Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Wind-Farm Power Tracking Via Preview-Based Robust Reinforcement Learning

This article aims to address the wind-farm power tracking problem, which requires the farm's total power generation to track time-varying power references and, therefore, allows the wind farm to participate in ancillary services such as frequency regulation. A novel preview-based robust deep reinforcement learning (PR-DRL) method is proposed to handle such tasks which are subject to uncertain environmental conditions and strong aerodynamic interactions among wind turbines. To our knowledge, this is for the first time that a data-driven model-free solution is developed for wind-farm power tracking. Particularly, reference signals are treated as preview information and embedded in the system as specially designed augmented states. The control problem is then transformed into a zero-sum game to quantify the influence of unknown wind conditions and future reference signals. Built upon the $H_\infty$ control theory, the proposed PR-DRL method can successfully approximate the resulting zero-sum game's solution and achieve wind-farm power tracking. Time-series measurements and long short-term memory networks are employed in our DRL structure to handle the non-Markovian property induced by the time-delayed feature of aerodynamic interactions. Tests based on a dynamic wind-farm simulator demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PR-DRL wind-farm control strategy.
Electrification Potential of Fuel-Based Vehicles and Optimal Placing of Charging Infrastructure: A Large-Scale Vehicle-Telematics Approach

As apprehension grows over global warming and urban pollution, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are experiencing a rise in worldwide popularity. Yet, their market uptake has been slowed down due to high purchase prices and concerns over the limited battery range and the insufficient public charging infrastructure. This work uses a massive real-world dataset, containing the anonymized global positioning system (GPS) traces from a fleet of private vehicles, to quantitatively evaluate if range anxiety (i.e., the fear of being stranded due to EV’s limited range) is a rational concern. In particular, the fleet’s electrification potential is assessed by analyzing the driving patterns of more than 50000 vehicles over the course of an entire year. The results reveal the potential of BEVs, which could satisfy the range needs of much of the existing fuel-powered vehicle fleet with no alteration to the owners’ routines (except for overnight recharging). Furthermore, the mileage analysis is later used to pinpoint the so-called eligible stops (ESs), corresponding to real charging demand and opportunities. ESs are aggregated through clustering analysis, obtaining a ranking of potential charging station sites. Finally, we quantitatively evaluate the effects of the increasing dissemination of charging facilities on the vehicles’ EV-switch suitability.
The role of antioxidant mechanism in photosynthesis under heavy metals Cd or Zn exposure in tobacco leaves

ABSTRACT We examined the effects of Cd and Zn exposure on the photosynthetic function and the tolerant mechanisms of ROS metabolism in tobacco leaves. The results showed that the photosynthesis inhibition caused by Cd exposure was due to the limitation of both stomatal and non-stomatal factors, while Zn exposure only showed a significant effect on the Gs of tobacco leaves. Cd increased the generation rate of O2•– and the content of H2O2, but Zn did not lead to the ROS burst. Cd enhanced the POD activity, but inhibited SOD and CAT activities. The activities of SOD and POD significantly increased under Zn exposure. Cd inhibited the activity and expression of APX. The up regulation of GPX, GR and GST expression and the increase of their activities also play a positive role in the adaptation to Cd. Although Zn inhibited the activities of APX and GPX, it had little effect on other enzyme activities and protein expression in AsA-GSH cycle. TPX and TrxR activities, Trx-Prx pathway-related proteins are very sensitive to Cd. However, only PrxQ and 2-Cys Prx BAS1, which are located in chloroplast, and Trx-HFC164 were significantly down-regulated in Trx-Prx pathway under Zn exposure.
High Level FPGA Implementation Of Adaptive Signal Segmentation And Autoregressive Modeling Techniques

This thesis contains new FPGA implementations of adaptive signal segmentation and autoregressive modeling techniques. Both designs use Simulink-to-FPGA methodology and have been successfully implemented onto Xilinx Virtex II Pro device. The implementation of adaptive signal segmentation is based on the conventional RLSL algorithm using double-precision floating point arithmetic for internal computation and is programmable for users providing data length and order selection functions. The implemented RLSL design provides very good performance of obtaining accurate conversion factor values with a mean correlation of 99.93% and accurate boundary positions for both synthesized and biomedical signals. The implementation of autoregressive (AR) modeling is based on the Burg-lattice algorithm using fixed point arithmetic. The implemented Burg design with order of 3 provides good performance of calculating AR coefficients of input biomedical signals.
Thermal diffusion effect on unsteady MHD free convective flow past an impulsively started but temporarily accelerated semi‐infinite vertical plate with parabolic ramped conditions

