Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preparation and properties of three dimensional printing materials made from biopolymers for medical applications

Tesavibul, P. and Suwanprateeb, J. Preparation and properties of three dimensional printing materials made from biopolymers for medical applications Songklanakarin J. Sci. Technol. , 2006, 28(3) : 575-586 A preliminary study employing a mixture of natural polymers for three dimensional printing (3DP) technology was carried out to determine the influence of mixture composition and post-processing technique on their physical and mechanical properties. Series of blended natural polymers including cassava starch, maltodextrin, cellulose fiber and gelatin with different amount were formulated. It was observed that the percentage of individual component influenced the properties and characteristics of prepared samples including part stability, dimension accuracy and flexural properties. Starch aided part stability and the fineness of the mixture. Maltodextrin and gelatin increased flexural strength whereas cellulose fiber helped in both part stability and strength. Infiltration by light-cured resin could further enhance flexural modulus and flexural strength of samples to be close to generally used acrylate resin. Preliminary in vitro toxicity test of infiltrated sample showed that the cells which were in contact with samples were healthy. No inhibition zone was observed.
Kinect v 2 evaluation for in-home medical rehabilitation scenarios

The technology advancements greatly improved the medical services over time with virtual reality (VR) devices and applications. Currently taking advantage of these recent advancements is the medical rehabilitation field, heavily studied in past few years as a promising VR area. VR-based rehab brings several advantages over the traditional therapy and could deliver personalized in-home treatment without the need of a permanent dedicated supervisor. A device that could make this technology possible is the Microsoft’s new Kinect v2, an improved motion capture sensor available at low prices for personal use. This promising high-tech device can track body movements without the need of additional attached devices that could prove unconformable and expensive. In order to evaluate the medical rehabilitation utility for in-home usage we conducted some research studies and practical experiments focusing on the upper-part of the body in a seated pose in front of a desk. Results indicate that the Kinect sensor can successfully track the body in the proposed scenario and showed great reliability. Occlusion interferences can highly impact the sensor’s overall performance, but in a normal prepared in-home environment the sensor proves to be very efficient.
Firms transactions and knowledge flows in the European Union ' s Neighboring Countries

The globalization process of production and technological activities has generated an unprecedented increase in the number of international transactions among firms which take the forms of Strategic Alliances, Joint Ventures and Mergers and Acquisitions. These transactions, whatever their nature and motivation are, generate knowledge flow among the companies involved that occur before, during and after the deal. Consequently, firms’ transactions represent a valuable proxy for the exchange of knowledge across the geographical areas where companies are located. The aim of the paper is to analyze in details the companies transactions and agreements in the European Neighboring Countries (ENC) over the period 2000-2011 in order to explore the geographical directions and sectoral characteristics of the knowledge flows among firms in those areas and external firms.
Supplementary Material for Query-Focused Video Summarization : Dataset , Evaluation , and A Memory Network Based Approach

In this section, we thoroughly describe the process of generating the queries from dense concept annotations. While users often input free text to query videos through search engines, we simulate the real scenarios and construct the queries using the dense concept annotations we have collected (cf. Section 3.2 in the main text) to ease benchmarking different algorithms. By processing the dense user annotation data, we extract various statistics that enable us to have the queries covering a wide range of varieties. Initially, a concept is assumed present in the video if it appears in at least T shots. This is to filter the present noise in annotations acquired from AMT workers and to make sure the concepts really appear together (to steer clear of the pairs that are tagged together as a result of noise or bias). As described in the main text, when a user enters a query q (for instance, on a video search engine), which is usually
2 Experimental 2 . 1 Materials and characterization methods

Plasmonic sensing has a great potential in the portable detection of human tumor markers, among which the carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) is one of the most widely used in clinical medicine. Traditional plasmonic and non-plasmonic methods for CEA biosensing are still not suitable for the fast developing era of Internet of things. In this study, we build up a cost-effective plasmonic immunochip platform for rapid portable detection of CEA by combining soft nanoimprint lithography, microfluidics, antibody functionalization, and mobile fiber spectrometry. The plasmonic gold nanocave array enables stable surface functionality, high sensitivity, and simple reflective measuring configuration in the visible range. The rapid quantitative CEA sensing is implemented by a label-free scheme, and the detection capability for the concentration of less than 5 ng/ml is achieved in clinical experiments, which is much lower than the CEA cancer diagnosis threshold of 20 ng/ml and absolutely sufficient for medical applications. Clinical tests of the chip on detecting human serums demonstrate good agreement with conventional medical examinations and great advantages on simultaneous multichannel detections for high-throughput and multi-marker biosensing. Our platform provides promising opportunities on low-cost and compact medical devices and systems with rapid and sensitive tumor detection for point-of-care diagnosis and mobile healthcare.
Fire Detection using Optical Flow Method in Videos

