Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Mobility-Supported Routing Mechanism in Industrial IoT Networks

Nowadays, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has emerged as a promising paradigm for the future network, which intends to connect all kinds of objects, including smart home equipment and intelligent drive devices. Despite the fact that IIoT routing has already attracted a lot of attention from both academia and industry, current researches on IIoT routing cannot effectively solve the mobility problem in a self-adaptive and self-organized manner, because the number of IIoT devices connected is extremely large, and mobility is a very important feature of these IIoT devices. In this paper, a novel routing mechanism based on probability calculation and segment routing is proposed to solve the mobility and scalability problem in IIoT routing. On the one hand, probability calculation can address the extremely unbalanced load condition caused by mobility by forwarding packets to different routings with a certain probability. On the other hand, segment routing enables scalability and flexibility for packet forwarding, and it can also be used to bypass the over-loaded links, thus to achieve load balance. Finally, the simulation results indicate that the proposed mechanism not only solves the mobility problem effectively but also achieves a better performance in many aspects.
A Composite Sliding Mode Controller for Wind Power Extraction in Remotely Located Solar PV–Wind Hybrid System

Ensuring electrification of remote locations continues to be a major challenge for power engineers. To deal with the effect of intermittent nature of wind, this paper presents the design and implementation of a composite sliding mode controller (CSMC) for a battery energy storage (BES) supported solar photovoltaic (PV)–wind hybrid system in a remote location. This control technique comprises of a soft-switching sliding-mode observer (SS-SMO) and a nonsingular terminal sliding mode controller (NTSMC). The SS-SMO is used to observe the disturbances, whereas the NTSMC is used as a speed controller. The chattering problem caused by the conventional sliding mode controller is alleviated by replacing the conventional signum switching function with the smooth hyperbolic tangent function in disturbance observer loop. The fast and finite time convergence NTSMC based speed controller along with the SS-SMO based disturbance rejection unit, serves the benefits of CSMC. This technique exhibits robustness against model uncertainties and external disturbances. Moreover, the complexity of the system is reduced by replacing the mechanical speed and position sensors with parameter estimation. A double-stage configuration using a dc/dc boost converter is adopted for a PV system. A comparative analysis is presented between the proposed and conventional techniques. A prototype of the hybrid system is developed in the laboratory with permanent magnet synchronous generator. The CSMC-based controller with disturbance rejection ability is implemented to harvest peak wind power. A perturb and observe maximum power point tracking technique is adopted to harvest peak solar power. A voltage control technique is adopted to maintain the voltage at the point of common coupling.
A Novel Stick–Slip Piezoelectric Actuator Based on a Triangular Compliant Driving Mechanism

There is a growing demand for positioning actuators with a higher resolution, accuracy, speed, and driving force. Various piezoelectric actuators have been proposed to meet these requirements; however, they all have inherent limitations. This paper presents a novel high-performance piezoelectric actuator that can overcome the limitations of existing designs. It is based on the stick–slip actuation principle and makes use of coupling motions of the proposed triangular driving mechanism to generate a clamping action during the “stick” phase and a releasing action during the “slip” phase. Unlike existing driving mechanisms based on similar principles, the proposed actuator can employ its unique structure to amplify the clamping force and the related driving force by using a large design triangular angle. Apart from its superior performance in driving force, it is interestingly found that its driving speed performance also improves when the design angle is increased. Finite-element analysis and experiments are carried out to justify the superior performance of the proposed actuator. In comparison with existing actuator prototypes based on similar principles, a prototype of the proposed actuator, even driven with a lower input voltage, achieves an 11 times larger driving load and a 3 times higher free-load driving speed.
Reducing RF-induced Heating near Implanted Leads through High-Dielectric Capacitive Bleeding of Current (CBLOC)

Patients with implanted medical devices such as deep brain stimulation or spinal cord stimulation are often unable to receive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This is because once the device is within the radiofrequency (RF) field of the MRI scanner, electrically conductive leads act as antenna, amplifying the RF energy deposition in the tissue and causing possible excessive tissue heating. Here we propose a novel concept in lead design in which 40cm lead wires are coated with a ~1.2mm layer of high dielectric constant material (155 < εr < 250) embedded in a weakly conductive insulation (σ = 20 S/m). The technique called High-Dielectric Capacitive Bleeding of Current, or CBLOC, works by forming a distributed capacitance along the lengths of the lead, efficiently dissipating RF energy before it reaches the exposed tip. Measurements during RF exposure at 64 MHz and 123 MHz demonstrated that CBLOC leads generated 20-fold less heating at 1.5 T, and 40-fold less heating at 3 T compared to control leads. Numerical simulations of RF exposure at 297 MHz (7T) predicted a 15-fold reduction in specific absorption rate (SAR) of RF energy around the tip of CBLOC leads compared to control leads.
A Model Repair Approach Based on Petri Nets by Constructing Free-Loop Structures

