Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimal design of tuned mass dampers for a multi‐storey cross laminated timber building against seismic loads

In this paper, the effectiveness of different design solutions for tuned mass dampers (TMD) applied to high‐rise cross‐laminated (X‐Lam) timber buildings as a means to reduce the seismic accelerations was investigated. A seven‐storey full‐scale structure previously tested on shaking table was used as a reference. The optimal design parameters of the TMDs, i.e. damping and frequency ratios, were determined by using a genetic algorithm on a simplified model of the reference structure, composed by seven masses each representing one storey. The optimal solutions for the TMDs were then applied to a detailed finite element model of the seven‐storey building, where the timber panels were modelled with shell elements and the steel connectors with linear spring. By comparing the numerical results of the building with and without multiple TMDs, the improvement in seismic response was assessed. Dynamic time‐history analyses were carried out for a set of seven natural records, selected in accordance with Eurocode 8, on the simplified model, and for Kobe earthquake ground motion on the detailed model. Results in terms of acceleration reduction for different TMD configurations show that the behaviour of the seven‐storey timber building can be significantly improved, especially at the upper storeys. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Study on Design of Uplift Piles and Calculation of Float in Underground Structures

As the development of the city and the increment in the level of our life,it is a tendency for us to use the underground space.The most important core problem is design of float-resistant.The key is to find the definition of the water level and the appropriation of the design of uplift piles.The difference of the soil layers and the depth of underground structures will effect the difference of design of float-resistant water level.Based on the experience of projects,the conculation method of water float and the suitable design of the uplift piles in the changing water level are proposed.
Breakdown Voltage Analysis of a REBULF LDMOS Structure with an n~+-Floating Layer*

A novel REBULF (reduced bulk field) concept is proposed for the development of a smart power integrated circuit with a thin epitaxy layer,and a new REBULF LDMOS device structure is designed with an n+-floating layer embedded in the high-resistance substrate.The mechanism of the improved breakdown characteristics is that a high electric field around the drain is reduced by a n+-floating layer,which causes the redistribution of the bulk electric field in the drift region,and the substrate supports more biases.The critical condition of the REBULF,which is analyzed and validated by a 2D MEDICI simulator,is that the product of the location of the n+-floating layer and the substrate doping cannot exceed 1×1012cm-2. The breakdown voltage of the REBULF LDMOS is 75% greater than that of a RESURF LDMOS.
Acceptance of Renewable Energies: Model Development and First Empirical Results

In order to achieve the energy turnaround it is of prime importance to ensure that renewables become more widely accepted and used – not only industrially, but also in the private sector. This paper develops a dynamic acceptance model on the basis of an end user survey conducted in Germany. The used construct of acceptance is based on the so-called threedimension-theory of attitudes and explains the decision process leading from a positive attitude to the actual purchase and use of renewable energies. The model seeks to explain, why private end users use renewable energies, or due to which motivational, temporal, social, financial or situational behavioral restrictions they do not. In fact, these restrictions correlate strongly with the respective behavior.
Adriaan ter Mors

In context-aware route planning, a set of agents has to plan routes on a common infrastructure and each agent has to plan a conflict-free route from a source to a destination with- out invalidating plans made by other agents. The existence of such a conflict-free set of plans can be ensured if each agent is allowed to reserve time slots on the infrastructure resources it intends to use. In the multi-stage variant of the context-aware routing problem, each agent has a sequence of destination locations it must visit. A naive approach to solve the multi-stage variant is to make context-aware route plans between ev- ery two subsequent locations in the sequence, and then to concatenate these plans together. It can easily be shown, however, that this concatenation approach cannot guaran- tee that a multi-stage plan (if it exists) can always be found, and even if it is found, then it need not be optimal. There- fore, we present a new polynomial-time algorithm for the multi-stage routing problem that always returns the opti- mal (shortest-time) route for a single agent, given a set of reservations made by previous agents, thus providing a set of Pareto-optimal route plans. Obviously, the need for such a dedicated multi-stage rout- ing algorithm depends on the frequency with which the con- catenation approach fails to find a plan, or finds a rather inefficient one. Our experiments show that, given a set of reservations from 200 agents, the concatenation approach fails to find a solution in more than 50% of the cases, for random visiting sequences of six locations or more. How- ever, if the concatenation approach does find a solution, its plan quality is often close to that of an optimal solution.
Rotor Position and Speed Estimate of SPMSM Using Sliding Mode Estimator