The purpose of the present study is to analyze the problem of a free convective MHD flow of incompressible, electrically conducting, and viscous fluid past an impulsively started semi‐infinite moving vertical plate. The fluid is considered to be non‐gray and optically thick. The parabolic ramped temperature of the plate and thermodiffusion effect are also taken into account. A magnetic field having uniform strength is applied in the transverse direction to the fluid velocity. Solutions of dimensionless governing partial differential equations are attained on the adoption of the closed‐form Laplace transformation technique. Effects of different flow parameters on the velocity field, temperature field, concentration field, Nusselt number, skin friction, and Sherwood Number are discussed graphically. It is noticed that fluid concentration, temperature, and velocity decline considerably for ascending values of Prandtl Number. Increasing Ramped parameter hikes the Nusselt number and Sherwood Number but declines skin friction.
Retinal organoid differentiation methods determine organoid cellular composition

methods determine Abstract Aim: We aimed to compare the quantity and quality of aging retinal organoids generated by applying three distinct differentiation protocols for human-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC). Methods: hiPSC were differentiated to retinal organoids using a 3D technique (Method 1) and a 3D-2D-3D technique (Method
Nonlinear Fuzzy Model Predictive Control of the TCP-100 Parabolic Trough Plant

Advanced control strategies can play an important role in improving the efﬁciency of solar plants. In particular, linear model predictive control strategies have been applied successfully when controlling solar trough plants. However, if the control algorithm uses a linear model associated only with one operating point, when the plant is working far from the design conditions, the performance of the controller may deteriorate. In this paper, a fuzzy model-based nonlinear model predictive controller is applied to the new TCP-100 solar facility. The control strategy uses a fuzzy model of the plant for predicting the future evolution of the outlet temperature. This approach reduces the computational time of the nonlinear model predictive control strategy and allows to solve it much faster than using the full nonlinear model.
Lubricants having zinc borate by homogeneous precipitation and Span 60 in spindle oil

Nano particles of zinc borate were obtained by homogeneous precipitation method which is based on dissolving zinc borate in ammonia and precipitating it as nano particles by slow evaporation of ammonia. The synthesized zinc borates were characterized by advanced analytical techniques. Zinc borate nano particles were used as a lubricant additive to spindle oil having Span 60 dispersant. The particles were well dispersed in spindle oil as shown by optical microscopy of the oils. Four ball tests of the lubricants indicated zinc borate lowered (61.8%) the wear scar diameter significantly. The hardness of wear surfaces of test balls was reduced from 688 HV to 618 HV and presence of zinc borate particles embedded on the surface indicated a flexible skin was formed. Therefore the pressure was decreased due to increase of the contact area of the balls. The surface roughness was also decreased from 35.63 nm to 27.60 nm by the addition of zinc borate to spindle oil having Span 60. Zinc borate prepared by homogeneous precipitation technique lowered the wear of the surfaces that rub to each other.
SPH Open Boundary Simulation of Free-Surface Flow Over Ogee-crested Spillway

This study was conducted to compare water surface profiles with standard ogeecrested spillways. Different methods were used, such as (experimental models, numerical models, and design nomographs for the United States Army Corps of Engineers, USACE). In accordance with the USACE specifications, three different models were constructed from rigid foam and then installed in a testing flume. The water surface profile has been recorded for these models with different design heads. For modeling the experimental model configurations, a numerical model based on the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) technique was used and is developed to simulate the water surface profile of the flow over the ogee-crested spillway. A 2D SPHysics open-source software has been used in this study, using the SPH formulation to model fluid flow, developing the SPH boundary procedure to handle open-boundary simulations, and modifying the open-source SPHysics code for this purpose. The maximum absolute difference between the measured and computed results of the water surface profile for all head ratios of (H/Hd), does not exceed 4.63% at the crest region, the numerical results for the water surface profile showed good agreement with the physical model results. The results obtained experimentally and numerically by SPH are compared with the CFD results in order to be more reassuring from the results. Additional comparisons were made using interpolated data from USACE, Waterways Experiment Station (WES), and design nomographs. The SPH technique is considered very promising and effective for free surface flow applications.
Outlier: Enabling Effective Measurement of Hypervisor Code Integrity With Group Detection

