Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Microfabricated thousand-turn coils for mW power generation from sub-mm vibrations

This paper presents two microfabrication approaches for 3D multiple-layer coils for vibration-energy harvesters. One type of coils is made out of 300 μm thick copper that is electroplated with silicon mold, and the other is built on 25 μm thick copper electroplated with photoresist mold. The latter approach is used to obtain 1,080-turn coil for microfabricated electromagnetic energy harvester with magnet array and plastic spring. Though the size and weight of the harvester are only 26×13×6 mm3 and 12 gram, respectively, it generates 1.04 mW power output (into 190 Ω load) when it is vibrated at 75 Hz with vibration amplitude of 220 μm.
Rehabilitation of Memory and Memory Self-Efficacy in Cognitively Impaired Nursing Home Residents

Abstract This quasi-experimental study examined the effectiveness of the Cognitive Behavioral Model of Everyday Memory (CBMEM) on memory self-efficacy and memory performance of the elderly. Thirty residents from a county nursing home in Northeast Ohio participated. Forty-three percent of the sample were depressed and 57% were cognitively impaired. There were 30 subjects in the experimental group. Class attendance was low (M = 4.48); the dropout rate was 58%. As a result, among the 30 individuals in the experimental group, posttest data were available for only 13 subjects. There were no pre- to posttest differences in total memory performance scores. However, immediate story recall significantly (p ≤ .01) increased (M1 = .67; M2 = 1.33). The experimental group also made significant gains (p ≤ .0001) in memory self-efficacy (Mj = 35.84; M; = 41.87). While the intervention helped these vulnerable individuals improve their memory, future interventions may need to specifically target the problems of individuals with depression and those with cognitive impairments. Nevertheless, there is hope for improvement, as shown both here and in other memory improvement studies, and therefore the efforts to develop effective interventions need to continue.
He Says, She Says: Mothers and Children Remembering the Same Events.

This study examined the consistency of memories for the same events in mothers and children, and how that varied as a function of culture and organizational components of memories. European American (EA) and Chinese immigrant (CI) mothers and their 6-year-old children (N = 127) independently recalled two emotionally salient events. In both cultures, mothers and children agreed more on factual event details and observable behaviors and less on subjective experiences and idiosyncratic interpretations. EA mothers and children told more diverse stories than did CI mothers and children. The findings shed important light on autobiographical memory as a multidimensional construct shaped by cultural beliefs and practices, and have critical implications for the evaluation of memory accuracy in research and real-life settings.
Patch-based texture synthesis using differential evolution

This paper presents a novel algorithm for patch-based texture synthesis. This method surpasses the conventional texture synthesis method with evolutionary algorithm. Patch-based texture synthesis is to enlarge the texture image by quilting the small patches together in a raster scan manner by applying some preliminary processes. In the initial population generation at the time of fetching patches from the original texture image, there is the 8-pixel difference between each adjacent patch to dilate the search space. The process Patch-based Texture Synthesis using DE (PTSDE) can search the adaptive patches from the available population in a candidate single generation. PTSDE gives efficient result in texture synthesis in comparison to other used methods.
On the minimum size of tight hypergraphs

A k-graph, H = (V, E), is tight if for every surjective mapping f: V {1,…. k} there exists an edge α ϵ E sicj tjat f|α is injective. Clearly, 2-graphs are tight if and only if they are connected. Bounds for the minimum number ϕ of edges in a tight k-graph with n vertices are given. We conjecture that ϕ for every n and prove the equality when 2n + 1 is prime. From the examples, minimal embeddings of complete graphs into surfaces follow. © 1992 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Quality versus cost analysis for 3D Stacked ICs

To fulfill customer demands, IC products must satisfy the required quality generally expressed in defective parts per million (DPPM). To meet this DPPM target, appropriate test infrastructures and test approaches must be developed. This is a challenging task for 3D Stacked-ICs (3D-SIC) due to a large test flow space; each test flow may require different design-for-test features and impact the product quality and total stack cost differently. Therefore, appropriate models to predict the impact of test flows on the product quality and overall stack cost at early design stage is important for quality versus cost trade-offs. This paper presents a model that predicts the 3D product quality in terms of DPPM for different test flows and associated cost; it incorporates the quality of the wafer manufacturing, stacking and packaging process. For example, the presented case study showed that maintaining the same product quality for larger stack size might result in a significant test cost increase.
Comparing the validity of five participation instruments in persons with spinal conditions.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate and compare the construct validity of 5 participation instruments developed using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). METHODS A total of 545 subjects diagnosed and treated for a spinal condition at an acute hospital were followed-up and consented to complete a questionnaire. Subjects completed 5 participation instruments (Impact on Participation and Autonomy (IPA), Keele Assessment of Participation (KAP), Participation Measure-Post Acute Care (PM-PAC), Participation Objective Participation Subjective (POPS), World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule II (WHODAS II)). In addition, each subject completed a health status instrument and a quality of life instrument. The dimensionality, convergent/discriminant validity and known-group validity of the participation instruments were assessed. RESULTS A confirmatory factor analysis of the facture structure for the IPA and PM-PAC demonstrated adequate model fit. For convergent/discriminant validity, correlations were generally higher among similar domains of the WHODAS II, IPA, KAP and PM-PAC, and as expected the lowest correlations were observed with the objective domains of the POPS. Most instruments demonstrated known-group validity. CONCLUSION Differences in the construct validity evidence of the POPS compared with the other 4 instruments were noted. To date, there is no gold standard for measuring participation, and clinicians and researchers should consider the type of information required prior to selecting an instrument.
The effect of CSI imperfection on the performance of SVD based adaptive modulation in MIMO systems