A method based on a novel sliding mode observer and phase-locked loop for the sensorless control of the surface permanent synchronous motor(SPMSM) is proposed.The improvable SMO uses sigmoid function to determine the equivalent back electromotive force,which can effectively reduce the influence of the sliding mode chattering.Through estimating the electromotive force,the rotor position and speed are gained by the phase lock loop(PLL). A Lyapunov function is established to prove the sliding mode observer convergence.This method also solves the robustness and complexity of the algorithm.It is thoroughly tested by using STM32F10X-128X-EVAL motor development kit and Matlab simulation.The experimental results shows that the proposed method can precisely estimate the motor speed and rotor position,and the SPMSM Vector Control System is of good dynamic and static performances and easier to be applied.
Simulated Tiltrotor Aircraft Operation in Close Proximity to a Building in Wind and Ground-Effect Conditions

A mid-fidelity computational fluid dynamics tool called RotCFD – specifically developed to aid in rotorcraft studies – has been applied to the study of wake interactions of civil tiltrotor aircraft in the immediate vicinity of buildings, inand out-of-ground-effect, with and without winds, consistent with notional tiltrotor operations from urban vertiports. Such civil tiltrotor operations from urban vertiports could potentially enable city-center-to-citycenter commercial transport. However, in order to one day realize such civil tiltrotor operations, though, it is necessary to better understand the wake interaction and interactional aerodynamic operating environment of urban vertiports. In the early 2000’s, a series of 7-by-10 Ft. Wind Tunnel tests were conducted at NASA Ames Research Center that began to explore some of these civil tiltrotor and vertiport wake-interaction/interactionalaerodynamics issues. This study seeks to validate computation fluid dynamic predictions against these early wind tunnel experimental results and, thereby, continue exploration of this important research area.
Optimal Fuzzy-PID Controller in AC Servo System

The performance of PID controller lies in the choice of proportional, integral and different coefficient. The choice of the coefficients of traditional PID controller mainly depends on trial and error. Due to the interaction of the coefficients and poorer robustness, the satisfactory effect is difficult to reach when it is applied in AC servo system. Considering the requirement of high performance of AC servo system , this paper design such a system with a Fuzzy-PID controller based on AGA optimization. Both dynamic and steady performance is improved evidently and the results are satisfactory.
A Mathematical and Computational Proposal for the Development of Tight-Binding Order-N Density Matrix Methodology

The aim of this paper is to present, in a broad context, a proposal of mathematical foundation that serves as framework for the development of the electronic structure calculation methodology called “DMTB-Densit Matrix Tight Binding method. ” ), which was originally presented in the literature by the group led by physicist David Vanderbilt in 1993 (\cite{vanderbilt}), as well as its relationship to the computational modeling that can be chosen for its implementation. The approach adopted makes it clear that the final mathematical formulation of this methodology is completely dependent on the computational strategies chosen for its effective implementation. Thus, we put the DMTB as a mathematical-computational model of variable final formulation. Finally, we propose an implementation based on the nonlinear conjugate gradient method. The final model obtained is slightly different from the DMTB that was originally presented in 1993, in agreement with the version presented by Millam and Scuseria in 1997 (\cite{scuseria}). The approach used develops the mathematical aspects, aiming at the effective computational implementation of the methodology.
Comparison between mid-nasal swabs and buccal swabs for SARS-CoV-2 detection in mild COVID-19 patients

