Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of biexcitons on the relaxation mechanisms of polaritons in III-nitride based multiple quantum well microcavities

We report on the direct observation of biexcitons in a III-nitride based multiple quantum well microcavity operating in the strong light-matter coupling regime by means of nonresonant continuous wave and time-resolved photoluminescence at low temperature. First, the biexciton dynamics is investigated for the bare active medium (multiple quantum wells alone) evidencing localization on potential fluctuations due to alloy disorder and thermalization between both localized and free excitonic and biexcitonic populations. Then, the role of biexcitons is considered for the full microcavity: in particular, we observe that for specific detunings the bottom of the lower polariton branch is directly fed by the radiative dissociation of either cavity biexcitons or excitons mediated by one LO-phonon. Accordingly, minimum polariton lasing thresholds are observed, when the bottom of the lower polariton branch corresponds in energy to the exciton or cavity biexciton first LO-phonon replica. This singular observation highlights the role of excitonic molecules in the polariton condensate formation process as being a more efficient relaxation channel when compared to the usually assumed acoustical phonon emission one.
Individual specialization and the seeds of adaptive radiation in Darwin’s finches

Background: Empirical and theoretical studies suggest that individual specialization can be an important force in evolutionary diversification. However, few studies of natural populations have explicitly considered the impact of individual specialization on adaptive divergence. Questions: To what extent do individuals within a bimodal Darwin’s finch population specialize on different resources? Is this individual specialization likely to enhance adaptive divergence? Field site: El Garrapatero, Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos, Ecuador. Organism: A population of the medium ground finch, Geospiza fortis, showing large – and bimodal – morphological and genetic variation resulting from ecologically based adaptive divergence. Methods: We described the diets of individual G. fortis through feeding observations in the wild. We calculated several indices of individual specialization. We then examined the relationship between individual specialization, adaptive morphological traits (beak and head dimensions), and neutral genetic variation (microsatellites). We also performed a cluster analysis on the basis of individual foraging observations and asked whether the clusters were morphologically and genetically divergent. Results: We found significant levels of individual specialization and expected, but weak, associations between individual diet differences, morphological traits, and neutral genetic variation. The cluster analysis yielded two distinct diet-clusters of individuals that differed in morphological traits but not in neutral genetic markers. In the early stages of adaptive radiation, individual specialization appears to be associated with morphological divergence but not neutral genetic divergence.
Grinding wheel condition monitoring with boosted classifiers

In this thesis, two data sets collected in grinding process under different cutting and wheel conditions were studied. One is the cutting forces in three directions, i.e. X, Y and Z, collected under two different cutting conditions. The other one is the acoustic emission (AE) signals collected under different wheel conditions(sharp and dull). For the goal of grinding wheel condition monitoring, the regression model with autocorrelated errors was proved to be effective and was used to extract features from signals in this study. The coefficients of the models served as the features used in the classification step that employed boosting method. Based on the AdaBoost and Aboosting algorithms which can only be used in two classes situation, two improved boosting methods called Adaboost-M and A-boosting-M, which can be used to classify multiple classes, are proposed. With the forces data set, we compared Adaboost-M and A-boosting-M against the traditional AdaBoost.M1 and the corresponding weak learners(KNN and Prototype). The accuracies of Adaboost-M and A-boosting-M are higher than that of AdaBoost.M1 and the weak learners in our application. With the AE data set, our focus is to recognize the signals collected when the wheels were dull from the signals collected when the wheels were sharp. The AdaBoost, A-boosting and the corresponding weak learners(KNN and Proto) were used. The results indicate that (i) boosting does not improve the effectiveness of k-nearest neighbor but greatly improve the effectives of the prototype classifier, (ii) depending upon the data, AdaBoost or A-
Automatic Extraction of Facade Details of Heritage Building UsingTerrestrial Laser Scanning Data

The Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) has become an interesting technology in various fields. The architecture and heritage fields benefit more and more of this technology. In the heritage field, TLS data and derived products are used to complete the digital archive of cultural sites all over the world. Among these cultural sites, we deal with the historical Moroccan sites, especially the old Medina. The rehabilitation of the old Medina requires the reconstruction of facade planes. For that purpose, Moroccan authorities need a precise inventory of all facades. The planes extracted from 3D point cloud provide the desired results. However, the manual process is too long and sometimes difficult. Automatic methods of plane recognition including the point cloud segmentation are generally based on geometric approaches which fail to identify some facade details of such heritage buildings. In this context, we propose a new automatic approach of point cloud segmentation. This approach relies on all the components of a colored point--both geometric and radiometric--combining the RGB values, laser intensity and geometric data. Our approach also includes a new method to filter the segmentation result through Delaunay triangulation. The last step of our processing is the facade and detail contour detection that is based on alpha-shape algorithm to find interior and exterior boundaries. Experiments are performed on facades presenting an example of old Medina architecture located in Casablanca’s Medina. Results show the importance of integrating all point cloud components for the detail facades extraction and planes establishment.
ScottyActivity: Mixed Discrete-Continuous Planning with Convex Optimization

