Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Method Validation for Simultaneous Determination of Phthalates and Bisphenol A Released from Plastic Water Containers

Phthalates (or phthalate esters, PAEs) and bisphenol A (BPA) are widely used in various industries, particularly in the fields of cosmetics and packaging, and they increase the malleability and workability of materials. As a result of their use, some international health organizations have begun to study them. In this study, the authors developed a methodology for the simultaneous determination of dimethyl phthalate (DMP), diethyl phthalate (DEP), diisobutyl phthalate (DiBP); dibutyl phthalate (DBP), bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP); di-n-octyl-phthalate (DnOP) and bisphenol A (BPA) from drinking and non-potable waters. The extraction of PAEs and BPA was performed using a solvent-based dispersive liquid–liquid microextraction (SB-DLLME) method. The analytical determination was performed using a gas chromatography–ion trap mass spectrometry (GC-IT/MS) analysis. The entire procedure was validated as recoveries were studied according to the volume and the extraction solvent used, pH, and ionic strength. Dynamic linearity ranges and linear equations of all the compounds were experimentally determined as well as the limit of detection (LOD) (1–8 ng mL−1) and the limit of quantification (LOQ) (5–14 ng mL−1), reproducibility, and sensitivity. The method was applied to 15 water samples (mineral water and tap water) for determining PAEs and BPA released from the plastic container. After the release simulation, four PAEs (i.e., DiBP, DBP, DHEP, and DnOP) were determined at very low concentrations (below 1.2 ng mL−1) in two water samples from (sport) bottles.
PHEE: A Dataset for Pharmacovigilance Event Extraction from Text

The primary goal of drug safety researchers and regulators is to promptly identify adverse drug reactions. Doing so may in turn prevent or reduce the harm to patients and ultimately improve public health. Evaluating and monitoring drug safety (i.e., pharmacovigilance) involves analyzing an ever growing collection of spontaneous reports from health professionals, physicians, and pharmacists, and information voluntarily submitted by patients. In this scenario, facilitating analysis of such reports via automation has the potential to rapidly identify safety signals. Unfortunately, public resources for developing natural language models for this task are scant. We present PHEE, a novel dataset for pharmacovigilance comprising over 5000 annotated events from medical case reports and biomedical literature, making it the largest such public dataset to date. We describe the hierarchical event schema designed to provide coarse and fine-grained information about patients’ demographics, treatments and (side) effects. Along with the discussion of the dataset, we present a thorough experimental evaluation of current state-of-the-art approaches for biomedical event extraction, point out their limitations, and highlight open challenges to foster future research in this area.
Contextual Recurrent Predictive Model for Long-Term Intent Prediction of Vulnerable Road Users

Recently, the problem of intent and trajectory prediction of vulnerable road users (VRUs) in urban traffic environments has got some attention from the intelligent transportation research community. One of the main challenges that make this problem even harder is the uncertainty exists in the actions of pedestrians in urban traffic environments, as well as the difficulty in inferring their end goals. In this paper, we are proposing a data-driven framework based on inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and the bidirectional recurrent neural network architecture (B-LSTM) for long-term prediction of VRUs’ intention. We evaluated our framework on real-life datasets for agent behavior modeling in traffic environments, and it has achieved an overall average displacement error of only 2.93 and 4.12 pixels over 2.0 and 3.0 s ahead prediction horizons, respectively. In addition, we compared our framework against other baseline models based on sequence prediction models and planning-based approaches. We have outperformed these approaches with the lowest margin of average displacement error of more than 5 pixels. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed framework was evaluated on an additional vehicle-based video sequence dataset for path prediction of pedestrians and it continued to achieve robust results with higher generalization capabilities.
3-D Deformable Object Manipulation Using Deep Neural Networks

Due to its high dimensionality, deformable object manipulation is a challenging problem in robotics. In this letter, we present a deep neural network based controller to servo control the position and shape of deformable objects with unknown deformation properties. In particular, a multi-layer neural network is used to map between the robotic end-effector's movement and the object's deformation measurement using an online learning strategy. In addition, we introduce a novel feature to describe deformable objects’ deformation used in visual servoing. This feature is directly extracted from the 3-D point cloud rather from the 2-D image as in previous work. In addition, we perform simultaneous tracking and reconstruction for the deformable object to resolve the partial observation problem during the deformable object manipulation. We validate the performance of our algorithm and controller on a set of deformable object manipulation tasks and demonstrate that our method can achieve effective and accurate servo control for general deformable objects with a wide variety of goal settings. Experiment videos are available at https://sites.google. com/view/mso-deep.
Encapsulation of Fatty Oils into Electrospun Nanofibers for Cosmetic Products with Antioxidant Activity