Background The use of rapid antigen diagnostics tests (Ag-RDT) has gained widespread acceptance as an alternative method for diagnosis of COVID-19 outside of health care settings. Various authors have reported that saliva is a reliable specimen, alternative to nasopharyngeal and mid-nasal swabs, to detect SARS-CoV-2 infections by RT-PCR. We assessed the performance of buccal swabs containing saliva for SARS-CoV-2 detection by Ag-RDT, using mid-nasal specimens as a reference in the northern area of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) Methods In the context of routine clinical diagnosis of mild COVID-19 patients, we enrolled 300 adults in a study to directly compare mid-nasal swabs and saliva specimens for SARS-CoV-2 detection by Ag-RDT. When mid-nasal and buccal Ag-RDTs showed discordant results, a third mid-nasal swab was collected and analysed by RT-PCR. Results Paired samples were successfully obtained in 300 suspected cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Of the 300 paired samples, Ag-RDT with the mid-nasal swab detected 139 (46.3%) positive COVID-19 cases. In comparison, buccal swabs showed a sensitivity and specificity of 31.7% (44/139) and 98.8% (159/161), respectively. 65 discordant results with positive mid-nasal swabs and negative buccal swabs were tested by RT-qPCR. All samples tested by Rt-PCR resulted positive, with a mean cycle threshold (Ct) of 28.3 (SD 7.3). Conclusion Our findings show that mid-nasal swabs have better performance than buccal swabs for detecting SARS-CoV-2 with Ag-RDT tests. Of note, the sensitivity of buccal samples was affected in samples with high viral loads (Ct<33), suggesting that buccal swabs might not be sensitive enough to detect individuals at risk of transmission. Taken together, the existing literature and the results provided in our analysis we advise against the use of buccal specimens for SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics with Ag-RDT.
Fast spectral clustering with self-weighted features

As one of the mainstream clustering methods, the spectral clustering has aroused more and more attention recently because of its good performance, especially in nonlinear data sets. However, traditional spectral clustering models have high computational complexity. Meanwhile, most of these models fail in distinguishing the noisy and useful features in practice, which leads to the limitation of clustering performance. In this paper, we propose a new fast spectral clustering with self-weighted features (FSCSWF) to achieve good clustering performance through learning and assigning optimal weights for features in a low computational complexity. Speciﬁcally, the FSCSWF selects anchors from original samples, then learns the weights of features and the similarity between anchors and samples interactively in a local structure learning framework. This interactive learning makes the learnt similarity can better measure the relationship between anchors, and samples due to the optimal weights make the data points become more discriminative. Moreover, the connectivity constraint are embedded to make sure that the connected components of bipartite graph constructed by the learnt similarity can indicate clusters directly. In this way, the FSCSWF can achieve good clustering performance and has a low computational complexity, which is linear to the number of samples. Extensive experiments on synthetic and practical data sets illustrate the effectiveness and efﬁciency of the FSCSWF with respect to state-of-the-art methods.
Sustainability integration into engineering curricula: A choice between stand-alone or intertwined

In view of the mounting evidence on the destruction of environmental quality and loss of cultural heritage as a result of technology development, various organizations have seen the dire need for sustainable development which can be acquired through education on sustainability. In institutions of higher education, engineering is one of the programmes that are active in seeking to integrate sustainability into its curricula. Several researchers have conducted researches on means of incorporating sustainability into engineering curricula and such means can generally be categorized into the horizontal or vertical approach. An integration approach is considered horizontal when the sustainability or environmental component is intertwined into the existing courses. On the other hand, integration through a specialized or stand-alone course on sustainability is considered as vertical approach. Both of these approaches are used and there is no consensus on which approach works the best. The existing literature has shown evidence on engagement of these two approaches by the American, European and Australian Institutions of Higher Education. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there has not been any similar study for the Malaysian IHE. Therefore, this research was conducted to identify the current sustainability integration approach for 3 traditional engineering disciplines, namely Civil, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in 5 Malaysian IHE. An analysis of the engineering syllabi was conducted to identify if horizontal or vertical approach is used by the selected IHE for these 3 engineering disciplines. The result showed that horizontal approach was more commonly employed compared to vertical approach. This finding concocted with opinion of some of the researchers that sustainability education through horizontal approach may be more suitable for engineering programme which encourages interdisciplinary learning.
Measurement of wheel tread parameters with linear structured light

