Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical and Preclinical Applications of High-Frequency Ultrasound High-frequency ultrasound technology is set to emerge as a common clinical tool after decades of niche applications

Introduction Ultrasound is widely used for medical imaging, and many of us saw our kids for the first time as gray-scale images or 3-dimensional (3-D) surface renderings at the doctor’s office. Although clinical ultrasound made its debut a half century ago, enormous advances in technology and capability have taken place since then. Clinical ultrasound machines are now extremely powerful digital signal-processing engines, and tasks that may once have been done as postprocessing in a research lab are now performed in real time while a patient stares at a screen with a sense of awe (if not comprehension).
24 h pre-incubation of EA . hy 926 cells with angiotensin II regulates insulin-dependent activation of eNOS in a concentration-dependent manner

The rennin-angiotensin II system (RAS) and the insulin-PI3kinase signalling pathways cross-interact with important physiological and pathophysiological consequences for cells and the whole organism. Here, the effect of 24 h pre-incubation of EA.hy926 with two different concentrations of angiotensin II, on insulin-mediated activation of the PI3kinase-AKT-eNOS signalling was investigated. Quiescent EA.hy926 cells were treated with insulin (100 nM, 30 min) following 24 h pre-treatment with or without either 0.1 or 1 μM of angiotensin II. Cell lysates were immunoblotted for phospho AKT Ser-473, phospho eNOS Ser-1177 and normalized with β-actin. Homogenates of EA.hy926 treated with insulin in the presence or absence of 1 μM angiotensin II, were also subjected to nitric oxide synthase (NOS) activity assay using titrated arginine as substrate. To exclude cytotoxicity of the 1 μM angiotensin II concentration, Trypan blue cell viability assay as well as the microscopic examination of unstained and DAPI/Phalloidin stained EA.hy926 cells were undertaken. Insulin resulted in about 2 fold increase in phospho-eNOS Ser-1177 and 8 fold increase in phospho-AKT Ser-473 levels in treated compared to untreated cells. A 2 fold increase was observed in the NOS activity of insulin-treated and untreated cells preincubated with Ang II. 24 h pre-treatment with 0.1 μM Ang II did not significantly interfere with the responses to insulin but the 1 μM Ang II pre-treated EA.hy926 showed significant attenuated insulin induced phosphorylation of eNOS Ser-1177 and AKT Ser-473, alongside impaired NOS activity. The Ang II-treated cells showed normal nuclei and cytoskeletal architecture. Angiotensin II concentrationdependently regulated basal and insulin-mediated PI3Kinase-AKT-eNOS signalling in cultured endothelial cells.
Wavelength Conversion Devices Using Quasi-phase-matched LiNbO

This paper describes recent progress in research on wavelength converters that employ quasi-phasematched LiNbO3 (QPM-LN) waveguides. The basic structure and operating principle of these devices are also explained. The wavelength conversion characteristics, resistance to photorefractive damage, and optical parametric amplification characteristics of an annealed proton exchanged waveguide are presented. Polarization-independent wavelength conversion using a ridge waveguide fabricated on epitaxially grown LiNbO3 is also introduced. QPM-LN-based wavelength converters have several advantages: for example, they can convert high-speed signals of 1 THz or more, have no signal-to-noise ratio degradation and no modulation format dependence, and can simultaneously convert broadband wavelength division multiplexing channels. Therefore, they will be key devices in future photonic networks. Wavelength Conversion Devices Using Quasi-phase-matched LiNbO3 † NTT Photonics Laboratories Atsugi-shi, 243-0198 Japan E-mail: m-asobe@aecl.ntt. co.jp Selected Papers
Phytochemical Study of Underutilized Leaves of Cola Acuminata and C.Nitida

Cola acuminata is a tree that grows up to 20m tall, usually less in cultivation. The bole commonly branches close to the ground. It is claimed in Nigeria that the root has aphrodisiac property. It is used in the Borno area as a stimulant. The leaves, not specifically reported to contain any active principle, are also said to be taken in Borno as a stimulant (Burkill, 2000). The fruit is composed of up to 5 carpels, to 20cm long by 6cm broad, with as many as 14 seed covered with a white skin. The number of cotyledons is usually 3-5. The seeds are generally red or pink, but occasionally white. The latter are preferred, commanding a higher price and have special significance for ritual. A tree may have nuts of different colours, but self-pollinated white bearing trees produce only white nuts.
Implementing Haralick Features on GPU for Pavement Distress Detection