Active compounds derived from pomegranate and sea-buckthorn were encapsulated into polylactide (PLA-based fibers) and poly(vinyl-pirrolidone) (PVP-based fibers) nanofibers using electrospinning technique. The focus was on the antioxidant activity of prepared nonwovens. Morphology, thermal, and mechanical properties were also examined. Due to the different physical and chemical properties of the basic polymers, the obtained results indicate that PLA-based fibers have better antioxidant activity than PVP-based ones. All prepared samples were formed from bead-less continuous fibers networks, but in the case of PLA-based samples some small irregularities in the structure occurred. Mechanical properties were improved with the addition of active compounds in most of the cases, while thermal properties were slightly affected. Preserved antioxidant activity of active compounds by encapsulation and good material properties significant for manipulation, make these functional materials promising candidates for application in cosmetics.
The Data Fusion Method of Redundant Gyroscope System Based on Virtual Gyroscope Technology

Sensor-level redundancy technology has gradually become the development direction of the new generation of navigation systems, so the data fusion method for redundant sensor systems has become a key factor affecting the output accuracy of redundant system. Usually, the least square method is used for data fusion of redundant sensor system, but the fusion accuracy is low, so this paper explores the application of virtual gyroscope technology in redundant oblique sensor system. The redundant 3 gyroscope system, 5 gyroscope system, and 8 gyroscope system are designed. The least square method and virtual gyroscope technology are used for data fusion. And, the Kalman filter optimization scheme is designed for Multi-gyroscope system. The experimental results show that the fusion accuracy of virtual gyroscope technology is higher than that of least square method, and the running time of optimized Kalman filter algorithm is greatly shortened. When the filter is stable, the X axis’s $1{\sigma }$ standard deviation of the proposed method is 2.5 times lower than that of the least square method, and 4.3 times in Y axis, and 3.3 times in Z axis.
Studies on Contact Degradation Process and Failure Mechanism of GIB Plug-In Connector

Overheating faults of gas-insulated bus (GIB) plug-in connectors induced by contact degradation seriously threaten the safe operation of equipment and power system. Multiphysics coupled numerical simulations and physical experiments were conducted in this article to reveal contact degradation processes of the GIB plug-in connector. First, electromagnetic-thermal-mechanical coupled finite-element (FE) model was built. Relative motion between contact interfaces was considered by low-velocity Stribeck friction model. FE model was verified by physical experiment. Second, influences of operation current, spring stiffness, and conductor insert depth on contact temperature rise were analyzed. Results show that insufficient conductor could induce overheating on several contact spots then accelerate the degradation process. Third, thermal and motion characteristics under cyclic operation currents and short-circuit (SC) current impact were analyzed. Results show that conductor insert depth could be changed by relative motion between contact elements. Relative motion accumulates gradually under cyclic thermal loading by operation current. Significant relative motion and temperature rise could be induced by SC current impact. Finally, progressive and sudden failure mechanisms of the GIB plug-in connector were discussed. Research result may guide optimal design and field maintenance of GIB equipment, and thus improves its reliability.
Soft Robotic Gripper with Chambered Fingers for Performing In-Hand Manipulation

In this work, we present a soft robotic gripper for grasping various objects by mimicking in-hand manipulation. The soft robotic gripper consists of three fingers. Each finger contains three air chambers: Two chambers (side chambers) for twisting in two different directions and one chamber (middle chamber) for grasping. The combination of these air chambers makes it possible to grasp an object and rotate it. We fabricated the soft finger using 3D-printed molds. We used the finite element method (FEM) method to design the most effective model, and later these results were compared with results from experiments. The combined experimental results were used to control the range of movement of the whole gripper. The gripper could grasp objects weighing from 4 g to 300 g just by inflating the middle chamber, and when air pressure was subsequently applied to one of the side chambers, the gripper could twist the object by 35°.
Experimental and numerical studies on a novel shape-memory alloy wire–woven trusses capable of undergoing large deformation