The state of the art practice in robotics planning is to script behaviors manually, where each behavior is typically generated using trajectory optimization. However, in order for robots to be able to act robustly and adapt to novel situations, they need to plan these activity sequences autonomously. Since the conditions and effects of these behaviors are tightly coupled through time, state and control variables, many problems require that the tasks of activity planning and trajectory optimization are considered together. There are two key issues underlying effective hybrid activity and trajectory planning: the sufficiently accurate modeling of robot dynamics and the capability of planning over long horizons. Hybrid activity and trajectory planners that employ mixed integer programming within a discrete time formulation are able to accurately model complex dynamics for robot vehicles, but are often restricted to relatively short horizons. On the other hand, current hybrid activity planners that employ continuous time formulations can handle longer horizons but they only allow actions to have continuous effects with constant rate of change, and restrict the allowed state constraints to linear inequalities. This is insufficient for many robotic applications and it greatly limits the expressivity of the problems that these approaches can solve. In this work we present the ScottyActivity planner, that is able to generate practical hybrid activity and motion plans over long horizons by employing recent methods in convex optimization combined with methods for planning with relaxed plan graphs and heuristic forward search. Unlike other continuous time planners, ScottyActivity can solve a broad class of robotic planning problems by supporting convex quadratic constraints on state variables and control variables that are jointly constrained and that affect multiple state variables simultaneously. In order to support planning over long horizons, ScottyActivity does not resort to time, state or control variable discretization. While straightforward formulations of consistency checks are not convex and do not scale, we present an efficient convex formulation, in the form of a Second Order Cone Program (SOCP), that is very fast to solve. We also introduce several new realistic domains that demonstrate the capabilities and scalability of our approach, and their simplified linear versions, that we use to compare with other state of the art planners. This work demonstrates the power of integrating advanced convex optimization techniques with discrete search methods and paves the way for extensions dealing with non-convex disjoint constraints, such as obstacle avoidance.
A microscopic view on contact angle selection

We discuss the equilibrium condition for a liquid that partially wets a solid on the level of intermolecular forces. By using a mean field continuum description, we generalize the capillary pressure from variation of the free energy and show at what length scale the equilibrium contact angle is selected. After recovering Young’s law for homogeneous substrates, it is shown how hysteresis of the contact angle can be incorporated in a self-consistent fashion. In all cases, the liquid-vapor interface takes a nontrivial shape, which is compared to models using a disjoining pressure.
Density Oscillator: Analysis of Flow Dynamics and Stability

Two open containers filled with fluids of different density and connected by a vertical capillary tube can approach their thermodynamical equilibrium via an oscillatory flow. The temporal evolution of flow velocities was measured quantitatively. Data on the critical values determining the flow reversal are extracted yielding a simple dependence of the critical level of heavy fluid as a function of the density ratio and the length of the capillary. A novel theoretical description of the system is presented which is based on a one-fluid model and a steady-state approximation for a two-dimensional flow. Theoretical results are in good agreement with the experimental data.
Using Voice Quality Supervectors for Affect Identification

The voice quality of speech sounds often conveys perceivable information about the speaker’s affect. This study proposes perceptually important voice quality features to recognize affect represented in speech excerpts from individuals with mental, neurological, and/or physical disabilities. The voice quality feature set consists of F0, harmonic amplitude differences be-tween the ﬁrst, second, fourth harmonics and the harmonic near 2 kHz, the center frequency and amplitudes of the ﬁrst 3 formants, and cepstral peak prominence. The feature distribution of each utterance was represented with a supervector, and the Gaussian mixture model and support vector machine classiﬁers were used for affect classiﬁcation. Similar classiﬁcation systems using the MFCCs and ComParE16 feature set were implemented. The systems were fused by taking the conﬁdence mean of the classiﬁers. Applying the fused system to the Interspeech 2018 Atypical Affect subchallenge task resulted in unweighted average recalls of 43.9% and 41.0% on the development and test dataset, respectively. Additionally, we investigated clusters obtained by unsupervised learning to address gender-related differences.
Dynamic depletion attraction between colloids suspended in a phase-separating binary liquid mixture