Virtualization brings the benefits of utilization and scalability to the multi-tenant cloud platforms. However, the hypervisor, as one of the foundations in virtualization, is challenging to survive under various malicious attacks due to its large attack surface. This article presents a novel group detection framework for the hypervisor code integrity, called Outlier. In an Outlier group, each host contains two parts. One is a distributed detection protocol, called Co-protocol, and the other is a detection interface, called Checker. The Co-protocol constructs trust for the integrity detection within an Outlier group. With the Co-protocol, each Checker conducts reliable integrity detection on the hypervisor code, and then the potential “outlier” host is perceived. We implement our Outlier prototype on the Xen hypervisor and evaluate its overhead. Experiments show that the introduction of the Outlier has few impacts on the performance of the virtualized systems.
Home-Microgrid Energy Management Strategy Considering EV’s Participation in DR

Electric vehicles (EVs) have a lot of potential to play an essential role in the smart power grid. EVs not only can reduce the amount of emission yielded from fossil fuels but also can be considered as an energy storage system (ES) and a backup system. EVs could support the demand response (DR) strategy that is considered as utmost importance to shift electricity demand in peak hours. This article aims to assess the impact of the presence of EV on DR strategy in a home-microgrid (H-MG). In order to reach the optimal set point, our energy management system (EMS) has been merged with differential evolution (DE) method. The results were auspicious and showed that the proposed method could decrease market clearing price (MCP) by 26% and increase the performance of DR by 17%.
Crystalline S-Layer Protein Monolayers Induce Water Turbulences on the Nanometer Scale

Bacterial surface layers (S-layers) have been observed as the outermost cell envelope component in a wide range of bacteria and most archaea. They are one of the most common prokaryotic cell surface structures and cover the cells completely. It is assumed that S-layers provide selection advantages to prokaryotic cells in their natural habitats since they act as protective envelopes, as structures involved in cell adhesion and surface recognition, as molecular or ion traps, and as molecular sieves in the ultrafiltration range. In order to contribute to the question of the function of S-layers for the cell, we merged high-resolution cryo-EM and small-angle X-ray scattering datasets to build a coarse-grained functional model of the S-layer protein SbpA from Lysinibacillus sphaericus ATCC 4525. We applied the Navier–Stokes and the Poisson equations for a 2D section through the pore region in the self-assembled SbpA lattice. We calculated the flow field of water, the vorticity, the electrostatic potential, and the electric field of the coarse-grained model. From calculated local changes in the flow profile, evidence is provided that both the characteristic rigidity of the S-layer and the charge distribution determine its rheological properties. The strength of turbulence and pressure near the S-layer surface in the range of 10 to 50 nm thus support our hypothesis that the S-layer, due to its highly ordered repetitive crystalline structure, not only increases the exchange rate of metabolites but is also responsible for the remarkable antifouling properties of the cell surface. In this context, studies on the structure, assembly and function of S-layer proteins are promising for various applications in nanobiotechnology, biomimetics, biomedicine, and molecular nanotechnology.
O Penedo dos Lobos: Roman military activity in the uplands of the Galician Massif (Northwest Iberia)

ABSTRACT A new Roman military site was recently detected in Galicia, Spain, an area where the army presence had been challenging to trace until date. O Penedo dos Lobos is a playing-card shaped camp with very distinctive, fortified entrances. The archaeological survey conducted on this site in the summer of 2018 allowed us to recover some elements of Roman militaria, as well as numismatic evidence dating back to late 1st c. BC, thus suggesting a connection with the Cantabrian-Asturian Wars of Augustan times. However, there is still some uncertainty regarding the specific task undertaken by the military contingent that occupied this site. Besides its historical implications, a focus will be given to the methodology applied for the archaeological survey of this site. This has shed new light on the Roman military presence in Galicia, allowing its integration into wider European debates on Roman conquest and expansion.
Making Use of Functional Dependencies Based on Data to Find Better Classification Trees

For the classification task of machine learning algorithms independency between conditional attributes is a precondition for success of data mining. On the other hand, decision trees are one of the mostly used machine learning algorithms because of their good understandability. So, because dependency between conditional attributes can cause more complex trees, supplying conditional attributes independent each other is very important, the requirement of conditional attributes for decision trees as well as other machine learning algorithms is that they are independent each other and dependent on decisional attributes only. Statistical method to check independence between attributes is Chi-square test, but the test can be effective for categorical attributes only. So, the applicability of Chi-square test is limited, because most datasets for data mining have mixed attributes of categorical and numerical. In order to overcome the problem, and as a way to test dependency between conditional attributes, a novel method based on functional dependency based on data that can be applied to any datasets irrespective of data type of attributes is suggested. After removing highly dependent attributes between conditional attributes, we can generate better decision trees. Experiments were performed to show that the method is effective, and the experiments showed very good results.
Фітохімічне та фармакологічне дослідження полісахаридних комплексів плодів prunus domestica

