Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Solubility and viscosity of R-134a refrigerant/lubricant mixtures

In response to concerns about the depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer, the HVAC and R industry is in the process of introducing environmentally safer refrigerants. This process is well underway. Because of the different properties of some new refrigerants (like R-134a), new lubricants are needed. There also exists a need for fundamental data on these new refrigerant/lubricant pairs. R-134a used in this work was 99.97 percent pure. The proprietary lubricant had a viscosity of 70 cs at 40{degrees} C.
Learning rest-to-rest motor coordination in articulated mobile robots

In this dissertation we analyze insights about common approaches for the synthesis of motion behaviors in robots composed by joints, Current control frameworks are robust, complete, and include advanced features that compute efficient control actions, commanding the robot through desired workspace references while dealing with the complexity of the mechanism (redundancies, non-linearities, etc). Nevertheless, and from the point of view of the human interpretation of the motion, there is a lack in both the available type of realizable motions and the naturalness of the realizable ones. The main objective of this work is the conformation of a framework for the synthesis of motion behaviors defined by rest-to-rest movements in this type of robots. As well as in traditional methods, availability of initial kinematic information of the motion is assumed; however, trajectory references in workspace are not specified, letting this level of control unrestricted. The presented framework considers the robot as a set of actuated and unactuated Degrees Of Freedom (DOFs). The first are directly driven by torque commands while final states achieved by the unactuated DOFs are analyzed as a consequence of the joint acceleration profiles. Thus, the problem is formulated as the computation of certain adequate acceleration policies for the joints such that desired final values for the unactuated DOFs are fulfilled. Two main ideas command the perspective from which the problem is tackled. First, Dynamical Systems (DS) are used as policies for the actuated DOFs, and second, the indirect manipulation of the unactuated DOFs is understood as a coordination phenomenon. Using DSs as acceleration policies, convenient attractor properties are provided to the behavior of the joints. Moreover, the resulted behavior of the unactuated DOFs, e.g. robot's dynamic balance, becomes a direct consequence of the temporal properties of the mentioned DS. In order to obtain the desired whole-body behavior, initial joint trajectories are deformed such that its convergence properties remain valid but its resultant transition motion change, favoring the behavior of the unactuated DOFs. Deformation of a joint's profiles is attained imposing the linear combination of the initial local primitives as acceleration policy. The indirect control of the unactuated DOFs, through the weighted sum of the primitives, is interpreted as a motor coordination. Finally, a policy gradient reinforcement learning (PGRL) algorithm, adapted for the robotic scenario, is used as synthesis methodology. The performance of every combination of primitives is quantified, thus, the coordination weights can be optimized using a gradient descent iterative process.
Implementation of Road Weather Information System Supporting Intelligent Transportation Systems Based on USN

Intelligent Transport System(ITS) has been studied in various systems, such as road environment information offering, vehicle short-range wireless/wire communication, vehicle collision preventing and pedestrian safety offering systems. Related to this, the USN technology based on the sensing accuracy for motorists and pedestrians safety, the information reliability, the maintenance and convenience for Sensor Network is highlighted. This study uses various sensors to construct USN to the road, and connect it to the developed RSU so it collects the real-time road environment information and offers it to OBU and Traffic Control Surveillance Center with Road Weather Information System. RSU collects roadside information for driver's safety and analyzes it to offer IP and beacon service according to the service priority to OBU & upper layer terminal. In the upper layer terminal it is developed the IP based Settop Box application program to offer the urban traffic information & road environment, and environment sensor error, etc. Finally, RWIS develops the real-time collection of roadside information to complement the driver's safety to the intelligent traffic system, and presents various service modes with technology convergence.
Vortices

I discuss in these lectures vortex-like classical solutions to the equations of motion of gauge theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking. Starting from the Nielsen-Olesen ansatz for the Abelian Higgs model, extensions to the case in which gauge dynamics is governed by Yang-Mills and Chern-Simons actions are presented. The case of semilocal vortices and also the coupling to axions is analyzed. Finally, the connection between supersymmetry and the existence of first order BPS equations in such models is described.
Comparative Study of Friction-Compensating Control Strategies for Servomechanisms