Adaptive modulation (AM) schemes in multiinput multioutput (MIMO) systems are usually designed and analyzed under the assumption of perfect channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we consider the effect of CSI imperfection on the bit error rate (BER) and average spectral efficiency (ASE) performance. Approximate analytical expressions for BER and ASE are derived and verified by simulations. The thresholds for the CSI imperfection are identified, below which an ideally designed AM MIMO system can operate satisfactorily
On Optimal$p$-Cycle-Based Protection in WDM Optical Networks With Sparse-Partial Wavelength Conversion

We study the optimal configuration of p-cycles in survivable wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical mesh networks with sparse-partial wavelength conversion while 100% restorability is guaranteed against any single failures. We formulate the problem as two integer linear programs (Optimization Models I, and II) which have the same constraints, but different objective functions. p-cycles and wavelength converters are optimally determined subject to the constraint that only a given number of nodes have wavelength conversion capability, and the maximum number of wavelength converters that can be placed at such nodes is limited. Optimization Model I has a composite sequential objective function that first (G1) minimizes the cost of link capacity used by all p-cycles in order to accommodate a set of traffic demands; and then (G2) minimizes the total number of wavelength converters used in the entire network. In Optimization Model II, the cost of one wavelength converter is measured as the cost of a deployed wavelength link with a length of alpha units; and the objective is to minimize the total cost of link capacity & wavelength converters required by p-cycle configuration. During p-cycle configuration, our schemes fully takes into account wavelength converter sharing, which reduces the number of converters required while attaining a satisfactory level of performance. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed schemes significantly outperform existing approaches in terms of protection cost, number of wavelength conversion sites, and number of wavelength converters needed
Real-time indoor assistive localization with mobile omnidirectional vision and cloud GPU acceleration

In this paper we propose a real-time assistive localization approach to help blind and visually impaired people in navigating an indoor environment. The system consists of a mobile vision front end with a portable panoramic lens mounted on a smart phone, and a remote image feature-based database of the scene on a GPU-enabled server. Compact and e ective omnidirectional image features are extracted and represented in the smart phone front end, and then transmitted to the server in the cloud. These features of a short video clip are used to search the database of the indoor environment via image-based indexing to find the location of the current view within the database, which is associated with floor plans of the environment. A median-filter-based multi-frame aggregation strategy is used for single path modeling, and a 2D multi-frame aggregation strategy based on the candidates’ distribution densities is used for multi-path environmental modeling to provide a final location estimation. To deal with the high computational cost in searching a large database for a realistic navigation application, data parallelism and task parallelism properties are identified in the database indexing process, and computation is accelerated by using multi-core CPUs and GPUs. User-friendly HCI particularly for the visually impaired is designed and implemented on an iPhone, which also supports system configurations and scene modeling for new environments. Experiments on a database of an eight-floor building are carried out to demonstrate the capacity of the proposed system, with real-time response (14 fps) and robust localization results.
A Rapid Model Adaptation Technique for Emotional Speech Recognition with Style Estimation Based on Multiple-Regression HMM

In this paper, we propose a rapid model adaptation technique for emotional speech recognition which enables us to extract paralinguistic information as well as linguistic information contained in speech signals. This technique is based on style estimation and style adaptation using a multiple-regression HMM (MRHMM). In the MRHMM, the mean parameters of the output probability density function are controlled by a low-dimensional parameter vector, called a style vector, which corresponds to a set of the explanatory variables of the multiple regression. The recognition process consists of two stages. In the first stage, the style vector that represents the emotional expression category and the intensity of its expressiveness for the input speech is estimated on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Next, the acoustic models are adapted using the estimated style vector, and then standard HMM-based speech recognition is performed in the second stage. We assess the performance of the proposed technique in the recognition of simulated emotional speech uttered by both professional narrators and non-professional speakers.
Hybrid 5-level cascaded H-Bridge converter with model predictive controller