Understanding interactions between colloids (or nanoparticles) immersed in a phase-separating binary mixture is of both fundamental and technological importance. Here we report a novel type of interparticle attractive interaction of a purely dynamic origin, which is found by a coarse-grained numerical simulation. Due to surface wetting effects, there are strong diffusion fluxes towards particles just after the initiation of phase separation of the matrix binary liquid mixture. The flux in the region between particles soon becomes weaker than that in the other regions since the depletion zones formed around particles overlap selectively between the particles. The resulting imbalance of the diffusion flux induces interparticle attractive interactions, i.e., the osmotic force pushes particles closer. We confirm that this wetting-induced ‘dynamic’ depletion force can be stronger than a van der Waals force and a capillary force that is induced by the interfacial tension, and thus plays a dominant role in the early stage of particle aggregation. We note that this novel interaction originating from the momentum conservation law may be generic to particles acting as diffusional sinks or sources.
Sub-clinical uterine infection is associated with altered amino acid concentrations of follicular fluid in early lactation dairy cows

The effect of sub-clinical endometritis (scEndo) in early lactation on follicular amino acid (AA) concentrations was determined. On D21 and D42 postpartum cows were classified as having scEndo or Clean based on uterine cytology; >18% polymorphonuclear (PMN) cells amongst uterine nucleated cells. On D21 and D42, 35% and 7% of cows respectively were classified as having scEndo, with a large proportion of scEndo cows having self-resolved the infection by D42. Follicular histidine (P = 0.04), as well as alanine, aspartate and serine concentrations (P <0.1) were higher in scEndo compared with Clean cows. The effect of change in uterine status from D21 to D42 resulted in increased (P <0.1) follicular glutamate, ornithine and valine concentrations in cows that resolved infection. Correlation coefficients were determined to test the relationship between plasma and follicular AA concentrations. A greater number of AA in Resolved cows showed no relationship between plasma and follicular concentrations compared to Clean cows. Thus, scEndo is associated with an increase in follicular histidine and an increase in the concentration of several AA when a uterine infection is resolved. This study demonstrates that scEndo may be responsible for long-term alterations in follicular AA concentrations that could potentially result in altered oocyte viability. Kewords: follicle; amino acid; sub-clinical infection; dairy cow.
Influence of acoustic complexity on spatial release from masking and lateralization.

In realistic listening scenarios, humans are extremely skillful in following one particular talker even in the presence of many others (i.e., the cocktail party effect). One aspect of this is the ability of a listener to make use of the spatial separation between different sound sources. In a complex acoustic scene, as interferers are moved away from the spatial position of the target, speech intelligibility (SI) increases, often referred to as spatial release from masking (SRM). This benefit is largely based on the listeners’ ability to make use of interaural level differences (ILD) and interaural time differences (ITD), which vary with the source location. While many studies have explored SRM, few have investigated the effects of overall number and spatial distribution of interferers while controlling for monaural masking effects. In the present study, speech reception thresholds (SRTs) and lateralization thresholds were measured over headphones in babble noise conditions consisting of 2, 4, 8 and 12 talkers. The perceived locations of the signal (female voice) and individual maskers (male, time-reversed voices) were steered separately either to the left or to the right using 680 μsec ITDs. For a fixed number of maskers, the distribution of interfering talkers (i.e., co-located or separated from the target) was varied. Thus, for all conditions with the same number of maskers, the monaural SNR was held constant regardless of the perceived spatial distribution. The performance between the speech and lateralization tasks was highly correlated. No substantial SRM occurred while one or more maskers were co-located with the target. Interestingly, spatially shifting the last 2 co-located interferers resulted in the same SRM, independent of the overall number of maskers. The same finding was found for the last 4 co-located maskers. The results suggest that SRM is independent of the overall number of interfering talkers.
– SPECIAL SESSION ON “ SIGNAL PROCESSING FOR RADAR IMAGING ” OPTIMISED IMAGE AUTOFOCUSING FOR POLARIMETRIC ISAR

The use of full polarisation enables multi-channel SAR processing for enhancing both imaging and classification capabilities. In the field of Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) very little has been investigated, especially from the point of view of multi-channel ISAR image formation. In this paper, the authors want to define an optimised image autofocusing technique that exploits full polarisation information. Theory and simulation results will be provided in the paper.
1 Biopolymer-based Aerogel Bead Production via Jet 2 Cutting Method 3