Abstract : This paper describes a comparative investigation of friction-compensating control strategies designed to improve low-velocity position tracking performance for servomechanisms. Several control methods are considered including adaptive control and estimation-based control. Additionally, the various controller designs incorporate different friction models ranging from classical friction and Stribeck friction to the less popular Dahl friction model. This investigation of friction models is motivated by the fact that there is little consensus in the literature on how best to model friction for dynamic friction compensation. The control strategies are compared in an extensive test program involving position tracking experiments on a direct-drive dc motor. This effort addresses the current lack of comparative experimental results on friction compensation. The results show that the adaptive and estimation-based controllers out perform more traditional linear controllers. The experiments also yield insight into the appropriateness of the different friction models under the tested operating conditions. In particular, the Dahl model is observed to provide a reliable representation of friction behavior near zero velocity.
Biometric Recognition Systems Employing Novel Shape-based Features

of a dissertation at the University of Miami. Dissertation supervised by Professor Mohamed Abdel-Mottaleb. No. of page in text. (138) With the increased security requirements in a variety of applications and advances in sensor technology, emerging biometric technologies, including using some lesser known biometrics, have become important research topics. This is due to the potential benefits they may provide as independent biometric markers or as compliments to existing biometric systems. In this work, our aim is to explore new biometric technologies for person identification. We consider three different biometrics, namely, Three Dimensional (3D) and Two Dimensional (2D) ear biometrics, 3D face recognition, and human identification based on dental X-Ray images. For the ear biometrics component, we propose a novel 3D shape descriptor, termed Histogram of Categorized Shape (HCS), to robustly encode range images within a 3D object detection framework. For the 3D ear detection task, this feature, employed in conjunction with a linear SVM classifier and sliding window technique, produces a robust and efficient 3D ear detection system. Afterwards, we extend the HCS descriptor to an object-centered 3D surface feature descriptor, termed Surface Patch Histogram of Indexed Shape (SPHIS), for local surface patch representation. The SPHIS feature descriptor is evaluated for its effectiveness in real world scenarios where a database may contain ears of highly similar shape. The ear surface is also voxelized to construct a holistic representation. Based on the novel SPHIS feature and the voxelization representation, a unified approach incorporating local and holistic surface features is proposed to improve both the robustness and efficiency of the 3D ear shape matching subsystem, while simultaneously improving the performance of the recognition system. In the 2D domain, a complete, automatic ear biometric system based on 2D images is developed. The color Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptor is exploited as the feature representation, which in conjunction with a feature fusion method, maximizes the robustness of the recognition system. For the 3D face recognition component, we propose a method using AdaBoost to determine the geodesic distances between anatomical point pairs that are most discriminative for 3D face recognition. Through a method that establishes a dense set of correspondences between face surfaces, the discriminating potential of geodesic distances between anatomical points is investigated. For the dental biometrics component, we present a content-based image archiving and retrieval system for assisting in human identification using dental radiographs. The system includes processes for dental image classification, automatic segmentation of bitewing dental X-Ray images, and teeth shape matching.
Stima della produzione lattea della pecorain base al ritmo di accrescimento dell'agnello

Estimate of ewe milk yield on the basis of lamb growth ratio. In a trial on 10 Sardinian lambs sucking ewes for 1 month (from birth to 30th day), ewes milk yield (g 877.5 ± 96.2), lambs daily growth (g 163.6 ± 16.7) and milk conversion ratio were recorded; moreover, in order to estimate milk yield on the basis of lamb growth, regression equations were calculated.
Miniaturized Analysis of Amylopectin Chain Length Distribution by Fluorescence-Assisted Capillary Electrophoresis (FACE) down to Single Starch Granules

In the present work, we developed a miniaturized method for determining amylopectin chain length distribution (CLD) by fluorescence-assisted capillary electrophoresis (FACE). The method relies on single granule entrapping into capillaries followed by direct starch gelatinization and amylopectin debranching on carbograph-based solid phase extraction (SPE) cartridges. Sample desalting on HypersepTM tips following APTS-labelling and the use of nanovials allowed for the fluorescence analysis of weakly diluted samples. Consequently, method sensitivity was improved by 500-fold which is compatible with the analysis of single potato starch granules. The method was implemented to determine CLD profiles of single starch granules ranging from 50 to 100 µm in diameter. In these experiments, the relative proportion of starch glucans of up to 30 degrees of polymerization (DP) could be quantified.
Rainbow: cost-effective software architecture-based self-adaptation