Information systems are increasingly used to realize and support business processes. Process mining, a technique that discovers process models from data such as event logs generated by enterprise information systems, guides business managers to more accurately and intuitively understand their business processes. In order to solve the problem that the original model cannot correctly describe the system update and change, a technology called model repair is developed in the field of process mining. This paper proposes a new model repair approach based on Petri nets, which can change the transition that can only fire once in the original model to fire it any times by constructing free-loop structures. First, problematic transitions are identified. Then, a repaired Petri net-based model by constructing free-loop structures is obtained. Finally, the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed approach are verified by experiments.
A Simple Architecture for Arbitrary Interpolation of State Feedback

Stability of a linear system under fast switching or blending of a set of controllers can be ensured by an appropriate observer-based state-space realization. In this letter, the more specific problem is considered of arbitrary interpolation of a set of state feedback gains based on an initial static state feedback. First, the dynamic augmentation generating this parameterization is derived as well as the associated parameters for local recovery of predefined static controllers. By further simplification, a simple and intuitive structure is obtained with only a single design matrix. We propose to exploit this remaining degree of freedom to maximize robustness in terms of coprime factor uncertainty. The resulting parameterization is comparatively simple to implement in both continuous and discrete time. The robotics problem of active variable impedance control serves to illustrate utility of this parameterization.
Mobile GUI Testing Fragility: A Study on Open-Source Android Applications

Android applications do not seem to be tested as thoroughly as desktop ones. In particular, graphical user interface (GUI) testing appears generally limited. Like web-based applications, mobile apps suffer from GUI test fragility, i.e., GUI test classes failing or needing updates due to even minor modifications in the GUI or in the application under test. The objective of our study is to estimate the adoption of GUI testing frameworks among Android open-source applications, the quantity of modifications needed to keep test classes up to date, and their amount due to GUI test fragility. We introduce a set of 21 metrics to measure the adoption of testing tools and the evolution of test classes and test methods, and to estimate the fragility of test suites. We computed our metrics for six GUI testing frameworks, none of which achieved a significant adoption among Android projects hosted on GitHub. When present, GUI test methods associated with the considered tools are modified often, and a relevant portion (70% on average) of those modifications is induced by GUI-related fragilities. On average, for the projects considered, more than 7% of the total modified lines of code between consecutive releases belong to test classes developed with the analyzed testing frameworks. The measured percentage was higher on average than the one required by other generic test code, based on the JUnit testing framework. Fragility of GUI tests constitutes a relevant concern, probably an obstacle for developers to adopt test automation. This first evaluation of the fragility of Android scripted GUI testing can constitute a benchmark for developers and testers leveraging the analyzed test tools and the basis for the definition of a taxonomy of fragility causes and guidelines to mitigate the issue.
Improved Harmonic Performance of Cascaded H-Bridge Converters With Thermal Control

Among multilevel converter topologies, the cascaded H-bridge (CHB) converter is one suitable solution for multiple applications, such as flexible ac transmission systems and motor drives. CHB presents a natural high modularity because it is formed by the serial connection of H-bridges. This paper deals with a CHB where the cells do not have the same aging because the maintenance during the years of operation forces to replace some damaged cells of the converter with new or repaired ones. A method based on clamping one power cell can be used to reduce the power losses of that cell reducing its temperature and increasing its lifetime. However, clamping one cell of the CHB introduces high harmonic distortion around twice the carrier frequency due to the CHB unbalanced operation when a conventional phase-shifted pulsewidth modulation (PWM) is applied. A deep harmonic distortion analysis of the CHB output voltage with thermal control based on clamping one cell is presented. Using this analysis, the harmonic distortion at twice the carrier frequency is eliminated applying a nonconventional phase-shifted PWM where the angles between the carriers of consecutive power cells are modified. Experimental results show how the thermal control applying the clamping of a power cell is achieved while the harmonic distortion around twice the carrier frequency is eliminated.
DNA methylation in peripheral blood measured by LUMA is associated with breast cancer in a population‐based study

