Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
APPLYING DIFFUSION MODELS TO SEMICONDUCTOR SUPPLY CHAINS: INCREASING DEMAND BY FUNDED PROJECTS

The question of the paper is: “How does governmental funded projects influence the demand forecast for semiconductor manufacturing”. For Semiconductor Manufacturing an accurate demand is of paramount advantage due to the challenges arising from a mix of high capital cost and short product life cycles. We consider the Bass Model for new technology and product introduction as the most sophisticated model for supporting demand forecast for new products and technologies. In this paper it is described how the boost from governmental funded projects can be parameterized in the Bass Model from a theoretical and practical point of view. From a practical point of view the model is applied for the German funded projects GeniusTex and Productive4.0 on the example of a selected pressure sensor. A perspective is given on how this model can be validated in future research once actual data are available.
Nonverbal Communication in Human-AI Interaction: Opportunities and
 Challenges

In recent years, we have explored the use of gaze—an important nonverbal communication signal and cue in everyday human-human interaction—for use with AI systems. Specifically, our work investigated whether an artificial agent, given the ability to observe human gaze, can make inferences on intentions, and how aspects of these inferences can be communicated to a human collaborator. We leveraged a range of humancomputer interaction techniques to inform the design of a gaze-enabled artificial agent that can predict and communicate predictions. In this paper, we include a snapshot of how AI and HCI can be brought together to inform the design of an explainable interface for an artificial agent. To conclude, we outline the challenges we faced when designing AI systems that incorporate nonverbal communication stemming from our work.
Data Mining of Assessments to Generate Learner Remediation Teams: Method, Efficacy, and Perceptions in an Undergraduate Engineering Pilot Offering

This research developed an approach to integrate the complementary benefits of digitized assessments and peer learning. Its basic premise and associated hypotheses are that by using student assessments of correct and incorrect quiz answers using a fine-grained resolution to pair them into remediation peer-learning cohorts is an effective means of learning. Delivered and scored in a computer-based testing center, the assessment of digitized formative quizzes paired students whose scores indicated a different knowledge skill level so that by the end of the same week as the quiz, the paired students cooperatively took an in-class quiz during a remediation session to determine if there were any learning improvements. This research article discusses this research approach and presents the findings.
Hyers-Ulam Stability of a Class Fractional Boundary Value Problems with Right and Left Fractional Derivatives

In this paper, we consider the Hyers-Ulam stability and Hyers-Ulam-Rassias stability of a class differential equation boundary value problems with right and left fractional derivatives. The research results mean that the type of boundary value problem has at least one exact solution and its approximate solutions are stable. The research method is a generalized fixed point theorem. Two examples are given to illustrate our theoretical results.
Institutional Impressions through Economic Impact Studies

This article explores how colleges and universities deploy impression management theory in economic impact studies. Ample resources are expended to produce the studies, but little attention has been paid to the overt, and covert, impressions portrayed within them. This study offers the first empirically-based work on economic impact studies by examining 24 studies from Ohio to pinpoint three impression management tactics: self-promotion, ingratiation, and supplication. A taxonomy was designed to elucidate the messages found within these studies to guide future practice.
Subjective Well-Being Trajectories of Street-Involved Youth: Considerations of a Longitudinal Study

The street life is part of a larger process of vulnerability. Many youths use the streets as an escape from poverty, abuse and violence. However, a focus on risks may neglect positive factors that have the potential to promote healthy development. Accordingly, we examined trajectories of street-involved youth with diff erent subjective well-being (SWB) profi les. Interviews conducted at three time points with six-months intervals included a semi-structured life experience interview (e.g., leaving home, street life, and school experience) and well-being measures. Cluster analysis identifi ed three groups namely average SWB, positive SWB, and negative SWB. Within each SWB profi le, two participants were selected to a multiple case study. The results revealed that positive SWB group had connections with other environments (family and institutions) beyond the street, while youth with negative SWB reported low social support and strong involvement with the street. Negative SWB group were formed by girls who reported family confl ict, emotional, physical and sexual violence and adjustment diffi culties. Finally, this study suggests that well-being research can contribute to protective practices, also indicating to the need to strengthen family and institutional ties as a strategy for the youth development. The longitudinal approach points that early interventions can anticipated positive developmental outcomes.
Safer Refactorings with Assertions

