Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Artifact detection and correction in Neurofeedback and BCI applications

Scalp recorded electroencephalogram signals (EEG) can nowadays be recorded by pocket-size devices, giving rise to several new consumer based applications of EEG, e.g. brain computer interfaces (BCIs) and neurofeedback (NF). Using EEG ambulatory systems such as these, creates new challenges for EEG data analysis, especially concerning artifact handling. In a clinical setting, EEG can be recorded in a controlled environment, while the subject is in rest, and using additional sensors, e.g. EOG electrodes or eye tracker systems. For user-friendly applications, controlling the environment and the user, and using obstructive sensors for recording, are not possible. This requires a new perspective in the evaluation of artifact handling in EEG. In this thesis artifact handling is considered from an ambulatory-system point of view. Artifacts are classified in accordance with their impact on possible BCI and NF applications. Artifact detection performance is measured based on individual electrode signals, yielding a topographic view of artifact detectability. A method for artifact correction is chosen based on practical considerations pertaining to implementation. The influence of recording settings on correction performance is explored. A validation of artifact correction is given, based on averaged signals. Ocular artifacts have a significant impact on the analysis of EEG. The fact that they cannot be avoided, appear often (up to 15 times for eye blinks and possibly more often for movement), and have a large signal to artifact ratio (SAR)(up to -10 for frontal electrode sites and approximately 1 for the central area of the scalp), makes the correction of these artifacts necessary. The performance of three threshold-based detection methods is found to be highly subject dependent. The locations of the electrodes used for detection have a great influence on detection performance, which is closely related to SAR. For the correction of ocular artifacts from EEG recordings for BCI and NF applications, independent component analysis (ICA) is chosen as the preferable method. Key in accurate ICA artifact estimation is the location of the electrodes that are used as input. The importance of using frontal electrodes outweighs the importance of a high number of electrodes. The minimum sample rate needed for accurate ocular artifact estimation is 128 Hz. The most efficient and effective approach to correct artifacts, is to first construct a training file for each ocular artifact type. From these training files a filtering matrix is constructed, which will subsequently be used to correct artifacts as they are detected. Even under optimal conditions ICA correction is incomplete and residual artifacts remain. iv c © Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. 2008
Brief Overview of Modelling Methods, Life-Cycle and Application Domains of Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are systems that connect the physical world with the virtual world of information processing. They consist of various components that work together to create some global behaviour. These components include software systems, communication technologies and sensors, executive mechanisms that interact with the real world, often including embedded technologies. One CPS may include a variety of components from different manufacturers or service providers, often without even knowing that their products and services are integrated with others as a result of CPS. This paper systematises information about CPS modelling methods and domains and presents the CPS modelling cycle – from abstraction to architecture and from concept to realisation.
Thermogelation Analysis of F127-Water Mixtures by Physical Chemistry Techniques

Abstract Aqueous solutions of F127 pluronic systems exhibit an interesting thermal gelation above a certain concentration. This phenomenon concerns the transition from a liquid-like behavior at low temperatures to a solid-like behavior at high temperatures, and it is due to different temperature responses from the different polymer segments, polypropylene oxide (PPO) and polyethylene oxide (PEO). Such property leads to a structural change in the self assembled macromolecule upon heating, from an isotropic micellar structure to an ordered cubic structure. These two types of assembly are clearly distinct with respect to their rheological behavior. This contribution emphasizes the rheological properties of the pluronic system in micellar and cubic phase, in combination with NMR, Dynamic Light Scattering and DSC information. The results emphasize the gelation process upon heating and a cubic phase characterized by higher storage modulus and higher A and z Weak Gel Model exponents than the micellar phase. Micellar growth upon heating was found within micellar phase. The presented data support the hypothesis that each polymer segment actively participates in the formation of the different phases: while PPO is responsible for micelle formation, PEO plays a dominating role in cubic phase formation. Finally, different stiffness between the core and the corona of the aggregates in the two phases is observed.
Effectiveness Measurement Using DEA & BSC Methods in Public Health Services

