Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Deep Learning Based Approach to Child Labour Detection

Currently, the world is facing extreme turmoil due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus, but the effects of this detrimental virus have been exceedingly dreadful for developing countries like Bangladesh. Being a developing country, Bangladesh has many social concerns to overcome and among them child labour has been a constant one for decades. It has been anticipated by several researchers that the contingency of COVID-19 virus would cause a surplus of such child labour occurrences throughout the world especially in the South Asian region. Considering the concern, we are proposing a benevolent yet technical solution that has the potential to eradicate the problem on a large scale. This paper beholds the idea of a child labour detection technique to prevent such illegal instances taking place in the construction areas, brickfields, coal mining fields, make-up product mining fields, etc. on the South Asian countries like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal. Considering the unavailability of an open sourced child labourers dataset in the context of the mentioned region, a noble dataset of such kind has been formulated in this project. A child labour recognizing model has been built based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) using the dataset. Additionally, the resulting accuracy has also been compared using two well-known transfer learning methods for better perception. The CNN model possessed 90.625% test accuracy whereas the two transfer learning based models showed 95.312% and 96.875% respectively.
Investigations on the Negative Shift of the Threshold Voltage of Polycrystalline Silicon Thin-Film Transistors Under Positive Gate Bias Stress

Different from the conventional degradation phenomenon under positive bias stress (PBS), the shift of the transfer characteristic curve of polycrystalline silicon thin-film transistors (TFTs) to the negative gate bias direction after PBS is observed and reported. The PBS degradation is found to be recoverable and the recovery proceeds at a faster rate first and then continues at a much slower rate. The recovery can be further accelerated at a higher temperature or by applying a negative gate bias. After detailed data analysis, the degradation mechanism is proposed to be the generation of protons in the gate oxide and its accumulation at the channel/gate oxide interface. The proposed degradation model could explain both the degradation phenomena and the recovery behaviors of PBS degradation.
Innovative Dual-Binary-Field Architecture for Point Multiplication of Elliptic Curve Cryptography

High-performance Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) implementation in encryption authentication severs has become a challenge due to the explosive growth of e-commerce’s demand for speed and security. Point multiplication (PM) is the most common and complex operation in ECC which directly determines the performance of the whole system. This article proposes a 6CC-6CC (clock cycle) dual-field PM architecture and a 6CC-4CC dual-field PM architecture based on maximizing utilization of Karatsuba multipliers and re-ordering schedule strategy in PM. The Montgomery Ladder algorithm used in PM is modified to a 4CC algorithm for better resource utilization and parallel computation. To solve the frequency drop problem while working on large finite field, the PM architectures for high and low field are carefully studied to have universal critical path length and balanced performance. Both of the architectures are implemented over GF(2<sup>571</sup>) and GF(2<sup>283</sup>) on Xilinx Virtex-5 and Virtex-7 FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Array) for comparison. The 6CC-6CC architecture is shown to have the best performance on GF(2<sup>571</sup>), which achieves one PM operation in <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$17.44~\mu s$ </tex-math></inline-formula> using 81549 LUTs (Look-Up-Table) with the frequency of 197.2 MHz on Virtex-5, and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$12.55~\mu s$ </tex-math></inline-formula> using 80970 LUTs with the frequency of 274.1 MHz on Virtex-7. The 6CC-4CC architecture performs better on GF(2<sup>283</sup>) with the shortest computation time. It takes only <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3.21~\mu s$ </tex-math></inline-formula> to finish one PM operation on Virtex-5 and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2.22~\mu s$ </tex-math></inline-formula> on Virtex-7, which are faster than all the previous designs. The implementation results prove that the proposed architectures have state-of-the-art performance as well as higher versatility for ECC designs.
User-Perceived Response Metrics in Android OS for Software Aging detection

