SCADE and Esterel Studio, both products from Esterel Technologies. SyncCharts are devoted to programming control-dominated software or hardware systems. These systems are reactive, that is, they continuously react to stimuli coming from their environment by sending back other stimuli. SyncCharts are much more than a Finite State Machine: they support hierarchy, concurrency and preemption. This report presents SyncCharts through examples. A section deals in particular with the operational semantics of StateCharts: a semantics of StateCharts is precisely defined "without mathematics".
Recurrence and transience of diffusions in a half-space

For non-degenerate diffusions in the half-space with oblique reflection, a dichotomy between recurrence and transience is established; convenient characterizations of recurrence and transience are given. Verifiable criteria for recurrence/transience are derived in terms of the generator and the boundary operator. Using these criteria, 'real variables proofs' of some results due to Rogers, concerning reflecting Brownian motion in a half-plane, are obtained. The problem of transience down a side in the case of diffusions in the half-plane is dealt with. Positive recurrence of diffusions in half-space is also considered; it is shown that the hitting time of any open set has finite expectation if there is just one positive recurrent point.
Production and Partial Purification of Laccase Produced by Bacillus species Isolated from Contaminated Soil

Laccases, a group of multi-copper oxidases, catalyzes oxidation of wide variety of naturally occurring as well as synthetic compounds like phenolic, diamines and aromatic amine compounds. Laccases are widely distributed among plants, insects, fungi and bacteria. In present study, indigenous bacteria capable of producing laccase enzyme was isolated and screened from soil and sediment samples. Among these bacterial strains AS1, with maximum laccase production of 3.348 U/ml after partial purification, was selected and identified as Bacillus spp. on the basis of biochemical characteristics. Effect of various physico-chemical parameters like pH, temperature, carbon, nitrogen and copper supplementation on laccase production by bacterium was investigated. Dye decolorization potential of laccases was studied on Reactive Red 152 and Coralene Yellow C4G azo dyes. Partial purification of laccase produced by bacterium under optimum condition was done by ammonium sulphate precipitation and membrane dialysis method.
Efficient Crosstalk Avoidance Using Modified Redundant Fibonacci Code ( MRFC ) in VLSI Interconnects

Now a day’s coding schemes for crosstalk avoidance require either a large wiring overhead or complex encoder-decoder circuits. There are techniques with some of the existing crosstalk avoidance coding techniques which eliminate crosstalk completely, but not inductance. The worst-case is that the inductance occurs when adjacent lines transition in the same direction. In order to have a better performance in avoiding inductive cross talk a new approach has been proposed. This CODEC checks for state transitions of each bit of the Modified Redundant Fibonacci code (MRFC) to detect the occurrence of the inductive crosstalk and overcome the crosstalk. The CODEC is designed with the traction detector and Crosstalk detector in Verilog HDL.The simulation of the proposed approach is carried out in Xilinx ISE design suite 14.5tooland the performance is examined.
Vlogging Over Time: Longitudinal Impressions and Behavior in YouTube

YouTube vlogging, as a popular genre of ubiquitous social video, engages people in entertainment, civic, and social activities. Although several aspects of vlogging have been studied in media studies and multimedia analysis, the longitudinal angle of vlogging regarding recognition of personal state and trait impressions from behavior has not been yet analyzed. We present a study using behavioral data of vloggers who posted vlogs on YouTube for a period between three and six years. We use online crowdsourcing to collect a rich set of 21 impression variables for each video, including perceived personality, mood, skills, and expertise. Acoustic and motion features are extracted to characterize basic nonverbal behavior. The analysis shows that only a couple of perceived variables, including perceived expertise and perceived quality of audio and video, display weak temporal patterns. Furthermore, we show that the use of longitudinal data helps to improve the automatic inference of impressions for several of the impression variables.
Investigation of Global Sensitivity Analysis on Operating Revenue and CO 2 Emissions from Crude Oil Distillation using Two-Stage Uncertainty Quantification Method

This paper presents a global sensitivity analysis based strategy for uncertainty quantification of the operating revenue and the carbon dioxide emissions in a crude oil distillation column. Aspen HYSYS is used for rigorous simulation of the column. A two-stage approach, which is executed by an interface between MATLAB and HYSYS, is implemented in this study. A multiplicative dimensional reduction method is applied to first identify which factors have the most influential to the model outputs, e.g. the operating revenue and the CO2 emissions. In the second stage, the uncertainty quantification regressed by Gaussian prediction regression method is exploited. As a result, there is a good agreement between the predicted results by the Gaussian prediction regression method with that of the conventional Quasi-Monte Carlo approach, which shows that the computational efforts was reduced significantly compared to the conventional study (about less than 10 times). Furthermore, the Kernel points estimated by the Gaussian prediction regression method are generated to highlight influential factors identified in the first stage.
Oral Health in a Cognitive and Behavioral Unit

In the 2000’s, there are approximately 860 000french persons affected by Alzheimer’s diseases and dementia (ADD). This number is increasing constant because of the ageing of the population and the progress of the diagnosis. Today, about 165 000 new patients a year are diagnosed. These diseases engender later an important physical, intellectual and social dependence which impacts on the social life of the patient and people around him. It is the main cause of heavy dependence of elderly and of admission in nursing homes; at present 40% of ADD-patients live there.
Online backup and versioning in log-structured file systems