The condition of municipal roads has deteriorated in recent years, leading to pavement distress such as cracks or potholes. In order to enable road maintenance, pavement distress should be timely detected. However, manual investigation, which is still the most widely applied approach towards pavement assessment, puts maintenance personnel at risk and is time-consuming. During the last decade several efforts have been made to automatically assess the condition of the municipal roads without any human intervention. Vehicles are equipped with sensors or cameras in order to collect data related to pavement distress or record videos of the pavement surface. Yet, this data is usually not processed while driving, but it is instead saved persistently and later analyzed offline. As a result, a vast amount of memory is required to store the data and the available memory may not be sufficient. To reduce the amount of saved data, the authors have previously proposed a GPU-enabled pavement assessment approach based on the wavelet transform of pavement images. The GPU implementation enables pavement distress detection in real time. Although the method used in the approach provides very good results, the method can still be improved by incorporating pavement surface texture characteristics. This paper presents an implementation of Haralick features on GPU for pavement distress detection. Haralick features are based on gray tone spatial dependencies in an image and characterize the image texture. To evaluate the computational efficiency of the GPU implementation, performance tests are carried out. In addition, classification results obtained by applying the approach on 1000 pavement images are compared to the results without integrating Haralick features. The results of both tests show that reliable detection of pavement distress is achieved in real-time.
Inductive Data Flow Graphs Azadeh

The correctness of a sequential program can be shown by the annotation of its control flow graph with inductive assertions. We propose inductive data flow graphs, data flow graphs with incorporated inductive assertions, as the basis of an approach to verifying concurrent programs. An inductive data flow graph accounts for a set of dependencies between program actions in interleaved thread executions, and therefore stands as a representation for the set of concurrent program traces which give rise to these dependencies. The approach first constructs an inductive data flow graph and then checks whether all program traces are represented. The size of the inductive data flow graph is polynomial in the number of data dependencies (in a sense that can be made formal); it does not grow exponentially in the number of threads unless the data dependencies do. The approach shifts the burden of the exponential explosion towards the check whether all program traces are represented, i.e., to a combinatorial problem (over finite graphs).
Numerical Investigation of Separation of Air-Water Upward Flow and Experimental – CFD Flow Map and Pressure Drop Comparison

In this study a series of numerical studies of air-water two-phase flow inside a vertical rectangular pipe are discussed. The main purpose is the investigation of partial separation of the mixture. The separator under investigation is a cavity (Plexiglas box) placed in the middle of the wide side of the pipe. The cross section of the test pipe is 25 x 55 mm and the total length is 755 mm. A series of CFD tests were carried out using Fluent 16. The flow phenomena of one constant water flow rate (33.3 L/min) with five increasing air volume rates (5, 14, 25, 36 and 53 L/min) were examined. Two cases were simulated. Initially, the separation performance was applied by applying one separator. Subsequently, the effect of applying a second separator facing the first one across the opposite side of the test pipe was investigated. The Volume of Fluid multiphase model (VOF) combined with the standard and ReNormalisation Group (RNG) k-ε turbulence models were selected for the simulations. A flow map was designed based on theoretical calculations and experimental observations in a new a laboratory facility. Moreover, the theoretical pressure drops of multiphase flow with the homogeneous and the Friedel model were calculated. Keywords— air-water flow; efficiency separation; VOF; pressure drop;
DEIM Forum 2018 P 5-2 Context-Sensitive Query Auto-Completion with Knowledge Base

Query auto completion (QAC) is one of the most prominent features of a modern search engine. Current QAC algorithms mostly rank QAC candidates based on their past popularity, for example, frequency. Due to the long-tail distribution of query frequency, the frequency-based QAC algorithms deliver poor prediction results when the frequencies of users’ queries are low. In our work, we observe that the high semantic similarity between queries in the same session can be used to improve the prediction quality when the query frequency is very low. We propose a semantic QAC algorithm, which ranks the candidates according to the similarity between context and query. The semantic similarity is computed based on the knowledge base. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Thermal Properties of a Prototype Permanent Magnetized Electrical Motor Embedded in a Rim Driven Thruster

For machine designs it is usually the thermal limits that sets the boundaries for how high the power density of a machine can be. This paper shows calculations of losses and temperatures together with temperature measurements on a 100 kW surface mounted radial flux permanent machine (SM RFPM). The special feature of this machine is that it is totally enclosed in water, which yields very good cooling. The measurements confirm this.
Maternal Depression , Parental Investments and Early Child Development : Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