Empirical studies have shown that the Android platform is exposed to the software aging effects. Aging effects, such as poor performance and increased response times for systems and applications, have a negative impact on the user experience. This paper considers user-perceived response metrics: Frame Draw Time and Janky Frames. The proposed metrics are compared with Android Activity Launch Time and memory usage metrics. The expediency of using the proposed metrics in future studies of the aging phenomenon in the Android operating system is substantiated.
Real Time Voronoi-like Path Planning Using Flow Field and A*

In this paper we introduce a path planning approach for robotic and related applications to reach a target within a known environment. We improve the flow fields based path planning approach by avoiding typical obstacle hugging behavior. Flow field path planning defines the potential at each node of an environment which allows a large number of agents to traverse the environment while avoiding the task of calculating paths for each individual agent. This approach maintains the same benefit of typical flow field path planning with the addition of avoiding paths that are too close to obstacles. This method can be referred to as Valley Field Path Planning. In the general method, this algorithm takes two major steps. Firstly, the obstacle potential field that results in a low potential in regions farthest from the obstacles. The second step of the algorithm is to find potential provided that the goal node corresponds to a higher potential at nodes farther. The weighted sum of these two potential fields results in a flow field that avoids obstacle hugging. To avoid the local minima problem with this approach, $A^{\ast}$ path planning can been introduced with the benefit of a configurable deterministic path at the cost of calculating the path on a per agent basis. The results show that this combination of an obstacle potential field and the A* search algorithm results in an efficient and inexpensive way to generate a configurable path.
Player Attachment to Mobile Social Network Games: An Information Processing View

This study applied the information processing view and the concept of fit to improve understanding of how attachment behaviour and continued use in mobile social network game (M-SNG) players is affected by the alignment between their motivation and technological capability. A quantitative method and a cross-sectional study design were used to evaluate the research model. Data were collected for 427 active M-SNG players in Taiwan. The proposed model was tested with fit as a covariation and with fit as a propensity score in matching method. The results of this study verified that (1) coalignment between motivation and technological capability is positively associated with attachment behaviour in M-SNG players; (2) M-SNG players who have a high coalignment between motivation and technological capability have stronger attachment behaviour compared to players with low coalignment; and (3) attachment behaviour is positively associated with continued use of M-SNGs. This study contributes to the literature by improving understanding of the antecedents of attachment and continued use in M-SNG players. For providers and developers, this study also provides insights into how to improve the business performance of M-SNGs.
A comparative study of RTC applications

Real-Time Communication (RTC) applications have become ubiquitous and are nowadays fundamental for people to communicate with friends and relatives, as well as for enterprises to allow remote working and save travel costs. Countless competing platforms differ in the ease of use, features they implement, supported user equipment and targeted audience (consumer of business). However, there is no standard protocol or interoperability mechanism. This picture complicates the traffic management, making it hard to isolate RTC traffic for prioritization or obstruction. Moreover, undocumented operation could result in the traffic being blocked at firewalls or middleboxes. In this paper, we analyze 13 popular RTC applications, from widespread consumer apps, like Skype and Whatsapp, to business platforms dedicated to enterprises - Microsoft Teams and Webex Teams. We collect packet traces under different conditions and illustrate similarities and differences in their use of the network. We find that most applications employ the well-known RTP protocol, but we observe a few cases of different (and even undocumented) approaches. The majority of applications allow peer-to-peer communication during calls with only two participants. Six of them send redundant data for Forward Error Correction or encode the user video at different bitrates. In addition, we notice that many of them are easy to identify by looking at the destination servers or the domain names resolved via DNS. The packet traces we collected, along with the metadata we extract, are made available to the community.
Audiovisual, Genre, Neural and Topical Textual Embeddings for TV Programme Content Representation