Modern, complex software systems (e-commerce, IT, critical infrastructures, etc.) are increasingly required to continue operation in the face of change, to self-adapt to accommodate shifting user priorities, resource variability, changing environments, and component failures. While manual oversight benefits from global problem contexts and flexible policies, human operators are costly and prone to error. Low-level, embedded mechanisms (exceptions, time-outs, etc.) are effective and timely for error recovery, but are local in scope to the point-of-failure, application-specific, and costly to modify when adaptation objectives change. An ideal solution leverages domain expertise, provides an end-to-end system perspective, adapts the system in a timely manner, and can be engineered cost-effectively. Architecture-based self-adaptation closes the “loop of control,” using external mechanisms and the architecture model of the target system to adapt the system. An architecture model exposes important system properties and constraints, provides end-to-end problem contexts, and allows principled and automated adaptations. Existing architecture-based approaches specialize support for particular classes of systems and fixed sets of quality-of-service concerns; they are costly to develop for new systems and to evolve for new qualities. To overcome these limitations, we posit this thesis: We can provide software engineers the ability to add and evolve self-adaptation capabilities cost-effectively, for a wide range of software systems, and for multiple objectives, by defining a self-adaptation framework that factors out common adaptation mechanisms and provides explicit customization points to tailor self-adaptation capabilities for particular classes of systems, for multiple quality-of-service objectives. Our approach, embodied in a system called Rainbow, provides an engineering approach and a framework of mechanisms to monitor a target system and its environment, reflect observations into the system's architecture model, detect opportunities for improvements, select a course of action, and effect changes. The framework provides general and reusable infrastructures with well-defined customization points, a set of abstractions, and an adaptation engineering process, focusing engineers on adaptation concerns to systematically customize Rainbow to particular systems. To automate system self-adaptation, Rainbow provides a language, called Stitch, to represent routine human adaptation knowledge using a core set of adaptation concepts.
An HMM-based automatic singing transcription platform for a sight-singing tutor

A singing transcription system transforming acoustic input into MIDI note sequences is presented. The transcription system is incorporated into a pronunciation-independent sight-singing tutor system, which provides note-level feedback on the accuracy with which each note in a sequence has been sung. Notes are individually modeled with hidden Markov models (HMMs) using untuned pitch and delta-pitch as feature vectors. A database consisting of annotated passages sung by 26 soprano subjects was compiled for the development of the system, since no existing data was available. Various techniques that allow efficient use of a limited dataset are proposed and evaluated. Several HMM topologies are also compared, in analogy with approaches often used in the field of automatic speech recognition. Context-independent note models are evaluated first, followed by the use of explicit transition models to better identify boundaries between notes. A non-repetitive grammar is used to reduce the number of insertions. Context-dependent note models are then introduced, followed by context-dependent transition models. The aim in introducing context-dependency is to improve transition region modeling, which in turn should increase note transcription accuracy, but also improve the time-alignment of the notes and the transition regions. The final system is found to be able to transcribe sung passages with around 86% accuracy. Finally, a note-level sight-singing tutor system based on the singing transcription system is presented and a number of note sequence scoring approaches are evaluated.
Towards Unified Management of Networked Services in Wired and Wireless Networks

Organizations world-wide are adopting wireless networks at an impressive rate, and a new industry has sprung up to provide tools to manage these networks. Unfortunately, these tools do not integrate cleanly with traditional wired network management tools, leading to unsolved problems and frustration among the IT staff. We explore the problem of unifying wireless and wired network management and show that simple merging of tools and strategies, and/or their trivial extension from one domain to another does not work. Building on previous research on network service dependency extraction, fault diagnosis, and wireless network management, we introduce MnM, an endto- end network management system that unifies wired and wireless network management. MnM treats physical location of end devices as a core component of its management strategy. It also dynamically adapts to the frequent topology changes brought about by end-node mobility.We have a prototype deployment in a large organization that shows that MnM’s root-cause analysis engine easily out-performs systems that do not take user mobility into account in terms of correctly localizing faults and blame attribution.
Technical Highlights from the ExaHDF5 project

Technical Highlights from the ExaHDF5 project Prabhat, Kesheng Wu, Jerry Chou, Suren Byna, Mark Howison, E. Wes Bethel Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Quincey Koziol, Peter Cao, Mohamad Charawi, Christian Chilan, Mike McGreevy The HDF Group Karen Schuchardt, Bruce Palmer Pacific Northwest National Laboratory DISCLAIMER: This document was prepared as an account of work sponsored by the United States Government. While this document is believed to contain correct information, neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor the Regents of the University of California, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by its trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof, or the Regents of the University of California. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof or the Regents of the University of California. Acknowledgments: This work was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office and Advanced Scientific Computing Research, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 through the ASCR Exascale Scientific Data Management award. This work used computational resources provided by NERSC.
The evaluation of losses in maize stored on a selection of small farms in Zambia with particular reference to the development of methodology (G109)