Abstrcat For the safety of the railroad transportation, it is necessary to measure the parameters of the wheel tread in time and with high precision. Even with the advantages of high measurement precision and not easy to wear for the method, the practical measurement result of the linear structured light is not satisfying. A new approach for surface parameter measuring of wheel tread with linear structured laser scanning is put forward. The measurement system is based on triangulation measuring principle. Two matrix charge-coupled devices cameras are used to capture the image scattering from the tread by the projected laser light. Through image recognition, feature collection and data processing, the three dimensional parameters of wheel tread can be rapidly acquired. A 650 nm wavelength Linear Laser Class ⅢA is used. The experiment shows this method in high precision and high speed.
Investigating the Effect of the Programme of Study on University Students’ Perceptions about Assessment

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the effect of the programme variable on the purposes and effects that students associate with assessment, on the assessment methods used and on the perceived use of assessment. Data were collected in five Portuguese Public Universities through a survey (n = 4144) and focus group (n = 250) with students enrolled in different programmes. Findings point to statistically significant differences in relation to the purpose of assessment, assessment methods most used and perceived use of assessment. The main differences were found in the kinds of methods used in different programmes: Law reported the lowest frequency of the use of collective assessment methods and portfolios, whereas Psychology, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering were the programmes that reported the lowest frequency of use of individual methods. Educational sciences reported more frequency of all types of methods and reported significantly more preference for the use of alternative methods than the remaining programmes. Negative emotions were most associated with assessment by Nursing students and Educational Sciences’ students reported more participation in the assessment process than students from all other programmes. Implications of the findings are discussed.
Effectiveness of a Mindfulness-Based Mobile Application for the Treatment of Depression in Ambulatory Care: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial

Background Patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) often experience relapses despite regular treatment with pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. Further, long waiting lists and more demand than treatment capacity characterize ambulatory settings. Mindfulness-based interventions proved to be effective in relapse prevention in MDD. Next, mindfulness-based interventions in the form of free mobile applications can be an effective augmentation of the treatment as usual and can fill a gap in ambulatory care. Objective Given this background, the aim of this randomized controlled study is to assess the effectiveness of additional MBI via a mobile app on the symptom severity and stress levels, compared to treatment as usual. Methods A total of 140 individuals with MDD will be randomly allocated to the intervention or control condition. The intervention consists of the daily use of the mindfulness mobile application Headspace for thirty days (up to 10 minutes a day). The control condition will be treatment as usual. At baseline and four weeks later, the following key outcome dimensions will be assessed: self-rated (Beck Depression Inventory) and experts’ rated symptoms of MDD (Hamilton Depression Rating Scale); secondary outcome variables will be blood pressure, heart rate, and respiratory rate and changes in tobacco and alcohol consumption and medication as a proxy of perceived stress. Results This study was funded in February 2021 and approved by the institutional review board on April 15, 2021, and it started in May 2021. As of December 2021, we enrolled 30 participants. The findings are expected to be published in spring 2023. Conclusions We hypothesize that compared to the control conditions, individuals with MDD of the mobile app-condition will have both lower self- and experts’ rated symptoms of MDD and more favorable stress-related levels. While the risk for medical events is low, the immediate benefit for participants could be a decrease in symptom severity and reduction of the stress level. Trial Registration Clinical Trials.gov NCT05060393; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05060393. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/33423
Trends in Incidence and Mortality of Gynecological and Breast Cancers in Poland (1980–2018)