Image processing plays an important role in real time applications such as video surveillance. Video tracking is one of the popularly growing methods of surveillance when the object is at risk. Fire detection in videos at early stage is vital for prevention of material damage and human loss. Sensors won’t be able to detect the fire in its initial stage as it takes time for smoke to reach the sensors. Classical Optical flow methods are based on intensity constancy and flow smoothness. But fire is having dynamic texture and nonsmoothness for saturated flames. Optical flow fields are extracted from optimal mass transport for the dynamic texture of fire and non-smooth data flow fields for saturated flames. These features are tested on large video database to detect the fire.
Net Premium Estimation by using Forward Selection Linear Model for Motor Vehicle Insurance

Protection is fundamental to transfer the risk of loss. The way to protect financial losses caused by car damage is car insurance. Owners of motor vehicles bind themselves to insurance companies, to protect their vehicles, by purchasing insurance premiums. The amount of premium depends on various aspects, including location, year of manufacture, and the contents of the engine cylinder and so on. To claim as a benefit of the premium already paid to the insurer, the amount of net premium can be estimated through the large expectations of claims and the number of possible claims. Therefore, it is necessary to specify the types of dependent variables and independent variables. In this research, modeling is done with Linear Model Selected reverse selection. The model is used to estimate the premiums to be offered. More expensive premiums can cope with some unexpected possibilities.
PALEOLITHIC ARTIFACTS IN SIWALIK AND POST-SIWALIK DEPOSITS OF NORTHERN PAKISTAN

A recent visit to the Potwar Plateau of northern Pakistan suggests a new interpretation of the nature and dating of Paleolithic industries in this area of Asia. This paper presents a history of past research in the area and reports on the results of an investigation carried out by the author during the winter of 1976 in collaboration with the Geological Survey of Pakistan-Yale University and University of Peshawar-Dartmouth College geological and paleontological research groups,
Length weight relationship and condition factor of Tilapia zilli (Perciformes: Cichlidae) in Warri River, Southern Nigeria

The length-weight relationship and condition factor of Tilapia zilli were analyzed in Warri River, Southern Nigeria. A total of 240 species were recorded. The mean total length and weight were 11.27 cm and 26.57g respectively. The highest (0.248134) and lowest (0.138083) “a” value was recorded in January and February respectively, while the “b” value ranged from 5.037534 January and 7.923723 in May, 2013. The mean condition factor ranged from 2.18 in January and 7.25 in May. The result obtained in this study showed general positive allometric growth.
Meson-Nucleon Physics and the Structure of the Nucleon September 10-14 , 2007 IKP , Forschungzentrum Jülich

The theory of Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) reproduces the strong interaction at distances much shorter than the size of the nucleon. At larger distance scales, the generation of hadron masses and confinement cannot yet be derived from first principles on basis of QCD. The PANDA experiment at FAIR will address the origin of these phenomena in controlled environments. Beams of antiprotons together with a multi-purpose and compact detection system will provide unique tools to perform studies of the strong interaction. This will be achieved via precision spectroscopy of charmonium and opencharm states, an extensive search for exotic objects such as glueballs and hybrids, in-medium and hypernuclei spectroscopy, and more. An overview is given of the physics program of the PANDA collaboration.
QUEST User Manual

QUEST stands for “Quick, Unbiased, Efficient Statistical Trees” and is a program for tree-structured classification. The algorithms are described in Loh and Shih (1997). The performance of QUEST compared with other classification methods can be found in Lim, Loh and Shih (2000). The main strengths of QUEST are unbiased variable selection and fast computational speed. In addition, it has options to perform CART-style exhaustive search and cost-complexity cross-validation pruning (Breiman, Friedman, Olshen and Stone, 1984). This version is coded in Fortran 90. The main changes since version 1.6 are
Empirical efficiency gains of high-speed UDP-based protocols in realistic settings