Our purpose was to identify epigenetic markers of breast cancer risk, which can be reliably measured in peripheral blood and are amenable for large population screening. We used 2 independent assays, luminometric methylation assay (LUMA) and long interspersed elements‐1 (LINE‐1) to measure “global methylation content” in peripheral blood DNA from a well‐characterized population‐based case‐control study. We examined associations between methylation levels and breast cancer risk among 1055 cases and 1101 controls and potential influences of 1‐carbon metabolism on global methylation. Compared with women in the lowest quintile of LUMA methylation, those in the highest quintile had a 2.41‐fold increased risk of breast cancer (95% confidence interval: 1.83‐3.16; P, trend>0.0001). The association did not vary by other key tumor characteristics and lifestyle risk factors. Consistent with LUMA findings, genome‐wide methylation profiling of a subset of samples revealed greater promoter hypermethylation in breast cancer case participants (P=0.04); higher LUMA was associated with higher promoter methylation in the controls (P=0.05). LUMA levels were also associated with functional sodium nitroprusside in key 1‐carbon metabolizing genes, MTHFR C677T (P=0.001) and MTRR A66G (P=0.018). LINE‐1 methylation was associated with neither breast cancer risk nor 1‐carbon metabolism. Our results show that global promoter hypermethylation measured in peripheral blood was associated with breast cancer risk. —Xu, X. , Gammon, M. D. , Hernandez‐Vargas, H. , Herceg, Z. , Wetmur, J. G. , Teitelbaum, S. L. , Bradshaw, P. T. , Neugut, A. I. , Santella, R. M. , Chen, J. DNA methylation in peripheral blood measured by LUMA is associated with breast cancer in a population‐based study. FASEB J. 26, 2657‐2666 (2012). www.fasebj. org
Acoustic Model Adaptation for Emotional Speech Recognition Using Twitter-Based Emotional Speech Corpus

In recent years, Japanese Twitter-based emotional speech (JTES) was constructed as an emotional speech corpus. This corpus is based on tweets, and has features wherein an emotional label is assigned to each sentence, and sentences are selected considering the balance of both phoneme and prosody. Compared to speech recognition without emotion, emotional speech recognition is a difficult task. In this study, we aim to improve the performance of emotional speech recognition on the JTES corpus using acoustic model adaptation. For recognition, a deep neural network-based hidden Markov model (DNN-HMM) is used as the acoustic model. As a baseline, a word error rate (WER) of 38.0% was obtained when the DNN-HMM was trained by the corpus of spontaneous Japanese. This model was used as an initial model for adaptation. In this study, various types of adaptation were examined, and substantial performance improvement was achieved. Finally, a WER of 23.05% was obtained using speaker adaptation.
TDNN-Based Multilingual Mix-Synthesis with Language Discriminative Training

We propose to build a time delay neural network based, Mandarin and Uyghur, bilingual TTS system. To facilitate the phone sharing across the two languages, we design multilingual question set, which includes language specific, language independent and IPA sharing questions. Neural network based language discriminative approach is also used to get better network output during mix-training. Language discriminative information is augmented as auxiliary feature to linguistic features at input level and control the output of a feed-forward deep neural network at the output layer. Preliminary experimental results show that the multilingual mix-synthesis models can be constructed using the proposed language discriminative training architecture. Monolingual and multilingual system performance are evaluated and compared for both languages, language discriminative codes also show to be efficient to distinguish the contextual linguistic features from different languages and can help to control the output features.
Wideband Microstrip Yagi-Uda Array Antenna with High Gain and F/B Ratio for 5 GHz Wi-Fi Band Applications

A wideband inset feed microstrip Yagi-Uda array antenna on photonic crystal substrate with high gain and front to back (F/B) ratio for 5 GHz Wi-Fi band has been proposed. At first, a microstrip Yagi-Uda array antenna has been designed on Rogers RT/Duroid 5880 (lossy) having dielectric constant of 2.2 and tangent loss of 0.0009. Later on, few numbers of cylindrical air gaps has been introduced in the substrate and the length and width of patch somewhat has been readjusted without changing overall size of the antenna. In that case the performance of the antenna is enhanced in terms of IEEE gain (9.816 dB), directivity (10.15 dBi), bandwidth (396.2 MHz), efficiency (96.71%) and F/B ratio (29.094 dB) though return loss somewhat decreases. So the proposed antenna possesses very high front to back ratio as well as high gain and wide bandwidth. A vivid comparison between the microstrip Yagi-Uda array antennas without air gaps and with air gaps have also been presented in this paper.
A Sketch-based Network Traffic Analysis Implementation on Commodity OpenFlow Switches

The paradigm of Software-defined Networking (SDN) provides excellent flexibility where the traffic monitoring applications can be implemented in the SDN controller. The objective of this work is to develop a software implementation of a Sketch-based network traffic analysis system on commodity OpenFlow switches. A sketch data structure is implemented inside the Open vSwitch as the extra table to collect flow statistics. The OpenFlow protocol is extended to support sketch request and reply messages such that the controller can collect the sketch data structure from the switches. The implementation of heavy-change detection is provided to showcase the flexibility of this implementation. Performance evaluations are conducted with real-world network traffic traces. The system is capable of finding flows with significant volume changes above a predefined threshold.
Design and Control of a Suspended Cable-Driven Parallel Robot with Four Cables