We evaluate the impact of maternal depression on parental investment and children’s human capital development, exploiting a cluster-randomized control trial that provided cognitive behavioral therapy to women diagnosed with depression in their third trimester of pregnancy. The trial, conducted in rural Pakistan, was highly successful in reducing postnatal depression. We conducted a followup study when the children were age 7 and assessed their cognitive, socio-emotional and physical development, parental investments in children, indicators of the quality of parenting, and of the home environment. We find that treated mothers exhibited significantly better parenting behaviors both during infancy and at the age 7 followup, providing a better home environment and investing more in their children’s education. Our results are robust to conservative adjustments for attrition and are not driven by differential shocks to treated clusters. We find weak evidence of improvements in physical development and health but no detectable effects on children’s cognitive or socio-emotional development at age 7. Since we find sustained reinforcing parental investments in many domains in the treated group, it is also unlikely that the limited effects on child development are explained by unobserved compensating investments in the control group. Furthermore, ∗University of Melbourne. Email: victoria.baranov@unimelb.edu. au †University of Essex. Email: srbhal@essex.ac. uk ‡University of Zurich. Email: pietro.biroli@uzh.ch §University of North Carolina. Email: joanna.maselko@unc.edu The authors thank Grand Challenges Canada for funding this research under their Saving Brains programme Grant Number #0072-03. We also thank the Human Development Research Foundation for providing support for the original trial. We received helpful feedback from James Fenske, Satadru Mukherjee, Kjell Salvanes, Siham Sikander, Agne Suziedelyte, Atif Rahman and seminar and conference participants at Oxford, IFS, University of Sydney, CSAE, PacDev, and RES. All errors and opinions are our own. a comparison of control children to children from baseline non-depressed mothers reveals little difference in cognitive development and physical growth though significant differences in socio-emotional development and illness. We conclude that there are possibly positive but latent effects of the intervention that may be detectable in later life. JEL Classification Codes: I15, I30, O15
Alpine Common Property Institutions under Change : Conditions for Successful and Unsuccessful Collective Action of Alpine Farmers in the Canton Graubünden of Switzerland

The goal to protect and sustainably manage alpine summer pastures is stated in the Swiss state law since 1996 and direct subsidy payments from the state for summer pasturing have been bound to sustainability criteria since 2000 reflecting the increasing value of the alpine cultural landscape as a public good. However, the provision of the public good remains in the hands of the local farmers and their local common pool resource (CPR) institutions to manage the alpine pastures and those institutions increasingly struggle with upholding their institutional arrangements particularly regarding the communal work, called Gemeinwerk, necessary to maintain the pastures. This paper examines two case studies of local CPR institutions to manage alpine pastures in the canton Graubünden of Switzerland manifesting different institutional developments in the light of changing conditions. Explanations for the unequal reactions to change and their impacts on the provision of the CPR are provided by focusing on relative prices, bargaining power and ideology as drivers of institutional change often neglected within common property research.
Long-Term Changes of Open-Surface Water Bodies in the Yangtze River Basin Based on the Google Earth Engine Cloud Platform

The spatiotemporal changes of open-surface water bodies in the Yangtze River Basin (YRB) have profound influences on sustainable economic development, and are also closely relevant to water scarcity in China. However, long-term changes of open-surface water bodies in the YRB have remained poorly characterized. Taking advantage of the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud platform, this study processed 75,593 scenes of Landsat images to investigate the long-term changes of open-surface water bodies in the YRB from 1984 to 2018. In this study, we adopted the percentile-based image composite method to collect training samples and proposed a multiple index water detection rule (MIWDR) to quickly extract the open-surface water bodies. The results indicated that (1) the MIWDR is suitable for the long-term and large-scale Landsat water bodies mapping, especially in the urban regions. (2) The areas of permanent water bodies and seasonal water bodies were 29,076.70 km2 and 21,526.24 km2, accounting for 57.46% and 42.54% of the total open-surface water bodies in the YRB, respectively. (3) The permanent water bodies in the YRB increased along with the decreases in the seasonal water bodies from 1984 to 2018. In general, the total open-surface surface water bodies in the YRB experienced an increasing trend, with an obvious spatial heterogeneity. (4) The changes of open-surface water bodies were associated with the climate changes and intense human activities in the YRB, however, the influences varied among different regions and need to be further investigated in the future.
The simplest case : the simplified Randles cell

Usually, EIS measurements are performed in 2 steps: a stabilization step followed by an acquisition step. The first is necessary in order to ensure that the impedance is determined when the system has reached its stationary state. In this work, a theoretical framework is proposed for estimating the required stabilization time for EIS measurements. Here, it was applied to the simplest case: the simplified Randles cell. In order to calculate the required stabilization time for performing EIS measurements, a theoretical dynamic model of a Randles cell under galvanostatic sinusoidal perturbation was developed. The proposed model can be used to estimate, from a theoretical point of view, the required stabilization time for performing EIS measurements in a Randles-like system. Even though, this work focuses on the simplest case, the developed theoretical framework can be applied to any system, however complex it may be.
Size and abundance of deep water shrimps on the continental slope of the SE Gulf of California , Mexico