Different cloud and data/video delivery applications require the use of high-speed links to fulfill a reasonable qu ality of experience. However, Internet connections in developing c ountries like Chile are -in many casesfar from being suitable for transferring large data files in a fast and efficient manner toend (non-business) users. These are usually non-dedicated lin ks, with no more than 10-20 Mbps at the user’s end, showing patterns of congestion (and high latency) when connecting to distant servers. In this context, it has been shown in controlled/l ab situationsthat certain UDP based protocols outperform TCP. In this work, we aim to empirically evaluate upper bounds of performance for a set of UDP-based protocols, comparing their efficiency with respect to TCP, in realistic settings. We performed a long-term measurement campaign, transmitting1 GB files from Santiago, Chile to Atlanta, US, allowing us to compute eventual efficiency gains of UDP, Tsunami and UDT over TCP. Our results show that UDT and UDP perform better than TCP and Tsunami when comparing their achievable rates, stability and completion time to download large files. In terms of their attainable throughput, UDP and UDT duplicate TCP (on average), where UDT has the added benefit of acknowledging receptions of data blocks, being then suitable for reliablehighspeed transmissions. Therefore, typical home-users with l imited download bandwidth would significantly improve their quali ty of experience if UDT is employed as an application-layer proto col for reliable transmissions, being not only transparent to them but also highly efficient.
Robust output regulation for autonomous vertical landing

We consider the design of an autopilot for the autonomous landing of a VTOL air vehicle on a ship, whose deck oscillates in the vertical direction due to high sea states. The deck motion is modeled as the superposition of a fixed number of sinusoidal functions of time of unknown amplitude and phase. We design an internal-model based error-feedback dynamic regulator that is robust with respect to uncertainties on the mechanical parameters that characterize the model and secures global convergence.
A Case Study in Planning Online Interaction

In using the qualitative case study methodology (Merriam, 1998) an MDE candidate at Athabasca University investigated the effects of planning learning activities intended to heighten online student interaction. The investigation targeted several pivotal decisions in instructional systems design (ISD) addressed in the conversion of an existing course for online delivery. Training for Improved Performance (TIP), developed by AU (1990), was selected as the ISD model. The study sought to identify planning decisions taken during analysis, design and development processes that would foster interaction.
High Performance Fortran interface to the parallel C++

Describes the design of a High Performance Fortran (HPF) interface to the parallel C++ (pC++) programming language. The pC++/HPF interface provides a mechanism for users to link pC++ programs with Fortran subroutines so that they can take advantage of both the fast computing speed of Fortran and the object-oriented programming paradigm of C++. We discuss the design of the Fortran interface and illustrate it with a galactic dynamics application. Our interface implementation is efficient. The galactic dynamics application can achieve a 14.4 GFLOPS sustained speed on a 512-node CM-5 massively parallel supercomputer. <<ETX>>
Programming the grid with components: models and runtime issues

This paper describes different aspects of our research activities aiming at designing a component-based software infrastructure, called Padico, for computational Grids. Several problems were identified as obstacles to designing such an infrastructure. This paper addresses some of them especially a suitable software component model, capable of encapsulating parallel codes (GridCCM), a communication framework (PadicoTM) allowing software components to communicate between each other taking advantage of various networking technologies available within a grid infrastruc- ture and a network topology description model, permitting an automatic deployment of software components by capturing real-world grid network topologies.
IMPACTS OF SAMPLING EFFORT ON ESTIMATING ABUNDANCE OF THE APHID SIPHA FLAVA ( FORBES ) IN SUGARCANE IN MAZABUKA , ZAMBIA

The exotic aphid Sipha flava (Forbes) (Homoptera: Aphididae) has recently become a pest of concern for sugarcane farmers in the Mazabuka region of Zambia. The steady decline in sugarcane yields has led to the need for investigation into the spatial-temporal dynamics of S. flava outbreaks, its population dynamics and invasion potential. Field survey data of S. flava, its abundance and distribution (every 20 m by 10 lines in ±6 ha blocks), were intensely collected over a period of 6 weeks on a weekly basis in 7 separate fields. Using randomisation across subsets of these data, the authors illustrate how sampling effort might impact on estimates of abundance. These data provide much greater spatial resolution than current coarse-scale monitoring techniques are able to do. The levels of uncertainty with lower sampling effort are presented, highlighting the need for improving the current inconsistent scouting procedures. These results are discussed in the context of further development of an integrated pest management programme for aphids on sugarcane in Zambia.
A REDUCED-ORDER METHANE-AIR COMBUSTION MECHANISM THAT SATISFIES THE DIFFERENTIAL ENTROPY INEQUALITY