Refactoring and restructuring code is a natural part of the development process and can play an important role in software maintenance and evolution. Methodologies like Agile Programming [14] and eXtreme Programming [2] emphasise the importance of continuous refactoring in software development, and small refactorings like Rename and Extract Local Variable should be performed regularly by the developer, to keep the code clean and avoid technical debt [9, 11]. Refactoring by hand is hard and can introduce errors [17]. To support the ideal practice of frequent refactoring, a number of automated refactoring tools have been developed and common refactorings are often supported by IDEs (integrated development environment). Unfortunately the behavior of automated refactoring tools are not always well documented, and the implementations can differ from what programmers expect. Refactoring preconditions are not always communicated well, neither in the documentation nor in error messages. Most tools have basic precondition checks in place, with typically at a minimum a syntactical check of the input code. These checks are not necessarily sufficient, and may result in refactorings being applied in cases where preconditions are violated. The reverse can also be true – over-eager preconditions can prevent safe refactorings or refactorings were semantic errors are easily fixed afterwards. The implementation of the refactoring can also be surprising at times, and, as we will soon see in examples, can deviate from what the programmer intended. Currently, the commonly suggested solution by Fowler, among others, is: never refactor without a proper test suite. This correlates with the Fowler’s dependence on the developer’s own judgement in how to implement the described refactoring in the particular cases. This leads to descriptions that are hard to implement in tools, which in turn leads to ad-hoc implementations that can surprise the programmer, break the code, and introduce subtle changes in the semantics of the code that will not show up as a compilation error, and it requires carefully crafted tests to reveal them. Some of these errors are hard to identify manually, and require that the programmer has a solid understanding of the programming language [20]. Such problems prevents the adoption of tools, and the need for more correct refactoring tools has been voiced several times [3, 8, 12]. At the same time, making the tools too restrictive or rejecting refactoring invocations when the programmer does not understand why it is prevented will also inhibit use, and can make the programmer simply perform the same (possibly unsafe) refactoring by hand [3, 8, 12, 21, 16]. Although proper tests should undeniably be in place, we would like to address the semantic precondition checking. While syntactic preconditions can effectively be checked statically, semantic preconditions can pose
Secure and Decentralized Live Streaming using Blockchain and IPFS

​ — Decentralized cloud systems are proving to be much more advantageous than centralized cloud systems. They distribute power away from a central authority, cut down operation cost, have greater fault tolerance, fewer trust requirements between storage providers and data owners and is less prone to attacks. InterPlanetary File System, a protocol to create a content-addressable, peer-to-peer method of storing and sharing hypermedia in a distributed file system can revolutionize how we share the media content over the internet. We provide an overview of the current systems to stream media over the internet and describe various problems that these systems face with regards to media delivery, governance, and distribution. We exhibit, how with the help of IPFS, Blockchain based Smart Contracts and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), it is possible to minimize, avoid and diminish the problems associated with the traditional media delivery system and how we can improve the overall efficiency of media delivery systems. We explain how the conventional framework of media delivery can be transformed by IPFS based delivery network supported by HLS streaming for all kinds of distribution model (live or on-demand). We also propose a novel method to decentralize the cloud storage system using a separate server and client-side applications.
Interpolating and translation-invariant approximations of parametric dictionaries

In this paper, we address the problem of approximating the atoms of a parametric dictionary ${\mathcal{A}} = \left\{ {a\left(\theta\right):\theta \in \Theta } \right\}$, commonly encountered in the context of sparse representations in "continuous" dictionaries. We focus on the case of translation-invariant dictionaries, where the inner product between a(θ) and a(θ′) only depends on the difference θ – θ′. We investigate the following general question: is there some low-rank approximation of ${\mathcal{A}}$ which interpolates a subset of atoms $\left\{ {a\left({{\theta _j}}\right)} \right\}_{j = 1}^J$ while preserving the translation-invariant nature of the original dictionary? In this paper, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions characterizing the existence of such an "interpolating" and "translation-invariant" low-rank approximation. Moreover, we provide closed-form expressions of such a dictionary when it exists. We illustrate the applicability of our results in the case of a two-dimensional isotropic Gaussian dictionary. We show that, in this particular setup, the proposed approximation framework outperforms standard Taylor approximation.
ACTIVE CONTROL OF THE PASSIVE PITCHING OF A FLAPPING WING WITH ELECTROSTATIC CLAMPING