Deep water shrimps were collected with a benthic sledge in the southeastern Gulf of California, Mexico. One species of Dendrobranchiata (Benthesicymus tanneri) and three species of Caridea (Acanthephyra brevicarinata, Heterocarpus affinis, Pandalopsis ampla) are considered exploitable species for their maximum body size and distribution in the area. Samples of benthic fauna were obtained at depths between 600 and 2250 m, and maximum abundance for these species was observed in the 800-1400 m depth range. All four species feature a high tolerance to hypoxic conditions (expressed in ml O2/l) and were mostly sampled in environments with less than 1.0 ml O2/l. Ranges of dissolved oxygen values (ml/l) were: H. affinis, 0.13 to 0.79; P. ampla, 0.38 to 0.87; B. tanneri, 0.38 to 1.46; A. brevicarinata, 0.38 to 2.50. Maximum body size and individual fresh weight obtained for these species were: H. affinis, 153 mm TL, 23 g; P. ampla 168 mm TL, 25 g; B. tanneri, 121 mm TL, 19 g; A. brevicarinata, 113 mm, 11 g. Highest catch during the survey was approximately 1.00 kg/ha, fresh weight, for H. affinis and 1.95 kg/ha for all four species. This figure is obviously underestimated due to the sampling device used during the survey.
Trusted Mobile Computing

Mobility leads to unplanned interactions between computer systems as people use devices to access services in varied environments. Before two systems agree to interact, they must trust that each will satisfy the security and privacy requirements of the other. In this paper we introduce trust overlays, a systematic approach to building such trust. Our solution exploits the increasing availability of trusted computing hardware on commodity systems, including portable computers. We argue that key pieces of this solution are coming into place, for example ways to dynamically establish a distributed trusted computing base. We also point out that difficult challenges remain, for example how to set compatible security policies across administrative domains.
Energy Room Impulse Response Prediction by an Extended Image Source / Hierarchical Radiosity Combined Method

This paper presents a combined method for the prediction of the energy impulse response in rooms where the boundaries are composed of surfaces with reflection characteristics that are a mixture of specular and diffuse components. The specularly reflected components are obtained by an extended image source method with statistical addition of late reverberation, whereas the diffusely reflected components are calculated by a time-dependent hierarchical radiosity method. Each of the methods is operated independently, with the diffusivity coefficients of the surfaces establishing the only link between them. Accelerating techniques for the extended image source method will be portrayed and, regarding the hierarchical radiosity method, implementation issues will be highlighted. Prediction results will be shown, and a discussion on the flexibility, accuracy and low computation times achieved by this new combined method will be given.
University of Birmingham The University of Birmingham 2019 Spoken CALL Shared Task Systems: Exploring the importance of word order in text processing

This paper describes the systems developed by the University of Birmingham for the 2019 Spoken CALL Shared Task (ST) challenge. The task is automatic assessment of grammatical and semantic aspects of English spoken by German-speaking Swiss teenagers. Our system has two main components: automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text processing (TP). We use the ASR system that we developed for 2018 ST challenge. This is a DNN-HMM system based on sequence training with the state-level minimal Bayes risk criteria. It achieved word-error-rates (WER) of 8.89% for the ST2 test set and 10.94% for the ST3 test set. This paper focuses on development of the TP component. In particular, we explore machine learning (ML) approaches which preserve different degrees of word order. The ST responses are represented as vectors using Word2Vec and Doc2Vec models and the similarities between ASR transcriptions and reference responses are calculated using Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) and Dynamic Programming (DP). A baseline rule-based TP system obtained a D full score of 5.639 and 5.476 for the ST2 and ST3 test set, respectively. The best ML-based TP, consisting of a Word2Vec model trained on the ST data, DP-based similarity calculation and a neural network, achieved D full score of 7.379 and 5.740 for ST2 and ST3 test sets, respectively.
era Pose Esti m ation Based on Keypoints Matching with Pre-Captured Set of Real I m ages

In this paper, we propose a method for camera pose estimation based on keypoints matching with images capturing the target scene from multiple viewpoints. For estimating camera pose from an image, 3D structure of the target scene is needed. Then a set of correspondences between 2D position in the image and 3D positions in the target scene provides the camera pose by solving Perspective-n-Point problem. Image keypoints are used as these positions, but finding corresponding 3D positions of the 3D structure is not easy problem even if a 3D textured model of the target scene is given. This is because the appearance of each 3D position is not always the same. In order to solve this problem, we adopt real images as a source of keypoints contained in the database. Real image represents accurate appearance for each 3D position, so keypoint matching with the input images can be more accurate. We constructed database based on the keypoint using the local image feature derived from real images and evaluated the accuracy of camera pose estimation. The result showed that the database constructed by our method is effective to accurate camera tracking.