This paper presents a new method for determining the Arrhenius parameters of a reduced chemical mechanism such that it satisfies the second law of thermodynamics. The strategy is to approximate the progress of each reaction in the reduced mechanism from the species production rates of a detailed mechanism by using a linear least squares method. A series of non-linear least squares curve fittings are then carried out to find the optimal Arrhenius parameters for each reaction. At this step, the molar rates of production are written such that they comply with a theorem that provides the sufficient conditions for satisfying the second law of thermodynamics. This methodology was used to modify the Arrhenius parameters for the Westbrook and Dryer two-step mechanism for methane combustion. The optimized mechanism showed good agreement with the detailed mechanism for species mole fractions and production rates of most major species. The optimized mechanisms produced no violations of the second law of thermodynamics.
Using Data Analytics for Cost-Effective Prediction of Road Conditions: Case of The Pavement Condition Index: [summary report]

Municipalities and transportation departments devote considerable effort to collecting data— particularly in relation to road conditions. Many small municipalities do not have sufficient resources to collect data regularly. In larger municipalities, on the other hand, collecting field-based data may have negative impacts in terms of crew safety and traffic interruptions; data analytics could help reduce these negative impacts. In this study, data analytics is used to test if affordable and easy-tocollect data can be used to predict future values of the Pavement Condition Index (PCI). North American transportation departments frequently use the PCI to assess road conditions. To calculate the PCI, transportation departments and municipalities must collect distress data and their severity levels. In this study, the Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) database was used as the source of data. Because the LTPP database does not include the PCI values of its road sections, the first step in the study was to develop a program to calculate the PCI from the distress values in the LTPP database. Next, a set of pavement attributes was selected—mainly based on the ease of collection and cost effectiveness. The researchers tested the potential importance of these attributes in predicting PCI using seven ranking algorithms and a heuristic feature-selection algorithm. Two types of decision trees were trained based on 942 examples of asphalt roads. Using combinations of 14 attributes, a set of decision trees was developed to predict the level of PCI deterioration with an accuracy of more than 70 percent. Finally, the accuracy and confusion matrices of different decision trees were compared to test the impact of each attribute on prediction accuracy. This method can help municipalities and transportation departments identify the most significant attributes to accurately predict road performance indicators (PIs).
Four-Dimensional Anisotropic Diffusion Framework With PDEs for Light Field Regularization and Inverse Problems

In this paper, we consider the problem of vector-valued regularization of light fields based on PDEs. We propose a regularization method operating in the four-dimensional (4-D) ray space that does not require prior estimation of disparity maps. The method performs a PDE-based anisotropic diffusion along directions defined by local structures in the 4-D ray space. We analyze light field regularization in the 4-D ray space using the proposed 4-D anisotropic diffusion framework by first considering a light field toy example, i.e., a tesseract. This simple light field example allows an in-depth analysis of how each eigenvector influences the diffusion process. We then illustrate the diffusion effect for several light field processing applications: denoising, angular, and spatial interpolation, regularization for enhancing disparity estimation as well as inpainting.
Prose Conversion in Sanskrit as a Linearisation Task : A case for Low-Resource Languages

The word ordering in a Sanskrit verse is often not aligned with its corresponding prose order. Conversion of the verse to its corresponding prose helps in better comprehension of the construction. Owing to the resource constraints, we formulate this task as a word ordering (linearisation) task. In doing so, we completely ignore the word arrangement at the verse side. kāvya guru, the approach we propose, essentially consists of a pipeline of two pretraining steps followed by a seq2seq model. The first pretraining step learns task specific token embeddings from pretrained embeddings. In the next step, we generate multiple hypotheses for possible word arrangements of the input (Wang et al., 2018). We then use them as inputs to a neural seq2seq model for the final prediction. We empirically show that the hypotheses generated by our pretraining step result in predictions that consistently outperform predictions based on the original order in the verse. Overall, kāvya guru outperforms current state of the art models in linearisation for the poetry to prose conversion task in Sanskrit.
Effect of service quality on occupancy levels at Molopo Lodge in Mafikeng , South Africa

Molopo Lodge in Mafikeng, North-West Province, experiences difficulties in maintaining consistent service quality, thus culminating in a fluctuation in return visits. Consequently the purpose of the study was to determine whether service quality levels have an effect on inconsistent occupancy levels. Relevant literature was reviewed with respect to customers and service quality expectations, related to consistent occupancy levels. Hospitality establishments aim to ensure consistent service quality levels. One such requirement is to have a reliable system which caters to meet a certain standard. A questionnaire was designed and used to collect data from 163 purposely, conveniently chosen respondents. The results of the data analysis reflected the direct effect of service quality on occupancy levels. The results of the regression analysis proved that providing quality service would have a positive impact on overall customer experience. Thus, the results of the empirical findings confirmed the existing body of literature regarding the relationship between service quality dimensions and overall experience. Customers overall experience is dependent on good service quality, which has a potential for driving more consistent occupancy levels at the Molopo Lodge and other similar enterprises.