Wing designs for Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicles (FWMAVs) might use a properly tuned elastic hinge at the wing root to obtain the required passive pitching motion to stay aloft. Practical use of this type FWMAVs requires some form of control which can be achieved by actively adjusting the elastic hinge stiffness and, thus, the pitching motion and lift production of the wing. This paper introduces an elastic hinge design consisting of stacked layers which can be clamped together using an electrostatic loading. This clamping changes the bending stiffness of the hinge. The voltage dependent characteristics of this elastic hinge during the large pitching motion are described in detail. A quasi-steady aerodynamic model is used to obtain the equation of motion of the passive pitching flapping motion as a function of the elastic hinge stiffness and the applied control voltage. Numerical simulations show significant changes of the passive pitching motion and of the lift production, if the layers are clamped together. Experiments are conducted to study the practical applicability of this method for FWMAV applications. The experiments show similar trends although the effect is less significant which is mainly due to manufacturing difficulties. In conclusion, this method is promising in controlling FWMAV designs.
Machine learning in research and development of new vaccines products: opportunities and challenges

Modern high-throughput technologies deployed in research and development of new vaccine products have opened the door to machine learning applications that allow the automation of tasks and support for data-driven risk-based decision making. In this paper, the opportunities and the challenges faced for the deployment of machine learning algorithms in the field of vaccines development are discussed.
Realizing an Internet of Secure Things: A Survey on Issues and Enabling Technologies

Since the term first coined in 1999, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant momentum in connecting physical objects to the Internet and facilitating machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communications. By offering the capability to connect and integrate both digital and physical entities, IoT becomes an important paradigm that enables a whole new class of applications and services. Security is one of the most challenging issues that need to be addressed before these IoT applications and services can be fully embraced. In this survey, we investigate the major research efforts over the period of 2013–2019 that address IoT security and privacy issues. We provide extensive discussions on securing cloud-based IoT solutions. The main focus of these discussions is on securing the information in transit between IoT devices and IoT applications, where most of the data processing and modelling tasks take place. These discussions include all security aspects and challenges facing the data in transit. Specifically, a number of common attacks that target IoT solutions are first discussed, while presenting the main challenges of IoT security (e.g., the resource limitation of IoT devices, which hinder the ability of such devices to do expensive computations for securing the data). Then we present the main security requirements needed by IoT systems, which include access control, integrity, and authentication. We review recent research work in providing security and privacy services, which delegate the expensive computations to an edge or cloud, to cope with the low computations restrictions in IoT devices. Open research issues and possible research directions in securing cloud-based IoT systems are discussed, while proposing some possible solutions.
Early events in cell entry by foot-and-mouth disease virus.

The studies presented in this thesis demonstrate that foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) infection mediated by the integrin ? v? 6 takes place through clathrin-dependent endocytosis. Inhibition of clathrin-dependent endocytosis by sucrose treatment or transient expression of a dominant-negative version of AP180 inhibited virus entry and infection. Similarly, inhibition of endosomal acidification inhibited an early step in infection. Blocking endosomal acidification did not interfere with surface expression of alphavbeta6, virus binding to the cells, uptake of the virus into endosomes, or cytoplasmic virus replication. These observations suggest that the low pH within endosomes is required for a post-entry step of infection, most likely capsid uncoating and delivery of viral RNA into the cytosol. FMDV infection occurred in the absence of caveolae and inhibition of lipid-raft dependent endocytosis did not inhibit virus uptake or infection. Using immunofluorescence confocal microscopy, FMDV colocalised with alphavbeta6 at the cell surface but not with the B subunit of cholera toxin, a marker for lipid rafts. At 37°C, virus was rapidly taken up into the cells and colocalised with markers for early and recycling endosomes but not with a marker for lysosomes, suggesting that infection occurs from within the early or recycling endosomal compartments. This conclusion was supported by the observation that FMDV infection is not inhibited by nocodazole, a reagent that inhibits vesicular trafficking between early and late endosomes (and hence trafficking to lysosomes). Internalisation of alphavbeta6 and its accumulation in early and recycling endosomes was triggered by virus binding, suggesting that the integrin serves not only as an attachment receptor but also to deliver the virus to the acidic endosomes.
Guidelines for the Management of Non Transfusion Dependent Thalassaemia (NTDT)