Currently, most wire-woven trusses are fabricated with traditional metals such as steel and aluminum, thus the deformation ability is constrained due to the low yield strain of common metals. Shape-memory alloy is a kind of smart material which can bear large recoverable strain while producing hysteresis. Due to the unique capacity of large deformation and remarkable damping property of the shape-memory alloy, a novel lattice trusses assembled by superelastic shape-memory alloy coil springs was proposed. Furthermore, the treatment processes to prepare the shape-memory alloy coil springs and the assembly method to fabricate the shape-memory alloy wire–woven trusses were also introduced. The quasi-static compression under different maximum deformation and temperatures was performed to investigate the mechanical and thermal responses of the proposed shape-memory alloy wire–woven trusses. Cyclic compression tests were also performed to study the functional fatigue of the shape-memory alloy wire–woven trusses. The proposed wire-woven trusses can undergo up to 80% deformation by compression and recover without evident residual deformation after unloading. Finite element analysis simulation of representative volume element under different deformation was presented. Analytical modeling of the stiffness of shape-memory alloy wire–woven trusses was also carried out. Both the numerical and analytical methods can predict the stiffness within a small deviation.
Improved Capacitive Sensor for Combined Angular and Linear Displacement Sensing

This paper presents the design and development of a non-contact capacitive sensor suitable to measure both angular and linear displacements. The sensor is composed of two parts: a rotating shaft and three fixed pairs of electrodes. The shaft has a semi-cylindrical rectangular slot at its middle. Two pairs of electrodes are designed for the measurement of angular displacement and the remaining pair, for linear measurement. A suitable signal conditioning circuit is developed to obtain the change in capacitance between the electrodes and the shaft-slot combination. A function is defined to calculate the absolute angular and linear positions of the shaft. A prototype of the sensor, capable to measure 360° for angular measurement and ±45 mm for linear measurement, was built and tested in the laboratory. The measurement results show that the resolution of the prototype is 0.15° for angular displacement and $41~\mu \text{m}$ for the linear displacement. The linearity error in measurement was found to be less than 0.9% for both angular and linear displacements.
Enabling the seamless supply chain by exploiting the four smooth material flow controls

A decade after the publication of the concept of smooth material flow via four fundamental principles related to the work of Jay Forrester and John Burbidge (FORRIDGE) the influence of this work on academe and industry is discussed. We show that by extension of their principles via a three-level model which includes the vision and the toolkit, substantial contributions have been made towards new management theory. The associated 12 simplicity rules and uncertainly circle concepts have been exploited within the structured framework provided by the quick scan audit methodology. This generates value stream classification ranging from baseline to exemplar, and a design procedure aimed at material flow best practice. A detailed case study demonstrates the improved industrial performance achievable by this means.
Basic Study of Both-Sides Retrodirective System for Minimizing the Leak Energy in Microwave Power Transmission

In the beam-type microwave power transmission system, it is required to minimize the interference with communication and the influence on the human body. Retrodirective system that re-radiates a beam in the direction of arrival of a signal is well known as a beam control technique for accurate microwave power transmission. In this paper, we newly propose to apply the retrodirective system to both transmitting and receiving antennas. The leakage to the outside of the system is expected to minimize self-convergently while following the atmospheric fluctuation and the antenna movement by repeating the retrodirective between the transmitting and receiving antenna in this system. We considered this phenomenon theoretically using an infinite array antenna model. Finally, it has been shown by the equivalent circuit simulation that stable transmission can be realized by oscillating the system. key words: microwave power transmission, retrodirective system, beam propagation method, phase conjugator, feedback oscillation
A Survey of Condition Monitoring and Fault Diagnosis toward Integrated O&M for Wind Turbines

Wind power, as a renewable energy for coping with global climate change challenge, has achieved rapid development in recent years. The breakdown of wind turbines (WTs) not only leads to high repair expenses but also may threaten the stability of the whole power grid. How to reduce the operation and the maintenance (O&M) cost of wind farms is an obstacle to its further promotion and application. To provide reliable condition monitoring and fault diagnosis (CMFD) for WTs, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of the existing CMFD methods in the following three aspects: energy flow, information flow, and integrated O&M system. Energy flow mainly analyzes the characteristics of each component from the angle of energy conversion of WTs. Information flow is the carrier of fault and control information of WT. At the end of this paper, an integrated WT O&M system based on electrical signals is proposed.
Using Membranes to Model a Multi-Agent System towards Underground Metro Station Crowd Behaviour Simulation

Simulation of crowd behaviours has long been an area of active research due to its high impact on urban area design. Rather recently, the problem has been tackled using agent based simulation (ABMS), a modelling approach that offers a more natural and flexible method for describing pedestrian behaviour. The current work, concerns ABMS modelling of passengers boarding an underground station using Population P Systems (PPS), a membrane computing paradigm that allows formal definition of an agent based system. It is argued that the expressive power of PPS allows modelling the simulation under study, and an implementation of the model described is provided in a well known agent simulation platform to further prove its validity.
The Lander Vision System for Mars 2020 Entry Descent and Landing