The aim of this work is to develop a method to produce spherical biopolymer-based aerogel 10 particles, which is capable for scale up in the future. Therefore, jet cutting method is suggested. Amidated 11 pectin and sodium alginate were used as precursor (1-3 wt.-% solution) for particle production via jet 12 cutting. Gelation was realized via two methods: internal setting method (using calcium carbonate particles 13 as cross-linker and citric and acidic acid for pH adjustment) and diffusion method (in calcium chloride 14 solutions). Gel particles were subjected to solvent exchange to ethanol and consequent supercritical drying 15 with CO2. Spherical aerogel particles with narrow particle size distribution in the range of 400 to 1500 μm 16 and with specific surface area of around 500 m2/g could be produced. Overall, it can be concluded that jet 17 cutting method is suitable for aerogel particle production, although the shape of the particles is not 18 perfectly spherical in all cases. However, parameter adjustment might lead to even better shaped particles 19 in further work. Moreover, the biopolymer-based aerogel particles synthesized in this study were tested 20 as humidity absorber in drying units for home appliances, particularly for dishwashers. It could be shown 21 that for several cycles of absorption and desorption of humidity aerogel particles are stable with an 22 absorption capacity of around 20 wt. -%. 23
Effect of Acute High Intensity Interval Exercise and Energy Balance on Plasma Acylated Ghrelin Concentrations

Ghrelin is an appetite-stimulating hormone produced mainly in the stomach and duodenum. Poor ghrelin control is often caused by obesity-related hyperinsulinemia, which fails to suppress ghrelin and results in excess appetite and higher body fat storage that perpetuates even greater fat accumulation. High intensity exercise has been shown to acutely decrease plasma acylated ghrelin concentrations in healthy weight individuals. However, the evidence for how exercise affects ghrelin in obese individuals is currently lacking. PURPOSE: To compare the effects of high intensity interval exercise on acute plasma acylated ghrelin levels in obese and non-obese males. METHODS: Eighteen subjects with a mean age of 29.8 yr. (± 7.6) were assessed for body fat percent (BF%), acylated ghrelin and hunger. Subjects included 9 nonobese men (BF% mean= 13.7 ± 3.6) and 9 obese men (BF% mean = 31.7 ± 4.7) who agreed to participate in this study. Using a crossover design, participants were randomly assigned to an exercise or control condition, with each subject acting as their own control. The exercise trial consisted of participants cycling at high intensity intervals for 20 minutes (not including the 5 minute warmup and cool down) at a rate of 65% to 85% of their heart rate reserve on a cycle ergometer followed by 60 minutes of rest. The control trial consisted of 90 minutes of rest. Blood samples (3-4ml) were collected at baseline, 0.5, 1, and 1.5 hours post-intervention. Acylated ghrelin concentrations were determined from plasma. Hunger was assessed using a 10-point Likert-type scale while blood samples were being drawn. Group means for plasma ghrelin concentrations between groups were analyzed using an independent t-test. The effect of exercise on ghrelin was analyzed using paired t-test. The relationship between perceived hunger and ghrelin was assessed using Pearson correlations. RESULTS: Baseline plasma ghrelin levels were significantly higher in the non-obese group when compared to the obese group (t = 3.43, p = .036). While exercise was effective in reducing plasma acylated ghrelin levels in the non-obese group (t = 2.34, p = .047), no significant changes were found in acylated ghrelin in the obese group between baseline or any time point following the exercise intervention. CONCLUSIONS: The low resting levels of plasma ghrelin concentrations exhibited by the obese subjects, when compared to non-obese subjects, may result in long fasting periods that lead to hypoglycemia and a hyperinsulinemic response at the next eating opportunity. Furthermore, the lack of reduction in ghrelin following exercise may result in an overconsumption of energy. Both the sustained ghrelin with associated excess energy intake and the hyperinsulinemia may result in sustained or increased fat storage in obese individuals. INDEX WORDS: Ghrelin, Obesity, Exercise Effect of Acute High Intensity Interval Exercise and Energy Balance on Plasma Acylated Ghrelin Concentrations
Supplementary Material : Part-Aligned Bilinear Representations for Person Re-Identification

We show the additional visualization examples of feature maps on the MARS dataset in Figure 7. For a given input image (left), appearance maps (center) and part maps (right) encode the appearance and body parts, respectively. It shows how the appearance maps differentiate different persons while being invariant for each person. By contrast, the part maps encode the body parts independently from their appearance.
Restructuring of XML Documents in the Form of Ontologies

— The intense use of the web has made it a very changing environment, its content is in permanent evolution to adapt to the demands. The standards have accompanied this evolution by passing from standards that regroup data with their presentations without any structuring such as HTML, to standards that separate both and give more importance to the structural aspect of the content such as XML standard and its derivatives. Currently, with the appearance of the Semantic Web, ontologies become increasingly present on the web and standards that allow their representations as OWL and RDF/RDFS begin to gain momentum. This paper provided an automatic method that converts XML schema document to ontologies represented in OWL.