Abstract It is well-known that health-care systems all over the world try to improve efficiency and effectiveness due to high pressure to pursue rational performance. Many of the health-care reforms in different countries are conducted with the objectives to rationalise costs, to make health services more available, and to increase, or at least not to reduce, the quality of health services. Adequate efficient metrics used in assessing health-care services are critical for the quality of decision-making. The subject of this research is efficiency measurement in the institutes of public health in Croatia oriented to preventive activities, i.e. monitoring, analysis, and evaluation of the health of the population. Diversity of the programmes and temporal variability are the characteristics of public health services, and it is therefore harder to measure the effects in the long run. This research aims to analyse and propose a new approach to the measurement system using two methods: the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the Balanced Score Card (BSC), combined into the DEABSC integrative model, which can be an efficient method for the decision-making process. The starting point of this research is the analysis of the measurement system in public-health services in Croatia. The results confirm a weak and inadequate efficiency measurement system and very low effectiveness measurement. To enhance the efficiency measurement, we have developed the conceptual integrative DEABSC model which has been tested at the Teaching Institute of Public Health – the Department of Health Ecology. Using DEA for 2017, we have identified relatively efficient units that helped establish future goals set in the BSC strategic map. The combination of DEA and BSC allows identifying options for improving the effectiveness of public-health service programmes. The study confirms that it is possible to determine the relative efficiency of different DMUs within the Department of Health Ecology and use best practice for each perspective in the BSC Cause & Effect conceptual model. This paper also provides recommendations for an easier establishment of performance measurement in order to achieve the mission of public health institutions, but also indicates some limitations in the application of the methods.
Bulgarian-English Code-switching in Internet Forum Communication: The BG-mamma Case

Abstract The aim of the paper is to introduce the author's observations on the influence that English has on the Bulgarian forum "Netspeak" for women living in the USA. The collected data for the investigation are excerpted from a Bulgarian forum platform. The emphasis is on code-switching, one of the main topics in sociolinguistics; as well as on the interlanguage, which is a result of the penetration of some elements from English into the first language of communicators. The orthography may also be influenced as in Bulgaria the Cyrillic alphabet is used. The informal situation is a prerequisite for the mixed style use, especially in vocabulary. Different topics have been observed and discussed by users in the forum: the choice of baby accessories; baggage loss in airports; child diseases, child physical and mental development, etc. The investigated forum discussion includes 52,020 lexical items. Excerpted English words are few - only 1.5%. Most of them are nouns because of their easy grammatical adaptation. The verb group is not affected so noticeably. The Bulgarian verbal system is very complicated and English verbs used in Bulgarian context are grammatically adapted. There are some exceptions when people use ready-made constructions like idioms and phrasal verbs.
Genetic Algorithms vs. Knowledge-Based Control of PHB Production

Abstract The paper proposes an approach using Genetic Algorithm (GA) for development of optimal time profiles of key control variable of Poly-HydroxyButyrate (PHB) production process. Previous work on modeling and simulation of PHB process showed that it is a highly nonlinear process that needs special controllers based on human experience, as such fuzzy logic controller proved to be a good choice. Fuzzy controllers are not totally replaced, due to the specific process knowledge that they contain. The achieved results are compared with previously proposed knowledge-based approach to the same optimal control task.
Algorithms and Low Cost Architectures for Trace Buffer-Based Silicon Debug

An effective silicon debug technique uses a trace buffer to monitor and capture a portion of the circuit response during its functional, post-silicon operation. Due to the limited space of the available trace buffer, selection of the critical trace signals plays an important role in both minimizing the number of signals traced and maximizing the observability/restorability of other untraced signals during post-silicon validation. In this thesis, a new method is proposed for trace buffer signal selection for the purpose of postsilicon debug. The selection is performed by favoring those signals with the most number of implications that are not implied by other signals. Then, based on the values of the traced signals during silicon debug, an algorithm which uses a SAT-based multi-node implication engine is introduced to restore the values of untraced signals across multiple time-frames. A new multiplexer-based trace signal interconnection scheme and a new heuristic for trace signal selection based on implication-based correlation are also described. By this approach, we can effectively trace twice as many signals with the same trace buffer width. A SAT-based greedy heuristic is also proposed to prune the selected trace signal list further to take into account those multi-node implications. A state restoration algorithm is developed for the multiplexer-based trace signal interconnection scheme. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches select the trace signals effectively, giving a high restoration percentage compared with other techniques. We finally propose a lossless compression technique to increase the capacity of the trace buffer. We propose real-time compression of the trace data using Frequency-Directed Run-Length (FDR) code. In addition, we also propose source transformation functions, namely difference vector computation, efficient ordering of trace flip-flops and alternate vector reversal that reduces the entropy of the trace data, making them more amenable for compression. The order of the trace flip-flops is computed off-chip using a probabilistic algorithm. The difference vector computation and alternate vector reversal are implemented on-chip and incurs negligible hardware overhead. Experimental results for
Analysis and design of a class E current-driven rectifier for 1 MHz wireless power transfer system