Background This study aimed to analyze and determine the incidence and mortality trends in gynecological and breast cancers (BCs) in Poland. The gynecological cancers assessed were cervical cancer (CC), corpus uteri cancer (CUC), ovarian cancer (OC), vaginal cancer (VAC), and vulvar cancer (VUC). Patients and Methods Data concerning the incidence and mortality for the period of 1980–2018 were obtained from the Polish National Cancer Registry (PNCR). Joinpoint regression analysis was performed to identify trends, which were described using the annual percentage change (APC) and the average annual percent change (AAPC). Results Statistically significant increases were observed in BC incidence (AAPC: 2.3; CI: 1.8 to 2.9; p<0.05), CUC incidence (AAPC: 2.3; CI: 1.9 to 2.7; p<0.05), CUC mortality (AAPC: 0.4; CI: 0.1 to 0.7; p<0.05) and VUC mortality (AAPC: 1.16, CI: 0.1 to 2.2; p<0.05). VAC mortality decreased (AAPC: −3.5, CI: −5.0 to –2.0; p<0.05), as did CC incidence and mortality (AAPC: −2.1, CI: −2.3 to −1.8; p<0.05, AAPC: −2.0, CI: −2.2 to –1.8; p<0.05, respectively). Between 1980 and 1993, OC incidence initially increased and then stabilized (AAPC: 0.9; CI: 0.7 to 1.1; p<0.05). After 2007, OC mortality decreased (AAPC: 0.0; CI: −0.2 to 0.2; p=0.8). Trends in VUC and VAC incidence and BC mortality were not statistically significant. Conclusion The results of this study showed a significant increase in OC, CUC, and BC incidence, and a decrease in the incidence of CC and VAC. The VUC trends were stable. Mortality trends for BC initially fluctuated and, since 2010, has begun to increase. Throughout the observed period, mortality due to VUC and CUC increased, whereas decreased among patients with CC. OC mortality was stable, but not significant. Furthermore, the study showed a correlation between age group and rate of incidence and mortality of each assessed cancer.
Modeling and vibration control of piezoelectric actuator

The piezoelectric actuator is a voltage spring system that behaves in similar characteristic to mechanical mass spring system. It converts electrical signal to physical displacement. The displacements profile of the piezoelectric actuator shifts due to hysteresis and creep during actuation. Static models of piezoelectric actuator were developed with different equations in the past. However, static (non-dynamic) piezoelectric actuator models were not represented by single transfer function. Furthermore, the modelling of dynamic (vibrating) piezoelectric actuator was not considered. In this work, we presented the behaviour of the piezoelectric actuator in terms of mechanical displacement from applied electric potential. The transfer function mathematical model was generated representing the actuator characteristics. The vibration model that can vibrate at desired frequency of the actuator was also developed. The models were developed by system identification from experimental results. A high resolution microscope together with the image processing technique was used to obtain the system characteristics. Simulation using Matlab simulink was used to validate the experiment (The hysteresis was reduced by 90 % and the vibration was reduced to 97 %.). These models can be used to develop the controller for controlling vibration profile. It can also be used for desired micro actuation. It can also be used for desired micro actuation.
Soft & Hard ideas to improve interaction with robots for Kids & Teachers

In this paper we present the activities we are carrying out in order to provide teachers with new tools and educational Robotic kits for the classroom. We are working in two directions. First we are interested in early robotic programming languages. Available robots (like the Bee-Bot) are convenient to begin but the programming language is very limited. The direction of our research is to use Arduino based robots to improve the programming language. The other issue we want to work on is to provide teachers with computer supported sceneries in order to enrich robotic activities. In this paper we present some preliminary results of the experiences we are having in using an interactive top table with Bee-Bot robots where Kids and Teachers can work together.