In January 2016, the Mars 2020 project added Terrain Relative Navigation to the project baseline. This new capability helps the mission avoid large hazards in the landing ellipse, which enables the consideration of landing sites that more geologically diverse than before. This diversity should improve the quality of the samples collected by Mars 2020 for possible future return to earth. The Lander Vision System (LVS) is the sensor that provides the position fix that is used to determine where to land between hazards identified in orbital data prior to landing. This paper describes the LVS flight design for Mars 2020, a highfidelity simulation used as a design tool and the expected LVS performance for Mars 2020.
Horizontal cumulative variance chart: a quality control scheme monitoring shifts in process variation

In this study, we consider a new quality control scheme named horizontal cumulative variance (HCUV) which is designed to monitor the shifts in process variation. We start our discussions with the statistical properties of the distribution of cumulative squares then further to that of cumulative variances, and the mathematical measures to have a horizontal shape of these control schemes. We then propose HCUV. To illustrate the charts, we first run HCUS and HCUV with simulated data. We finally apply HCUV to chemical process data obtained from a real chemical manufacturing company. The illustration suggests that the HCUV scheme have the potential for practically monitoring changes in process variation.
Aplicação da análise harmônica por séries de Fourier para a previsão de produtividade da cultura do café no Estado de Minas Gerais

The objective of this work was to obtain a forecast model of coffee crop productivity in seven municipal districts of Minas Gerais State, Brazil. The harmonic analysis in Fourier series was applied on productivity series to each location. The obtained coefficients until the harmonic seventh were submitted to multiple linear regression in the first three principal components of a group of 33 inherent variables of coffee production. These variables were averages of 15 years corresponding to the same years of productivity and subdivided in four quarterly periods during the agricultural year (July to June). The model did not prove adequate, since the results presented errors of estimatives with great discrepancies evidencing the complexity of yield forecast of coffee crop.
Modelling Occupants' Presence and Behaviour – Part II

The first generation of dynamic simulation programs (DSPs) was developed during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These were essentially command-line interfaces to routines to calculate the dynamic heat transfers within a building and between this and the outside environment. Subsequent work concentrated on improving the usability of these routines and extending the scope of the programs’ core capabilities, for example, to incorporate coupled plant and mass flow modelling. With improved functionality and amidst growing demand for their use by the more pioneering design consultants, attention shifted to proving the validity of their core heat transfer models. By the mid-1990s, with results from these validation studies taken on board and with improved usability, attention then focused upon the addition of further modelling functionality. This included the addition of 3D conduction modelling, links with ray tracing programs for improved lighting modelling, electrical power flow modelling and embedded computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The result is programs such as ESP-r (Clarke 2001) which has a transient finite difference heat flow solver at its core and supports simultaneous solutions of plant, fluid, electrical power and CFD equation sets.
Solitons in one-dimensional three-band model with a central flat band

Defect formation in the one-dimensional topological three-band model is examined within both lattice and continuum models. Classic results of Jackiw-Rebbi and Rice-Mele for the soliton charge is generalized to the three-band model. The presence of the central flat band in the three-band model makes the soliton charge as a function of energy behave in a qualitatively different way from the two-band Dirac model case. Quantum field-theoretical calculation of Goldstone and Wilczek is also generalized to the three-band model to obtain the soliton charge. Diamond-chain lattice is shown to be an ideal structure to host a topological three-band structure.
How to Write a Research Proposal

When applying for a PhD position or a research grant in Germany you will usually be asked to submit a research proposal, at least in part, since individually led research is still the norm in most subject areas. Even if you are applying to an established research project, you will probably be expected, as a part of the university application procedure, to explain how your particular research would develop the basic propositions of the overall project. The purpose of the proposal is to ensure that the candidates have done sufficient preliminary reading/research in the area of their interest, that they have thought about the issues involved and are able to provide more than a broad description of the topic which they are planning to research. The proposal is of course not a fixed blueprint. Findings cannot be predicted beforehand and often the research may need to be modified as you go along. There is also no fixed formula for writing a proposal. However, your proposal will have to convince members of the academic community that you have identified a scientific problem and a methodical approach to solve the problem within a realistic time frame and at reasonable expenses.
Integrable Heisenberg-van Vleck chains with variable range exchange

The review of recent results in the s=1/2 quantum spin chains with $1/\sinh^2(\kappa r$ exchange is presented. Related problems in the theory of classical and quantum Calogero-Sutherland-Moser systems with inverse square hyperbolic and elliptic potentials are discussed. The attention is paid to finding the explicit form of corresponding Bethe-Ansatz equations and to connection with generalized Hubbard chains in one dimension.