Abstract The paper presents the design of the class E current-driven rectifier, which is intended for operation in the wireless power transmission system, as well as the concept of selection of the rectifier parameters which allows the operation with high efficiency. The selection of the rectifier parameters was performed with a view to the use of the existing wireless power transmission (WPT) system. The procedure for selection of the rectifier parameters has been proposed to enable its optimal use in reference to the system parameters given already at the design stage, ie; load resistance and the coil magnetic coupling factor (distance between coils). In order to verify the correctness of the procedure for selection of the parameters, the numerical model of the system which consists of the class E resonance inverter, the air-core transformer and the designed E class rectifier system was developed in the LTspice environment. Simulation tests and analysis of the obtained calculation results were performed. Based on the simulation results, a prototype of the class E rectifier system which cooperates with the existing wireless power transmission system supplied from the class E inverter was developed. The obtained results of laboratory measurements demonstrated a high compliance with the simulation results, thus, confirming the correctness of the proposed design procedure and the high operating efficiency of the rectifier system.
Interpretation of T-Bar Tool Measurements for Yield Stress Materials

Abstract The T-bar rheometrical tool (Brookfield Engineering Laboratories, Inc.) is a slender rod which is placed in a material and rotated horizontally about its short axis by a vertical shaft. The torque on the shaft from laminar flow of material around the rod is determined by the material’s rheological properties. T-bar experiments for a Newtonian liquid are shown to agree closely with existing theory. For yield stress materials an approximation is derived for the torque on a rotating T-bar which is supported by experiments on a range of materials. The torque for very slow rotational speed is insensitive to boundaries beyond a few T-bar diameters and is shown to correlate with the material’s yield stress and other non-Newtonian parameters. A step-decrease in torque for each half-revolution of the T-bar was shown by some materials and possible origins of this effect are discussed.
Design and Implementation of Vision-Guiding Controller for Autonomous Cart

This paper studies the image processing algorithms to recognize the face features and hands gestures for the motion control of an autonomous cart. The camera installed on a cart is used to grab the images of its task scene, from which to recognize the commander and his or her hands gestures, which is combined with the cart motions to determine the distances and directions of the target for control cart directions and speeds to achieve the purpose of image navigation. The experimental results show the proposed approaches make the cart with the abilities to interactive with its commander. (Abstract) Keywords—face identification, gesture recognition, cart navigation.
Statistical Models for Querying and Managing Time-Series Data

Keywords: time-series data management ; statistical query processing ; adaptive clustering ; community sensing ; probabilistic databases ; ane transformations ; view generation ; approximate caching These Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne EPFL, n° 5705 (2013)Programme doctoral Informatique, Communications et InformationFaculte informatique et communicationsInstitut d'informatique fondamentaleLaboratoire de systemes d'information repartisJury: M. Grossglauser (president), R. Cheng, C. Koch, G. Trajcevski Public defense: 2013-6-21 Reference doi:10.5075/epfl-thesis-5705Print copy in library catalog Record created on 2013-06-12, modified on 2017-05-12
Figure 4. Typical Evolution of a Population of Networks Generated by (a) Mta Algorithm, (b) Cca Algorithm and (c) Ccas Algorithm. (a) (b) 6. Acknowledgments 7. References

[4] F. Dellaert, and J. Vandewalle, " Automatic design of cellular neural networks by means of genetic algorithms: finding a feature detector " , in The Third Efficient reinforcement learning through symbiotic evolution " , Training Data Validation Data Test Data gorithms than it is in the latter. The difference in performance is a result of statistical dissimilarities between the two data sets and is a potential way of measuring how representative the training and validation data sets are. Of the three algorithms MTA produces the best classifiers with the highest confidence measures (Table 2, Fig. 3), however it suffers from the problems of scaling and competing conventions. The CCA solves the scaling problem at the cost of a larger population and perhaps more evaluations required in order to get a good measure of the fitness of the population. However, it keeps the search space from growing exponentially , and the size of the population need only grow linearly with the number of feature detectors in the network. On the other hand CCA suffers from a problem of how to combine a good complement of feature detectors, which degrades its performance. CCAS solves this problem by isolating specialized feature detectors in separate populations, resulting in much better performance than the CCA. Use of genetic algorithms with back propagation in training of feed-forward neural networks " , in IEEE Internationalbinations of genetic algorithms and neural net-comparison we ensured that the same number of trial networks were evaluated each generation for all the algorithms. Each algorithm was run 10 times. The networks with the best fitness during each evolution were recorded and the performance of these networks on the three data sets, averaged over the ten runs, is shown in Table 2, These values are compared p crossover 0.6
The Use of Decision Tables within Systematics