The term thalassaemia intermedia describes a form of thalassaemia of intermediate severity between the major, transfusion-dependent forms of the disease and the symptomless carrier states. The term includes many different varieties of thalassaemia including the compound heterozygous state for mild and severe beta thalassaemia mutations or forms of homozygous beta thalassaemia in which genetic modifiers have reduced the severity of the disease, diseases like haemoglobin E beta thalassaemia due to the co-inheritance of a structural haemoglobin variant with beta thalassaemia, the compound heterozygous states for other structural variants such as haemoglobins S or C and beta thalassaemia and a heterogeneous group of forms of alpha thalassaemia that produce haemoglobin H disease of varying severity. The wide clinical variability of these conditions leads to major difficulties in their management. These problems have been magnified over recent years by the discovery that in many forms of thalassaemia intermedia there are a wide range of complications which tend to occur later in the lives of affected patients.
Numerical Computations of Three-dimensional Air-Quality Model with Variations on Atmospheric Stability Classes and Wind Velocities using Fractional Step Method

The air pollutants emitted from industrial plants are considered one of the major causes of the typical air pollution problem. A mathematical model for describing the dispersion of the air pollutants released from the source into the atmosphere is examined. A numerical approximation using the three dimensional fractional step method is applied based on the discretization of the time dependent atmospheric advection-diffusion equation. The diffusion coefficients are supplied by the meteorological station. The concentration of the pollutants at the source is assumed to be a δ-function, which gives rise to a steady emission rate of pollutants. The resulting model is solved for the test problem with the range of parameters in the Pasquill’s stability classes. In this research, the effects of the variations of atmospheric stability classes and wind velocities on the three-dimensional air-quality models are observed. The fractional step method is used to solve the dispersion model. This paper proposes a fractional step method so as to make the model simpler without any significant loss of computational efficiency. The results obtained indicate that the proposed experimental variations of the atmospheric stability classes and wind velocities do affect the air quality around the industrial areas.
Control of Polar Robot Manipulator Subjected to Harmonic Excitation Using Low Cost Controller

Robot manipulators have been used for many years in several environments especially that prove hazardous or out of human reach. However, the operating conditions especially for the military applications may include unpredicted excitations that negatively affect the manipulators' performance. The objective of the research presented in this paper is to develop a model for a three degree-of-freedom polar robotic arm that can be employed on a disposal system platform. The forward and inverse kinematics equations of the robot arm have been developed, and then have been used to design a low cost control circuit to control the manipulator in normal operating conditions as well as in the presence of harmonic excitation. The manipulator links have been then designed with the aid of SOLIDWORKS. Using the proposed links geometry and calculated torques' values for each robot joint, motors that can support the expected torques have been selected. The proposed models have been used to simulate the manipulator's behavior when it is subjected to excitations. Finally, a robot arm prototype has been implemented to test the proposed control technique to ensure a satisfactory response of the manipulator.
The Effect of Lipopolysaccharides on Primary Sensory Neurons in Crustacean Models

Many types of gram-negative bacteria are responsible for serious infections, such as septicemia. Lipopolysaccharides (LPS), the endotoxins released from these bacteria, are responsible for inducing the immune response of organisms such as crustaceans, who have well-conserved Tolllike receptors. Little is known about the direct impact LPS has on primary sensory neurons apart from this immune reaction. Previous studies have demonstrated that motor neurons increase both spontaneous and evoked firing frequencies with LPS, but differences have been observed across species. Here, the effects of LPS from two strains of gram-negative bacteria (Serratia marcescens and Pseudomonas aeruginosa) on firing frequency of primary sensory proprioceptors in the crab propodite-dactylopodite (PD) organ and crayfish muscle receptor organ (MRO) is examined. These sensory organs correlate to mammalian proprioception, as the MRO is analogous to the mammalian muscle spindle, and the PD organ allows for the separation of motor nerve function from sensory neuronal transduction. The neuronal function of the two model organisms was studied through the stretch-activation of rapidly-adapting and slowly-adapting sensory neurons. Results indicated that there is no statistically significant impact on sensory transduction through the application of LPS; however, in the crab PD organ, the application of LPS from both strains decreased the nerve activity except when the LPS from both bacteria was applied together. In the crayfish MRO, there usually was an increase in nerve activity. In saline controls, there was also an increase in firing of the neurons in both preparations, but this also was not statistically significant. Interestingly, the MRO muscle fibers often contracted upon the addition of LPS, perhaps indicating that the known impact LPS has on motor nerve function is partially responsible for the results obtained.