The paper presents a multilevel cascaded H-bridge 5-level converter with boosting capability. Standard solution for boosting voltage in power electronic devices is utilization of a dc-dc converter with a bulky inductor. However, inductor is a problematic component of a power electronic converter because usually it needs to be individually designed and produced for every device and also because its size and weight not allow for compact construction. The novelty of the presented paper lies in application of Model Predictive Control (MPC) instead of conventional PWM methods. Simulation experiments show that presented converter can boost output voltage and keep the capacitors voltage balanced.
Garbage collection: algorithms for automatic dynamic memory management

The Classical Algorithms. Reference Counting. Mark--Sweep Garbage Collection. Mark--Compact Garbage Collection. Copying Garbage Collection. Generational Garbage Collection. Incremental and Concurrent Garbage Collection. Garbage Collection for C. Garbage Collection for C++. Cache--Conscious Garbage Collection. Distributed Garbage Collection. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.
EXPLORING A SUBGRAPH MATCHING APPROACH FOR EXTRACTING BIOLOGICAL EVENTS FROM LITERATURE

An important task in biological information extraction is to identify descriptions of biological relations and events involving genes or proteins. In this work, we propose a graph‐based approach to automatically learn rules for detecting biological events in the life science literature. The event rules are learned by identifying the key contextual dependencies from full parsing of annotated text. The detection is performed by searching for isomorphism between event rules and the dependency graphs of complete sentences. When applying our approach to the data sets of the Task 1 of the BioNLP‐ST 2009, we achieved a 40.71% F‐score in detecting biological events across nine event types. Our 56.32% precision is comparable with the state‐of‐the‐art systems. The approach may also be generalized to extract events from other domains where training data are available because it requires neither manual intervention nor external domain‐specific resources. The subgraph matching algorithm we developed is released under the new BSD license and can be downloaded from http://esmalgorithm.sourceforge. net.
Design of 1-Bit Digital Reconfigurable Reflective Metasurface for Beam-Scanning

A 1-bit digital reconfigurable reflective metasurface (RRM) with 20 × 20 cells is presented, fabricated and measured for beam-scanning performance in this paper. The cell is designed with a single layer structure and one varactor diode, controlled electronically. The cell’s phase compensation is over 180° between 3 GHz and 4 GHz and the two states with 180° phase difference are selected as coding “0” and coding “1”. By the fuzzy quantification theory, all the elements on the RRM are set to be coding “0” or coding “1” according to the phase compensation calculated by MATLAB. Furthermore, by changing the coding of the RRM, it can achieve beam-scanning. The simulation results show that the beam-scanning range is over ±60°. The RRM prototype is fabricated and experimentally tested for principle. The gain of the RRM is 18 dB and the 3 dB bandwidth is about 16.6%. The 1-bit digital RRM is preferred in practical implementations due to less error and much easier bias voltage control. The proposed RRM successfully balances the performance and system complexity, especially in the large-scale antenna designs. The experimental and simulated results are in good agreement to prove the correctness and feasibility of the design of the 1-bit digital RRM.
Radial Flow Permeability Testing of Indiana Limestone

The geotechnical importance of studying fluid flow through porous media and soils in particular, becomes evident when dealing with groundwater movement in surficial geomaterials that can be initiated by hydraulic gradients that develop during construction activity, groundwater extraction, impounding of reservoirs and groundwater recharge during adverse climatic events. In a geotechnical context, rocks are regarded as virtually impermeable materials, with comparatively greater resistance to flow of water through their pore structure. The importance of the permeability of rocks comes to the forefront when deep geologic formations are used in geoenvironmental activities for disposal of hazardous and toxic materials. The permeability of the rocks encountered is of critical importance to these geoenvironmental activities since the movement or transport of the hazardous materials during their eventual release will be largely governed by the permeability characteristics of the geologic formation. The estimation of the permeability characteristic of geologic formations is a non-trivial exercise since the measure of permeability can be influenced by the scale at which the measurement is made. Regional-scale and borehole-scale estimates of the permeability can be greatly influenced by the inhomogeneities, including fractures, fissures, solution channels and other anomalies that are present in naturally occurring geologic media. These anomalies are considered to be site specific and can only be determined in a reliable fashion by either conducting tests at the appropriate scale or in the regional-scale through inverse analysis of tracer movement patterns in rock masses. The estimation of the permeability of intact units of a geologic medium has important geoenvironmental applications in connection with storage of wastes since the units in which repositories will be located should be sparsely fractured and the sealing of the fractures and fissures are a prerequisite to developing an efficient solution for storage. The intact permeability of geomaterials is therefore regarded as an important property that influences efficiency and reliability of geoenvironmental solutions for deep geologic disposal. The permeability of geomaterials such as concrete and cementitious grouts are also important to many geoenvironmental and infrastructure applications where durability of structural materials in general and cements used for sealing deep boreholes and other access shafts employed in waste management endeavours is influenced by the permeability characteristics of these materials. The in situ measurement of permeability characteristics of intact rocks has been in existence since construction of concrete dams founded on rock (Mayer, 1963; Stagg and Zienkiewicz, 1968; Jaeger, 1972). The laboratory measurement of the permeability of relatively low permeRadial Flow Permeability Testing of Indiana Limestone
Demographic and Clinical Characteristics of Adult Acute Myeloid Leukemia--Tertiary Care Experience.