TV programmes have their contents described by multiple means: textual subtitles, audiovisual files, and metadata such as genres. In order to represent these contents, we develop vectorial representations for their low-level multimodal features, group them with simple clustering techniques, and combine them using middle and late fusion. For textual features, we use LSI and Doc2Vec neural embeddings; for audio, MFCC's and Bags of Audio Words; for visual, SIFT, and Bags of Visual Words. We apply our model to a dataset of BBC TV programmes and use a standard recommender and pairwise similarity matrices of content vectors to estimate viewers' behaviours. The late fusion of genre, audio and video vectors with both of the textual embeddings significantly increase the precision and diversity of the results.
Chronology of anthropedogenesis in the Omiya tableland, Japan, based on a 14C age profile of humic acid

Volcanic ash soils along the western edge of the Omiya tableland, Japan, are covered with thick anthropogenic soil horizons. The formation of anthropogenic soil horizons occurs because of the soil dressing practice known as “Dorotsuke,” where alluvial soil materials are deposited on fields and mixed with volcanic ash topsoil by tillage over the years. To clarify the chronology of this anthropedogenesis, carbon-14 (14C) age profiles were estimated using humic acid fractions from three pedons: an anthropogenic soil, an undressed Andosol, and a Fluvisol. Soil charcoal fragments were also dated to estimate maximum burial age. Charcoal fragments displayed vertically random age distributions, indicating that the fragments may have had multiple origins. However, the age of charcoal in the lower part of the anthropogenic soil horizons indicated that the initiation of anthropedogenesis occurred later than the late 13th century. The 14C age profile of humic acid in the Andosol exhibited little variation in age with depth in the subsoil. The 14C age profile of humic acid in the Fluvisol suggested that the humic acid fraction included allochthonous old carbon (C), although the soil itself had been formed from recent sediments. The 14C age profile of humic acid in the anthropogenic soil showed features of its two component soils. The 14C ages in the volcanic ash subsoil matched with those in the Andosol, whereas the ages increased in the anthropogenic soil horizons because of supplementation with old C from alluvial soil materials. However, the peak 14C ages occurred in the lower part of the anthropogenic horizons, whereas the middle part on the peak position displayed a gradual age-depth gradient. This feature was interpreted as a sign of 14C activity equilibrium throughout anthropedogenesis. On the basis of this postulated 14C activity equilibrium, the linear age-depth gradient at the peak position was derived from differences in burial time, and burial ages were calculated by estimating steady-state 14C. The calculated ages were lower than the charcoal ages. These age estimates suggest that anthropedogenesis was initiated in the Middle Ages and reached an intermediate stage before or during the first half of the Edo period.
The bacterial virulence factors rhamnolipids and their (R)-3-hydroxyalkanoate precursors activate Arabidopsis innate immunity through two independent mechanisms

Plant innate immunity is activated upon perception of invasion pattern molecules by plant cell-surface immune receptors. Several bacteria of the genera Pseudomonas and Burkholderia produce rhamnolipids (RLs) from L- rhamnose and (R)-3-hydroxyalkanoate precursors (HAAs). RL and HAA secretion is required to modulate bacterial surface motility, biofilm development, and thus successful colonization of hosts. Here, we show that the lipidic secretome from the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa mostly comprising RLs and HAAs stimulates Arabidopsis immunity. We demonstrate that HAAs are sensed by the bulb-type lectin receptor kinase LIPOOLIGOSACCHARIDE-SPECIFIC REDUCED ELICITATION/S-DOMAIN-1-29 (LORE/SD1-29) that also mediates medium-chain 3-hydroxy fatty acid (mc-3-OH-FA) perception in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. HAA sensing induces canonical immune signaling and local resistance to plant pathogenic Pseudomonas infection. By contrast, RLs trigger an atypical immune response and resistance to Pseudomonas infection independent of LORE. Thus, the glycosyl moieties of RLs, albeit abolishing sensing by LORE, do not impair their ability to trigger plant defense. In addition, our results show that RL-triggered immune response is affected by the sphingolipid composition of the plasma membrane. In conclusion, RLs and their precursors released by bacteria can both be perceived by plants but through distinct mechanisms. Significance Activation of plant innate immunity relies on the perception of microorganisms through self and nonself elicitors. Rhamnolipids and their precursor HAAs are exoproducts produced by beneficial and pathogenic bacteria. They are involved in bacterial surface dissemination and biofilm development. As these compounds are released in the extracellular milieu, they have the potential to be perceived by the plant immune system. Our work shows that both compounds independently activate plant immunity. We demonstrate that HAAs are perceived by the receptor protein kinase LORE. By contrast, rhamnolipids are not senses by LORE but activate a non-canonical immune response affected by the sphingolipid composition of the plant plasma membrane. Thus, plants are able to sense bacterial molecules as well as their direct precursors to trigger a distinct immune response.
Size-dependent eco-evolutionary feedbacks in fisheries