Aim. The aim of our research was fractionation of polysaccharide complexes from fresh plum fruits, comparative study content of neutral sugars in it, element composition of plum fruit and investigation of influence of fibers and water soluble polysaccharide complex (WSPC) on histostructure of rats liver in conditions of ethanol intoxication Methods. The elemental composition was determined with atomic emission spectrophotometer ISE 3500 (Thermo Scientific, USA). The content of polysaccharide fractions as fibers, WSPC and pectin was determined by Gravimetry. The comparative study of monosaccharides content in obtained fractions was carried out with picric acid method on a Hewlett Packard 8453 spectrophotometer at a wavelength of 463 nm in a cuvette with a layer thickness of 10 mm. Investigation of the influence of fibers and water soluble polysaccharide complex (WSPC) of plum fruit on histostructure of rat liver was carried out on the model of ethanol intoxication. Results. As a result of the study element composition were determined. Potassium has the most content in fruits– 2000 μg/100 g. Content of heavy metals in the plum fruit does not exceed the norms established by the State Pharmacopoeia of Ukraine. Three polysaccharide fractions, as fibers WSPC and pectines, were obtained from the fresh plum fruits. The most content of neutral sugars were determined in the WSPS – 61.52±1.47 %. Their content in other complexes was: in fibers – 59.23±1.15 %, pectin – 22.85±0.55 %. It was confirmed that simultaneous administration of alcohol with the fibers of plum fruits in a dose of 200 mg / kg prevents the development of fatty dystrophy of the liver parenchyma, in contrast to the similar scheme of the administration of the WSPC of plum fruit in the same dose or drug comparison silibor at a dose of 30 mg/kg. Conclusions. Considering results of phitochemical and pharmacological research we can assume that the plum fruit fiber is promising for further study in order to create a new effective and safe drugs for use in medical practice
Does Human Capital Mitigate Resource Curse? Evidence in the Short- and Long-Run

This paper examines the short-term and long-term relationships among natural resources, human capital, and growth in Mali in an Autoregressive Distributed Lag-Error Correction Model framework. In the presence of natural resources, we find that human capital has a positive impact on growth over time. Results show a long-term, stable and positive relationship between economic growth, natural resources, and human capital. Furthermore, the results do not show evidence of Dutch disease or the presence of any natural resource curse in Mali.
Verification of moist surface variables over northern Australia in a high-resolution reanalysis (BARRA)

Reanalyses are important tools for understanding past weather and climate variability, but detailed verification of near surface humidity variables have not been published. This is particularly concerning in tropical regions where humid conditions impact meteorology and human activities. In this study, we used screen level temperature and humidity data from a high-resolution atmospheric regional reanalysis, the Bureau of Meteorology Atmospheric high-resolution Regional Reanalysis for Australia (BARRA), validated against automatic weather stations (AWS) data for 32 sites across northern Australia. Overall, the BARRA data was reliable, with the time series from the AWS and BARRA being very highly correlated, but there were some seasonal and diurnally varying biases. The variability of the differences also changed from location to location and as a function of time of day and season, but much less than the biases. This variability was less than the ‘weather signal’ as evidenced by the high correlations. In particular, the amplitude of the diurnal cycle was overestimated, particularly in the dry (winter) season. In general, the differences in temperature were larger than those of the dew point temperature, and the wet bulb temperature had the least uncertainty. Overall, this study contributes to a better understanding of the effectiveness of reanalyses for examining the impact of moist variables on tropical climate variability.
Using Shrubs as Nurse-plants to Reduce Browsing and Rubbing Damage by Roe Deer: An Experimental Approach

ABSTRACT We conducted a field experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of neighboring vegetation to protect cherry-wood (Prunus avium) saplings against roe deer browsing and rubbing, and determine whether this protection varies according to the attractiveness of – and the physical barrier provided by – a variety of nurse shrubs. Our results show that nurse shrubs may delay roe deer browsing and rubbing on highly attractive cherry-wood saplings, even in a situation of high deer density. The most obstructing shrubs at roe deer knee to shoulder height (Populus x canescens and Cytisus scoparius) appeared to be efficient barriers, whereas the spiny shrub (Elaeagnus angustifolia) did not protect saplings more efficiently than thornless species. Yet, obstruction appeared to be less effective against browsing when the nurse species was itself browsed (Cornus sanguinea and Alnus cordata). Since roe deer may help to reduce plantation cleaning through the control of the shrub layer, especially brambles, we argue that natural methods of protection using surrounding vegetation should represent an economic and sustainable alternative to artificial protection of saplings.