BACKGROUND Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an acquired clonal frequent malignant disorder of myeloid progenitor cells. Our aim was to study demographical and clinicopathological features of adult Pakistani AML patients at presentation. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this single centre study extending from January 2010 to December 2014, data were retrieved from the patient records with a predetermined performa and analyzed with SPSS version 22. RESULTS Overall 125 patients were diagnosed at our institution with de novo AML during the study period. There were 76 males and 49 females (ratio 1.5:1), with an age range between 15 and 85 years and a mean age of 38.8±20.1 years. The major complaints were fever (72.8%), generalized weakness (60%), bleeding (37.6%) and dyspnea (12%). Physical examination revealed pallor in 56.8%, splenomegaly and hepatomegaly in 16% and 12.8%, respectively, and lymphodenopathy in 10.4%. The mean hemoglobin was 8.19±2.12g/dl with a mean MCV of 86.0±9.83 fl, a mean total leukocyte count of 43.1±68.5x109/l, an ANC of 3.09±6.66x109/l and a mean platelet count of 62.3±78.6x109/l. CONCLUSIONS AML in Pakistani patients is seen in a relatively very young population with male preponderance, compared with the west. However, clinico-pathological features appear comparable to published data.
Parameter estimation of the Hodgkin-Huxley model using metaheuristics: Application to neuromimetic analog integrated circuits

In 1952 Hodgkin and Huxley introduced the voltage-clamp technique to extract the parameters of the ionic channel model of a neuron. Although this method is widely used today, it has a lot of disadvantages. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to the estimation method of the voltage-clamp technique using metaheuristics such as simulated annealing, genetic algorithms and differential evolution. This method avoids approximations of the original technique by simultaneously estimating all the parameters of a single ionic channel with a single fitness function. To compare the different methods, we apply them on measurements from a neuromimetic integrated circuit. This circuit, due to its analog behavior, provides us noisy data like a biological system. Therefore we can validate the efficiency of our method on experimental-like data.
Generalized Low-Density Parity-Check coding scheme with Partial-Band Jamming

In this study, a class of Generalized Low-Density Parity-Check (GLDPC) codes is designed for data transmission over a Partial-Band Jamming (PBJ) environment. The GLDPC codes are constructed by replacing parity-check code constraints with those of nonsystematic Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH), referred to as Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC)-BCH codes. The rate of an LDPC-BCH code is adjusted by selecting the transmission length of the nonsystematic BCH code, and a low-complexity decoding algorithm based on message-passing is presented that employs A Posteriori Probability (APP) fast BCH transform for decoding the BCH check nodes at each decoding iteration. Simulation results show that the LDPC-BCH codes with a code rate of 1/8.5 have a bit error rate performance of 1×10-6 at signal-noise-ratios of -6.97 dB, -4.63 dB, and 2.48 dB when the fractions of the band jammed are 30%, 50%, and 70%, respectively.
Rapid Detection of Colicin E9-Induced DNA Damage Using Escherichia coli Cells Carrying SOS Promoter-lux Fusions

ABSTRACT ColE9 is a plasmid-encoded protein antibiotic produced by Escherichia coli and closely related species that kills E. coli cells expressing the BtuB receptor. The 15-kDa cytotoxic DNase domain of colicin E9 preferentially nicks double-stranded DNA at thymine bases and shares a common active-site structural motif with a variety of other nucleases, including the H-N-H homing endonucleases and the apoptotic CAD proteins of eukaryotes. Studies of the mechanism by which the DNase domain of ColE9 reaches the cytoplasm of E. coli cells are limited by the lack of a rapid, sensitive assay for the DNA damage that results. Here, we report the development of an SOS promoter-lux fusion reporter system for monitoring DNA damage in colicin-treated cells and illustrate the value of this reporter system in experiments that probe the mechanism and time required for the DNase domain of colicin E9 to reach the cytoplasm.