Harvesting may drive body downsizing along with population declines and decreased harvesting yields. These changes are commonly construed as consequences of direct harvest selection, where small-bodied, early-reproducing individuals are immediately favoured. However, together with directly selecting against a large body size, harvesting and body downsizing alter many ecological features, such as competitive and trophic interactions, and thus also indirectly reshape natural selection acting back on body sizes through eco-evolutionary feedback loops (EEFLs). We sketch plausible scenarios of simple EEFLs in which one-dimensional, density-dependent natural selection acts either antagonistically or synergistically with direct harvest selection on body size. Antagonistic feedbacks favour body-size stasis but erode genetic variability and associated body-size evolvability, and may ultimately impair population persistence and recovery. In contrast, synergistic feedbacks drive fast evolution towards smaller body sizes and favour population resilience, but may have far-reaching bottom-up or top-down effects. We illustrate the further complexities resulting from multiple environmental feedbacks using a co-evolving predator-prey pair, in which case outcomes from EEFLs depend not only on population densities, but also on whether prey sit above or below the optimal predator/prey body-size ratio, and whether prey are more or less evolvable than their predators. EEFLs improve our ability to understand and predict nature’s response to harvesting, but their integration into the research agenda will require a full consideration of the effects and dynamics of natural selection.
Click evoked Middle Ear Muscle Reflex: Implications for Medial Olivocochlear System Assays

This study describes a time series-based method of middle ear muscle reflex (MEMR) detection using bilateral clicks, with implications for otoacoustic emission (OAE)-based medial olivocochlear reflex (MOCR) assays. Although current click-based methods can detect changes in the OAE evoking stimulus to monitor the MEMR, these methods do not discriminate between true MEMR-mediated vs. artifactual changes in the stimulus. We measured MEMR in 20 young clinically normal hearing individuals using a series of clicks presented at six levels (65 to 95 dB peak-to-peak SPL in 6 dB steps). Results were well-approximated by double-exponential functions. The change in ear canal pressure due to MEMR increased monotonically as a function of click level but non-monotonically with frequency. MEMR thresholds estimated using this method were lower than that obtained from a clinical tympanometer in ~94% of the participants. It is recommended that the OAE-evoking stimulus be monitored to determine the presence of MEMR across a wide band of frequencies in MOCR assays. A time series-based method, along with statistical tests, may provide additional confidence in detecting the MEMR. MEMR effects were smallest at 2 kHz which may provide avenues for minimizing the MEMR influence on the MOCR.
Factors affecting depression in elderly patients with coronary heart disease and the effect of comprehensive nursing intervention