The terms of reference for this project were: (1) to develop a satisfactory methodology to evaluate the extent of losses; (2) to establish reasonably reliable cost- benefit relationships for a simple improved farm storage technique; and (3) to recommend whether a longer term project should be undertaken over a wider area to evaluate cost-benefit relationships of improved storage techniques for the purpose of planning development programmes. Following these criteria the report makes a detailed study of various methods of assessing losses. These methods are then applied to maize stored by small farmers in selected areas of Zambia and an evaluation made of the costs and benefits to these farmers of adopting an improved storage technique.
Photoexcitation dynamics in organic solar cell donor/acceptor systems

Solceller presenteras ofta som ett miljovanligt alternativ for energiproduktion. Det storsta hindret for en bredare ibruktagning av kiselbaserade solceller ar deras hoga pris. I och med upptackten av ledande och halvledande organiska (kolbaserade) molekyler och polymerer har ett nytt forskningsomrade, organisk elektronik, vuxit fram. Den stora fordelen med organisk elektronik ar att de anvanda materialen oftast ar losliga. Tillverkning av elektroniska komponenter kan da goras med hjalp av konventionella trycktekniker dar blacket ersatts med upplosta organiska material. Detta har potential att betydligt sanka priset for solceller. Nackdelen med organisk elektronik ar att de anvanda materialen ar komplexa, och de fysikaliska processerna i dem likasa. I min avhandling har jag studerat fotofysiken i tva polymerer, P3HT och APFO3, som kan anvandas for att tillverka organiska solceller. Blandade med fullerenderivatet PCBM, som ar en stark elektronacceptor, fas ett material som effektivt producerar elektroner och hal under belysning. I praktiken bidrar dock inte alla skapade laddningar till strommen ur solcellen. Elektronerna och halen kan forbli bundna till varandra i olika exciterade tillstand, och aven de som ar fria kan traffa pa motsatta laddningar under vagen till kontakterna och rekombinera. Centralt i mitt arbete har varit att identifiera olika typer av exciterade tillstand i dessa solcellsmaterial, samt att bestamma deras livstider och rekombination. Metoden for detta har varit s.k. fotoinducerad absorption, som mater fotoexcitationernas absorptioner i infraroda vaglangdsomradet. De tva viktigaste resultaten som presenteras i avhandlingen ar en ratekvationsmodell for fotoexcitationsdynamiken i APFO3 pa ultrasnabba tidsskalor (femtosekund - microsekund) och bildandet av en rekombinationshammande dipol vid gransytan for P3HT och PCBM som foljd av varmebehandling. Dessa resultat bidrar till forstaelsen av de fotofysikaliska processerna i relaterade material.
Cost-Effective Integration of Efficient Low-Lift Base Load Cooling Equipment

The long-term goal of DOE’s Commercial Buildings Integration subprogram is to develop cost-effective technologies and building practices that will enable the design and construction of net Zero Energy Buildings — commercial buildings that produce as much energy as they use on an annual basis — by 2025. To support this long-term goal, DOE further called for — as part of its FY07 Statement of Needs — the development by 2010 of “five cost-effective design technology option sets using highly efficient component technologies, integrated controls, improved construction practices, streamlined commissioning, maintenance and operating procedures that will make new and existing commercial buildings durable, healthy and safe for occupants. ” In response, PNNL proposed and DOE funded a scoping study investigation of one such technology option set, low-lift cooling, that offers potentially exemplary HVAC energy performance relative to ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2004. The primary purpose of the scoping study was to estimate the national technical energy savings potential of this TOS.
Performance of Propeller 4381 in Crashback

Abstract : Propeller operation in crashback is technically very challenging, both computationally and experimentally. Propeller 4381 was evaluated experimentally in Carderock's 36-inch (0.91 m) water tunnel. Propeller 4381 was operated in the ahead condition for comparison. Details of the flow field were measured with 3-component laser Doppler velocimetry (LDV) and 2-component particle imaging velocimetry (PIV). Propulsion performance was measured with thrust and torque transducers. Cavitation was documented photographically with a strobe light, and flow visualization was conducted with a vertical laser light sheet for observation of the recirculation region of the propeller in crashback. Results showed that highly random cavitation occurred on the propeller in crashback on the downstream side at the leading edge, which is the trailing edge for ahead. A highly unstable recirculation zone occurred with a ring vortex near the propeller tip. The maximum variation in thrust and torque as computed from the standard deviation relative to the mean load with a value of 0.25 occurred at an advance ratio of J = -0.5. The high variation in loads appeared to correlate with the maximum total kinetic energy relative to tunnel velocity in the flow at the blade tip, which was measured by LDV as 1.5. These results indicate that vibration and wear may be reduced by minimizing operation near J = - 0.5 for this propeller.