This paper addresses design and control of a new suspended under-constrained cable-driven parallel robot with four cables. In order to improve the estimation of the cable lengths, an auxiliary roller screw mechanism is utilized to move the winch linearly for proper cable coiling on one layer. Also, for the sake of obtaining the pose of the robot in real-time, an angular rate sensor is embedded on the end-effector. The collected data from the angular rate sensor is used to make equivalent the solution of the forward geometric-static problem to the solution of linear system of equations. The foregoing reduced system can be readily solved and leads to the pose of the moving platform in real-time which is a definite asset in control. Moreover, kinematic problem of the cable-driven parallel robot is provided and a new method for obtaining the forward geometric-static problem is proposed.
Evidence for anti‐inflammatory effects of C5a on the innate IL‐17A/IL‐23 axis

There is growing evidence that the complement activation product C5a positively or negatively regulates inflammatory functions. The studies presented here report that C5a exerts anti‐inflammatory effects by altering production of the cytokines IL‐17A and IL‐23 during endotoxic shock in young adult male C57BL/6J mice and has similar effects on macrophages from the same mice. IL‐17A and IL‐23 both appeared in plasma during endotoxemia, and their neutralization improved survival. The relevant sources of IL‐17A during endotoxemia were not CD4+ cells, γ δ T cells, or NK cells but CD11b+F4/80+ macrophages. The addition in vitro of C5a to lipopolysaccharide‐activated peritoneal macrophages dose dependently antagonized the production of IL‐17A (IC50, 50‐100 nM C5a) and IL‐23 (IC50, 10 nM C5a). This suppression required the receptor C5aR, but was independent of the second C5a receptor, C5L2. Genetic absence of C5aR was associated with much higher levels of IL‐17A and IL‐23 during endotoxic shock. Mechanistically, C5a mediated its effects on the IL‐17A/IL‐23 axis in a 2‐step process. C5a caused activation of the PI3K‐Akt and MEK1/2‐ERK1/2 pathways, resulting in induction of IL‐10, which powerfully inhibited production of IL‐17A and IL‐23. These data identify previously unknown mechanisms by which the anaphylatoxin C5a limits acute inflammation and antagonizes the IL‐17A/IL‐23 axis. —Bosmann, M. , Sarma, J. V. , Atefi, G. , Zetoune, F. S. , Ward, P. A. Evidence for anti‐inflammatory effects of C5a on the innate IL‐17A/IL‐23 axis. FASEB J. 26, 1640‐1651 (2012). www.fasebj. org
Optical Flow-Guided Multi-Scale Dense Network for Frame Interpolation

Video frame interpolation is a traditional computer vision task, which aims to generate intermediate frames between two given consecutive frames. Many algorithms attempt to solve this task relying on optical flow to compute dense pixel correspondence. According to the estimated flow, the input images are warped to the location of the interpolated frame, and then blended together to generate synthesis frame. However, due to the difficulty of flow estimation, this method always leads to blurry region and visually unpleasant results. To overcome the limitation of inaccurate flow estimation, we perform an end-to-end neural network to improve interpolation results after warping, which explicitly uses optical flow but not completely depends on it. Moreover, we design a multi-scale dense network for frame interpolation (FIMSDN), which not only makes full use of the multi-scale information for large motion frame interpolation, but also strengthens feature propagation. Specifically, a pre-trained optical flow net is firstly utilized to produce the bidirectional flow between two input frames. The input images are warped to the middle frame by the estimated flow and then fed with the original images into the FIMSDN to directly estimate the in-between frame. Experimental results show the improvement in terms of both objective and subjective quality by comparing with other recent optical flow and convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods.
Numerical Computational Analysis of Lightning Energy Storage System Using Single Stage Two Level Impulse Generator

Due to very intermittent properties of lightning strike and also hazards involved within it, very limited research has been conducted in Lightning energy harnessing area worldwide. However, the lightning causing clouds have very high charge density. So, an experimental study in numerical computational environment has been experimented for measuring the response characteristics of lightning spark to store the energy by real time environmental data collected from various meteorological center. The single stage two level spark generator circuit has been used to simulate the presented system. Also, this paper presents an analytical and experimental response of five level inverter integrated with supercapacitor to store lightning energy within supercapacitor and to convert it into AC voltage for various loads. Through this presented paper an imitated response has been shown of PMSM and Grid Load connected with storage and conversion system.
Counteraction against Internet of Things Botnets in Private Networks

This article focuses on problems related to detection and prevention of botnet threats in private Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Actual data about IoT botnets activity on the Internet is provided in the paper. Results of analysis of widespread botnets, as well as key characteristics of botnet behavior and activity on IoT devices are also provided. Features of private IoT networks are determined. The paper provides architectural features as well as functioning principles of software systems for botnet prevention in private networks. Recommendations for process of interaction between such system and a user are suggested. Suggestions for future development of the approach are formulated.