A range of techniques under the general title of Systematics is being developed for designing and describing information systems. The main feature of these techniques is that they allow the user to concentrate on the design and description of the information system without having to consider the computer strategy problems concerned with how the system is to be implemented. Some of these have been described elsewhere (Grindley, 1966). One of the basic techniques in this earlier paper was called an AND/OR Matrix. As King (1967a) has shown this AND/OR Matrix is a form of decision table. During the field work which has since taken place, this particular technique has undergone some modification. The present form of the decision table and the way in which it is used is described in this paper.
A Views-Based Design Framework for Web Applications

I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. Abstract Web application design is a broad term that refers to any aspect of designing a Web application, including designing Web interfaces to data. There are a number of commercial software tools available that employ various techniques for implementing Web access to databases. However, these techniques apply only to portions of Web application implementation and lack a common design paradigm. We believe that defining an approach to designing and implementing Web applications based on views, frameworks, and patterns allows us to extend an object-oriented design representation and develop reusable and extensible design solutions for a class of Web applications in which the concerns are separated. The major contribution of this thesis is the development of a new approach to designing Web applications, producing the following visible contributions: a model for Web applications based upon a separation of concerns using views; a framework for system elements so that object-oriented design patterns can be used to build the application; a reusable design approach so that many Web applications can be built around the same framework; a coherent and organized framework representation using extended UML; and an implementation approach that can be implemented on a number of different platforms using a range of software and tools. In support of this solution, this thesis shows the design and implementation of a proof-of-concept Web application using this design technique. We believe that the approach to Web application design promoted in this thesis has proven itself useful in a practical way for the case studies discussed herein and points the way to a wider range of design and implementation possibilities. iv Acknowledgments
TinySDR: Low-Power SDR Platform for Over-the-Air Programmable IoT Testbeds

Wireless protocol design for IoT networks is an active area of research which has seen significant interest and developments in recent years. The research community is however handicapped by the lack of a flexible, easily deployable platform for prototyping IoT endpoints that would allow for ground up protocol development and investigation of how such protocols perform at scale. We introduce tinySDR, the first software-defined radio platform tailored to the needs of power-constrained IoT endpoints. TinySDR provides a standalone, fully programmable low power software-defined radio solution that can be duty cycled for battery operation like a real IoT endpoint, and more importantly, can be programmed over the air to allow for large scale deployment. We present extensive evaluation of our platform showing it consumes as little as 30 uW of power in sleep mode, which is 10,000x lower than existing SDR platforms. We present two case studies by implementing LoRa and BLE beacons on the platform and achieve sensitivities of -126 dBm and -94 dBm respectively while consuming 11% and 3% of the FPGA resources. Finally, using tinySDR, we explore the research question of whether an IoT device can demodulate concurrent LoRa transmissions in real-time, within its power and computing constraints.
Suppression of the antiferromagnetic metallic state in the pressurized 
MnBi2Te4
 single crystal

MnBi2Te4 has attracted tremendous research interest recently as the first intrinsic antiferromagnetic (AF) topological insulator. It undergoes a long-range AF order at TN = 24 K accompanied with a cusp-like anomaly in the metallic resistivity. Here, we studied the effect of hydrostatic pressure on its electrical transport properties up to 12.5 GPa by using a cubic anvil cell apparatus. We find that TN determined from the resistivity anomaly first increases slightly with pressure and then decreases until vanished completely at ~7 GPa. Intriguingly, its resistivity rho(T) is enhanced gradually by pressure, and evolves from metallic to activated behavior as the AF order is suppressed. From the Hall resistivity measurements, we confirm that the n-type carriers dominate the transport properties and the carrier density is raised by pressure. In addition, the critical magnetic field Hc1 ~3.3 T at 0 GPa for the spin-flop transition to the canted AF state is found to increase to ~ 5 T and 7.5 T at 1 and 3 GPa. High-pressure XRD evidenced no structural transition up to 12.8 GPa. Based on the Hall resistivity results and first-principles calculations, we proposed that the intralayer direct AF interactions are strengthened by pressure and the competition between AF and FM interactions not only prevents long-range magnetic order but also promotes charge carrier localizations through enhance magnetic fluctuations at high pressures.