Objective: To analyze the risk factors of depression in elderly patients with coronary heart disease (CHD), and to explore the effect of comprehensive nursing care on improvements in depression and quality of life in such patients. Methods: In Phase I of this study, 192 patients admitted to the hospital from May to December, 2016 were selected as subjects, a case-control study was conducted to analyze the risk factors for depression in elderly patients with CHD. In Phase II of this study, 144 patients admitted to the hospital from January to June 2017 were randomized to either comprehensive nursing intervention (primarily cognitive behavioral psychological intervention and continuous nursing) or routine nursing. The effects of comprehensive nursing intervention on depression and quality of life were assessed in the patients. Results: In this study, the prevalence of depression in elderly patients with CHD was 49.0%. Univariate analysis revealed that age, women, education and income levels, course of disease and pain may be associated with depression in elderly patients with CHD. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that gender, longer course of disease, lower family income and insomnia were independent risk factors for depression in elderly patients with CHD. The adjusted odds ratios (OR) were 1.87 (95% CI: 1.19 to 2.30), 1.09 (95% CI: 1.04 to 1.1.14), 1.51 (95% CI: 1.17 to 1.86) and 1.94 (95% CI: 1.61 to 2.27), respectively. The improvements in the SDS scores and SF-36 quality of life scores in the comprehensive nursing intervention group were significantly greater than those in the routine nursing group. Conclusion: Women, longer course of disease, low family income and insomnia are independent risk factors for depression in elderly patients with CHD. Comprehensive nursing care results in greater improvements in depression and quality of life of the patients than routine nursing care.
Hepatoprotective role of fruit extract of Terminalia arjuna in acetaminophen intoxicated mice

Results: The fruit extract (400 mg/Kg) of the plant showed hepatoprotective effects upon pre-treatment for 5, 10 and 15 days and later challenged with acetaminophen (400 mg/Kg) for 3 days. The results showed substantial protective properties as there was comparatively less damage to the liver. Furthermore, the fruit extract of T. arjuna also exhibited hepatocurative effects when animals were given acetaminophen (400 mg/Kg) for 3 days to damage the liver followed by the treatment with the plant extract (400 mg/Kg) for 5, 10 and 15 days. The results also indicated hepatocurative activities, as the elevated serum levels of hepatic enzymes were inclining to normal ranges in a time-dependent manner.
Acclimatization of drought tolerance with Somaclonal variants of sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.)

Methods: CPF-248, a drought sensitive variety was used to induce stress tolerance using somaclonal variation approach. Various combinations of callogenesis and regeneration media were used to induce soma clonal variations. The plants, thus achieved, were subjected to drought selection pressure using different concentrations of PEG, the selected plants were referred as in vitro selected putative somaclonal variants 1 & 2 (IPSV1 & IPSV2). These two plants were then subjected to acclimatize under greenhouse conditions by planting them in soil filled plastic pots. The in vitro grown seedlings named as in vitro selected putative somaclonal variants along with parent plants were subjected to drought conditions by withholding watering for 8 days. After 10 days of treatment, data for photosynthetic and biochemical attributes were recorded and subjected to comparison. The activity of antioxidants enzymes like superoxide dismutase (SOD), ascorbate peroxidase (APX), catalase (CAT), peroxidase (POD), ascorbate and carotenoid contents was analyzed using standard protocols.
Dynamic Controller Instantiation in MEC-NFV based Software Defined Internet of Vehicles

Softwarization of vehicular networks has been a fundamental approach to deal with its dynamic topology along with requirements of scalability and flexible resource management in order to deploy future Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Despite Software-defined Vehicular Networks (SDVN) has gained momentum in industry and academia to tackle the aforementioned issues, some requirements such as on-demand allocation of network functions and scalability support are not yet satisfactorily addressed in current proposals. Even scalable solutions based on distributed and hierarchical SDN controllers are commonly deployed statically before the network operation. With the advent of network functions virtualization (NFV), it is expected that IoV will benefit from a standard architecture for dynamic instantiating of SDN controllers to provide an efficient solution for IoV management. This article proposes and evaluates a flexible and dynamic solution for the management of IoV through the synergy between SDN and NFV paradigms in order to provide on-demand instantiation of SDN controllers, as well as meet QoS requirements. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal in supporting the increasing demand for connected vehicles, reduction in packet loss, jitter control, and avoiding processing overhead when compared to the performance of traditional architecture.