With the advent of large and fast storage devices (eg. SSDs, Flash Disks) file system sizes have grown beyond bounds. Large volume of dynamically changing data makes it difficult to store data on the fly. Consistent backup ensuring integrity and correctness of data is of utmost important. Offline backup schemes result in heavy losses due to large down time. Online backup schemes offer weak consistency guarantees. Transactional file systems offer strong guarantees; however, they hinder the normal functioning of user applications. This results in transaction aborts and suboptimal performance. This work proposes an online backup approach that circumvents user transaction aborts due to the backup process in a transactional file system. Conventional serialization approaches ensure consistency with transaction aborts. This work defines a concept “Conflict Dependence” that helps identify conflicts within backup and user transactions. An efficient implementation within a log-structured file system (LFS) is proposed. It does not require aborts because of the backup process. The backup scheme extends naturally to a versioning in a LFS.
Forecasting fi ne-scale changes in the food-web structure of coastal marine communities under climate change

known environmental tolerance limits to abiotic variables (Ara ú jo et al. 2011). By measuring the spatial translations of bioclimatic envelopes, SDMs allow the projection of species distribution shifts under diff erent climate change scenarios (Cheung et al. 2009, Albouy et al. 2013 for marine fi shes). Aggregating the results across species informs us of the future distribution of species richness (the ‘ predict fi rst, assemble later ’ strategy; Ferrier and Guisan 2006). However, community structure is not only shaped by the abiotic environment but also by biotic interactions, such as competition, predation, parasitism, mutualism, or potential trophic cascade that rely on direct and indirect interactions (Gilman et al. 2010, Urban et al. 2012). One challenge that marine ecologists are facing today is understanding how communities forming a complex interaction network will be reorganized following individual species responses to climate changes (Woodward et al. 2010). Spatial mismatch may separate previously interacting species (Schweiger et al. 2008), while novel interactions Ecography 39: 001–011, 2016 doi: 10.1111/ecog.01937 © 2016 Th e Authors. Ecography © 2016 Nordic Society Oikos Subject Editor: Miguel Matias. Editor-in-Chief: Miguel Ara ú jo. Accepted 15 January 2016
Kinetic theory of nonequilibrium stochastic long-range systems: phase transition and bistability

We study long-range interacting systems driven by external stochastic forces that act collectively on all the particles constituting the system. Such a scenario is frequently encountered in the context of plasmas, self-gravitating systems, two-dimensional turbulence, and also in a broad class of other systems. Under the effect of stochastic driving, the system reaches a stationary state where external forces balance dissipation on average. These states have an invariant probability that does not respect detailed balance, and are characterized by non-vanishing currents of conserved quantities. In order to analyze spatially homogeneous stationary states, we develop a kinetic approach that generalizes the one known for deterministic long-range systems; we obtain a very good agreement between predictions from kinetic theory and extensive numerical simulations. Our approach may also be generalized to describe spatially inhomogeneous stationary states. We also report on numerical simulations exhibiting a first-order nonequilibrium phase transition from homogeneous to inhomogeneous states. Close to the phase transition, the system shows bistable behavior between the two states, with a mean residence time that diverges as an exponential in the inverse of the strength of the external stochastic forces, in the limit of low values of such forces.
Evolution of ontogenetic allometry shaping giant species: a case study from the damselfish genus Dascyllus (Pomacentridae)

The evolution of body size, the paired phenomena of giantism and dwarfism, has long been studied by biologists and paleontologists. However, detailed investigations devoted to the study of the evolution of ontogenetic patterns shaping giant species are scarce. The damselfishes of the genus Dascyllus appear as an excellent model for such a study. Their well understood phylogeny reveals that large-bodied species have evolved in two different clades. Geometric morphometric methods were used to compare the ontogenetic trajectories of the neurocranium and the mandible in both small-bodied (Dascyllus aruanus and Dascyllus carneus; maximum size: 50–65 mm standard length) and giant (Dascyllus trimaculatus and Dascyllus flavicaudus; maximum size: 90–110 mm standard length) Dascyllus species. At their respective maximum body size, the neurocranium of the giant species is significantly shorter and have a higher supraoccipital crest relative to the small-bodied species, whereas mandible shape variation is more limited and is not related to the ‘giant’ trait. The hypothesis of ontogenetic scaling whereby the giant species evolved by extending the allometric trajectory of the small-bodied ones (i.e. hypermorphosis) is rejected. Instead, the allometric trajectories vary among species by lateral transpositions. The rate of shape changes and the type of lateral transposition also differ according to the skeletal unit among Dascyllus species. Differences seen between the two giant species in the present study demonstrate that giant species may appear by varied alterations of the ancestor allometric pattern. © 2010 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2010, 99, 99–117. ADDITIONAL KEYWORDS: coral reef fishes – development – geometric morphometrics – giantism – growth – heterochrony – trajectory – shape – size – skull.